About Cyberhetoric’s Social Assemblage.

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“the passions are not blind automated responses to events but something fashioned by our will”

Caligula « Drama and Philosophy.

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This blog is simply a satellite export of the actual Cyberhetoric blog – please go to:

blog.Cyberhetoric.com

or

www.Cyberhetoric.com

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CybeRhetoric will be hosting an unofficial SXSW Showcase in order to breed new connections, spread the wings of Cyberhetoric.com, and celebrate all that this blog stands for.

Special Guests include official SXSW Bands Horse Thief and DEERPEOPLE.

More details can be found here….

    Celebrate the end of SXSW the proper way – in a passionate display of friendship, fanaticism, and a twist of fortune. 

 And for your musical enjoyment:

Check out Horse Thief’s “Warrior”

Posted in Austin Texas, cyber rhetoric, Cyberhetoric, Danny Rose, DEERPEOPLE, DEERPEOPLE Ulysses, Horse Thief, Horse Thief Warrior, Saturday SouthBy Soiree, South By South West, South by Southwest, SXSW, SXSWi

 

What is our present? What is thepresent field of possible experiences? This is not an analytics of truth; itwill concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology ofourselves, and it seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting ustoday is this: one may opt for a critical philosophy that will present itselfas an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or one may opt for a criticalthought that will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of thepresent…

                                                                        -Michel Foucault,The Art of Telling the Truth

Consequently, those who resist orrebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to denounce violence orcriticize an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on reason ingeneral. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake…Thequestion is: how are such relations of power rationalized? Asking it is theonly way to avoid other institutions, with the same objectives and the sameeffects, from taking their stead.

-Michel Foucault, Politics and Reason

We sit idly trapped in the muddied trenches of an uncannyvalley – a horizon of existence bereft of the eternal gloss of the nationstate, the species, religion and republic. The variegated spectrum of forms bywhich political associations and ethical commitments take place has outstrippedthe potentiality for the taxonomic nodes to retain their positions asmeaningful referents. When politics is reduced down to a distracted display ofpublic affiliation, the capacity for change becomes impotent.

The Kony 2012 Campaign which has recently gone viral offersa keen case study evincing the means by which the politics of humanitarianismshort circuits the perceived necessity of, the capacity to, and the desire fora reflexively engaged ethico-political constitution of the global citizen.

Right now there are more people onFacebook, than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatestdesire is to belong and connect. And now we see each other, we hear eachother…we share what we love and it reminds us what we all have in common… (Kony2012)

The video begins with a self-conscious introduction of itsplace within the interconnections of a globalized world. There are literallythousands of videos out there which make appeals to ethical causes and whichcomment on the opportunities for new social movements – why did this onesucceed?

It can’ t merely be that more people simply believe in oragree about this cause. It seems to me that it is definitively rooted in theaesthetics of the campaign. Yet it also reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s observationthat the aura’s present decay is linked to “the increasing significance of themasses in contemporary life” (255).

Benjamin continues in  Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility:

Thedesire of the present-day masses to “get closer” to things spatially and humanly,and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness byassimilating it as a reproduction….The stripping of the veil from theobject, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose“sense for sameness in the world” has so increased that, by means ofreproduction, it extracts sameness from what is unique (255-6).

The introduction’s statement that, “Humanity’s greatestdesire is to belong and connect” performs, analyzes and describes the processby which the increasing significance of the masses is linked to the desire toovercome uniqueness. To reproduce the work of art through the youtube filmmeans to merely share it; the work’s reproduction coincides with itsconsumption. Thus the dynamics of the artwork’s aura have reinvigorated theiroriginal ritualistic association.

As Benjamin writes:

Theunique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the sourceof its original use value.

 Markers of the viral-ity of the video, the display ofthe statistics of views, analytics, data etc…express the thoroughness of “theinterpenetration of art and science” in the age of technologicalreproducibility. The ritual is disclosed through the knowledge of the commonalityof viewership which simultaneously endows a video with a cult like magic, whiledepressing any semblance of uniqueness inherent in the act of consumption.

The video then proceeds to show a scene of a person who ‘hears’for the first time as the result of a cochlear implant. In seeing anotherperson learn to hear, we learn to see hearing differently, and hear differentthings than were previously possible. The film discloses a world of scenes andgestures contained within our everyday movements that were previously unknown. Film calls for our attention and analysis because it more precisely documents thegestures of the body, through slow motion time is extended, through thejuxtaposition of images new associations emerge, through the procession ofangles new viewpoints and understandings of positionality are created and soon.

Photographic records begin to beevidence in the historical trial. This constitutes their hidden politicalsignificance. They demand a specific kind of reception. Free-floatingcontemplation is no longer appropriate to them. They unsettle the viewer; hefeels challenged to find a particular way to approach them.

Watching the cursor click share leads to an instinctive, mimetic desire to also share the video, perceptions and understandings of the video are changed in the act of consumption itself. 

“The world is changing…the rules of the game havechanged…the next 27 minutes are an experiment, but in order for it to work you haveto pay attention” (Kony 2012)

“[T]he audience is an examiner, but adistracted one” (Benjamin).

Related articles

• Politics and Ontology – CFP (accursedshare.blogspot.com)
• Mishima, Carroll, Madness (closerreading.blogspot.com)
• Monstrosity and Ontology (mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com)
• Some Notes on Ontology and Politics (accursedshare.blogspot.com)
• Foucault or Deleuze (newappsblog.com)

Posted in Audience theory, cyber rhetoric, humanitarianism, Joseph Kony, Kony 2012, Michel Foucault, New Media, ontology, P, Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility

Lines of Fracture: Hephaestus’ Golem:Hank Stolte of Lines of Fracture will be featured in UT’s Literary and Arts Journal Anelecta 38

Posted in Analecta, Analecta Literary and Arts Journal, cyber rhetoric, Golem, Hank Stotle, Hephaestus' Golem, Lines of Fracture, Linesoffracture, UT Austin