shades of techne, or the grey zone

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

dear List,

[which I see is up to its usual tricks]

Here are some words I just finished writing for something else. Disconnecte=
d
from context, they may be rather fascinating. The recent debates on source
and creation might find para 1 rather interesting. The recent debates on
technology as mediation or interface might like para 2. Use like a sample.
Cut, paste, remix, granularize. Writing is sound.

[para 1]

"An affirmation is not an agreement; it is already implicate in the
possibility of negation. To negate is to attempt to negate oneself and one'=
s
implicate affirmation of that which is under negation (that which is under
erasure). To negate is a disaster, a violence of the highest order, an
attempt to control and repeat the same, master and dominate the territory,
discourse, event, object, subject, body, etc.. It is often successful (but
never wholly so). It is a real and present danger. Negation is stop-motion.
Call negation copyright. To affirm incorporation is to risk an openness to
the suspicious concept and its tendrils in the chance of affirming its
explicate potentiality through an analysis of its implicate uniqueness. Thi=
s
is done through a motion theft. Motion theft, or the movement of theft, its
necessary speed and grasp: call this sampling. By sampling the possible
[Brian] Massumi extends its limit through a feedback loop; the limitation o=
f
limitation is exteriorized and inverted, displaced and changed, at the same
time that it dissevers from a hierarchy and power of realisation. Call this
filesharing. The tendrils stretch far into the structuration of this
placement. Change is affected both ways through sampledelia=8Bthe filesharing
of samples. Possibility is not negated, but changed through its grafting.
The prosthesis changes the written corpus. The new "addition" of the
"possible" changes the meaning of "addition" as well as the "possible." To
"add" is to "change" insofar as change is spectral and partial, indebted to
the part-object of that which is always-already incorporated (including, bu=
t
never limited to, the incorporation of introjection, of calculation): a
double feedback loop between the host and the incorporated parasite.[1] Lik=
e
an echo, where every repetition of sound bounces off new surfaces, levels,
corners, unpredictably, we might say "undecidably," without determination
save for the determination of the persistence (or continuity) of the echo
(the insistence of changing change=8Bdesire). Call this insistence: rhythm.
This feedback loop is immediate, but immediate only insofar as it operates
in the immediate past, and not the "present:" the present is an echo, and
through all these "levels" what is implicate and "unique to each level," as
the specifications of the explicate, or the particularities and
singularities of the differentiated general, fileshares various samples in
relations of sampledelia, always on the flipside to stop motion and the
possibility of copyright. "These modes are fed back and fed forward into on=
e
another, echoes of each other one and all" (Massumi, Parables 37). Feedback
is sonic=8Bfeedback can be heard=8Bthe echo, the loop, and repetition: this is
what becomes specific to the operation of hearing writing. Call the
operation of philosophy at this level remixing. Sample Kodwo Eshun:
philosophy-essays become rhythmachines."

& on the debate over technology and, I think we could say, its "signature,"
perhaps affect:

[para 2]

"Techne is understood as the conditions of possibility of transmission or
movement itself. The conditions of techne are the virtual, the spectral;
movement is of changing change. Techne is implicated at every explicate
level; it is constituent of the construction of levels. If affect is the
interface of implicate and explicate at every level, then techne is the
iterability of the interface; iterability is the effect of a general
writing, that conducts a tracing "from" the trace, differentiated potential=
..
Affect is a wedge or lever of potential; affect is the catalytic interface,
and always mediating through that which provides its form, or "level,"
insofar as the level is recognizable or iterable=8Btechne. A circle? No=8Ba
fractal."

=20

[1]  One might note here a passage from _Of Grammatology_: "Conversation is=
,
then, a communication between two absolute origins that, if one may venture
the formula, auto-affect reciprocally, repeating as immediate echo the
auto-affection produced by the other. Immediacy is here the myth of
consciousness. Speech and the consciousness of speech=8Bthat is to say
consciousness simply as self-presence=8Bare the phenomenon of an
auto-affection lived as suppresion of diff=E9rance" (166).

tobias c. van Veen -----------
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http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
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