Friday, June 24, 2011

Review essay Van der Tuin: New feminist materialisms

(via @juspar ):
"A nice review article by Iris van der Tuin in Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 271–277 on New Materialist Feminisms."

The article reviews the following publications:


  • Material feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Eds.), Indiana University Press, 2008, 
  • The material of knowledge: Feminist disclosures, Susan Hekman, Indiana University Press, 2010, 
  • New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds.), Duke University Press, 2010, 
  • Carnal knowledge: Towards a “new materialism” through the arts, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (Eds.), I.B.Tauris, (forthcoming)

Shifting titles, and a new challenge: "One, two... Soup!"

Behind the stage of paper writing: how the paper title has shifted while writing over the last weeks (I recovered these from my drafts between June 6 - 13)

  • Shifting musicologies, or the transversal capacities of New Materialism live as an explosive fuel to performance studies.
  • Shifting musicologies and the new materialist generation: methodology, ontology and time for change.
  • Or, productive alliances and not-a-new methodology
  • New materialism live! Transversal methodology, shifting musicologies, and time for a radical politics of affirmation
  • Or: affirming (my) new materialist music(ologi)cal experience as performance and transversal methodology
  • Or: Hippies or Butches?  Soft affirmation as alternative to feminist criticism
  • New materialism live! Transversal methodology, posthuman subjectivies and shifting musicologies


It reveals some of the more articulate and less subtle stages of the process, I think..   what do you think? (the penultimate one remains my favorite..)

p.s. yes, I've finally finished. As you may have noticed, there is a point where I couldnt keep up with the live stream. Probably, there's a time of opening up, and one of closing down. Necessary to get things done.
This morning I realize that all the more, as I just started the next paper challenge, and immediatly felt the desire to share some thought again..

and of course, no new project goes without a funky working title. For today:

"One, two… Soup! On the limits of politeness/othering, perception, and pluri-modal ontology"


This paper will focus on the Speculative Turn, and I'm taking some earlier posts on that book (on the authenticity of imitation, for instance) as the starting point..  I need a shorter hashtag for this one, do you have suggestions? #12soup doesnt look good, I think..

Friday, June 10, 2011

Think becoming and watch this

Think 'becoming' and watch this.
Think 'first there is movement' and 'unity is what we make of it as its product'
Think 'oppositional terms are themselves part of one and the same movement'

Remember that neither the one, nor the multiple is privileged in pluri-modal ontology. That there are different modes does not mean that you can be 'both at once... compossibility works in a quite different way from simple accumulation. .. the difference lies in good and bad ways of protecting the multiplicity from the dangers of both inity and dispersal.' (Latour on Eitienne Souriau in The Speculative Turn, p. 332 (full details posted earlier))  


and perhaps most of all
Realize that constant becoming, flux, movement is FAR FROM CHAOS.

[with thanks to F for bringing this to my attention]


Art is life

So cool, so cool..

The 'is life' campagin does indeed resonate already in other fields.  (Read this earlier post if you don't understand what I mean)

check it out!! http://www.artislifemovie.com/
'it's there.. it follows you... it breaks borders... its always there..  it touches everything... it brings people together'


Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Sally Macarthur, Gilbert Simondon and more

So here's my "my-life-is-too-short-but-these-articles-I'd-otherwise-read-right-now" list of today.
Included: short notes on why these, and full-text pdf links

Have you read it? Will you read it (for me)? Share your thought in 100 words, or even less .. so that we can use the time of our too short lives together more productively.


0.(that is, this before and most of all)

Sally Macarthur


I still haven't had time to properly read her work. But she's clearly a partner in new materialist crime. Or in feminist-deleuzian musicology, as she would probably call it. Her 2010 book is expensive. I'll talk to my librarian. Meanwhile, we'll have to do it with this:

Macarthur, Sally. "A thousand dissonances" in Australian Feminist Studies 2009.

Macarthur, Sally. "A Becoming-Infinite-Cycle in Anne Boyd’s Music: A Feminist-Deleuzian Exploration" in Radical Musicology 3(2008). http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Macarthur.htm

See also the full list of publications on her site.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Anahid Kassabian

http://blahfeme.typepad.com/blahfeme/2007/01/when_the_music_.html

Anahid Kassabian's work on haptic and ubiquitous listening

(Recommended by in a discussion on "it's her factory" blog)

New layout

Thanks to Nate, another one of my great artist friends. Check her amazing work here.

The header image is a fragment of the one below. To me it looks like a radically open brain with many schizoid alliances.

Life project equals insight of the day, in less then a twitter update

The tricky thing with bodies is the moment you try to define one, you find yourself always already involved in producing another. 

This is, in short, my view on the relation between bodies and the subject.

In contrast to objects, bodies never fully detach, let alone do they stand in a binary opposition to the subject. Hence, my understanding of the subject is in no way a pure (Cartesian) mind. Embodied it is. Yet, I do not first pose the subject and thereafter the body. To posit the subject as embodied is not to say that embodied subjectivity is the only position from which expression,  experience and consciousness take place.

