SHARKS HAVE ELECTORECEPTION, WHY CAN’T WE?
BY MYCLEF LAUN
https:// soundcloud.com/ mw-laundry/ sets/sharkshave-electoreceptionwhy-cant-we
SHARKS HAV RECEPTION, W TYPOLOGY massage intervention reader DESIGN / DESIGNER myclef laun PUBLISHER portmanteau books REPRO hardbakka ruins 2017 PAPER 180 gram sopor DIMENSIONS 150mm x 220mm ISBN 978-82-690766-2-2
VE ELECTOWHY CAN’T WE Please load the sound files for this project at:
https://soundcloud.com/mw-laundry/sets/sharks-have-electoreception-why-cant-we Welcome to ‘Sharks Have Electoreception Why Can’t We’ by Myclef Laun. This is an experimental reading intervention and you are invited to participate in helping Myclef make heads or tails of some theory using two unlikely companions. The text you have in front of you is a work in progress. It will be an ongoing project, which will be republished based on your input. Don’t be afraid to stop the recording at any time to talk. As one point of inquiry, consider a previous working title for this piece: ‘FRAMES FOR ACTION: An exploration of Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto and Jacque Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics’
Please turn to page 4 further instructions
“Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.” These are the opening lines from the Xenofeminist Manifesto, formally Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (hereafter XFM). Let’s let these words gently guide us into the very nature of art’s relationship to politics. This relationship is indeed technological, daily, abstract and complex. This ought not to bother us, but rather allow us to imagine things possible out of what might seem impossible. Laboria Cuboniks’ XFM (2015) and Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004), are not lightly assimilated works, but at the core, issue a call for radically different ways of seeing and managing egalitarian politics and its relationship to art. You will not have had to read either to make this experience mutually beneficial. And it’s from here that you and I will work together. You will be relaxed, and afforded the opportunity, to listen, to read, to comment, as you like. I will be here supporting you. Please take a deep breath, allow your body to feel safe and heavy on the massage table. We will begin our journey together using a message technique called effleurage. Effleurage is a French term meaning “to stroke”, or “to skim over”. It’s purpose is to allow your body to become acquainted with my touch and for the muscles to warm up.
Please take a moment to adjust the volume of the MP3 and ensure that you are comfortable. On page 8 you will find a table of contents. Notice that there are 7 sections. Each section is indicated numerically and has its own title. You may select any section that seems like it may appeal to you. There is no need to start at the beginning. To do this simply press play or skip tracks, as you like. Our session will last for the duration of one secti,on or 15 min.
CONTENTS
1. Engineering the Parasites: singular problems, and pluralistic action 2. Positing Universalism 3. The Part, Which Has No Part 4. Aporia of Location 5. The Hyperstitional as Weapon 6. Epistemic and Event Frames 7. Framing Our Virtual and Real Selves
Part 1 Engineering the Parasites: singular problems, and pluralistic action The issue of managing XFM’s so-called “social emancipation” by dealing with cultural and semiotic potential for mutation will be an area of focus during this session. Cultural and semiotic mutations and their relationship to concepts of social emancipation will be discussed in two parts. Firstly, we will go through what semiotic parasite theory means for J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructivist position, and secondly, we will consider its implications for collective action with the imposition of predominately subjective and individual semiotic experiences. Ok, why are we talking about parasites? The XFM calls on us to create superior forms of corruption, to liberate us from the corrupting nature of textual, virtual and cultural spaces that would shame us or have us believe in one stultifying idea of what is ‘right’. For the Xenofemenists, we have to be able to deconstruct the very platforms that we critique and participate in, or as they put, ‘the mimetic parasites’. In order to do this, we will work on the concepts of parasites and deconstruction. Hopefully, by doing this we can move from ideas about how the individual works as a kind of critic to thinking about
‘collective self-mastery’. This part is a brief synopsis of the main argument of J. Hillis Miller’s influential piece “The Critic as Host.” The version reported on here is not from Critical Inquiry 3 (1976) but the longer version in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), as reprinted in Adams and Serles’ Critical Theory Since 1965. As an aside, a large part of this synopsis is credited to the late and great Professor John Lye. In 2010, I went to a used book store in St. Catharines, Ontario and found several boxes of books in the bathroom, as a make-shift storage spot before they were catalogued and put on the shelves. I made the book store an offer of 80 dollars for the lot, and got them. Professor Lye’s interests in literature lives on! Back to J. Hillis Miller. Miller begins by taking the idea that deconstruction is plainly and simply parasitical on the obvious or univocal reading. By now you will be becoming astute enough to realize that a univocal reading is impossible -- it is a vocalization of a vocalization. If the poem has a voice, it is articulated before, and one rearticulates it, reads it with one’s own voice, one has a reading which cannot properly be univocal, because it is a voice of a voice: and of course all of the words are spoken before, are voiced in various discourses, and all contextual and intertextual references are voices of voices; a univocal reading would have no imaginative, social or intellectual articulation, and so in fact
