commencement wear

Sent to me here in Malibu was commencement gear, in official DePaul University colors. Like most Ph.D.’s I skipped my graduation ceremony at the time. Who wants to pay $500 for academic gear at the end of a long period as a starving graduate student?

However:

*It’s a royal pain to keep going to the storeroom and trying on bland generic black robes twice per year. Now I won’t have to do it anymore.

*Associate Provosts should have nice-looking gear, not the generic stuff. DePaul’s colors are pretty nice: bright blue.

*It’s kind of cool to own one set of Medieval-type clothing.

Still, it’s around $500-$600 for this stuff, and I’ll only be wearing it an average of twice per year for about 3 hours each time.

Even if I work at a university into my early 70’s, that would still be about $10 per usage. It’s too expensive.

weird country

The United States really is a weird country, isn’t it?

This is what I wanted: to be away long enough that my home could start seeming like a strange place rather than like a banal backdrop of normalcy. America is an oddity, and its people are oddities as well.

All I had to do this morning to feel the weirdness is walk down the hill to a convenience store, a Starbucks, a grocery store, and then read through the Wall Street Journal a bit. It’s a bizarre place, the USA.

But I also get the sense that things really have changed in the past decade, and I’ve fallen out of step a bit. Maybe I’m still expecting to find the America of spring 2000, and it’s gone.

Levi’s birthday girl

A nice tribute to his now 4-year-old daughter HERE.

Latour wins Korean prize

A nice honor for Bruno Latour. (Hat tip, Ashok Sukumaran, an interesting artist in his own right.)

*****

Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2010
Prize winner: Bruno Latour

Ceremony: November 26th 4:30 p.m.
Forum: November 27th 2:00 p.m.

Nam June Paik Art Center
85 Sanggal-dong, Giheung-gu,
Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do
446-905
Republic of Korea
T: + 82 (0) 31 201 8543
F: + 82 (0) 31 201 8515
chaeyoung@njpartcenter.kr

njp.kr/root/html_kor/Event.asp?idx=92&gotopage=1

The Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, an international yearly award, announces its 2010 solo-recipient, Bruno Latour. To respect Nam June Paik’s philosophy and creativity, the international jury and Nam June Paik Art Center Advisory Council reexamine Paik’s theoretical dimensions that hold urgent recognition and support. Based on the idea, the Prize opened its doors to internationally renowned researchers, thinkers and organizers of Paik studies and the jury selected the recipient among 8 strong nominees from around the world.

For the international jury panel the members were: Director of Le Consortium Xavier Douroux; Professor of Univ. Paris 1 Anne-Marie Duguet; Director of Kunsthalle Bremen Wulf Herzogenrath; former Director of Gwangju Biennale Wan-kyung Sung. The jury selected a person who will provide a new theoretical framework of Nam June Paik.

Some excerpts from the discussion: “[The recipient] has to be a high mediator to connect Paik’s thinking and action to the actual interests of intellectual and perceptive world,” said Xavier Douroux. According to Anne-Marie Duguet, “I find Latour’s thought very much in tune with Paik’s one. … None has the radical and deep thinking of Latour.” “We are honored to give this year’s Prize to Prof. Bruno Latour, and we are sure that master minds of both Latour and Paik will meet together to open up an unforeseen dimension in the future study of Paik. This will be a historical and strong statement,” said Nam June Paik Art Center Director Youngchul Lee.

The selected winner of 2010 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, Bruno Latour (b. 1947), professor of Science Po Paris and Vice President of Research for the same institution, has been honored for being the forefront thinker who opened new ways of thinking with his theories bridging fields of philosophy, techno-science, scientific visualization, anthropology and politics. He is the author of numerous books dealing with scientific practice and political philosophy of nature, including We Have Never Been Modern, dealing with his theory of “Symmetric Anthropology,” “Politics of Nature” and “Reassembling the Social.” He co-curated two important exhibitions at ZKM, Karlsruhe, titled Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005). These exhibitions are now regarded as a revolutionary way of linking art and science and they have resulted in the recent creation of a new program in ”political arts” in Sciences Po.

The Nam June Paik Art Center Prize will be endowed to the recipient on November 26th by the Governor of Gyeonggi Province at Nam June Paik Art Center. The Award ceremony comprises an exhibition composed of Paik’s major works specially supported by Shuya Abe, a Japanese technician who collaborated with Paik in creating Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer (1969).

On November 27th, the day after the ceremony, Bruno Latour will give a public lecture titled ‘The Time of Critique, The Time of Composition-Art and Politics Today.’

