Tag: The Semaphore Line

• Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon and Henri Lefebvre

  

  I’m in the process of putting together a research presentation for January. It’s something all first year PhD students in sociology at the University of Warwick have to do, and it’s a nice way to introduce your thesis to the other students, as well as helping formulate your own plans. I’ve started to put the bulk of it into MS PowerPoint but decided I’d have a little play about with Prezi, which is great for adding a few neat visual touches and is far more flexible than PowerPoint.

  After trying a couple of their pre-formatted designs I decided I’d search for a suitable background image. I first typed in something general like ‘digital maps’ and ‘map game boards’ because I wanted to re-create the sequential format Prezi seems to like, with arrows and frames and also play on the urban exploration side of mapping. Then I had a bit of a brainwave and searched for some Situationist artworks/maps; the perfect combination of maps, play and ‘flow’. The classic image of the cut-out map segments with red arrows darting from section to section seemed perfect (see a selection here). Alas, I couldn’t find an image with a good enough resolution for the levels of zooming Prezi requires so I had to ditch them.

  Then I came across a post on the [polis] blog on the Moscow Occupy movement. Their main picture was an image by Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920 – 2005). Taken from his New Babylon project, the image was part of a selection of “models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photocollages, as well as …manifestos, essays, lectures, and films” (Wigley 1998; text available here) that together formed a utopian vision of an anti-capitalist city. His work was strongly interconnected with the Situationists of the 1950s/60s.

  In two, perhaps not so, coincidental moves I found a translation of an interview with Henri Lefebvre on Nieuwenhuys, Guy Debord and the Situationists, and also a reference to the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his homo ludens concept. Nieuwenhuys wanted his utopian city to be populated with the ‘playing man’ (homo ludens) in opposition to the ‘bourgeois shackles’ (Goldhagen 2006; direct link) the working man had to contend with in the modern city.

  A subsequent image I found from Nieuwenhuys’ same New Babylon project was perfect for the background to my presentation. Good quality and a perfect colour scheme (here). Close up I think it looks like either a microscopic image of a biological cell or a computer circuit board. It also gives me an opportunity to pick out individual elements in the collage (as I think it originally was) and link them into the different sections in the presentation.

  If you want to know a little bit more about Constant himself there’s an interview by Linda Boersma at the art magazine BOMB here from 2005. I’d like to think my attempts to introduce the digital map (and mobile device) as a ‘new terrain’ for situationist-style explorations draws on some of themes Constant envisaged in New Babylon.

  2012.12.19

• Halsall Interviews Latour

  There is a new issue of Society and Space hot off the press which, amongst other things (including a heart-warming set of tributes to the late Neil Smith) includes a short interview with Bruno Latour as conducted by Francis Halsall. It’s mainly on art and his ongoing Modes of Existence project. Although it does turn nicely into a discussion of the Enlightenment and the Gaia hypothesis, which is the subject of his upcoming Gifford Lecture Series at University of Edinburgh, outlined below:

  Facing Gaia. A new inquiry into Natural Religion

  There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.

  There will be 6 lectures in total from 18 February – 28 February 2012. The details of which can be found in this publicity PDF.

  2012.12.14

• Post-Fordist Philosophy?

  Whilst I find these kinds of hybrid debates utterly exhausting they do provide some stimulation. Alexander Galloway has a piece in Critical Inquiry (here) entitled ‘The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism’. What’s the question?

  Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism?

  And, cue the inevitable responses:

  Moacir P. de Sá Pereira here, Peter Gratton here, Robert Jackson here and Levi Bryant here.

  And an important point from Bryant:

  How an entity is deployed is not fixed by the relations in which it happens to exist. It always harbors potentials for other things. Objects are pluripotent. Artists of the Duchampian tradition show us this all the time.

  and also:

  If everything is defined by the historical setting in which it emerged, if things– above all people –are not pluripotent such that they harbor potentials in excess beyond the way they’re related and deployed in the present, then there’s no hope for ever changing anything. Everything will be tainted through and through by the power dynamics in which it emerged.

  2012.12.13

• 3 Deleuzian critiques of Hardt & Negri

  As Tampio (2009) says in ‘Assemblages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the Postmodern Left’ (direct link here), Deleuze has three issues with Hardt and Negri’s political endorsements.

  Tampio claims that Hardt and Negri have reinterpreted Deleuze and his many concepts (the multitude, rhizomatic networks, nomadology, organs without bodies, war machines) for their own ends. In doing so they have obscured Deleuze’s ‘distinct contributions to the contemporary left’ (385). So, those three issues below:

  1. The concept of the proletariat. Not because they don’t exist per se, but that categorizing people as proletarians risks preserving a rather outdated opposition between capitalism and communism (bourgeoisie and worker). The left needs to work beyond these distinctions.

  2. The concept of revolution. Every revolution ‘almost always’ (390) ends badly and rarely changes people’s minds. This is in opposition to what Deleuze calls ‘revolutionary becoming’ (Transformations 1995: 171) – a kind of experimentation of political change. It goes beyond thinking about revolution as a requirement for political change and supposes that change can be brought about through smaller interventions.

  3. The desire for an end to sovereignty. Deleuze wants to ‘strike [an] optimum balance’ (391) between the state (order) and the war machine (chaos). In calling for an end to sovereignty we risk damaging individual and collective life. ‘It is far better to use a ‘very fine file’ to open up the political body to new possibilities than to wield a sledgehammer to obliterate its contours’ (391).

  2012.12.11

• The First Cut

  

  I went to a really interesting exhibition yesterday at the Manchester Art Gallery. The First Cut is an international show of artists who “cut, sculpt and manipulate paper”. From their website, then:

  Wonder at giant sculptures inspired by far away galaxies that spiral from the wall, explore a walk-through forest of paper trees and marvel at miniature worlds that explode from vintage staple boxes or emerge from the page of a book.

  Flocks of birds and butterflies cut from maps appear alongside artworks that feature dark fairytale imagery. Guns and grenades fashioned from paper currency and sinister silhouettes comment on social, political and economic issues.

  There was work on display from Abigail Reynolds (whose Mount Fear piece I’ve used as one of the banner images on this blog), Justine Smith (on power, money, and ‘illusion’), Susan Stockwell (some stunning map and dress pieces), Elisabeth Lecourt (again, some great map/dress pieces), Claire Brewster (more paper map art!), Andy Singleton (with some swirling, brewing cloud formations) and many more (complete list here).

  Paper art can be a little twee. There certainly was that aspect. Art made for birthday cards. Although there were plenty of political pieces that made altogether different statements.

  It’s on until Sunday 27th January 2013. The images above are from Elisabeth Lecourt’s Les robes géographiques project.

  2012.12.10