could not mean at all. But that is not what Miller looks at: he wants to track down the innerness of the senses that the negative and positive of things are inherent in each other, and that meaning is of its nature opening out and implying (from plier, “to fold”). With this in mind, it’s important to consider that Jacques Ranciere’s theory on the political aesthetic shares the same concept. That all things political start with the senses and are thus, aesthetic in nature. This will be revisited in further sections. Miller starts with the idea of the parasite, which of course requires a host -- in fact, no host without a parasite, no parasite without a host. He moves into the etymological complexities of each of the words. It turns out that a parasite was originally a guest; host has a more complex derivation, reflected in its different meanings today: it meant a stranger and a guest, someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality; also a stranger, an enemy; and of course the holy Host. What Miller wants to get to, is that each of the words has a reciprocal antithetical meaning built in, that the words have intertwining meanings in their etymology, and that the relation between them is both antithetical and necessary. He moves to the most malevolent of parasites, the virus, the re-programming, with its root gramme, as in grammar; is deconstruction a virus? But it is possible that it is metaphysics, the location of the univocal, that is the virus: are humans programmed to read Plato? If they are not, is Plato re-programming them, as it were? He then remarks that what he has done is shown you a deconstructive reading, and provides us with the
first “definition” of deconstruction: ‘This equivocal richness, my discussion of ‘parasite’ implies, resides in part in the fact that there is no conceptual expression without figure, and no intertwining of concept and figure without an implied narrative, in this case the story is of the alien guest in the home. Deconstruction is an investigation of what is implied by this inherence in one another of figure, concept, and narrative’. In the next paragraph he cites a “law”: that language is not an instrument or tool in man’s hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his ‘world’, including poems, if he will allow it to do so. There is another law implicit in the parenthesis of his next sentence: what thought is not figurative? The root of idea is the word for image. To imagine is to image. All figures are not what they figure. Univocality is impossible. Everything always means something else. (As we know, in the structuralist/ semiotic tradition no sign can be identical to its referent, there is always a space, a difference.) Indeed, for the feminism this project considers there can be no feminist without considering a ‘xeno’. Miller’s message at the end of this section is that every reading has a deconstructive as well as an obvious reading. This is inherent in the very logic of signs, the very operation of language, the way thought is constructed. As Miller writes, On the one hand, the “obvious and univocal reading” always contains the “deconstructive reading” as a parasite encrypted within itself as part of itself. On the other hand, the “deconstructive” reading can by no means free
itself from the metaphysical reading it means to contest. Criticism is a human activity, which depends for its validity on never being at ease within a fixed “method.” It must constantly put its own grounds in question. The critical text and the literary texts are each parasite and host for the other, each feeding on the other and feeding it, destroying and being destroyed. The position as I understand Miller to be stating is not to, cannot be to, construct a metalanguage which will encompass the play against each other of the parasite and host, rhetoric and grammar, figure and word; we must remain within language and its deep contra-dictions, within the tangle of repetitions, the co-inherence of metaphysics and nihilism -- which are themselves like dialectics, but are also not dialectics (as dialectics are solvable puzzles, images of metaphysics) but undecidabilities (in which closure is rendered impossible and even inconceivable). Interpretation is not an achieved point but a ceaseless movement, and this movement is deconstruction: ‘The tension between dialectic and undecidability is another way in which this form of criticism remains open, in the ceaseless movement of an “in place of” without resting place’. Deconstruction, Miller seems to be concluding, opens us to the power and the complexities of language, thought, tradition, influence, meaning, to the ambiguities and paradoxes which really constitute what we
once mistook for a unified field theory of human knowledge, by providing a form, a way of proceeding, which acknowledges the deep mysteries of meaning and which allows us to free ourselves from the tyrannies of univocal reading. Miller allows a kind of Xenofeminist reworking of reading experiences, while acknowledging that the freedom from the tyrannies of the univocal reading can’t ignore the rich and nuanced cultural and semiotic mutations that texts take on in their lifetimes. Just for a moment, consider if I were to have called this piece, ‘Let’s Make Theory Great Again’, you might have very attached this to the perverse, ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’. Indeed, the host’s self-image is just one in a series of never ending interpretive possibilities. For the XFM, “the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’, ‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up”. If the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation is primarily done at a semiotic level by the individual it is worthwhile to consider how this might be teased out to accommodate collective action. The XFM argues that “the task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional
manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. They will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires”. While the XFM focuses on collective action to manipulate a kind mass cultural corrective between arts and politics for example, “The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems”. Alternatively, Jacques Ranciere’s position looks again and again to the individual within the collective as his points of reference to the so-called ‘hyperstitional manipulation’ Laboria Cuboniks groups demands. While terms hyserstational manipulation or what Rancieir would borrow from Beaudrillard, ‘a simulacrum’, the action and meaning are the same. When dealing with reproductions or memes, critical attention is needed to the host’s intentions before conditions to produce self-mastery can be achieved. Given that much of Ranciere’s attention has recently been devoted to modes of production (primarily artistic), it fits that both his and Laboria Cubonik’s post-marxist approaches explore notions by which meaning, as a kind of capital, can be produced and even reproduced. In doing so, Laboria Cubonik’s wager that a supportive network of semiotic operators will be able to take stock of a full range of unique political possibilities at their disposal. While Rancier’s attention might be seen more as an historiographical critique into ideas of modernism and postmodernism, in order to understand conditions in which contemporary art is produced, the aim is the same, that
by making clear the existing power structures under which art or culture is produced, one can take advantage of a greater array of political tools, whether it be to engage with self-representation and gender or otherwise. All in all, when considering Hillis Miller’s deconstruction or ‘paracite’ theory, and considering the XFM desire for highly skilled semiotic operators where do we see this actualizing? No doubt the Laboria Cuboniks group would have us use this theory with self-representation and gender, but can we do this without also being a computer hacker?
Part 2 Positing Universalism With a drive towards deconstructivist tendencies in both the XFM and Ranciere’s work, they still, (and perhaps paradoxically, in Ranciere’s case as an avowed anti-Platonist), rely upon universals in terms of conceptions of what is political and what can be considered action to push their agendas forward. The universal concept of political equality is one which both take on boldly and without minced words. Politically, Ranciere favors the concept of equality. “Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society” (p. 51). In other words, Rancière is saying that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order. Esthetics is bound up in this battle, Rancière argues, because the battle takes place over the image of society -- what it is permissible to say or to show. While Ranciere focus in his text would have that its main aim is on the aesthetic and the political secondly, no such clean split can be made. For example, when one feels oppressed by a police force, or by a media saturation of predominantly white upper-class lifestyles, there cannot be a vivid differentiation or taxonomy of calculated oppression of
both aesthetic and physical realities. For Ranciere, politics are a place that are first appreciated by the senses, and therefore subject to aesthetic critique. If anyone feels that Trump’s aggressive use of social media has not functioned to evoke high pathos, and take command of the senses in its use of symbols and poetics, than they ought to, as this is as contructed a reality as any aesthetic movement by Leni Raffanstahl. Furthermore, Ranciere’s outline of what he terms the “distribution of the sensible”, is composed such that it, like the XFM, assumes, surprisingly even, that the senses, and sense experience can be gathered together to represent a kind of universalist position. This is to say, that the distribution of the senses are composed of the a priori laws which dictated the circumstances of what is possible to see, and hear, to say and to think, to do and to make. This is an important point for two good reasons: firstly, it accepts that senses are shared or that universal localities exist for attack and resistance. And secondly, that despite the debate about ontological possibilities in a cyber future, both Laboria Cuboniks and Ranciere, risk committing to a universalist position that binds our political ontology to the senses. To grasp the implication of this, its fruitful to come back to the wisdom of John Berger, that taking our sense of sight as one example effects the primacy of how we know, “it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world: we
explain the world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relations between what we see and what we know is never settled.” For Ranciere, much like, Berger’s subtle lesson, the point is that the senses are actually what make up the possible conditions for perception. In Ranciere’s work the sensible is partitioned into various regimes, and this is where Ranciere’s work is rather helpful parsing out forms of inclusion and exclusion in a community. What this means in terms of the relationship between the senses and the political for Ranciere, is what helps us to define the political in his work, as there is not one political party or group subjecting the rest to their political hegemony. Rather, Ranciere’s political ideology can be articulated as belonging to a ‘police order’, which attempts to maintain a particular distribution of the sensible. In this respect, politics for Rancière and the XFM, is seen as a demand within the world of the senses for greater equality, and must be forcefully reacted to by the people without a share in the communal distribution of the sensible, those who are in Ranciere’s tricky language, the ‘supernumerary’ and unaccounted for within the police order. In committing to a universalist position on sense and sense experience, both Laboria Cuboniks and Ranciere, not only establish a firm basis, by which we can conceive of a range of ontological possibilities, but also, and more importantly establish a universal political axiom, that “we are all equal”, at least in our right to participate and take the sense experience in new directions. This is where Ranciere meets closest with the XFM, in their deliberate attempt to not just bring in
the marginalized, but facilitate or engineer their rightful place in the demos.
Part 3 The Part, Which Has No Part Ranciere rejects “Habermasian and liberal ideas that politics consists of rational debate between diverse interests. He also rejects the view that politics involves struggles between pre-established interest groups or classes” says Sean Sayers. The problem here arises with the focus of the XFM’s targets, which, on the whole, are ‘highly networked’ and suggest part of controlled points of input and output, while ‘cultural systems’ suggest the very pre-established interest groups or classes which Rancier rejects. For Rancier, the political struggle is not for those, whose highly networked cultural systems are functioning, but rather when they are absent. For Ranciere, ‘politics is thus a struggle between the established social order and its excluded ‘part which has no part’. The puzzling discrepancy between the two levels of analysis (the artistic and the political) in Ranciere’s work is not made any easier when we consider that all pre-established interest groups, if dissolved or non-existent, make it difficult to determine who or what is contributing to any kind of meaningful intervention in both political and artistic levels. One of the troubling parts of both approaches to the critique of existing structures, is that no discernable structure; either political or artistic are clearly defined. Wider
social and political changes are only gestured towards in vague terms. Of course, in a manifesto this is to be expected, but for Ranciere, what perhaps is the reason for his opacity?
Part 4 Aporia of Location If locating the source of oppression, or in the parlance of Ranciere - part or that which has no part - is not a settled territory, than this is something which, itself becomes sketchy terrain when we task ourselves, what might the XFM mean by self-mastery over the influences which would manipulate us. For Laboria Cuboniks, manipulation of the points of manipulation seems logical, however it is a logical fallacy to assume that on one hand, we can have the rational capability to undercut that which undercuts us, while also recognizing that we will always be corrupted by both the medium and message of the that source of oppression. The XFM puts it that, “the task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems’, and that this ‘will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires”. For Ranciere, while he would agree that recognizing that systems of communication themselves creates voiceless situations, he does not have the same confidence in the tech-feminist position of the hyper-rational player as a semiotic string puller using hyperstitional realities as a cultural corrective. Indeed, it his here that in the aftermath of the Parisian student riots of 1968 that Rancier broke with Althussier and structuralist Marxism in his rejection of liberal Haberma-
sian politics, which consist of rational debate between divers interests. The acceptance of either rationality, or locality for both Laboria Cuboniks and Ranciere have far reaching implications despite the fact they both share a call to arms towards egalitarian politics, and furthermore art’s role in bringing this to fruition. In his book Metapolitics, another French post-Althusserian philosopher, Alain Badiou, opines that Ranciere’s political reflections are characterized by a singular unwillingness to draw conclusions about any specific political situation. I see this as a kind of aporia of location, in which the situatedness of conditions are perpetually up for debate. They are, Badiou concludes, more “motifs” than food for political militancy -- and what could better describe the art world’s relation to the political? If this is to be a purely symbolic commitment to politics than Ranciere’s work corresponds to a casuistic emphasis on the political power of symbols, perhaps making him the artist rather than the scholar. Maybe Ranciere has an intellectual’s bias towards purely intellectual means of resistance, but seen contextually as to why he won’t commit to specificity, we can understand that Ranciere is probably just competing in the same consumable academic community he enjoys criticizing. Rancier might have just been in the throws of intellectual combat to make his own space academically, out of the shadow of Althusserian post-marxists like Bourdieu. Derek Robbins has written a captivating piece in the British Journal of Sociology, arguing as much. “Ranciere pub-
lished two substantial criticisms of the work of Bourdieu in the early 1980s. It is possible that these were provoked by his sense that he needed to oppose what he considered to be the sociological reduction of aesthetic taste offered by Bourdieu in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1986, [1979]) at precisely the moment when he (Ranciere) was beginning to articulate his commitment to the potential of aesthetic expression as a mode of political resistance.” This point here, is that Ranciere cleverly or perhaps annoyingly avoids specificity, as a kind of trick itself designed to signal omnipotence of cloying influences both aesthetic and political. In thinking about locating points or modes of political resistance, its important to keep in mind, that the sites for staging opposition is far from settled. And the XFM, while it may be all-embracing of both symbolic and phenomenological struggles, the lack of commitment to specific political situations, has an implication that action remains a motif.
Part 5 The Hyperstitional as Weapon In understanding what Laboria Cuboniks means by “the task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings”, we might start with considering what hyperstitional means.