The Nam June Paik Art Center is supported by Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation and Gyeonggi Province.

Nam June Paik Art Center
85 Sanggal-dong, Giheung-gu,
Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do

446-905
Republic of Korea

T: + 82 (0) 31 201 8554

F: + 82 (0) 31 201 8530

chaeyoung@njpartcenter.kr

a job I would hate to have

President of the United States. Here’s the before/after of Bill Clinton, and it’s taken a similar toll on others.

speaking of Halloween masks

Look at THIS DISGUISE used by an asylum seeker on an airplane. He even did the bodily movements correctly, it is said. But he still had young man’s hands, which is a strange mess-up given that gloves can easily be worn.

quick thought based on a Google result

Word received that I was a Google result for the following question: “Who did Xavier Zubiri influence?”

Yes, Zubiri did influence me. I picked up On Essence very cheaply through a book catalog as an undergraduate, then didn’t get around to reading it for 9 years. He is what I would call a “weird realist”. Despite some residues of traditional realism that are unfortunate, Zubiri shows why essence (so decried even now) is an unavoidable concept, and is far stricter than Aristotle in subtracting essence from any functional or relational model of it. A thing is what it is, not what it can do.

While reading through Debaise yesterday (he’s an excellent young Belgian, a specialist in Whitehead) I was reminded of the fact that most members of my generation are still heading in the opposite direction. This is important because I think philosophy often begins negatively, with a sense that certain ideas are boring, used up, or out of date. And it is still often the case that people think substance, essence, the subject-predicate sentence structure, etc., are what need to be attacked. I can’t go there, however, because I think the attacks on these notions are now used up and hollow, and it’s time to retrieve what is of value in them. This is one of the reasons I’m so fond of Suárez– his works are practically a parade of concepts that look banal and middle-aged when viewed from an orthodox avant garde position (and Deleuze perhaps defines the current orthodox avant garde better than anyone else), but they are also a treasure house of ideas that, in my view, are now ripe for retrieval.

This is one of the most important ideas to be found in McLuhan: the notion that everything is retrievable. The history of philosophy, like the history of everything else, does not work according to linear modernization or improvement, but according to reversals and retrievals. “My wager”, as the Badiouians like to say, is that realism, essence, substance, individual entities, are now ripe for retrieval. They’ve simply been dumped on for too long.

Incidentally, my favorite part of Debaise’s book is his section on Simondon. At first it looks as though it’s going to be just another case of lumping all the “process” people together, but Debaise sees very clearly that there is a major point of incompatibility between Simondon and Whitehead: the former gives individuals a subordinate position, while the latter makes individuals primary. Latour is the same as Whitehead here, and I think this is the primary reason that those reviewers are completely wrong who want to read Latour as a sort of Deleuzian. I do think that Latour’s version of ANT was partly inspired by Anti-Oedipus, but the real historical debt for Latour is to Whitehead, and people tend to vastly overstate the Whitehead/Deleuze compatibility. (There is a tendency to take Deleuze too much at his word when he declares his alliances. His “alliance” with Leibniz is another such case. Deleuze’s Leibniz is simply Leibniz wearing a Spinoza mask as if on Halloween night: Leibniz’s face is unrecognizable except through a few minimal traces of body language.)

urban imbalance

My arriving at this house was mildly comical and took a long time. It’s pretty much a straight shot from LAX (the main Los Angeles airport) to Malibu, and any local could do it quickly and without difficulty. But I kept getting stuck in “exit only” lanes and then having to ask directions for detours back onto the freeway.

The point being that, despite my long and memorable decade in Chicago, and my now extensive travel record in 60 countries, I’ve still spent only a week apiece in both Los Angeles and New York, the two main cities of my country. Maybe my next exotic vacation should be New York.

Malibu

This is a nice house overlooking the seaside, and I believe a number of Hollywood stars live on this same street. I’m the guest of the in-laws of a friend, and being treated very nicely.

That was by far the best AirFrance flight I’ve ever had. The service was so over-the-top good that it seems to have been the result of a corporate policy decision, as in “let’s rebrand AirFrance as the best customer service airline in Europe”. They act like your butlers now. Free Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars in the back of economy class.

Also, nothing makes an 11.5-hour flight easy like a nearly empty plane. Whole row to myself. Was reading Whitehead the whole time, and Debaise’s Whitehead book again.

Rome

Security and passport lines were so long that I only had about an hour to go back to the Colosseum and other ruins. In December 1990 I did a Ravenna, Florence, Rome tour and hadn’t been back to Rome since.

Get a night in Paris tonight, but a short one. Crazy itinerary.