Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1411240454050.9255@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Last week on empyre: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:06:43 -0500 (EST)
Last week on empyre: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance See the empyre email list archive for November 2014: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2014-November/thread.html moderated by Johannes Birringer, Alan Sondheim This is an important topic, perhaps the most important, I think, given the increasing chaos and stress in so many regions of the planet. To join: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/join.php ============= The initial precis (abridged): The world seems to be descending into chaos of a qualitatively different dis/order, one characterized by terror, massacre, absolutism. Things are increasingly out of control, and this chaos is a kind of ground-work itself - nothing beyond a scorched earth policy, but more of the same. What might be a cultural or artistic response to this? How does one deal with this psychologically, when every day brings new horrors? Even traditional analyses seem to dissolve in the absolute terror that seems to be daily increasing. We are moderating a month-long investigation on Empyre into the dilemma this dis/order poses. We will ask a variety of people to be discussants in what, hopefully, will be a very open conversation. The debate will invite the empyre community to a deep and uncomfortable analysis of abject violence, pain, performance, and ideology [taking further the October 2012 debate on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual], looking at the ambivalences of terror, incomprehensible emotions, and our own complicity in the production of 'common sense' around terror. The format this month will be slightly different; participants will be announced on an organic basis, and we hope that many of the subscribers will chime in. We are all facing the anguish of political situations that seem out of control. We are interested in topics such as, How does one deal with anguish personally? How can anguish be expressed culturally? Can such expressions make a difference at all? We have all read political analyses of the causes of this descent; here, we're interested in the cultural and personal responses to it. [...] - Alan Sondheim