Palmette

(reflecting the world) 

We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology, or of

antiethnology, which is nothing but the pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign

of dead differences, and of the resurrection of differences. It is thus very naive to look for

ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World - it is here, everywhere, in the

metropolises, in the White community, in a world completely cataloged and analyzed,

then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real, in a world of simulation, of the

hallucination of truth, of the blackmail of the real, of the murder of every symbolic form

and of its hysterical, historical retrospection - a murder of which the Savages, noblesse

oblige, were the first victims, but that for a long time has extended to all Western

societies. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.8)

(introducing the terrain)

Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most

trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the

criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much

commotion as possible - in short, remain close to the “truth,” in order to test the reaction

of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of

artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will

really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will

actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once

again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any

attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real - that is, to the established order

itself, well before institutions and justice come into play. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.15)

(being shizo-maniac, mega-queer)

Dream of an eternal twining substituted for sexual procreation that is linked to death.

Cellular dream of scissiparity, the purest form of parentage, because it finally allows one

to do without the other, to go from the same to the same (one still has to use the uterus of

a woman, and a pitted ovum, but this support is ephemeral, and in any case anonymous: a

female prosthesis could replace it). Monocellular Utopia which, by way of genetics,

allows complex beings to achieve the destiny of protozoas. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.66)

(being self-reflexive)

The hallucination is total and truly fascinating once the hologram is projected in front of

the plaque, so that nothing separates you from it (or else the effect remains photo- or

cinematographic). This is also characteristic of trompe l’oeil, in contrast to painting:

instead of a field as a vanishing point for the eye, you are in a reversed depth, which

transforms you into a vanishing point . . . The relief must leap out at you just as a tram

car and a chess game would. This said, which type of objects or forms will be

“hologenic” remains to be discovered since the hologram is no more destined to produce

three-dimensional cinema than cinema was destined to reproduce theater, or photography

was to take up the contents of painting. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.66)

How to dance a question gave them a problem, which begins first with

the relation between movement and natural language, as the following

questions from the notes of Ritsema highlight:

He [Burrows] says that I [Ritsema] should not want to prove anything

with the movement, that I just ask questions, but how can one

ask a question by moving? This is impossible. Every movement is a

statement, this is what I learned when I started dancing. And unlike

speech, movements are never something else than they are, they do

not pretend. So how can I doubt about a movement which can only

be clear to me? (Ibid.)

Second, in order to dance a question, neither Burrows nor Ritsema

could find an adequate form or equivalent style. This is precisely why

their creation began with a thought without an image, which could

determine itself only as a problem. After frequent inquiries from the

spectators into the semantic content of the questions they were supposed

to be dancing, Ritsema rephrased “dancing a question” as “dancing

in a state of questioning,” as cited above. The latter formulation

had the purpose of preventing a simple equation between movements

and questions, which the dancers ruled out from the outset. “Dancing

in the state of questioning” couldn’t be subject to a process of realization,

as there would be no preexisting forms that could resemble it. (Cvejic, Choreographing Problems, p. 144)

Don’t make gestures, let the skeleton make the movement, and don’t

lead your moving with your eyes from one point to another; then

you try to rescue your body and there is no rescue. (...) The third term is most significant and difficult to sustain. For Burrows,

it meant undoing his dancerly disposition to shape movement and for

Ritsema, striving not to dance unconsciously—in Ritsema’s words,

“with my mind in the clouds” (Cvejic´ 2008c: n.p.). Or as Burrows noted,

“he wants to dance but gets stuck in an image of what he thinks dance

is” (Burrows and Ritsema 2003: n.p.).(Cvejic, Choreographing Problems, p. 145)

(staccato)

Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety. In this Reimannian

usage of the word ‘multiplicity’ (taken up by Husserl, and again

by Bergson) the utmost importance must be attached to the substantive

form: multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the

one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has

no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system. The one and the

many are concepts of the understanding which make up the overly loose

mesh of a distorted dialectic which proceeds by opposition. The biggest

fish pass through. Can we believe that the concrete is attained when the inadequacy

of an abstraction is compensated for by the inadequacy of its opposite?

We can say ‘the one is multiple, the multiple one’ for ever: we

speak like Plato’s young men who did not even spare the farmyard. Contraries

may be combined, contradictions established, but at no point has

the essential been raised: ‘how many’, ‘how’, ‘in which cases’. The essence

is nothing, an empty generality, when separated from this measure, this

manner and this study of cases. Predicates may be combined, but the Idea

is missed: the outcome is an empty discourse which lacks a substantive.

‘Multiplicity’, which replaces the one no less than the multiple, is the true

substantive, substance itself. The variable multiplicity is the how many, the

how and each of the cases. Everything is a multiplicity in so far as it incarnates

an Idea. Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity.

That the one is a multiplicity (as Bergson and Husserl showed) is

enough to reject back-to-back adjectival propositions of the one-many and

many-one type. Everywhere the differences between multiplicities and the

differences within multiplicities replace schematic and crude oppositions.

Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is

only the variety of multiplicity - in other words, difference. It is, perhaps,

ironic to say that everything is multiplicity, even the one, even the many.

