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19/11/20 – quick thought on touch and Debords S.O.T.Spectacle

Guy Debord writes about sight being the sense with the highest potential to abstract us from reality. I think this is relevant to my project in two ways:

  • I’m thinking about sensorial (or sensual, haven’t quite decided what word yet) experiences of data sets and the lack of connectedness to information and ways of doing this through ornamentation and how personal and intimate ornamental embodiment practices are/have the potential to be… ie; touch, hearing, taste etc – places to interrogate engagement
  • SECODNLY – I studied Graham Harmens tripple O during lock down and our practice viva and came to some interesting conclusions on what it means to touch something when in the contact of consumption… ie; the local market vs. the online experiences of purchasing something. I concluded that touch was necessary to access the real qualities of an object.
  • I now wonder whether using a sensory perception of ‘sight’ (which in Debords view is a weakest and most easily manipulated sense) may merely allow us to access the sensual object… whilst the metaphorical and/or aesthetic experience alludes to the real object (essence of) that is the subject matter.
  • Should this be something I discuss with Sean? ACTUALLY first, in order to answer this question i think look up ‘real qualities’ section in a new theory of everything book… (below are the diagrams I redrew for the essay that helped me understand the practical nature by which harman thinks the aesthetic experience happens)

Quote from medium website: https://medium.com/@mdowns1611/commentary-on-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle-chapter-1-37b2e105614a (has good definitions of marxist terminology)

Other website that helps translate issues spoken about in the spectacle

‘Alienation is separation — separation from ourselves — and the spectacle is the perfection of this sort of separation’

  • nice summery of what the issue of the society of the spectacle really is 

18. For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings — tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behav­ior. Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seenvia different special­ized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adapta­ble to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. This is not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is percep­tible to the naked eye — even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule. We live in an inverted world. If the real world becomes images, then images become the most real of things. These images attract and entrance us precisely because we take them to be real. We cannot experience the real directly anymore. The real is not something we can reach out and touch. The “real” is only visible in spectacular images. This is why the spectacle puts all the emphasis on visual experience. This is a very McLuhanite insight. McLuhan pointed out that different media-forms produce different types of societies as well as different types of subjectivities. For Debord, sight is the most abstract of the senses, that is, the one most capable is distancing itself from concrete experiences. Consider how we use the word “see” to refer to understanding abstract truths, for example, “I see why the circle cannot be squared”. We often say we can “see” these truths, but never that we can touch, hear, taste or smell them. Thought and seeing have long been associated. Given how abstract things have become in the consumer society, it’s no wonder the spectacle puts us in a sensory mode wherein visual experience is dominant. This is also no coincidence, since sight is the most easily tricked of all the senses and the spectacle is in the business of deception. However, the spectacle is not itself visible to the eye. This sounds strange, but what he means is that the spectacle is ultimately the way in which images are arranged and configured in relation to one another and, more importantly, how human beings are brought to relate to each other in consumer society. Remember what Debord said in thesis 4: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle is a social system, a social network, and not just a huge stockpile of images. I mean, it is a stockpile of images but one that mediates social relations among people. To say that the spectacle is “immune from human activity” means that any effort on our part to get control of the spectacle, to bend it to our will instead of to capital’s, is an effort in futility. The spectacle is far too pervasive and elusive for us to regulate it. Our simple concrete activities cannot correct it. When it comes to the spectacle, our activities do not factor in. Baudrillard was always quick to highlight the unilaterality or irreversibility of the code, of the simulation. Debord is getting at this as well. Average human activity cannot force the spectacle into a dialogue. If “dialogue” enters the equation, then it’s a simulated type of dialogue like that of a call-and-response format. If the dialogue is scripted, then it’s not really a dialogue at all — it’s a monologue in the simulated guise of a dialogue. Think about how scripted and predictable arguments on the internet are. No one is really engaging in active dialogue. Monologue is the structural default setting of the spectacle. If flows into us, it gives to us, and nullifies every attempt we make to give something back to it. It does not want us to be able to openly challenge it, reverse it, actively problematize it. It wants us to shut the fuck up and simply enjoy what it gives. This is precisely the issue with representation taking on a life of its own — the spectacle, imagistic capital, is like Ultron. Once representation usurps reality, real referents, once it has become unmoored from concrete things, it makes all the rules.

