Writing

This text was meant to be delivered at a teach in at the State Building in San Francisco on March 1, 2012, as part of the Occupy Education National Day of Action.

A guide for those still feigning perplexity. (Do you know who you are?)

The reception of Bridget Riley's paintings in the 60s serve as an example for thinking about how a notion like kinesthetic empathy might be used to explain a viewers relationship to painting. It suggests a path away from an insistently integrative ego that is incapable of an empathetic attitude towards the other constructed within an unbridgeable difference. Heteropathic identifications with unidealized images of the other interrupts the stubborn refusal of difference. Our experience of a variety of art forms demonstrates this possibility.

A particular figure of absence seems to possess a suspicious connotative efficacy in its deployment within language and as a visual figure. What is at stake in the use of the empty square? A clue to answering lies in the relation of two series which can be used to describe the mechanisms of computation. These are: the series of creation, including invention, birth, production, etc.; and the series of rule, including conditionality, boundary, possibility, etc. The two series are clearly gendered opposites that correlate with Oedipal principles.

The ideational threads that weave their way through this list summarize the obsessions that motivated my work during the five previous years. There is a trajectory here: from a concern for the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of computer technology, to the intertwining of technical and cultural logics in the lives and politics of the people who create and use computers.

The Turing machine (and thus, the computer) resembles the generalized semiotic structure. It consists of the conjunction of two series inside of a container. One series is made up of states out of a set of finite possibilities, the order of which proceeds by means of a determinate set of rules. The other is a series of symbols arranged in time along a potentially infinite ribbon of inscription, where the value of the symbols is dependent on their order. The machine is a conjunctive emptiness, which produces in movement.

In reading Barney’s work, what is at stake is the question of the possible transformations of masculinities in a milieu which must account for the critiques not just of feminism but of queerness. It is equally probable that Barney stands as evidence of a regressive retrenchment of the masculine in these circumstances as it is that he stands for just the opposite, a masculinity that can renounce a determined mastery of a dominant role in relation to nature, women, creation, self, etc.

Between 1920 and 1945, Iwata Jun’ichi carried out an unprecedented, extensive research project on the history and literature of homoeroticism in Japan. Iwata used the Tokugawa period word nanshoku (a compound of the character for “male” and the character for “sexual love”) almost exclusively in reference to his topic; however, the more recent coinage doseiai (literally “same-sex-love”), a translation of “homosexuality,” was also current.