However, irony itself is a multiplicity - or rather, the art of multiplicities:

the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems they incarnate in things, and

of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of

Ideas. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.200)

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations,

generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present nor

presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice . . . It is

necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it. (Derrida, 1994)

Specifically, therefore the truth of our being human in the now planetary homogenized

terms of the West’s Man, in its second, biohumanist homo oeconomicus reinvented

concept/self-conception, thereby within the terms of its now purely secular if no less

also fictively constructed, by means of the sociotechnology of our humanly invented,

then retroactively projected origin stories or cosmogonies and thereby autopoietically

instituted, subjectively experienced and performatively enacted genres of being

hybridly, human. (Wynter, 2007) (Dixon-Román, Towards a hauntology of data, p.2 /45)

Before we discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I prime students to recognize how early modernity often equated the female body with elements of the natural world or N/nature itself.1

On day one of the unit, we read a number of procreation sonnets, including Sonnet 3.2 Urging the young man to reproduce, the poet-lover rhetorically asks: “For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?”3 Students acknowledge the agrarian language, identifying the female body as a field to be plowed. Additionally, the lines summon the less-than-subtle image of an ear of corn and the act of planting seed (“earing”; Oxford English Dictionary [OED]). Many students (justifiably) find the poem offensive, as it reduces the female body to the means through which the young man’s beauty can be replicated. (Bruckner, Ecological Approaches, Reprocentric Ecologies, p. 1)

(energetic)

This is the most purely political phase , and

marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the

complex superstructures; it is the phase in which previously

germinated ideologies become ‘party’ , come into confrontation

and conflict , until only one of them , or at least a single

combination of them , tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand , to

propagate itself over the whole social area - bringing about not

only a unison of economic and political aims , but also intellectual

and moral unity , posing all the questions around which the

struggle rages not on a corporate but on a ‘ universal’ plane , and

thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a

series of subordinate groups. It is true that the state is seen as the

organ of one particular group, destined to create favourable

conditions for the latter’s maximum expansion . But the

development and expansion of the particular group are conceived

of, and presented , as being the motor force of a universal

expansion , of a development of all the ‘national’ energies (Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader, p. 205)

Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw

that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata.

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs

and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which

it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics

are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise

that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly

enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with

white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head,

white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is

not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The

form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate

if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his

or her choices (“Hey, he seems angry . . .” ; “He couldn’t say it . . .” ; “You

see my face when I’m talking to you . . .” ; “look at me carefully . . . “). A

child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not

speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific

faciality traits. Faces are not basically indi vidual; they define zones of

frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any

expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.

Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion,

would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that

select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a

dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy

with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance

or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order

to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen.

The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through;

it constitutes the black hole of subjecti vity as consciousness or passion, the

camera, the third eye. (Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.167)

The problem

of the diaspora is to think of it always and only in terms of its

continuity, its persistence,

the return to its place of origin, and not always and

at the same time in terms of its scattering, its further going

out, its dissemination.

The impossibility of ever going

home in exactly the same way as you left

it. The diaspora is always going

to be, in a certain way, lost to you. It has to be

lost to you, because

“they” have a double stake, an investment in both here

and elsewhere. It is not because

they love us or because

elsewhere has been

good to them, but because

the material conditions, the historical necessity, of

having to “make a life” means that they have to have ideas, investments, relationships

with somewhere else

as well. Now, my writing about the notion of

the diaspora, about identity, even about the necessary “hybridity” or creolization

of all culture, has been shaped

profoundly by reflecting on the Caribbean

experience, even when I have not directly written about it. I have been trying

to think about these

very complicated processes

of continuity and rupture,

of the return to the old, of the imaginary recuperation or reconfiguring of

the old, as well as the becoming—the

opening to the new, to the future—

and

what is happening, concretely, on the ground, in everyday life, in changing

the culture of those

people

who have been “diasporized.” That is certainly one

dimension of the work that I have been trying to do on the diaspora. (Hall, Essential Essays, Vol. 2, p.317)

(chorus)

The hauntological discourse I wish to investigate is not the topic of any

one recent work of Derrida’s. Instead, it is complexly interwoven into several

rather different discourses, all primarily elegiac in nature (if not in form):

Specters of Marx ( 19944edicated to assassinated South African activist

Chris Hani), Apurias (1993-“1n memory of Koitchi Toyosaki,” to the death

of whose father Derrida also refers), The Gift of Death (199%-which addresses

not only Kierkegaard’s “Eulogy on Abraham” but also the work of

Czech philosopher Jan PatoEka, who died under police interrogation in 1977)

and “Archive Fever” ( 1995a-which discusses Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s

Freud’s Moses: Jwlaism Terminable and Interminable [1991] and is, “[flor a reason

that will perhaps become clear later,” dedicated to Yerushalmi, but also

both to Derrida’s sons and to the memory of his father, “who was also called, as

is life itself, Hayim” [Derrida 1995a, 201). All of these texts evoke the same

syntagms of death, the ghostly, mourning, duty, the performative, debt, capital,

the F/father, messianism, Europe and Jerusalem; and also the same names,

above all those of Marx, Freud, Hegel, and Heidegger. The same is true, of

course, of much of Derrida’s writing, but these works present a particular

articulation of these themeslnames that invites the question I intend to put

to them: what becomes of the daughter in this hauntology, the daughter for

whom both the symbolic and the literal F/fathers, and thus also the duties and

debts they engender, are always simply Other, beyond any possible filiation or

inheritance? (Holland, the death of the other/father, p.2/65)

»By refusing to simply invoke identity, and instead to connote it, he

is refusing to participate in a particular representational economy« (ibid.).