  • The types of aesthetic experiences I am interested in simulating aren’t specifically un reified… they still entirely intend to have an mystic aura but I guess one that is ‘speculatively more real’

19. The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tra­dition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spec­tacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. The spectacle is not just the zenith of capitalism but also has a deep connection to Western philosophy. The Western philosophical tradition has all sorts of blindspots in it. These have been pointed out by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. The spectacle inherits all of these weaknesses. Western metaphysics has always been visucentric (based on sight). Think about how substance ontology describes everything in terms of visual properties. Substance ontology is visual ontology. This is one of it’s presuppositions. It never argued that reality itself is structured in the way that visual experience is, but, instead, blindly presupposed it. Why isn’t reality like hearing or touching? Why must it be like our experience at all? Don’t get me wrong. There have been philosophers that have challenged the validity of our experience, but I don’t really know of any that approached this in something like a McLuhanite manner. Activity, both nonhuman and human, might not be reducible to the parameters of visual perception. Just a thought. The spectacle is the technological outgrowth of the technical rationality that grew out of Western metaphysics (this is something Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, etc., would agree with). Debord claims that the spectacle doesn’t realize philosophy — it philosophizes reality. But what does this mean? What’s important is not that the spectacle is the purest realization of the technological rationality of Western philosophy, but, rather, that the spectacle comes to undermine what philosophy took reality to be. Put differently, the spectacle inverts reality and representation. It makes images into realities and realities into images. This is what it means for the spectacle to philosophize reality. This also involves negating concrete human reality by turning us into detached speculators of images. The spectacle turns all of us into “philosophers” insofar as it distances us from reality and forces us into never-ending contemplation of the consumer world. You’re not concretely living when you’re abstractly contemplating.

  • Also I like the word visucentric!!! (based on sight… Im interested in anti-visucentricity)
  • Also the idea of pseudocyclical time – is also applicable to data visualisations as well as commodified goods

Quotes from the actual texts: (in order that they appear in the text)

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign
to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, …truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.” 

  • thinking about ‘what people engage with’ and how representations are key… how can I prove that they are more key when they are more illusionary, representationally visceral as opposed to ‘trunfullinessly’ allured to via data and graph 

 But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. 

  • things such as false consciousness align with anthropocentric/cosmological confusion confusion

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle-the visual reflection of the ruling economic order-goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. 

  • good argument / reference for neoliberalsim’s void of forwards thinking yet has ‘development and progress’ (Ie GDP growth) stamped all around this void’s rim. Doughnut economics esque argument for the necessity of visualisations due to the power of them.

(17) The first stage o f the economy’s domination o f social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having­ human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real. 

  • ontological shifts…

The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autono­mously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunite 

  • the spectacle creating a lack of community and unconscious – a bid for why the opposite to the spectacle – the sensual and the connectedness – may allow for a reversing of this and an engendering of COLLECTIVE ACTIONS

(28) The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. ….. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the condi­ tions that engender “lonely crowds.” The spectacle is simply the common language ofthis separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. 

  • this I think holds true to ‘connectedness’. Different terms but this ‘language of separation’ is contemporary communication and comparison that exists on social media platforms and the way in which we interact with news and upsetting yet equally distant and temporally elongated information

(153) like all spectacular com­modities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itselfat a higher level ofintensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life. 

155) While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies con­ tradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their sys­ tem of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality 

161) As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the ter­ rain where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals from him is in reality separating him from his own time. This potentially surmountable social alienation is what has prevented and paralyzed the possibilities and risks ofa living alienation within time

163) The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all­ embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times-a federation of playful individual and collective forms ofirreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization ofauthentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists in­ dependently of individuals.” 