My understanding of the body, namely, on the other hand, is radically post-human. There is a bodily consciousness that exceeds the subject. Or perhaps it is better to say, the body has an entirely different ontological mode, a different mode of being. (I was inspired by reading Latour on pluri-modal ontology today[1]). Think of a string quartet: this supra-individual body has the capacity to express as an organic unity, even though individual bodies are at once also expressed.

The I that creates a cartography of a body is itself part of that very body in its subsequent actualizations (very simply: you read my view of a body hence you look ‘through my eyes’ at that body, so you read ‘me-seeing-a-body’) .    

I want to explore the idea of different modes of bodies as different ontological modes. That is: of ‘a bodily reality’, distinct to the singularity of each encounter.
Is it helpful to imagine a radically immanent/contingent multimodal plane of continuously shifting ontologies? No, not al the time. But sometimes.


[1] Latour, Bruno. “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les diffĂ©rants modes d’existence” (translated by Stephen Muecke) in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.). Open access (full text): http://www.re-press.org/content/view/64/38/

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Brian Massumi, another great crafty generator of life


Semblance and Event - The MIT Press

also on the list: his Parables for the Virtual

Reading Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying

Found some interesting stuff via Thomas Brett's blog, to be read at a later point:
Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying (online availlable)
See Brett's blog for a short review.

It resonates with my 'authenticity of imitation' line of thought.

Did someone read it and/or  has something to say about it?

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Career bitch or ordinary pleasure? The game of academia

Whether it's in games or sport, it's hard to resist the idea that boys, in general, are more competitiveThey are 
  • more fanatic,
  • enter the survival/fighting mode very quickly, 
  • and thus, are more committed and likely to win. 
Even though I hate stereotypes and try to subvert them whenever possible, I find myself - with other female friends, significantly less involved, caring less about the game itself. Let alone about winning it.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Cutting intermezzos

Cutted during my work of rewriting paradigms and disciplinary history of the new materialist generation.. 
----intermezzo
A few basic rules, or, what we can learn from successful revolutions of the facebook generation
Facebook only has a like button; an ultimate example of the affirmative mode. [1]
Existing online is a strong step towards ontological existence. Materialization is further secured by appearance in the established Western media (online, tv and print), helping it leak through at dinner-table talks and in classrooms. Realities on Facebook or YouTube have the capacity to intervene realities of hegemonic state media.
Active participation needed! Transversal mobilizing may go faster than ever before, forgetting and demobilization join easily after. One-day-flies don’t make sustainable difference. Therefore, constant reinforcement and active participation is needed. A high number of likes and visits in a short time is crucial to get feet on the ground, but keeping attention and ongoing engagement is the only way towards materializing sustainable difference.
---


[1] I am deliberately not delimiting the movement to ‘Arabic’ revolutions as it resonates as well outside the Middle East with varying effects, f.e. China and more recently Spain. 



--intermezzo 2:
A few consequences and implications of reshuffling hierarchies and structures in the new materialist generation.
‘Promise of the youth’ gets a whole new significance when taken on as leading for legitimacy. That is, you don’t have to be established before your arguments may be cited by others.
And, New materialist citation policies 2.0. 

Livestream paperwriting. Shifting musicologies ..

Today: a new experiment, after longterm frustration about paperwriting and the evil facebook distraction that notoriously stands in the way of efficient writing.

Now let's see if postindividualist thoughtstream may actually enhance the product.

Follow the livestream on twitter and join with the hashtag #shiftingmusicologies. This is an invitation to join, help, laugh at, challenge, and criticize the process. And remember, your contrinbutions will be acknowledged, in line with the recently proposed new materialist citation politics.*

Monday, May 30, 2011

Mimesis - CFP

Interesting call for papers, especially for someone concerned with the authenticity of imitation.
deadline 15oct2011

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Karen Barad, Myra Hird and Elizabeth Wilson Visit Warwick

Anyone close to Warwick / Manchester on June 13, don't miss this chance to meet these new materialist heroins! (Barad introduced the terms 'intra-action', 'material-discursive', etcetera)

Boundary crossing images I


Time for a little visual input on this platform.
A big part of the works displayed here are stored in my living room, I am staring at them all day long.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

First encounter with The Artistic Turn

Just a quick note after reading a few pages of The Artistic Turn (the chapter on deterritorialization and a fragment of Artist’s examples). I emphasize, I have read only a few pages. This is not a review after proper reading! These are investigation in research-in-the-making, glimpses of the first encounter between scholar and text.

Feminist upbringing immediately makes me try out replacing ‘artist’ with ‘women’, to see how the ontological and the nature/nurture or determinist/social-constructivist views work on the category as such.
In that respect it is crucial to question constantly the self-world opposition, since the ‘self’ or subject itself is not attainable for its life/living in the same manner. That is, the unregistered, the stateless, the insane, the prisoner, they are no subjects in the first place.

