Annotations & Notes

NOTES

PARATEXT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratext

Paratext is a concept in literary interpretation. The main text of published authors (e.g. the story, non-fiction description, poems, etc.) is often surrounded by other material supplied by editors, printers, and publishers, which is known as the paratext. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public. Paratext is most often associated with books, as they typically include a cover (with associated cover art), title, front matter (dedication, opening information, foreword), back matter (endpapers, colophon) footnotes, and many other materials not crafted by the author. Other editorial decisions can also fall into the category of paratext, such as the formatting or typography. Because of their close association with the text, it may seem that authors should be given the final say about paratextual materials, but often that is not the case. One example of controversy surrounding paratext is the case of the 2009 young adult novel Liar, which was initially published with an image of a white girl on the cover, although the narrator of the story was identified in the text as black.

The concept of paratext is closely related to the concept of hypotext, which is the earlier text that serves as a source for the current text.

Literary theorist Gérard Genette defines paratext as those things in a published work that accompany the text, things such as the author's name, the title, preface or introduction, or illustrations.[1] Genette states "More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold." It is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it". Then quoting Philippe Lejeune, Genette further describes paratext as "a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one's whole reading of the text".

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ART & ARTIFACE – Rob Irving (http://www.circlemakers.org/art_and_artifice.html)

The indivisible, insoluble bond between reality and illusion, between those who believe mystery should be adored and those who would play with it, between art (divinely inspired) and artifice (man-made simulacra of the divine). The distinction between art and artifice is easily lost or obscured. In this territory, common language, usually a guarantee of meaning, becomes a useful means of misinterpretation. Crucially, the word ‘genuine’ implies a single and identifiable origin, but anything supernatural is, by definition, unverifiable. Testing for genuineness, as opposed to falsifying is like using an oracle to determine truth. In our virtual reality, genuine is whatever we believe or agree it to be.

The super real must be always just out of reach and continually reinvented to maintain his distance. In the absence of any definitive image of ‘out there’, all we have are our own constructions, driven by a yearning for new experience. To understand this is to appreciate the power of imagination. Art inspires precisely this kind of experience of discontinuity. Their playful interest in ‘the supernatural’, like the subject it self, creates elaborate forms out of disconnected myths, from which new truths may emerge. It is a theatre of interactive creativity in which to escape convention. Metaphor is the key: we don’t necessarily have to either believe in, or reject, the phenomena to gain from the vision. By presenting us with unexpected novelty which threatens, cajoles and ultimately ridicules blind belief and its mirrored twin, blind scepticism, we learn new ways to perceive it.

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HALF TRUTHS – Review, Susan Schuppli, 10 January 2013

Change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination. - Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’, The New York Review of Books, 1971,p.2

These new truths, as Michel Foucault has taught us, always operate as a limit condition governing what can be known at any given time and in turn what might be said. Are facts thus only ever half-truths conditioned by what we might empirically know about the world at a particular time?

While spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and inconvertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? - Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30. Winter 2004, pp.226-227.

Art’s political potential is, in this instance, an indictment of a techno-scientific imagination aimed at covering over, rather than revealing the complex nature of speech understood as a materially encoded object in which debates between truth and deception, fact versus fiction, all become contretemps over the future of the new or unknown — the migrant or asylum seeker who arrives ‘unannounced’ at the borders of the nation state.

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THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE – Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia. 1974

Consider the following thought experiment.

Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?

Nozick provides the following suggestions: 1. We want to do certain things and not just have the experience of having done them. 2. We want to be certain people – to plug in is to commit a form of “suicide” (613). 3. We are limited to a human-created reality.

We thus learn according to Nozick that there are things which matter to us more than simply having certain experiences. Presumably, Nozick’s argument is as follows: 1. If all that mattered to us was pleasure, then we would want to plug into the experience machine. 2. However, we would not want plug-in. 3. Hence, there are things which matter to us besides pleasure.

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THE BUTTERFLY DREAM – Zhuang Zhou, Zhuangzi. c.3rd century BC

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Sud¬denly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The tran¬sition is called Metempsychosis. (Giles 1926: 47; Moeller 2006: 44)

Zhuang Zou wakes up and remembers his dream, then he understands he was dreaming starts to doubt if his perception is right and raises a question about illusion and reality. Doubt is essentially connected to memory, because Zhuang Zou has to remember his dream in order to doubt about its reality. The fitting of shoes, as fitting of everything else, is confirmed by for¬getting. Such forgetting that itself is forgotten means detachment and in¬dependence from memory as activity of our consciousness, but not its extension.

The forgetting – not the memory – is relevant here because forgetting means process of emptying our memory. It could be understood as all¬-embracing ‘forgetting’ and being unattached to any opposition and to the very oppositional thinking. There is the temptation to find oneself ‘understanding everything correctly.’