^ Translation: Citizens of the Spectacle are estranged from the present through spatial alienation that separates them from their own time. What is needed is a federation of independent times all simultaneously present: the authentic temporal realization of authentic communism which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals” 

  • I find this interesting because he not only identifies this spacial alienation that separates us from our own time. He claims under authentic communism there would be no grand order of time (what he calls pseudocycical time) because everyone would have the fulfilment and consciousness to be able to have ‘playful individual and collective’ forms of time (that he calls irreversible time that is simultaneously in the present 
  • maybe the idea of the spectacle is too dated and reductionist in lots of way but it does nicely align itself with temporality dictation which is almost exactly what slow violence speaks to. we all live on pseudo cyclical time and therefore find it next to impossible to see the perspective of / care about metabolism that are vastly distant in both relational spectrum of time frame and distance from the souse the information is reaching us via. (eg phone screen, graph, data, factoid)

169) The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its very territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism-“city planning”-is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor. 

(170 The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s con­ spicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time.” )

  • This could be a useful quote if I mention the ‘conservation’ dialogue of certain environmentalist movements – something that is irrational and un ecological in Peter Frase’s opinion as evolution in defined by the forwards notion of time and therefore there is no retracting to a previous form of ‘the environment’ and should therefore maybe gun to think more thoughtfully about the choice of ‘environmental decor’.

171) While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation. 

179) The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itselfurbanistic, technological or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue.

  • he wasn’t very hung up on planetary needs, those beyond society

192) The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form, including co-opted rehashes ofits negative manifestations, gives overt expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable …….. The critical truth of this destruction-the real life of modern poetry and art-is obviously concealed, since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory, applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic pseudo­ innovations

  • feel these phrases have some poetic utility.
  • also the spectacles function as

215) The spectacle is the material “expression �f the separation and estrangement between man and man.”

220) In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which can­ not truly know itself, the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies ofthe spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws ofthought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

  • Im not sure I agree or at least my project is to prove why this might not be true. I guess I”m not attempted to our throw capitalism, merely exploring strategies to outstretch an arm of understanding across and through the thicket of thorns that is the society of the spectacle…

17/11/20 – a thought on silver

I’m trying to zoom in a bit and pick something smaller to tackle than issues of slow violence… and therefore have been thinking about silver as its so commonly used in jewellery and has an interesting history with colonialism and extraction practices.

I actually went to Potosi, Bolivia on my gap year. It was once the silver capital of the world and rather rich because of it (Mexico being the being extractor and producer of silver currently). I remember the minors tour being offered to us but we were a gorp of three 19 year old girls and none of us really fancied the idea and felt a bit afraid of being in the mines. It’s hard to remember but I feel like a element of the discussions to whether to do the tour or not was due to the weird dynamic between tourists and local minor and the voyestics, post colonial undertones of the whole experience (possibly not in those words though…) yet equally I can’t remember if we really thought too hard about this.

Either way, I have just read another persons account of what it was like. The short white man traveller article was inoffensive yet riddle with hypocrisies. The authors ethics quickly flickered back and fourth and he sprinkled the writing with two it made him feel…

‘Upon visiting Potosí in Bolivia, I was torn by both safety concerns and the moral justification for visiting the mines. I went back and forth over whether I agreed with such voyeurism and in the end, vowed to look into companies and first-hand experiences as much as I could.‘

Despite the uneasy feeling these images give me, I was almost them. And is it wrong? The minors have capitalised off tourism… what is wrong with this

I especially like the mock tools provided for the photos… I want to think about this some more but I can’t figure out what it makes me think or feel just yet.

The most interesting and relevant thing I came across here was the fact the minors use the chewing of coca leaves as a way to tell the time of the working day. The amount of labour they do is translated into a bag of coca leaves (this is just what the westerner has said so i need to check this fact). When they finish the bag they know its roughly night time outside and tie to stop.

I want to do more reattach into chewing coca leaves. Also need to figure out what this means for material traces as this is more of the type that are participated in. Autographic experiential. Autographic cultural participatory…. (chewing spreads surely vary from culture to culture….)

