Julien Instructions (Contrast 1)
When I first started reading Julien, which was when we were working on the Mystory, I kept think about how the Mystory may be following the Chinese logic of discerning an overall pattern before it could be fully described (after the end of our career). The problem, however, with comparing the Mystory to the configuration of "propensities" is that, at least according to Julien, the Chinese are concerned with grasping the totality first and then filling in the details. Grasping the general "contours" of a scene is a way of grasping its telos or purpose. There is an emphasis on a kind of "necessity" that has little room for chance or arbitrariness. The military strategist must grasp the entire situation and already believe that he has won before acting.
This is, in some ways, a non-experimental attitude. In the Mystory, we act without knowing where we are going to go, working from individual details to invent (and discover) the pattern as it emerges. We are neither strategic or tactical in MIchel de Certeau's sense. We do not want to create distance for the sake of grasping the whole "at a glance" (even if this might approach an 'image logic' or 'flash reason'). The totality is not what allows us to see the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm, but the little detail, Barthes punctum. A little signifier that doesn't "mean" anything, but that gathers and organizes our lives into a pattern. We do not seek the objective situation "out there" and thus adapt and conform to it, but we dwell in an extimate (see Lacan) relation with the world. The outside is inside and the inside is outside. "Shi" is more like discerning a force that transcends the human being, to which the human should follow in order to be in harmony with the world.
The point that really brought this home for me was Julien's exploration of landscape painting. Julien, I assume following certain Chinese scholars, evokes a certain conception of the body:
"Once again a comparison with the human body proves revealing. Regardless of a man's posture whether he is standing upright, walking, sitting, or lying down, each part of his body, down to the smallest joint, will be in harmony with that posture. To push this analogy to its limit--as Chinese critics lvoe to do--rocks are like the skeleton of the mountain, forests are its clothes, grass its hair, waterways its arteries and veins, the clouds its airs, mists its complexion, and temples, belvederes, bridges, and hamlets its jewels" (100)
This allows us to discern our contrast. We must go from totality to partial objects. Psychoanalysis will teach us the way of the partial object, the partial body. The body not as a mirror stage reflection, but as partial zones. These partial objects correspond not to an overall structure, a one to one analogy between the world and the body, but correspond to the senses: Breast, Mouth, Anus, Gaze.
We are not a unity that can be grasped as an overall structural configuration, but gathered by partial objects, these experiences of the senses which are linked with our desire. Demand always misses desire.
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Greek Concepts vs. the Principles of Shi
Julien argues that Shi does not operate like Greek concepts. We obviously want to pay attention to this difference, since Greek concept formation (as definition, classification) is a major characteristic of Western Literacy. For the Chinese, Shi operates "through networks of affinities, one constantly implying the other through allusion" which "frequently convey their meaning through the interplay of parallelisms and correlations made possible by their infinitely rich evocatory powers" (77).
While it may seem obvious that "landscape" is different from mapmaking, I think that the contrast between Western mapmaking, which tries torepresent space in its accuracy, and Chinese landscape painting points to a key instruction. In this sense, I think that the electrate instruction is closer to the Chinese conception of "place" rather than "thing," as Ulmer lays it out in his Two Epistemologies diagram. In Heuretics, Ulmer also speaks of two different ways of considering place: Greek topos and Greek chora. "Chora" has an element ofmemory there rather than simply an attempt at representing the space for navigational purposes. Topos can be understood as space in the abstract: landmarks are noted, roads, etc. but the mood of the area is left to the traveler to experience him or herself once they arrive. Topos is literate because it desires a "true" representation; chora shows that within any given space, there are many places saturated with history.
Julien writes that space (and he does space rather than place) "an hence any landscape, was also conceived by the Chinese as a perpetual setup which puts to work the original vitality of nature" (93). Landscapes are like the world in "miniature" and so distance actually serves to connect the microcosm and the macrocosm. Julien cites Zong Bing, "a three-inch long vertical stroke is the equivalent of a height of a thousand paces; ink spread horizontally over a few feet gives body to a distance of a hundred leagues" (95).
Julien explicitly distinguishes between the map and the landscape: "for a map reduces scale merely for practical ends, whereas the process of reduction undertaken in painting has a richly symbolic purpose" such that it is "closer to writing," particularly "the series of hexagrams that were sufficient to account for the whole mystery of becoming" (96).
