"What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What un-disciplined stories would be told?"
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti
these days it feels as if everything i'm reading, seeing and hearing is synergistically sparking off one another and it's all part of one big idea-universe. synergy describes a system where the collaborative outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. the "greater than" effect for me is the incredibly exciting feeling of existing in a coherent network of ideas and values and like-minded people -- i wonder if this is what it's like to find god and religion -- you suddenly understand that everything makes sense and is relational and even the things that don't make sense are still part of the larger sense-making system you've discovered.
it's a hegelian universe: the kind that's based on the concept of absolute spirit and everything being relational via synthesis, where rocks are just the lowest organization of spirit in a spectrum that stretches out to include the most enlightened, reflective creatures in the universe: maybe it's a person, but maybe it's an animal or a fungus -- we can't really know. hegel thinks it's a rationally self-reflective person, but i'm not so sure... C got me a shittake mushroom kit for my birthday, and it's producing mushrooms finally, and each day i mist this 6" x 9" x 8" mycelium cake and when i come home, those little mushrooms have doubled in size. i've also got this really happy and frantically growing fiddle leaf ficus that unfurls new leaves everytime I turn around -- i'm amazed at all this growing energy going on in my little living room, and then i have to remind myself that I'm a walking laboratory of catalysts and growing and decay, too.
today I attended a talk by Rick Prelinger, co-founder of The Prelinger Library, and Richard Rinehart, digital media director for the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), part of the very excellent Takeovers & Makeovers: Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age conference that just happened at BAM. really motivating and empowering manifestos for participatory culture and the liberation of art and art-making from the tyranny of concepts like originality and sole, copyrighted authorship. they're advocates for open source programming, the creative commons, and museums and archives as banks of material for public access and use. i've just re-read Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" for the first time since college, and his call for the avant-garde to transform and adapt the apparatuses of production to alienate the ruling classes while enabling the proletarian masses to themselves create casts an encouraging light on the blogosphere, diy and maker-moment that we're in, where mccain doesn't know how to email but grade school kids are adept bloggers, hackers and piraters.
it's more fodder for feeling excited about making and writing a bunch of stuff, including this blog, and for seeing the world synergistically. once you catch onto a thread, you see the entire fabric differently.
case in point: the New Museum's online exhibition of Paul Chan's gorgeous 7 Lights series ("Lights" is supposed to be struck through but I can't figure out how to format that...) allows you to download the source file that's part of the range of materials Chan used to create these pieces. i wouldn't have fully understood the larger significance of this kind of accessibility without the constellation of marx, benjamin, and those talks that fired me up today.
watch 1st Light (strikethrough), which i first saw at the Whitney Biennial a few years ago, and the other six pieces. be patient! they're troubling and beautiful and worth the wait.
Sources
music: Evening Star, Fripp & Eno. Music for Films, Brian Eno
text: "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin
movement: ballet
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For a while everything I was reading, seeing, hearing, talking about was all tied together, but that was because it was all related to the same project. So it was just the sad illusion of synergy, not the great connections you are making between different and interesting ideas from all different sources.
ReplyDeleteIf one does away with the concept of originality and authorship in art, can it be defended in academia? Even (especially?) there, access to knowledge can be costly. But few make their work available in a public commons, like PLoS or googlebooks.
i think originality and sole authorship SHOULD be under fire in academia, though i do think that good academic writing anticipates these challenges by framing itself as an intervention in an ongoing dialogue that is as much responding to and building off of prior research and ideas as it is contributing new perspectives. it's not that there's no more creativity or no more "new" ideas, it's just that the new is so clearly a product of what came before -- standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say -- and it's faulty thinking to think that that lessens its value.
ReplyDeletewhat's PLos?
PLos is an open source science journal. authors are able to publish their work and make it immediately available to the larger public, not limiting it to academia alone or charging for the discoveries/research they present. socialized science, perhaps?
ReplyDeletein any case, i'm glad that you have the optimism of a greater sense of connectivity. i agree with you whole-heartily.
i remember in high school, after a particularly fantastic math class (don't ask...), having a momentary fit where i believed that nearly everything in the world could be stripped down to the fundamentals of simple math equations. it was a pretty great moment. i'm not sure it was entirely wrong or right but it was the same feeling you've described when everything seems to touch everything else in the world.