What are the issues here? In terms of material extraction? is the extraction process both ecologically unethical as well as socially; the working conditions, life expectancy, accidents, ways in which people have died ie exploiting into pieces….

Is extraction practices a form of slow violence in that they are so embedded in the culturally informing colonial capitalsene that attempting to look beyond a populous undergoing the long term heath effects is almost capitalist realism in that there is no ‘out’….

17/11/20 – a thought on ornamentation

I can’t get embodiment practices out of my head and more specifically, bodily ornamentation. We drape, lodge, insert, squeeze, hook, wrap, paint onto out bodies. At first thought this all seems entirely anti-functional (in the most basic of it’s definitions) as it halters the action the body in lots of cases and so seems almost entirely tied up in socio-cultural fashion.

We tend to ‘engage’ with the aesthetic qualities and benefits of ornamentation in a very basic way in terms of aesthetics… we are expressing identity politics of ourselves and our culture and of a moment.

As I’ve there is such strong speculative realist argument (Morton) for the truthfulness of aesthetics over truthiness of data sets when it comes to being ecological… I wonder how this could be applied to these seemingly ‘useless’ yet so ‘personal’ forms of embodiment. We wear these things with very little layering to the experiencing of ‘wearing’ these things.

When you wear and earring you may feel it against your neck or hear it clank in some way if you move to fast and the wind blows.

The ring you wear has a certain textural feeling when you wear it on different fingers and will interact with different objects in different ways. The gem stone may get worn down over time and the metal may rust.

If you were to wear a metal grill the metal might react to left over bacterial in your mouth and that new bacteria might then linger on the metal whilst it say i draw and mutated and so then may have a slightly different taste the next time you wore it.

I feel these sensory platforms allowed for by the process of self adornment / garnishing / ornamenting should be infiltrated. A bit like the Data Cuisine workshop projects (indexical design website) this may entail providing codes. This would be the equivalent to ‘framing’. Anything and everything can be a material trace with the right framing. A translation of ‘data’ with a contextual surrounding. This is the autographic-way surely…

I’d quite like to envision scenarios or circumstances where these tools may be more fictionally, literally existing (if that makes any sense).

  • A post capitalism, democratised automated world, inevitably still one of mass migration and environmental destruction…
  • or automation has changed labour entirely and therefore the way we access time has changed… the working day is now (retracted in a worryingly agricultural revolution kinda way) to be defined by your ‘harvest’… what your objects produces ie; how well your object identified

Growth Assembly – Sascha Pohflepp and Alexandra daisy ginsberg (2009)

This project represents the exact kind of speculating I would like to do. Creating the the future circumstances and outlining the objects the may exist here.

I think a good activity would be to rewrite the exhibition description shown below but replace key words with my own project identification at the point it is now – or at this early stage anyway.

After the cost of energy had made global shipping of raw materials and packaged goods unimaginable, only the rich could afford traditional, mass-produced commodities.

Synthetic biology enabled us to harness our natural environment for the production of things. Coded into the DNA of a plant, product parts grow within the supporting system of the plant’s structure. When fully developed, they are stripped like a walnut from its shell or corn from its husk, ready for assembly.

Shops evolved into factory farms, with licensed products grown where sold. Large items take time to grow and are more expensive while small ones are more affordable. The postal service delivers lightweight seed-packets for domestic manufacturers.

Using biology for the production of consumer goods has reversed the idea of industrial standards, introducing diversity and softness into a realm that once was dominated by heavy manufacturing.

The product shown here is the Herbicide Sprayer, an essential commodity used to protect delicate engineered horticultural machines from older nature that can naturally defend itself

The image references Ernst Heckel (a favourite of mine) in the way they are speaking about the mechanisation of plants. heckel depicted plants like beautiful machines, merging the ideas of atomisation with the style of botanical drawings.