Such perception is an aesthetic perception. While Julien argues that the Chinese were looking to the "vital breath of nature," we are less concerned with what might be called "nature" (to be explored in another post). Our target is the internet. So how do we form a landscape from the internet?
Julien once again contrasts cartography and landscape painting (associated with 'geomancy'): "Unlike the cartographic reduction of space, which is proportioned in a pedestrian manner, the aesthetic perception strives to apprehend space, whether pictorial or poetic through the tension expressed by its life lines" (103-104).
As mentioned in my previous post, Julien also makes analogies between the landscape and the human body. Even though the landscapes themselves lack human beings in their representational capacity, landscapes are conceived of in terms of human posture (100-101). Julien concludes:
"The painter must be inspired, must possess a particularly sensitive consciousness, so that he can 'unite in spirit' with this landscape and, by exposing himself to it and communicating with it, grasp in a stroke how the whole scene functions in its powerfully general and delicately detailed way" (101).
I think we can derive an instruction from this: We have to find the lifelines of the internet. We are not seeking to represent the internet through data visualization, but finding the lines of force that connect memory, place, and the body. Create a microcosmic landscape of the internet.
Such an understanding is similar to Ulmer's articulations of the "anti-definition" and "haiku logic," but here the context is Chinese calligraphy. Instead of defining terms and then building upon them, words (and images) are played off one another. As Julien writes further on, Shi is a particular effect of this energy tension, "each element composing the configuration of the ideogram must either attract or repel another" (78).
The language of "attraction-repulsion" should give us a clue that this is an instruction. If indeed electracy operates on the polarity of attraction-repulsion rather than true-false (literacy) or right-wrong (religion), then the instruction is:
Every item in our experiment should create relations of tension through the ways in which they attract and repel each other.
We see this logic happening in the Mystory. Although an overlying pattern emerges, there is still tension within the individual components. In my Mystory, for instance, I showed the attraction and repulsion of "light" as a notion of truth (the phenomena, to "bring to light") and "light" as parody and performance -- to make light of. "Light" isn't a concept here, but a signifier that through pun logic already contains internal tensions in meaning. We will continue having to trace out these tensions.
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Another Relation to Place and Space
While it may seem obvious that "landscape" is different from mapmaking, I think that the contrast between Western mapmaking, which tries torepresent space in its accuracy, and Chinese landscape painting points to a key instruction. In this sense, I think that the electrate instruction is closer to the Chinese conception of "place" rather than "thing," as Ulmer lays it out in his Two Epistemologies diagram. In Heuretics, Ulmer also speaks of two different ways of considering place: Greek topos and Greek chora. "Chora" has an element ofmemory there rather than simply an attempt at representing the space for navigational purposes. Topos can be understood as space in the abstract: landmarks are noted, roads, etc. but the mood of the area is left to the traveler to experience him or herself once they arrive. Topos is literate because it desires a "true" representation; chora shows that within any given space, there are many places saturated with history.
Julien writes that space (and he does space rather than place) "an hence any landscape, was also conceived by the Chinese as a perpetual setup which puts to work the original vitality of nature" (93). Landscapes are like the world in "miniature" and so distance actually serves to connect the microcosm and the macrocosm. Julien cites Zong Bing, "a three-inch long vertical stroke is the equivalent of a height of a thousand paces; ink spread horizontally over a few feet gives body to a distance of a hundred leagues" (95).
Julien explicitly distinguishes between the map and the landscape: "for a map reduces scale merely for practical ends, whereas the process of reduction undertaken in painting has a richly symbolic purpose" such that it is "closer to writing," particularly "the series of hexagrams that were sufficient to account for the whole mystery of becoming" (96).
Such perception is an aesthetic perception. While Julien argues that the Chinese were looking to the "vital breath of nature," we are less concerned with what might be called "nature" (to be explored in another post). Our target is the internet. So how do we form a landscape from the internet?
Julien once again contrasts cartography and landscape painting (associated with 'geomancy'): "Unlike the cartographic reduction of space, which is proportioned in a pedestrian manner, the aesthetic perception strives to apprehend space, whether pictorial or poetic through the tension expressed by its life lines" (103-104).
As mentioned in my previous post, Julien also makes analogies between the landscape and the human body. Even though the landscapes themselves lack human beings in their representational capacity, landscapes are conceived of in terms of human posture (100-101). Julien concludes:
"The painter must be inspired, must possess a particularly sensitive consciousness, so that he can 'unite in spirit' with this landscape and, by exposing himself to it and communicating with it, grasp in a stroke how the whole scene functions in its powerfully general and delicately detailed way" (101).