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THE SUBLIEME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY – Slavoj Zizek

This other possibility is that offered by fantasy: equating the subject to an object of fantasy. When he was thinking that he was a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi, Zhuang Zi was in a way correct. The butterfly was the object which constituted the frame, the backbone, of his fantasy-identity. In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the Real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network. (page 46)

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THE MATRIX AS METAPHYSICS - David J. Chalmers

The brain in a vat, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back into the simulation. The brain is massively deluded, it seems. It has all sorts of false beliefs about the world.

For example in the Matrix, Neo is a brain in a vat. Let's say that a matrix is an artificially-designed computer simulation of a world. So the Matrix in the movie is one example of a matrix. And let's say that someone is envatted, or that they are in a matrix, if they have a cognitive system which receives its inputs from and sends its outputs to a matrix. Then the brain at the beginning is envatted, and so is Neo. A connection is arranged so that whenever this body receives sensory inputs inside the simulation, the envatted cognitive system will receive sensory inputs of the same sort.

How do I know that I am not in a matrix? Whether this is right or not, it certainly seems that we cannot be certain that we are not in a matrix. It seems that if I am envatted, my own corresponding beliefs are false. It makes a claim about the reality underlying physics, about the nature of our minds, and about the creation of the world.

The Creation Hypothesis says: Physical space-time and its contents were created by beings outside physical space-time.

A version of it is believed by many people in our society, and perhaps by the majority of the people in the world. If one believes that God created the world, and if one believes that God is outside physical space-time, then one believes the Creation Hypothesis. One needn't believe in God to believe the Creation Hypothesis, though. Perhaps our world was created by a relatively ordinary being in the "next universe up", using the latest world-making technology in that universe. If so, the Creation Hypothesis is true.

Recall that the Matrix Hypothesis says: I have (and have always had) a cognitive system that receives its inputs from and sends its outputs to an artificially-designed computer simulation of a world.

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers “Oh that’s a McGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?”. “Well”, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!”. So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.- Hitchcock

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THE SUBLIEME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY – Slavoj Zizek

The things (commodities) themselves believe in their place, instead of the subjects: it is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between things’. They no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for them. (page 31)

This problem must be approached from the Lacanian thesis that it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire. When Lacan says that the last support of what we call ‘reality’ is a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense pf ‘life is just a dream’, ‘what we call reality is just an illusion’, and so forth. The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream. (page 47-48)

It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience - on the contrary, it is the reference to a 'pure' signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself Historical reality is of course always symbolized; the way we experience it is always mediated through different modes of symbolization: all Lacan adds to this phenomenological common wisdom is the fact that the unity of a given 'experience of meaning', itself the horizon of an ideological field of meaning, is supported by some 'pure', meaningless 'signifier without the signified’. (page 108)

Fantasy appears, then, as an answer to ' Che yuoi?', to the unbearable enigma of the desire of the Other, of the lack in the Other, but it is at the same time fantasy itself which, so to speak, provides the co-ordinates of our desire - which constructs the frame enabling us to desire something. The usual definition of fantasy ('an imagined scenario representing the realization of desire') is therefore somewhat misleading, or at least ambiguous: in the fantasy-scene the desire is not fulfilled, 'satisfied', but constituted (given its objects, and so on) - through fantasy, we learn 'how to desire’. In this intermediate position lies the paradox of fantasy: it is the frame co-ordinating our desire, but at the same time a defence against ' che yuoi?', a screen concealing the gap, the abyss of the desire of the Other. Sharpening the paradox to its utmost - to tautology - we could say that desire itself is a defence against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a defence against the desire of the Other, against this 'pure', trans-phantasmic desire (i.e. the 'death drive' in its pure form). (page 132)

The famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself' nothing at all' - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them. The original anecdote is well known: two men are sitting in a train; one of them asks: 'What's that package up there in the luggage rack?' 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin.' 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well, it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'Well, then, that's not a MacGuffin.' There is another version which is much more to the point: it is the same as the other, with the exception of the last answer: 'Well, you see how efficient it is!' - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Needless to add, the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire. (page 183)

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THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION - Arthur Schopenhauer, Volume II, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)

The act of willing arises from a need or desire for something, and it is therefore a manifestation of deprivation or suffering. The fulfilment of a wish terminates the act of willing. However, no object of desire that is obtained by a subject can provide lasting satisfaction. Thus, the conditions that are necessary for knowledge of the Platonic Idea include pure contemplation, extinction of desire, transcendence of the subject-object relation, and freedom from being confined by individuality.

Schopenhauer describes the gratification of a wish or desire as a negative condition, because it provides only temporary deliverance from deprivation or suffering. Happiness is negative, because it never provides lasting satisfaction. Because happiness is never lasting or complete, only the absence of happiness can become the true subject of art.

The will desires everything for itself, says Schopenhauer, and it manifests itself as a source of egoism. Egoism concentrates the self-interest of each individual in the individuality of his or her own willing. Thus, the voluntary renunciation of egoism must be achieved by a denial of the "will-to-live." Ethical action consists of denying one's own will-to-live, and it consists of not denying the will-to-live of other individuals. Ethical action also consists of not compelling other individuals to deny their own will-to-live. Justice may be achieved when the affirmation of the will-to-live of one individual does not conflict with the affirmation of the will-to-live of other individuals.

