Journal of Sino-Judaic Correspondence: December 2012

Saturday, December 29, 2012

COMEDY/ART

From an interview with Bishop;

jbw: Twice you mention BDSM as an alternative paradigm for thinking through this issue. Can you say more about how you see BDSM as a framework for differently processing both pain and pleasure, and how that might extend to participatory art?

cb: Ha! Well spotted. For me, BDSM and comedy provide two other frameworks for thinking about what bodies can say/do in space. There is a lot of moralistic discussion around contemporary art, but comedy also manages to say, very sharp, poignant, transgressive, politically acute things in a way that is highly pleasurable. And in a different way, the 'scenes' that people get into in BDSM are also (for them) highly pleasurable, even though they have no relationship to their actual desire to be dominated (for example) in daily life. Both are areas of experience that suspend the everyday, but also participate in it—they have the double ontology that I see as crucial to participatory art.

Friday, December 21, 2012

3d printing shops

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2012/nov/23/print-yourself-3d-photo-booth

Justin Lin

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1695

Interesting backstory to this guy

"In 1976 Lin entered the MBA program at National Chengchi University in Taiwan on a defense scholarship and returned to the army upon receiving his MBA in 1978. As a captain in the Republic of China Army (ROC Army) in Taiwan, he defected to Mainland China on May 17, 1979, under the control of the Republic of China (Taiwan), to the nearby island of Xiamen of the People's Republic of China (Mainland China). Lin left his pregnant wife and his three-year-old child in Taiwan; a year after he defected, he was declared "missing" by the ROC Army and his wife claimed the equivalent of US$31,000 from the government.His wife and their children joined him years later when both of them went to study in the United States. While an officer in the ROC Army, Lin was held up as a model soldier; after his desertion, the ROC originally listed him as missing but in 2000 issued an order for his arrest on charges of desertion.

In a letter written to his family in Taiwan about a year after his defection, Lin stated that "based on my cultural, historical, political, economic and military understanding, it is my belief that returning to the motherland is a historical inevitability; it is also the optimal choice. A Taiwan University alumnus Hongsheng Zheng (鄭鴻生) confirmed Lin's reason and motive. Lin's oldest brother said it was unfair to brand his younger brother a traitor. "I don't understand why people regard him as a villain," he said. "My brother just wanted to pursue his ambitions"

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Alternative reality

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from BBC

Zizek applies Hegel to examples

In all these cases, universality islocated in the enchainment or overlapping of particularities: A and B are not parts (species) of their encompassing universality; A cannot fully become A, actualize its notion, without passing into B, which is formally its subspecies, but a subspecies which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. Every species contains asubspecies which, precisely insofar as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame: the space opera is "a Western at the level of its notion" and, for that very reason, no longer a Western. Instead of a universality subdivided into two species, we thus get a particular species which generates another species as its own subspecies,and true ("concrete") universality is nothing but this movement in the course of which a species engenders a subspecies which negates its own species. The same dialectical mediation between the universal and the particular can also be formulated in terms of a universal notion and its examples. The difference between the idealist and the materialistuse of examples is that, in the Platonic-idealist approach, examples are always imperfect, they never perfectly render what they are supposed to exemplify, while for a materialist there is always more in the example than in what it exemplifies, in other words, the example always threatens to undermine what it is supposed to exemplify since it givesbody to what the exemplified notion itself represses or is unable to cope with. (Therein resides Hegel's materialist procedure in the Phenomenology: each "figure of consciousness" is first exemplified and then undermined through its own example.) This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples—since no single examplereally fits, one has to enumerate a great many of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the Idea they exemplify, the Idea being the fixed point of reference for the floating examples. A materialist, on the contrary, tends to return obsessively to one and the same example: it is the particular example which remains the same in all symbolicuniverses, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so that we get a multitude of universal notions circulating around a single example. Is this not what Lacan does, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing-game with five hats, the dream of Irma's injection, etc.), each time providing a newinterpretation? The materialist example is thus a universal Singular: a singular entity which persists as the universal through the multitude of its interpretations