I think we can derive an instruction from this: We have to find the lifelines of the internet. We are not seeking to represent the internet through data visualization, but finding the lines of force that connect memory, place, and the body. Create a microcosmic landscape of the internet.
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Lists, Gestures, and Moods
In the Mystory I created, I intuited one possible instruction: create lists of moments when a word is used. In my experiment, I did this with the word "light." The difference is that in my experiment I was not necessarily thinking this in term of a state of mind, but rather linguistic cliches.
Lists were apparently a crucial aspect of Chinese poetics. According to Julien, the lists of particular configurations and gestures would suggest that "it is as if the Chinese using the lists would have no need to derive a more abstract concept fro any theory over and above what they themselves instinctively and actively feel to be the pertinence of shi through the cases listed" (112).
Ulmer has alluded several times to the Chinese way of explaining how to play a lute, so I figured that would be a good place to look for an instruction. First, positions are explained, then a sketch showing the position of the fingers, but opposite that sketch is a pose of an animal or landscape "corresponding in each case to the particular example of fingering." Finally a short poem, "positioned beneath this second sketch and facing the explanation, renders allegorical the state of mind suited to the posture or landscape depicted" (110).
This link between the external gesture and the internal state of mind I think is a crucial point for us. Julien suggests that these positions in movement "for us" require a "cinematographic" technique. Series of shi are like cross sections from continuous movement. They "represent not just any random slice of movement, but those that most fully exploit the powers of this dynamism and that are the most potentially effective" (114). What matters is this overall movement that can be grasped "at once" (Moment against Now if we are using the terms of Avatar Emergency).
I think this points toward a useful instruction because I found myself enacting this very process: what screenshot from my popular film had the potential to convey the dynamism in the scene. The dynamism for shi is grasping the overall "movement," but I'm not sure that we are looking for the movement, so much as the tiny detail (the punctum). The screenshot can be punctive and potentially powerful because we cannot see these minute facial gestures or details when we watch cinema. Slowing down frame by frame allows us to see the force (and perhaps the "invisible") meaning behind even the most banal gestures in a film. People have used this technique in courts as well in order to find "microexpressions" that might reveal someone is lying on the stand. We will look at this from within an aesthetic perspective rather than a legal one.
The instruction: Use a screenshot, not necessarily from a movie, that shows the lines of force of the gesture/movement in that scene. The gesture and movement may seem insignificant, but through slowing down and isolating a "cross section" we can find those moments between the "visible and the invisible"
Additional Possible instruction: This may be obvious, but instead of using these still images to illustrate narrative, they will be "felted" like we did in the Mystory, layered on top of one another.
Lists were apparently a crucial aspect of Chinese poetics. According to Julien, the lists of particular configurations and gestures would suggest that "it is as if the Chinese using the lists would have no need to derive a more abstract concept fro any theory over and above what they themselves instinctively and actively feel to be the pertinence of shi through the cases listed" (112).
Ulmer has alluded several times to the Chinese way of explaining how to play a lute, so I figured that would be a good place to look for an instruction. First, positions are explained, then a sketch showing the position of the fingers, but opposite that sketch is a pose of an animal or landscape "corresponding in each case to the particular example of fingering." Finally a short poem, "positioned beneath this second sketch and facing the explanation, renders allegorical the state of mind suited to the posture or landscape depicted" (110).
This link between the external gesture and the internal state of mind I think is a crucial point for us. Julien suggests that these positions in movement "for us" require a "cinematographic" technique. Series of shi are like cross sections from continuous movement. They "represent not just any random slice of movement, but those that most fully exploit the powers of this dynamism and that are the most potentially effective" (114). What matters is this overall movement that can be grasped "at once" (Moment against Now if we are using the terms of Avatar Emergency).
I think this points toward a useful instruction because I found myself enacting this very process: what screenshot from my popular film had the potential to convey the dynamism in the scene. The dynamism for shi is grasping the overall "movement," but I'm not sure that we are looking for the movement, so much as the tiny detail (the punctum). The screenshot can be punctive and potentially powerful because we cannot see these minute facial gestures or details when we watch cinema. Slowing down frame by frame allows us to see the force (and perhaps the "invisible") meaning behind even the most banal gestures in a film. People have used this technique in courts as well in order to find "microexpressions" that might reveal someone is lying on the stand. We will look at this from within an aesthetic perspective rather than a legal one.