What does it mean to not »invoke« identity, but instead, to »connote« it?

Muñoz explains this with reference to the opaque character of a work by

Gonzalez-Torres: one must ask »What is that?« in order to understand it. A

rational understanding or direct knowledge that can be derived from what

is shown or said is thereby displaced. Yet this type of opacity is characteristic

for a number of so-called avant-garde works, which means that it does not

clarify why the work is considered a representation of queer subjectivities. (Lorenz, bodies without bodies, in Mehrwert Queer p. 155)

PROLOGUE

‘If we offend, it is with our good will.

That you should think, we come not to offend,

But with good will. To show our simple skill,

That is the true beginning of our end.

Consider then, we come but in despite.

We do not come, as minding to content you,

Our true intent is. All for your delight

We are not here. That you should here repent you,

The actors are at hand: and, by their show,

You shall know all that you are like to know,’  (shakespeare, a midsummernightsdream, p.63)

PROLOGUE 2

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show;

But wonder on, till truth make all things plain.

This man is Pyramus, if you would know;

This beauteous lady Thisby is certain.

This man, with lime and rough-cast, doth present

Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder;

And through Wall’s chink, poor souls, they are content

To whisper, at the which let no man wonder.

This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn,

Presenteth Moonshine: for, if you will know,

By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn

To meet at Ninus’ tomb, there, there to woo.

This grisly beast, which by name Lion hight,

The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,

Did scare away, or rather did affright;

And as she fled, her mantle she did fall;

Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain:

Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth, and tall,

And finds his trusty Thisby’s mantle slain;

Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,

He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

And Thisby, tarrying in mulberry shade,

His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,

Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain,

At large discourse while here they do remain. (shakespeare, a midsummernightsdream, p.63f)

(chorus 2)

The dispute over the pedagogical role of popular (visual) culture in art education in the U.S has invoked dichotomies such as low culture versus high culture (Ianni, 1968; Kaufman, 1966), populism versus elitism (Hobbs, 1985; Smith, 1981), mediocrity versus excellence (Eisner, 1978; Feldman, 1982, Smith, 1985, 1994), images of quantity versus works of quality (Clark, Day & Greer, 1987; Eisner, 1983; Nadaner, 1985), and, more recently, art study versus visual culture (Dorn, 2004; Eisner, 2001), social context versus aesthetic experiences (Dorn, 2001, 2003; Efland, 2004, Smith, 2003a; Stinespring, 2001), and visual culture studies versus art education (Kamhi, 2003; Smith, 2003b). When art educators admonish popular culture and critique the shift towards visual culture they usually base their arguments on theories of aesthetics, autonomy, originality, creativity, and cultural sophistication (Duncum, 1982, 1987, 1990; Rosenblum, 1981). The arguments against both popular culture and visual culture are always based on an ideological position that, in one way or another, revolves around the latter part of the term, “culture,” and its absent or present “other”-high culture. Hauntology may help unveil the apparitions that hide between these ideological stratifications that legitimatize one form of culture over another and in turn presuppose particular ways of life. (Tavin, hauntological shifts, p. 3/102)

Glitches are a near-perfect embodiment of the abject. They occur seemingly at random and without warning. They interrupt normalcy in a game’s programmed design, narrative, and a player, character, and player-character’s experience. Moreover, glitches appear in a variety of forms from a character model clipping through (passing through) solid objects to losing all saved progress in the game. The latter case, anyone who uses a word processor can relate to. In gaming, glitches, more frequently referred to as bugs, are a wild card. As an abject, they collapse the meaning (structure/safety rails/algorithms) of an object. However, they are also a random occurrence that can create new meanings (allegorithms) for the subject. From the surface, a glitch seems like a nightmare to behold, but more aptly put, they resemble chaos in a metaphysical sense. They have no motives and do nothing beyond causing a disruption; whether that disruption is a harmful inconvenience depends on the subjectexperience. (Ramirez, gamer-theory, p.39)

A project by Maike Hautz & Samuel Ferstl, 2021.

Sound by Maike Hautz

We kindly used Tbug's "Day 1 Mouth & Nose" model under Creative Common License (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/day-1-mouth-nose-sculptjanuary18-0831344ae9c74ce5b2817bef7d31990b), as well as artfromheath's "Death Valley- Terrain" (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/death-valley-terrain-9f57bca156e14cff9e4e316a9cc... ) and Šimon Ustal's Mountainous Valley (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/mountainous-valley-102726ea9fa0411b994a5ca0c02de823)

The development of the 3D works and research has been supported by the Stipendienprogramm des Freistaats Bayern „Junge Kunst und neue Wege".