I think this project is influential in the way it doesn’t need justification to create these ‘future manifestations’. It’s okay to create visualisations that express/reflect the negative way we are heading whilst not exactly being dark and dreary…

Moritz Stefaner / Susanne Jaschko: Data Cuisine

From Indexical Design website – one of the talks:

I didn’t think this project/workshop/talk was going to be useful until they started outlining the kind of learning objectives and it becomes clear; they aim for this small small scale social workshop thing where they interact with the language that is food and the multifaceted symbolic nature of all the variables. Beyond the experiences of eating (that is social and cultural) the physical preparation and entanglement of distances traveled and ways to cook and temperature of eating and arrange on the table… by that point you have a lot of variables to tap into signifying something (e.g heated means more energy intensely produces) .

  • interesting to find codes and ways to form codes…

What is the taste of data? Data Cuisine explores food as a means of communication and information expression. We research ways to represent local open data in local food, through the inherent qualities of food such as color, form, texture, smell, taste, nutrition, origin etc. In our presentation, we will reflect on the unique experiences “data foodification” can provide and its relation to other forms of data presentation.

Ultra-Black: Towards a materialist theory of oil – Oxana Timofeeva (E-Flux)

She was basically outlining the different materialisms in order to get to an argument where nothing and everything is materialsim… the nature of matter lies so far and beyond and around us that it is entirely amongst us. Then, in a subversive way she brings in oil as a core element of the movement and value of matter to humans… therefore its shared materialism and agency with labour and slaves (all under capitalism)… and then links back oil in that it has this edge to it, as a living, throbbing, agency of and within materialism.  

The nature of nature as such can be thought as agential (Karen Barad’s agential realism); as ancestral or as a real that was already there before us (Quentin Meillassoux); or as objectal, when everything, subjects included, turns into objects (Graham Harman), or even into hyperobjects (Timothy Morton) that now, at the end of the world, rise beyond all our measurements (global warming, etc.). It can be described in older oppositions of subject and substance, or subject and object, or subject and thing (materialist dialectics and transcendental materialism, critical Marxism, psychoanalysis). It can be approached as forms of life (vitalism), as bodies (corporeal, transcorporeal, and incorporeal materialisms, or what Alain Badiou ironically calls “democratic materialism”), or as media and technology. It can be dialectically or nondialectically opposed to technology, or identified with it. It can be represented and symbolized as a constant lack—a lack of resources (extractive economy), a lack of desire (libidinal economy), etc.—but at the same time as an irreducible excess; as a realm of need and necessity, or of hyperchaos and contingency; as something to be defended and preserved (ecophilosophy, deep ecology), or as a threat—a complex of unknown, blind, and potentially destructive forces (dark materialism).

In his book In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker presents a dark materialist philosophy of nature through the lens of horror. The word “world” has, according to Thacker, three different meanings. The first is the world-for-us, or simply the World; the second is the world-in-itself, or the Earth, and the third is the world-without-us, or the Planet. The World is anthropocentric, the Earth is natural, and the horrifying Planet is supra-natural, or fantastic. Regarding the Earth, or nature, that in a significant part is “grounded by scientific enquiry,” Thacker says that it is “a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-it-itself and becomes the world-for-us.

Today these meanings are maintained in the paronymous words “economy” and “ecology.” Both economy and ecology are concerned with nature—either as a living world, environment, Umwelt, or as a source and resource. They are conjugate—beyond ecology there is always economy, and vice versa: this is our earthy home, here we keep slaves and exchange oil for money. But this is not the whole story, as beyond the doors of nature, the Greater Outdoors stands and creates anxiety. How is it possible, the world-without-us?

The fact that it is a fantasy does not mean that it can be neglected. As psychoanalysis teaches us, fantasy is at least as important as what we call reality, and perhaps even more so. The phantasmatic world-without-us is not only attached to the world-for-us, but presents its internal truth. It is uncanny and unhuman and unnatural, where the prefix un- does not merely negate, but produces a kind of displacement or resistance that dialectically turns canny, natural, human, etc., into their opposites, while maintaining the ostensible clarity and significance of the original. This is why these new concepts of nature continue to revolve around an old concept of the human, in various directions, including the transhuman, the nonhuman, the antihuman, the posthuman, or the inhuman. Such concepts seem to start from the dismissal of the human, but often end up with what I would call negative anthropocentrism, i.e., anthropocentrism of a centrifugal, rather than a centripetal, type.

