Constraint based and Aleatory compositions

Hello Everyone,

I thought I might post a few links to part of my collection of "Robot Authors". I thought that it might further illustrate the idea of constraint based and aleatory compositions as a way of highlighting our roll in the production of meaning.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/
Kenneth Goldsmith who practices precisely the kind of writing which we talked about today. He calls it "Uncreative Writing" which is explained nicely in this little article on the ubu.com
http://www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol_goldsmith.html
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/uncreativity.html

http://apostropheengine.ca/
The live engine for Apostrophe

http://www.informationasmaterial.com/
Check out especially "The Royal Road to the Unconcious" project

There is also the Oulipo which is perhaps different but I think falls into a similar category of work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Hope you enjoy.

- J

Challenge to the Marxian System of Ideas

Hello Dr. Murray, Hello CoreCult Colleagues,

for the series "debate, for debate's sake", here is a (prestigious) quote in relation to Marx's system of ideas:

"Marx's Capital is in essence (...) a collection of atrocity stories designed to stimulate martial ardour against the enemy. Very naturally, it also stimulates the martial ardour of the enemy. It thus brings about the class-war which it prophesies. It is through the stimulation of hatred that Marx has proved such a tremendous political force, and through the fact that he has successfully represented capitalists as objects of moral abhorrence. [In fact, the purpose of] the theoretical part of Capital (...) is to make the reader feel that the hatred stirred up in him is righteous indignation, and may be indulged with benefit to mankind." (Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, p.115)

Marx, Base and Superstructure

Carefully read the following famous passage from Marx, written in 1859. Pay especial attention to the the words "will," "consciousness," "ideology," and "determines": what becomes of the Cartesian subject in this passage?

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of a society -- the real foundation [base], on which legal and political [and social, cultural, etc.] superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or ... with the property relations within which they had been at work before.... Then occurs a period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation [base] the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed ... the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical -- in short, ideological -- forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

January 29, changed location this week!

As some of you may know, due to the extreme cold there has been a water main break under 111 Gerrard St. E. This means that the whole building will be closed until at least Monday.

So, for Monday, January 29, we will meet nearby, in:
SHE 540 (Sally Horsfall Eaton Centre for Studies in Community Health),
located at 99 Gerrard St. E. (corner of Gerrard and Mutual Streets).

Descartes, Kant, Foucault...

Thanks, everyone, for an enjoyable seminar today. And thanks especially to Marcos for a thought-provoking presentation.

For those who are interested, I have written a small piece on Descartes and Foucault on the will. It is the basis of the argument I presented, and so if you are interested, you are free to read it here.

Reading Antigone

1. Externalities: the text as artefact
a. Sophocles: 100+ plays, 6 extant
i. Our earliest MSS 1500 years after Sophocles wrote (10th-c.)
b. The dates of the Antigone
i. 442 or 441 BCE
c. The transmission of the text: a myth
i. Story of Oedipus and his children was told in Homer, and in a number of epic and lyric poems: well-known, oral tradition
ii. Before Sophocles, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes tells the story of Eteocles (Thebes) and Polyneices (with Argos) in battle
iii. After Sophocles, Euripides’ non-extant Antigone (431 BCE) probably had Dionysus as deux ex machina to rescue the heroine