The term hyperstitional itself is a problematic term. It is a portmanteau between hyper and superstition and could be roughly defined as fictional utterances or actions that make themselves real. To help bring this term to life, it is useful to go to Judith Butler’s conception of performativity. For Butler, linguistic performativity refers to speech acts that effect what they announce (‘I dare you’; ‘I sentence you’). Butler adapts this into a theory of gender performativity whereby certain announcements of performances of gender produce the effects they seem to describe (the announcement ‘It’s a girl’ inaugurates the process of girling). Central to the theory of gender performativity are the mechanisms of citation and repetition. Likewise, it is central to Laboria Cuboniks conception of emancipatory action, that we use existing platforms, as well as make new ones where the reality we seek can be cited and repeated towards a more egalitarian model. It is in this space, that the artist can be seen as presenting subjects that have the hyperstitional potential to create what Ranciere terms the ‘what if’. That is, that the process can be a reiteration of discourses, performances and narratives utilizing existing or imagined structures which can confirm or repeal political, cultural or aesthetic assumptions. Where the XFM and Ranciere look to either technological or literary examples of hyperstitional manipulation, we might also consider Brazilian Augusto Boal’s work with the Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal worked to create greater awareness of oppression by visualizing and using dramaturgy to bring out a kind of realization. To what extent, Laboria
Cuboniks would argue that this non-tech intervention constitutes the kind of hyperstitional manipulation they envoke is not settled. Their goal may not be to settle it, however they invite a kind of schematic orientation or taxonomy by differentiating between the technological and the non-technological forms of hyperstitional resistance.
Part 6 Epistemic and Event Frames The XFM has been criticized for its approach to systematic thinking and structural analysis which for some, seems to have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, about fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. In order to combat a kind of global complexity Laboria Cuboniks argue for a kind of Promethean cognitive demand. And Promethean it is. It is at the level of cognition, which I am interested in discussing it in relation to Ranciere’s rejection of Habermas’ liberal systemic and rational approach to the development of discourse. For both, the XFM and Ranciere, the task of developing a cognitive awareness is not just an urgent demand, but a kind of ethical responsibility. Ranciere does not go so far as to demand ethical duty towards greater cognitive awareness, but at the very least, he shares the
project of making visible the intersections within discourse where his concept of the ‘what if’ is at least laid bare. For Laboria Cuboniks, they mandate themselves with the task of inventing ‘cognitive tools’ in the service of ends common to both of their projects. While the XFM is explicit in its demand for a sophisticated cognitive arsenal they are nonetheless opaque in their prescriptiveness of how these are to be mediated. It would be unfair to criticize any manifesto for this as a fault, as the genre itself isn’t the appropriate place for it, however it does allow for speculation. One such speculation might involve the development of a kind of analytical framework for discourse-based principles, which can be shared by both projects. In short, mediating a philosophy of action with cognitive mobilization, must accept, to some extent a Wittgensteinian concept of both language-game, and frame theory. First, language-game for Wittgenstein allows that language connected to a separate ‘reality’ in which individuals demarcate the same or even similar notions, is rejected. Second, although Wittgenstein did not term it ‘frame theory’, juggernauts in the field of cognitive linguistics, namely George Lakoff considered that all cognitive engagement and associations we make are done so via cognitive-linguistic frames. Simply, we associate our experiential knowledge with new inputs by coupling it to a kind of prototypical thing or concept and then order from there. Wittgenstein called these linguistic associations or groupings, ‘families’. While
Part 7 Framing Our Virtual and Real Selves The XFM at some point asks us to give up any traditional sense of a clean separation between our virtual and real selves. For the XFM, “digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, the XFM grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality. The challenge then is to accept an ongoing dialogue between primary and constructed cultures rather than to suppose that either social science or art possesses intrinsic autonomy. For Lucca Fraser, Halifax-based theorist, scholar and programmer, and one of the members of Laboria Cuboniks, there is no important dichotomy between the immaterial and material, as she puts it, “There is no real opposition any more, I don’t think. It already feels a bit quaint or ironic to contrast your “online” with your “real” life. With the rise of social media, on the one hand, and the decline of the academic humanities, on the oth
er, the Internet - especially extremely public and accessible zones, such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, the blogosphere, etc. - has become the place where relevant political discourse and theory happens. On the Internet, discourse [interweaves] with everyday life. Threads routinely bob back and forth from back of-the-envelope economic analyses to shitposting, confessionals and chitchat. It’s a whole different ecosystem for ideas and memes”. In this respect Laboria Cuboniks and Ranciere share similar positions on the potentiality of the virtual or real, but this also