  • if i want more references I can re read Mark Fishers the weird and eerie

In the world-for-us, where things operate according to the domestic laws of restricted economy, the unconscious becomes a capitalist unconscious.19 Existence under a capitalist regime is bound to a general equivalent, or a value form that can be attached to any piece of living and nonliving matter. The world as we know it consists of commodities, and among commodities there is one for which all other commodities can be exchanged: money. Money is both abstract and real; it is a real abstraction that, even if it does not really exist, produces effects in reality. However, this does not give us an entire picture of the structure of the world-for-us. The fact is that money is not an ultimate commodity. It is not an autonomous being. Behind money, there are three main commodities upon which it grows: the first is matter, the second is labor, and the third is time. All three of these are of principal interest, but here I will only address the first one.

In contrast to money, matter is not an abstraction; otherwise, it would not be matter, but an idea—this is the meaning of what Bataille calls “senile idealism.” Matter as an ultimate commodity is a concrete piece of substance, to which money clings in order to prove that it is real. Such a piece of substance historically stands for the whole material world exchanged for money. It is a material side of the general equivalent, or the Thing of the economy. In old times, the general equivalent was represented by gold. Now such a commodity is—not “officially,” but conventionally—oil.

Remember Marx, who, in his Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, does not really make an essential distinction between a worker and a slave: the point is that exploitation transforms living labor into dead capital. What do a slave, a worker, and oil have in common? The very fact that they are not only the repressed, but the oppressed, not only the unconscious layer of a society in which we exchange matter, labor, and time for money, but that which is exploited, consumed, and burned up in the production of surplus. The worker is exploited as a labor force, the slave is exploited as a “black” labor force, and oil is exploited as a natural resource. If we want to grasp oil, as Hegel would say, “not only as substance, but equally as subject,” not only as the thing from the Greater Outdoors but as “the Real that is already right here,” we must admit that oil—which, like money, now stands for the whole material universe—is not a master, but a kind of ultimately inhuman black slave, one that literally occupies the lowest—and the biggest—strata of the pyramid of exploitation, and creates the very core of our capitalist unconscious.

  • brilliantly tied back in!

12/11/20 – gathered bits n pieces

———— Cinematic visualisations 

  • Kodwo Eshun spoke in the zoom conversation i watched about how people living in the convention that is the anthropocene have turned to finding indexical signs, material traces, to inform them of seismic movements/predictions. 
  • ‘living in the anthropocene is to confuse and to complicate the difference between human sciences and so called natural sciences. To confuse the inherited devisions of knowledge of colonial order’ 
  • he also makes a strange point about a women (Charlotte King) who, when living in this confusion, had taken to thinking her body was able to predict seismic activity, she was especially sensitive to the earth indexes (in this case ones that are more spiritual and physical in my opinion) – and how this links to Bruno Latours call for ‘sensitisation’ 
    • SO maybe if we didn’t have this subconscious need to different so harshly between nature and science and earth and mind, we would not need to designate a the collecting of indexical signs into delusional/spiritual and scientific/datacolective… if these realms merge (is our perspective of technology vs nature) and we see US and OUR technology AS nature… we could create a space for innovation that nurtures this… objets and tools that mesh together the bodily reactions/visualisations/sensitisations/technology/tools etc….

———— Nixon’s slow violence 

We live, writes Cory Doctorow, in an era when the electronic screen has become an “ecosystem of interruption tech- nologies.”29 Or as former Microsoft executive Linda Stone puts it, we now live in an age of “continuous partial attention.”30 

  • something I’m defiantly intending to address in my research. attention span and engagement are both pinnacle to the way we interact with objects, including the ones that we choose to adorn ourselves with
  • what are the links with spectacle driven inforwhelming engagement and consumption of of objects of dress… are these ‘things’ still existing within identify politics and the need to embody identity… or will this ‘consumption desire’ be replaced with concepts of socialist ‘need’, designation of resources and tools…

Fast is faster than it used to be, and story units have become concomitantly shorter. In this cultural milieu of digitally speeded up time, and foreshortened narrative, the inter- generational aftermath becomes a harder sell. So to render slow violence visible entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial”—once a dead metaphor for “slow”—as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss. 