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THE REALITY EFFECT - Roland Barthes (Summary Oxford) https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAAahUKEwi5u5LkrPLIAhUMCBoKHUFUApM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oxfordreference.com%2Fview%2F10.1093%2Foi%2Fauthority.20110803100407783&usg=AFQjCNHpRCei7tYVTTf7ti1HlRJ9HeO-qA&sig2=kT3mIsDz340bSQQNheLMGw&cad=rja

The small details of person, place, and action that while contributing little or nothing to the narrative, give the story its atmosphere, making it feel real. It does not add to the plot to know that the character James Bond wears Egyptian cotton shirts, but it clearly does add considerably to our understanding of him. By the same token, knowing that he buys his food from Fortnum and Mason makes him more real. Thus, as Roland Barthes argues in his essay introducing this concept, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968, reprinted in The Rustle of Language1984) no analysis of a text can be considered complete if it does not take these seemingly insignificant details into account.

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SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS – Jean Baudrillard

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true”. – Ecclesiastes

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. Hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

Feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". In order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the spectre raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective cause have ceased to exist.

One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.

God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. These would be the successive phases of the image:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared.

It is no longer a question of the ideology of work — of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation — but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum. This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.

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SIMULACRA AND SCIENCE FICTION – Jean Baudrillard

Three orders of simulacra:

Simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God's image;

Simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production - a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra);

Simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game - total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.

There is no real, there is no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, including that between the real and the imaginary, tends to abolish itself, to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model? Well, from one order of simulacra to another, the tendency is certainly toward the reabsorption of this distance, of this gap that leaves room for an ideal or critical projection.

This projection is greatly reduced in science fiction: it is most often nothing other than an unbounded projection of the real world of production, but it is not qualitatively different from it.

This projection is totally reabsorbed in the implosive era of models. The models no longer constitute either transcendence or projection, they no longer constitute the imaginary in relation to the real, they are themselves an anticipation of the real, and thus leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation - they are immanent, and thus leave no room for any kind of imaginary transcendence. The field opened is that of simulation in the cybernetic sense, that is, of the manipulation of these models at every level (scenarios, the setting up of simulated situations, etc.) but then nothing distinguishes this operation from the operation itself and the gestation of the real: there is no more fiction.

Reality could go beyond fiction: that was the surest sign of the possibility of an ever-increasing imaginary. But the real cannot surpass the model - it is nothing but its alibi.

The imaginary was the alibi of the real, in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true Utopia - but a Utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.

The rank of cosmic value, hypostatized in space – the satellization of the real in the transcendence of space - it is the end of metaphysics, the end of the phantasm, the end of science fiction - the era of hyper-reality begins.

From then onward, something must change: the projection, the extrapolation, the sort of pantographic excess that constituted the charm of science fiction are all impossible. It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real.

In this way, science fiction would no longer be a romantic expansion with all the freedom and naiveté that the charm of discovery gave it, but, quite the contrary, it would evolve implosively in the very image of our current conception of the universe, attempting to revitalize, reactualize, requotidianize fragments of simulation, fragments of this universal simulation that have become for us the so-called real world.

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ARTISTS

BOMBS – Petro Sefstathiadis Undermining the concept of bombs, Greek artist Petros Efstathiadis created a series of sculptural assemblages made from consumer packaging, soap, flowers, light bulbs or sponges. The series titled “Bombs”, reveals how even common everyday objects can appear menacing when we are conditioned to be frightened by terrorism. Via his website, "There was a period of tension and despair in Greek society as the result of the economic crisis – and in a period of global confusion in general – Petros Efstathiadis’ bombs are a powerful and pacific answer to the absurdity we got ourselves into." - http://petrosefstathiadis.com/index.php?/root/bombs/

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SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF – Elin Hansdottir The site-specific new production uses the institution’s architecture as a starting point for a spatial and filmic installation, which encompasses two complementary floors. The enviroment on this level was used before the exhibition opened as a location for shooting an experimental film, presented on the floor above. While the installation looks at the space and its properties through various constellations of objects and perspectival shifts, in the film a further dimension of perception is superimposed through the use of the camera and editing techniques. The film’s sound connects both spaces, which together interweave present, past, surface, depth, and movement. The piece emerges upon entrance, as ties between its individual elements are produced.

The term Suspension of Disbelief was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to justify the success of artistic fiction: since we derive such a great pleasure from observing it, we “believe” the artistic illusion even against our better judgment. Early cinema’s special effects also employ this phenomenon, and were often – as here – simply simulated with glass painting, but nonetheless have the power to spur the imagination. http://www.elinhansdottir.net/project/45

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Gabriel Lester - http://gabriellester.com/