genuinely seeking to arrive at a place that might offer reconciliation
between philosophical positions that, in their difference, have sometimes
been counter-productive.
I am not sure if she succeeds. In the first page of her essay ³Posthumanist
Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter" she
asks ³how did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?², the point
being that contemporary cultural theorists have questioned objectivity so
thoroughly that the word has become more real than the material. However,
the argument of such cultural theorists (as I understand it) is not that
language is somehow prioritised over matter, that the representation is more
³real² than the thing it respresents, but that we do not have access to the
means to assure ourselves that our words are only words and that things are
indeed things. To argue that one thing is more trustworthy than another is
to miss the point of the argument which is that nothing can be taken on
trust. Everything is constantly in suspension. Nothing is trustworthy,
whether they are words or things. Therefore, one is unable to distinguish
between words and things. This is the nihilistic base-line of much of
phenomenological and post-structuralist thought and what Baudrillard means,
in part, when he writes of the simulacra.
I still don¹t see any argument beyond that position except through a leap
of faith that there is an objective reality. I am not keen on leaping before
looking, which leaves me stuck on one side of the argument. The difference
between scepticism and nihilism is too fine.
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
simon@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
From: "fmarineo@libero.it" <fmarineo@libero.it>
Reply-To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:15:18 +0100
To: yasmin_discussions <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Simulation, remediation
Simon writes:
"It is possible to argue that the thing being experienced and that
experiencing are part of the same thing; that existence is found in the
interaction between things".
I think this leads us to rethink the status of representation in accordance
with the "scientific" idea that the observer and the observed are part of
the same phenomenon. A very interesting perspective, and surely an
antirelativistic one, is that offered by Karen Barad in her book "Meeting
the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and
meaning", whose key concepts can also be found in her previously publsihed
short essay "Posthumanist Performativity: How Matter Comes to Matter"
(Signs, vol. 28, n. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831). Here, she develops the notion of
"agential realism" drawing on a critique of Bohr's physics, which I find
very fruitful for those working in between the artistic and the scientific
field (like me, on a theoretical level). Barad shifts from a
representationalist perspective to a performativist one (and here is where
feminist theory gives a great contribution), one which attributes
performativity to matter, and at the same time propose!
s an anti-representational form of realism.
Here, "relations do not follows relata", in Barad's words, but mattering is
itself a differentiating process (which also means that differences are not
pre-given). Barad's theory is very complex and fascinating, and I do not
want to enter into much detail here, but I firmly believe that her idea of
agential realism allows to reconceive the intra-actions between humans
(post-human in Barad's sense), non-humans, and the environments they live in
so as to abandon any metaphysics of purity or essential truth ( as well as
of immediacy), without nonetheless abandoning the possibility of
objectivity.
Jennifer, about "Avatar": personally, the level of hypermediacy it carries
with it all the time made me have a filmic experience of total detachment.
Every second, I was so totally aware of its excess of mediation, that I was
never emotionally involved. Maybe, an alternance of hypermediacy and
immediacy would have catched me a little bit more.
Pier Luigi: incidentally, the van de Vall's article I was mentioning in my
previous post talks about Cronberg's ExistenZ too...
Best,
Federica
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