july on -empyre-

July 2006 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: "Bare Life"


http://www.subtle.net/empyre



Please join guests Jordan Crandall (US), Tina Gonsalves (AU), GH
Hovagimyan (US), Conor McGarrigle (IR), Susana Mendes Silva (PT), and
Michele White (US) as we address
a question posed by the upcoming Documenta 12:


What is bare life?


This question is one of three leitmotifs being talked about, and
written about all over the world during 2006, in collaboration with
the Documenta Magazine Project ( http://www.documenta12.de/english/
leitmotifs.html ) -empyre- is honored to be invited into the
conversation, as an Australian based new media publication and
international collaborative list, founded by Melinda Rackham in
2002. In March 2006, we spent a lively multilingual month on 'Is
Modernity our Antiquity" – and the archives for this discussion are
online now at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March/


The Documenta Magazine project editors describe it this way……



"What is bare life?


" This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and
complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our
existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But
as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with
infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political
dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration
camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension
to it

these are excellent articles!

nordic-larp certainly sounds like the cutting-edge of self-reflexive, creative social engineering– reminds me of the anthropologist victor turner, hypothesizing the difference between a living or a dead ritual, his central premise being that ritual exists to illuminate (and therefore mediate) the inherent conflicts and contradictions that exist within a society, at the level of the individual… although i suppose the basic narrative of the modern world is that these conflicts and contradictions are so fundamentally terrible, that we tend to embrace radical freedoms of the imagination to preserve or renew the human soul: dadaism, surrealism, counter-cultures and fluxus, cyber-cultures and larps, oh my.

an acquaintance of mine has told me stories about a larping-community that existed within an intelligence division of the american military, circa 2000, a collection of spooks-in-training who liked to pretend they were vampires and werewolves; he said that it was a little alarming, to learn that an individual who might eventually become an interrogator, liked to walk around in military uniform secretly sporting vampire teeth– but in the long-run, he decided it was probably good for everybody if the pseudo-sadists played their hands early, in the hopes that they might be isolated and contained before they deployed into an actual "theatre of combat".

unfortunately the senior command didn't see it that way, and a memorandum was distributed which identified the entire practice of "larp-ing" as being a subset of satanism. of course, the sick joke was ultimately on everybody, because just a few years later, in the actual military deployment into iraq, we discovered that sadism was neither an outlier nor a game; arguably, the language of sadomasochsim had been an integral part of military culture, of inflicting and receiving pain and humiliation in order to feel power and powerlessness as the pleasurable erasure of your individual focus, and your immersion into the spectacle of a terrible force capable of destroying any man or woman, regardless of their beauty of virtue– the spectacle of a vengeful, maddened god, demanding the deaths of the first born, imparting plagues and patterns of the inferno, dante descending and ascending.

dadaism and the nordic larp: playfulness and perhaps freedom, however pathetic or sublime. ritual experience as moral illumination.