... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Monday 22 August 2011

Suspended to overlook the medium


In 2008, during United States presidential elections, Hillary Clinton characterized the recent reports on Iraq with “suspension of disbelief” to imply that these documents could be considered unbelievable or factual. Suspension of disbelief was used in order to advise the audience to overlook the medium; hence that what was presented would not interfere with facts or judgment. In the world of fiction it is common to require believing propositions, which would not be acceptable in the real world if presented in a newspaper as facts. Even though one is often asked to “go beyond the boundaries of what might be real”, it is always a semi-conscious decision to accept the premise as being real for the duration of the story. To put it in Foucauldian terms, to deconstruct or suspend systems means to reconstruct the forms of knowledge: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.”

Thursday 18 August 2011

Carnival or protest?

Men dress up and behave like animals, masters serve their slaves, males and females exchange roles and criminal behavior is considered legitimate or, in any case, not punishable - carnival has the license to temporarily suspend existing hierarchic distinctions, barriers, norms and prohibitions. As such, carnival serves as a brief metaphorical portrayal of broader social processes that would come into play in the overthrow of established authority. It is hard to reason these sudden explosions within well-ordered societies. But is this not in large a question of power in its many manifestations? A power as domination, charisma, hegemony, resistance, bio-power and so forth?

Thursday 11 August 2011

Out-of-Sync #2

"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day." Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire ME - and I don't care for jam." "It's very good jam," said the Queen. "Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate." "You couldn't have it if you DID want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day." "It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"" Alice objected. "No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know." "I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!" "That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first..." "Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!" "... but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways." "I'm sure MINE only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen." "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

According to Jung, synchronicity is the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. In a similar way do we expect from the overlay of sound-image-text. I wonder about the news channel that would not be formed in past tense but rather that of future. (what if the research project was... #2)

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Suspension in funeral rites

Just as during crisis normal social structures can collapse, and social functions and roles break down to the point where behaviours and customs are overlooked, so are periods of mourning characterised by an alteration and, in fact, suspension of all social relations. "All societies are constructed in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualised whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse" (Vernsel, 1980) Not only does Vernsel explain the state of exception to public mourning, but that the ultimate reason for this resemblance is sought in the idea of "terror" said to characterise the human societies as whole. The feelings of grief and disorientation and individual, collective expressions are not restricted to one culture or type of cultural pattern.

Seston seems to be aware of iustitium as public mourning as he stages and dramatises the funeral of the sovereign as a state of exception: "In imperial funerals survives the memory of mobilisation... Framing the funerary rites within a sort of general mobilisation, with all civil affairs stopped and normal political life suspended, the proclamation if the iustitium tended to transform the death of a man into a national catastrophe, a drama in which each person was involved, willingly or not". (Seston, 1962) The political significance of public mourning lies not in the presumed character of mourning but in the uproar that the sovereign's funeral can cause. Is it possible that the public mourning is nothing but a sovereign's attempt to appropriate the state of exception? It coincides with the death of the sovereign, while the suspension of the law is integrated into the funeral ceremony. It is as if the sovereign became unbound by laws at the moment of his death. In binding together norm and anomie, law and exception, one ensures the relation between the law and life/ death?

Saturday 6 August 2011

Non-relationship and indifference

Our culture is mainly structured between dichotomist oppositions. In dichotomist model one has A and not A, there is no third. The third is excluded. One can trace a line and that will divide two terms clearly. What Agamben in his lecture "Forms of power" in EGS suggests is to describe the world more like a magnetic field that is bipolar, from pole to pole, where one can never trace a single dividing line. In bipolar model a third is automatically admitted. The third is indifference. It is part of the structure, not a result of the model.

In fact Schelling has suggested that this indifference is the most original dimension that comes before any opposition. Indifference starts a new relationship between the two opposite elements - that is a non-relationship. Indifference is when all dichotomies break. Schelling calls this thing love. Love is a non-relationship. Love is when you reach the point of indifference, as you cannot prescribe properties to love. You can only love when all properties are indifferent. Indifference is usually described in negative terms - as no feeling at all. In Kant‘s model things are described with their counterparts. But in the beginning of the model is a thing with no counterpart. He calls it admiration. It is the point where you perceive the difference. In that sense admiration is the threshold of the system but there is exclusion in the model - that of indifference. Giorgio Colli states that two points are in contact only where there is a void of representation between them. Contact, in that sense, is again a non-relationship.

I wonder whether suspension (or state exception for that matter) in fact acts similarly to indifference in bipolar models - between everyday life and emergency, crisis...

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Form-of-Law (on potentiality #2)

A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through a doorway. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that is possible. The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it." ("Before the Law" by Kafka)

Nothing - and certainly not the refusal of the doorkeeper - prevents the man from passing through the door of the Law if not the fact that this door is already open and that the Law prescribes nothing. "The Law", Derrida writes, "keeps itself without keeping itself, kept by a doorkeeper who keeps nothing, the door remaining open and open onto nothing." The power of Law lies precisely where one already is. How can we open if the door is already open? The already open immobilises. It includes in excluding, and excludes in including.

On potentiality (quote)

"It is often said that philosophers are concerned with essence, that, confronted with a thing, they ask:"What is it?" But this is not exact. Philosophers are above all concerned with existence, with the mode (or rather modes) of existence. If they consider essence, it is to exhaust it in existence, to make it exist." (Aristotle)

It is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or do that but the potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality.