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Existence and Existents

April 16, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Existence and ExistentsExistence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not well versed in Heidigger’s work. And as for Levinas, I’ve avoided him for as long as I have heard of him.

This work however, is one of his first, and well worth the read. Much of it stems from his working closely with Heidigger. Heidigger restarted after the mess Hegel and Kant left, understanding that one cannot think through Being, he instead started to think around Being. This book works in much the same way, as Levinas begins with a critique of Heidigger and ends where it seems, he will work through on his own issues separate from Heidigger.

What was surprising for me, is that Levinas develops the same dialectical twists to talk around being as do other masterful dialecticians, such as Lacan, Zizek and the like. Although Levinas first starts with moods, explains the originary ground of such feelings like fatigue in order to highlight where one ends and the world begins, as a relationship to the world, Levinas quickly establishes being as independent of the world, as the ground of the self that is not incorporatable by the self or the world… ending with the there is, the limit of what can be thought… the same limit that Kant reached poised at the limit of the phenomenological.

This brief excursion (brief in page numbers) then takes a sharper turn as Levinas expands on how the self relates to the world in the last chapter. I’m not certain if hypostasis is a concept he turns towards later on in his career, but this last chapter is again, the respelling of the limits of existent in various axial dimensions, such as space, time and of course, language. His rhetorical device is dialectics without being obviously enamored with negation but he spells out a particular parallel between the I, and the present moment vs the existent and existence as a field. This thought remains the limit of the rest of the book, where the irruption in anonymous being of locationalization itself is best expressed temporally as the engagement in being on the basis of the present, which breaks and then ties back to the thread of infinity, contain a tension and a contracting. It is an event. The evanescence of an instant which makes it able to be a pure present, not to receive its being from a past is not the gratuitous evanescence of a game or a dream. A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present. If commitment in being thereby escape the weight of the past (the weight that was seen in existence), it involves a weight of its own which its evanescence does not lighten, and against which a solitary subject, who is constituted by the instant is powerless. Time and the other are necessary for the liberation from it.

In other words, not only is each being anonymous, but it is also a unique and indistinct instant, a brief encounter in infinity like all other encounters, only this one is mine. You see that Levinas is suspended between questions of one and infinity, unable, at least in this book, to resolve the very question he succinctly ends with: The event which we have been inquiring after is antecedent to that placing. It concerns the meaning of the very fact that in Being there are beings.

Very nice place to end. But one curious thing he brought up at the very beginning regarding how existence and existents were separated: that the existent and existence are understood as separate because life needs to be struggled for; that existence needs to be earned, be it at the level of 19th century biology or immanent within the economic order. While he set this as the stage for outlining fatigue, I think this young Levinas could have been better served to understand how the order of a priori necessarily arises as a special case of the a posteriori… but that is a different approach, a different school, one of the domain of semiotics and dialecticians of the negative (such as Zizek). It will be interesting to read more Levinas and see how this book fits into his work about transcendence and the encounter with the Other.

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on Testing Cheetos in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf

February 10, 2011 / posted in art, Business, images of being-human / No Comments

Economics and market behavior is a huge area of study — the best business minds are all interested in it — so rather than try and make an exhaustive account, I would like to point to one particular event.

A northern European group that started off making fictional zines and theorizing on ‘happenings’ called monochrom created a few years ago a last bastillion of Soviet culture called Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.  What started out as a village in the Austrian countryside ‘remade’ into the last Soviet Country (with tours available) became so widely popular that monochrom could not in good conscience continue to give tours.  Having three times the population of a 500 people village swamp the village for a weekend would be potentially devastating.  Eventually, in order to further the experience, monochrom created an ‘adventure style’ video game.  I won’t go into detail about the game here, what I am more interested in is how this experience interfaced with the economy.

It seems that with capitalism, we desire experiences, the novel experiences things can give us. There are plenty of Marxist thought about this — but what is interesting, although perhaps difficult to assess is how these novel experiences become translatable into other Cultures, of other peoples, and even of one’s past cultural experiences — which become commodified into a new kind of hybrid experience entirely, neither of the past nor of our ‘normal’ experience, but wholly of the present.

Monochrom went on to have various installations such as the Unterzoegersdorf computer (which ran on a coal furnace one had to shovel continuously in order for another person to be able to play Tetris) as well as various Unterzoegersdorf installations.  There was one especially interesting moment when they were kicked out of a computer convention as the Unterzoegersdorf representative with the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was borderline-trolling party-goers, perhaps offensive to Disney officials running the convention.  The Unterzoegersdorf representative also, for purposes of art, had the wild experience of eating a glob of wasabe ‘not knowing what wasabe is… and deciding that it was capitalist posion’.  Of course, one assumes the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was using a modern camera, something the Unterzoegersdorf representative did not even seem to notice as being astounding.

One particular event they did was particular applicable to this discussion.  The website boing boing hired Monochrom to do a viral video for Cheetos, paying them a sum of a few thousand dollars.  Monochrom saw a prime opportunity to further explore capitalist relationships with their very anti-capitalist characters.  The results are below.  I invite you to take the time to watch all 6 segments.  It is delightful.

Unterzoegersdorf/Cheetos Campaign

While amusing, one cannot help but think that the compete rage of the Soviet Unterzoegersdorf characters, in part jest, at being ‘tricked’ and ‘used’ to promote a very Capitalist-foodstuff but in part seriousness — for Unterzoegersdorf-ians to find their livelihood but a ‘colony’ of the Global Economy.  While Cheetos is featured heavily in the dialogue as the center of conflict, the nature of the Monochrom’s tension is more on the side of Unterzoegersdorf-ians trying to figure out what to make of the raw junk of Capitalism.  It may benefit Cheetos only to be repeatedly mentioned and pondered — we laugh because the weird orange coloring DOES smear all over our hands.  In fact, we are reminded of Cheetos and that may be enough to make our mouth water (or wince) in association.  Larger questions remain largely unexamined What should we make of our own economic proliferation?  How should we come to terms with ourselves?  In an exploration of Unterzoegersdorf we come to face ourselves as Other — perhaps in what only great works of Art do — reflected back to ourselves our own values in negativity, as dissymmetry and excess, the best non-linguistic analysis of all, something even Emmanuel Levinas refuses to see — when he preaches of the acceptance of the Other but cannot accept those ‘asiatic hordes’ which surround Israel… and refuses to deal with them as citizens of humanity…

I’d hate to think that if I were to continue on and on, I would end up swallowing myself into a Hegelian synthesis of some sort, negative and particular made universal, more or less.

I also strikes me that this entry is applicable with the previous On Testing IRL although creating such a viral meme does not in fact have a control group of any sort. One is immediately hypnotized in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf our own image, as fascist as they are in our unthinking allegiance to our own ideology, something which accepts Cheetos as blindly as they reject it.