An unfinished reading/listening/worlding guide for new materialist newbies

[under construction (like everything in life)]

1. Musicologists who certainly can be included in the new materialist generation are:

The most explicit and as far as I know only case of fieldwork-new materialist-musicology is  Milla Tiainen's "Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing and Subjectivity" (2007). (Abstract here, if you don't have full-text access through your library contact me).

Looking back in time, we see that the famous 94 essays on mind/body and on lesbian musicology of Suzanne Cusick are groundbreaking new materialisms at full force.

The authenticity of imitation

(or: demystifying freedom and spontaneity with speculative virtualism) 

A few insights from this morning’s reading encounter.

“As much as possible” needs to be speculatively revised.

When I stressed earlier the non-opposition of composition and improvisation, insisting on the constraints within the myths of “free acting” or “spontenous response”, it was precisely related to this.

There is a limitation in the idea of all possibles, and Meillassoux's chapter presented it to me perfectly with the image of the dice, this morning: it has a finite amount of sides and doesn’t allow different sizes its sides or addition of extra sides. This is the different between chance and contingency, and as I will argue, it helps to undo many myths, not only that of the musical genius, the transcendental image of the child prodigy, but also that of life as a miracle itself.

II

Crafty musicology matters, vitally;

developing focuses from people who are about*. (Not around, this is not a circus.)

developing focuses for people who are about.

developing focuses with people who are about.

Forms coalitions in social life (musicological life).

About ≠ local or institutional. (community=cringe)

Crafty musicology is not concerned with hybrids or hybridity.

is not writing in, with, or for a genre. It is obsessed with genre and with genreing.

is more interested in register than rhythm or pitch or harmony.

Crafty musicology is audatious: better accounts and greater detail.

is analytical.

is pleased to encounter myths, bespeaking narratives for mythical beings (not dramatis personae; history is not a play).

is as much as possible, seeking better craft (technique) from craft’s craftiness and the craft of others.

is bored with prosaic imaginations.

is productive in procrastination (sometimes).



* = 'All over or around; in various directions; to and fro; (also referring to things scattered over a surface) up and down, here and there.'

Monday, May 23, 2011

Copyright and the facebook generation

Copyright and the facebook generation

The beauty of  new materialist generative practice is that satisfies and intensifies life in a non-metaphorical manner. We don’t need to speak of and against the past and the other that we leave behind and aside. Positioning ourselves in the affirmative mode shows cartographies of alliances, the specific unborderedness  and the radical openness of life. It not moving away but joining in with movement,  the radical untogetherness and flux of experience. It is saying My reality is life.

Craftiness, creation, generation.
Haraway speaks of ‘critters’ rather than creatures, mapping a boundary that emphasizes a movement away from monotheist creation narratives. But a lovely capacitity of the new materialist mode is  that any notion can be reclaimed, reterritorialized. In fact, that is precisely the generative mode; performing a qualitative shift by continuously expanding what any concept may stand for.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Crafty Musicology

A crafty musicology
Is very interesting, since musicology is currently united in platitude, the anxiety of being first to interrupt with A declaration of ‘interest’. Once claimed, passivity is restored, the assertion normalizing presentation (however radical) with all other imagined presentations, different but never more sensual, dulled lenses that create shadows against the glow of the latest manifestation of blah blah blah.

Now writing for music, now craftiness for music, blind luminosity electric flux. Imbalanced and coerced by distortion, the coercion itself fashions topics of which the (The) fashioning is desired. In crafty-music-writing the consumption of presentation is a prelude to the bespeaking which shapes flows of energy and matter for human purposes. The telling of accounts for techniques provides materials for metamorphosis, multiplicities for multiplicities. Crafty musicology does not enjoy the posing of questions, and responds ‘thank you for your question, yes I have a b bottle of brandy just here’ or ‘to you a firstyness of thirdness fucking, converging on lips, with my own foreign tongue’. I wear glasses not because I have a nose… not for clichĂ©d lhooqing (was that joke ever amusing?)... but for focus, sharp lines, and more intense visions to mitigate against dull glows; Corubsier was right when he said that all freedoms belong to art save that of not being clear.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Creating life: a beginning

21 May 2010, Aveiro, Portugal.


Judgement Day.

It is time for a change. The end of the World, perhaps, indeed. The end. And the beginning of something new.

Yet we begin with renouncing innovation, for all the artificial change it generates. To 'make difference' is to believe in final salvation or world peace. It is not a difference opposing what has been going on so far, but difference in itself


We felt constrained by need to produce difference the innovative way: The expectation of exceptional performance, the burden of talent. We want to affirm instead the lives of those who do not excel, create, innovate: the poor, pathetic, piteous. Their lives too are essential to the production of difference.  Without them we would never felt powerful to act in the first place!