2. Internalities: the text as such
a. Textuality
i. Poetry versus prose
1. E.g., choral ode to Man (pp. 76-77)
a. Deinon
b. Description of CULTURE: triumph over nature
i. Second choral ode (pp. 91-92) is a kind of reversal, it is homage to the gods, Zeus’ law prevails
ii. Third choral ode (p. 101) to love, eros: a god
2. Sentry’s speech (p. 70)
ii. Argumentation
1. Haemon’s early speech (p. 95)
2. Antigone’s reasoning (p. 82)
iii. Performance piece: it is a play
iv. The role of the Chorus: everyman, moral majority
1. They side with Creon almost throughout
2. They never admit Antigone ought to be crowned with gold (as Haemon says) : even toward the end, they mock Antigone, saying her “own blind will, [her] passion has destroyed [her]” (p. 104)
b. Thematics
i. Politics
1. Creon’s argument
a. City and order is truer than blood (pp. 67-68)
b. King’s will is the rule of law
c. Thebes cannot tell him how to rule (p. 97) : king does not represent : tyranny
d. Thebes must obey, whether the king is right or wrong : justice and truth are secondary to power
ii. Law
1. The “force” or violence of law; arbitrariness
a. A “state of exception” or “state of emergency” (Karl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben) : martial law, a suspension of the law to preserve the law (e.g., Canada’s “notwithstanding clause”) : a “constitutive outside” of the law, founded on violence and power
i. Sovereignty
ii. Sovereign is he who decides the exception, decides when the law does and does not apply
iii. Sovereign is outside the law, IS the law, is the one to whom the law does not apply
b. Creon is a leader for today, e.g., Bush, “I am the decider”
c. Antigone shows that only the dead are outside the law : and she constantly places herself there, “I am already dead,” “wedded to death,” etc. : prerogative of the gods
2. Antigone is “a law to herself”
iii. Kinship
1. Antigone
a. Incest (an outrage sacred to the gods, p. 63);
b. Substitutability (p. 105) : “For this law alone” (p. 106)
i. Antigone fancies herself to be divine, though? “But think of Niobe…” (p. 102)
2. Creon
a. Man’s role to have sons (p. 93)
b. Conflates kinship and the state (p. 94)
iv. Religion
1. Antigone
a. Reverence for gods? And “unshakeable traditions” (p. 82)?
b. Or for kinship?
2. Creon
a. Secularism (p. 73)
b. Disdain for gods’ laws
c. After denouement, “it’s best to keep the established laws to the very day we die” (p. 117)
v. Gender
1. Greek fear of women
2. Sophrosyne: temperance, continence, men not leaky but women are leaky in all kinds of ways
vi. Etc.

3. Internal-External (dialectic)
a. The Greek context
i. Culture of superstition
ii. “Truth” is not epistemic (modern verifiability), but cosmic, based on swearing of oaths, etc.
iii. Gods have commerce with humans, have emotions, etc.
iv. Words—power of the logos—are not merely descriptive; they are magic,
1. They “bring to birth” (p. 120)
2. Chorus says Antigone was “cut down” “by a senseless word”
b. The reception of the play through the ages
i. Political contexts
c. How is this play “cultural”?
i. Draws on myth, oral tradition
ii. It is a cultural commentary (Sophocles’) on (2(b))—thematics above
iii. It “produces” or perpetuates culture: binding us together, telling our story
iv. It has a flexibility, a relevance over time across cultures (structuralism), ironically enough by telling a poststructuralist lesson
v. From Week 1’s themes:
1. Informs psychoanalysis: the unconscious, fates = Ucs.
2. Thus, knowing this story is the condition for certain pieces of cultural knowledge
3. Epistemic conditions? Not so much
4. Ontological conditions? Yes: man is deinon (choral ode): I do not have my culture, it has me, despite myself, despite all that I do
a. Deinon = uncanny, terrible, frightful, unheimlich (Freud and Heidegger, “not-being-at-home”)
b. (p. 108), chorus again, “The power of FATE is deinon, / dark, terrible deinon”
5. Culture vs. Nature
6. Culture (human) vs. Nature (the gods), i.e., positive law vs. natural law
7. Politics (human) vs. Nature
8. Universality vs. particularity
a. Cultural relativism
b. Historical relativism
c. Moral relativism
d. Multiculturalism
e. Structuralism vs. poststructuralism
9. Is it about minority culture vs. mass civilization?
10. Culture as meaning-making, as the power to make meaning, to instate law, order, justice, truth

Seminar Room Change!

The address is:
111 Gerrard St. E.
Room 206 D