  • needed terminology transition!! speed is all relative, especially in an age of accelerated lack attention span. marketing of information…. 

The representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a critically dangerous impact on what counts as a casualty in the first place. 

And what perspectives—not least those of the poor or women or the colonized—do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure? Pratt’s formulation of planetary consciousness remains invaluable because it allows us to connect forms of apprehension to forms of imperial violence.36  p15

It is here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life—and often whose very existence—is of indifferent interest to the corporate media. 

  • how and why design can be used

———— Latour thinking through fashion

In general this chapter on applying Bruno Latour to fashion wasn’t useful as it was just this – about fashion. The writer proceeded to analyse the market pulls and pushes within the network that is the buyer and the trend of the moment etc which doesn’t enthuse me at all and if anything is doing quite the opposite to what I’m into.

  • I guess I still don’t know where I picture an output of ‘dress’ as it is hard to conceive dress without fashion. Does this mean I have to consider the evolution of ‘trend’ in a world without capitalism? Or maybe try conceive of a future where dress exists in isolation from fashion… what is left (obviously an network of things, but is it categorisable/label-able for my purposes) when ornamentation exists without capitalistically induced advertising of ‘trend’…. can’t picture it yet but maybe something to really think about?

———— thinking through fashion

Still not totally sure how Butler can inform my territory… I guess her acknowledge of networks is useful and interesting and PERFORMATIVETY is also relevant in that ‘bodily practices’ such as dress are continually and inevitably performative.

This in turn i guess makes me think about what structures one can ritualistically/repetitively unforced through the act of seemingly passive ‘wearing’.

———— his not only signifies that the term ‘turn’ suffers a huge inflation, but also that we live and think in a time of fast change, a period after post-modernism that is not yet clearly defined (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010). – p12

  • I like this idea of inflation.. I think this interestingly intersects with Nixons connects of contemporary culture inability to engage with amorphous temporalities that lack visualisation and ‘shock factor’ spectacle…

———— Dust zone

It frames pollution by producing a way to measure the speed dust recollects on a given surface.

  • is this form of expressing an issue maybe more powerful / potent than a graph or a new article?
  • will it intersect with more individuals?
  • would it ever change behaviour?

———— Material traces

  • is maybe why I’ve started thinking about permanent pandemic possibilities
  • ESPECIALLY interesting as the vaccine race is because more politicised – not least because its a ‘race’, but also as he information has been released right after the Biden-harris election results.
  • still… hygiene / fear / polarisation (both social and physically ie. vulnerable and the not) / distancing (again, culturally and physically)

An interesting and growing area involves the design of smart materials with autographic properties, with many applications such as 4d printing, micro-fluidic robots, or the use and manipulation of bacteria to visualize environmental properties. !!!!!!!!!!!

———— Happiness x GDP

This project made me ponder what it means to speculate via ornamentation and dress.

  • my first issue was; how to avoid the fact dress is so entangled with consumption. Aesthetic representation FOR consumption of sorts.
  • this project made me wonder why she chose earrings. I couldn’t find an explanation and I a bit critical of these objects in the sense they seem like jewellery for the sake of jewellery.
  • I would like to think more academically about why I’m choosing / thinking about dress as the ‘forum’.
  • A late night thought lead me to the fact that we will always need be dressing ourselves, almost as a certainty (maybe fun to think of subversive scenarios of nudists communities OR anti body architecture/anti contact with materiality (due to back lash because of current circumstances/material treatment?!) emerging within this speculation). IF we are certainly wearing things for the future of our non-digital existence, ornamentation has the potential to evolve drastically and become more necessary to not just represent aesthetic culture symbols (maybe undetectable without a code..?) but (what I’m a lot more into) become more tool like. incorporate lost of different mechanisms to aid ‘environmental reformism’.