The instruction: Use a screenshot, not necessarily from a movie, that shows the lines of force of the gesture/movement in that scene. The gesture and movement may seem insignificant, but through slowing down and isolating a "cross section" we can find those moments between the "visible and the invisible"
Additional Possible instruction: This may be obvious, but instead of using these still images to illustrate narrative, they will be "felted" like we did in the Mystory, layered on top of one another.
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Causality and Explanation
In my first course with Dr. Ulmer, we were trying to invent an ontology of the accident as opposed to substance. One of the instructions and ideas that I will never forget is that we aren't in the business of explaining the accident, but rather that the accident EXPLAINS US (not just as individuals, but as a collective society). This is with the logic of psychoanalysis -- the externalization of a string of signifiers shows us to which signifiers we are subjected to (how our unconscious is structured/organized). So, in this case, we were not thinking about explaining history, nature, or anything external in terms of causality or tendency.
In the history section, Julien claims that Westerners too had an intuition of shi: "Montesqui, has an intuition of shi, as what he calls a 'general cause' or a 'trend'" (214). Going along with what Jake Greene said in the band presentation, we don't want a "general" cause and we are not looking for a concept or myth that would explain events. Instead, I would argue in contrast we have to look at the external world to understand ourselves and, particularly, to understand our own agency.
Greg said something very suggestive last night: We are all our own prime movers.
This directs me to Julien's more explicit philosophical claims on causality. Because we in the West were concerned with being, we posited a substance which meant that we had toexplain change: hence, agency. The challenge for China is that they have to explain beingor, relative stability. According to Julien, the Chinese explain that through positing nature, history (remember, although the Chinese are not speculative, they tend to be systematic) as a closed, auto-regulative system that functions through alternation.
We are looking for what Michel Serres calls a "quasi-cause," a catalyst, a parasite. A 'cause' in the sense of object cause of our desire (we will get into this more with Lacan).
Instruction: We are not trying to explain Chinese metaphysics or Western Metaphysics or Electrate Metaphysics, because to explain them would be to locate causality in either abstract concepts, agents, and causes or internal processes of auto-regulative systems. We have to look at Electrate Metaphysics as emerging from the co-agency (quasi-agency/quasi-cause) of human beings sending their desires out into the world and getting them back in return.
The world intimates.
I think this instruction is close to a Chinese poetics, but instead of trying to capture the internal "spirit" or "breath of life," we want to capture the relation between the senses, desire, and the world. I recognize I might be jumping the gun or important other attempts at electrate rhetoric/metaphysics from other seminars, but I think that this is in some ways the only alternative to these literate systems of explanation. Not to eliminate cause, but to think about cause differently. Lacan will help a lot with this task.
In the history section, Julien claims that Westerners too had an intuition of shi: "Montesqui, has an intuition of shi, as what he calls a 'general cause' or a 'trend'" (214). Going along with what Jake Greene said in the band presentation, we don't want a "general" cause and we are not looking for a concept or myth that would explain events. Instead, I would argue in contrast we have to look at the external world to understand ourselves and, particularly, to understand our own agency.
Greg said something very suggestive last night: We are all our own prime movers.
This directs me to Julien's more explicit philosophical claims on causality. Because we in the West were concerned with being, we posited a substance which meant that we had toexplain change: hence, agency. The challenge for China is that they have to explain beingor, relative stability. According to Julien, the Chinese explain that through positing nature, history (remember, although the Chinese are not speculative, they tend to be systematic) as a closed, auto-regulative system that functions through alternation.
We are looking for what Michel Serres calls a "quasi-cause," a catalyst, a parasite. A 'cause' in the sense of object cause of our desire (we will get into this more with Lacan).
Instruction: We are not trying to explain Chinese metaphysics or Western Metaphysics or Electrate Metaphysics, because to explain them would be to locate causality in either abstract concepts, agents, and causes or internal processes of auto-regulative systems. We have to look at Electrate Metaphysics as emerging from the co-agency (quasi-agency/quasi-cause) of human beings sending their desires out into the world and getting them back in return.
The world intimates.
I think this instruction is close to a Chinese poetics, but instead of trying to capture the internal "spirit" or "breath of life," we want to capture the relation between the senses, desire, and the world. I recognize I might be jumping the gun or important other attempts at electrate rhetoric/metaphysics from other seminars, but I think that this is in some ways the only alternative to these literate systems of explanation. Not to eliminate cause, but to think about cause differently. Lacan will help a lot with this task.
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