11/11/20

So now that the blog is up to date with all my references that are informing my current thoughts, I think I will start doing dated rounds ups as to where I see my territory right now.

I’m trying out this idea of triangulation because my interests are seemingly quite separate and I would like to know if there is a middle ground to be found in order to carry out an exploration or whether it is about choosing 1 or 2…

I have found a way to separate the the strands into three…

  • Dress / ornamentation as a platform for addressing futures. I am passionate about form fo dress separately to the course and I don’t see why I shouldn’t make this more prominent in my design outcomes.
    • humans will always be dressed (and the idea of them one day not should therefore also be explored) and I’m interested in how the cultural uses of dress will inevitable evolve…
    • I’d like to add to these ideas with research into embodiment practices and dress as extensions of everything social/cultural/ideological/practical etc (joanne entwistle..)
  • Speculative futures (/synthetic biology?) I guess is a bit broad for a whole ‘category’ but much of the thinkers I read tend to outline various ways in which we are heading and this is always what I’m drawn to thinking about.
    • This is more a research area that allows me to dwell on / focus on elements of the present that I want to invasions evolving and therefore evolving something like DRESS.
    • One thought circling heavily is the the effects of the global pandemic intersecting with the incredible real dangers of climate change. Hygiene, distancing, touch/interaction/tactility etc
    • microbial / synthetic biology and bacteria are, to me, obvious points of focus within this as ima already interested in mould and terminology around clean and dirty – purity and danger and what room lies within linguistics (structuralism?) to re-signify such terms and signifiers…
    • as well as this I’m interested in how these intersect with other subjects to speculate around such as economy (doughnut?), politics (socialism?), trade/consumption (post-capitalism?)…
  • Autographic visualisations interests me as I want to figure out forums of engagement.. and the tools available to me to affect this.
    • so I’m thinking about visualisations of problems (or maybe how in the future we will visualise problems in new ways ie.dress) as a way to induce engagement / change… this means finding ways to frame material traces that express an issue of sorts – that in turn may affect a ‘users/viewers’ outlook on said issue…
      • this aligns with concepts of spectacle culture and varying temporalities / metabolisms which in turn provides a place to intervene and find ways in which will engage a social media info-whelmed individuals of something damaging happening on a different temporal scale…
      • eg slow violence… pollution, waste, treatment / scarcity / uneconomical uses of materials, networks of materials in fashion, energy consumption, environmental racism
    • maybe the intersection is in the how autographic visualisations get used as tools of engagement AND problem solving tools (need to look more into the possibilities of this as all hypothetical atm) become merged with dress…….
    • I guess there is still a bit of a fork in the road between creating a visualisation that induces acknowledgement.. and visualisation that is a detection of something invisible within out environment… basically does the visibility of said trace just show something or should it change a behaviour… the ‘wearing’ of it in the first place is quite a large change of behaviour.

still can’t tell how the theorists I’ve been looking at can aid any of the above

throwing around research report questions….

  • should dress be autographic
  • How affective is autographic visualisations within consumer goods
  • How affective is autographic visualisations within embodiment objects and dress..?
  • How can dress enable collective action 
  • Should dress and fashion be made more political 
  • Are social science fictions successful in creating change 
  • How to justify producing more in times of obvious abundance and sacristy
  • What would it mean for dress and embodiment practices if they became even more utilitarian…  how would this intersect with capitalism or future that is post capitalism 
  • Is there a future for synthetic body ornamentation / augmentation in a post global pandemic society

Vibrant Matter – Jane Bennett

Takes a speculative realist approach to materiality in order for a re-analysis of agency and the non anthropocentrism of the ability to effect networks

New materialism is her term for this theoretical practice.

she uses case studies (as well as previous theorists) to prove these ideas such as electricity grids, nutrition, life of worms

  • still need to read second last chapter on ‘political ecology’
  • has good bit on the need for a bit of anthropomorphising… useful cognitive practice