<nettime> From Intervention to Zwischenology. With love to Wolfgang, Bey, and Lucille

[Monique Roelofs <Monique_Roelofs@brown.edu>]

Dear Bey, dear Lucille, dear Wolfgang --

Did I enjoy your last mailings! 

And Wolfgang, thank you for your compliment from a couple of weeks ago.  It
was kind of you to mention the superwomen:

"I have especially enjoyed Monique's remarks about the philosophical
super-women - some of them Iíve already invited to work
with us, others are being seriously considered for Saas-Fee where Donna
Haraway and Avital Ronell are going to teach this summer. And I am more in
agreement with Sean than he may like: The ZWISCHEN (in-between) is crucial
to my phenomenological truth.  That is to say: The poles are abstract and
there are no senders and receivers since the event (timing) is the temporary
activity (Wirklichkeit) "

I'd like to reply, though, that I had other superwomen in mind, one of whom
I mentioned, notably, the field of aesthetics, which, I quote myself, is
with us as "the connective mediation between form and content, the promise
of reconciliation, the playful, sensitive other of instrumental reason."  I
see little of that in Haraway; I have to say, with some of my friends, that
Haraway is more of a super-commodity (the old idea about replacing the
relations between people and inside of people with relations between things
and machines and sciences).  Much to my own distress, I also wasn't really
describing a real woman in the flesh.  Rather, for all my love of her, I
was describing a theoretical figure, whose seductive pose - forgive me for
repeating once more - I held up against the "dearly cherished bias that
influential perspectives in both media theory and traditional philosophy
share is their unwillingness to work out issues about embodiment,
sensuality, aesthetic experience, reciprocity, sharing, giving, love."  My
intention was to address the masculinist constructions that new media
theory and dead philosophy have in common.  I meant to address these by
pointing to some new avenues for philosophical radicalism and feminist
invention: love, play, sensation, a form of production that speaks to the
moments that our theoretical inheritance does not to address, which, is
more at ease in the sphere of rules and exchange.

I quote my original invention:

"One dearly cherished bias that influential perspectives in both media
theory and traditional philosophy share is their unwillingness to work out
issues about embodiment, sensuality, aesthetic experience, reciprocity,
sharing, giving, love.

This bias is not foreign to philosophical aesthetics, even if aesthetics,
as the connective mediation between form and content, the promise of
reconciliation, the playful, sensitive other of instrumental reason, has
always been a philosophical super-woman.

Sex, apparently, is easier than love; exchange is easier than mutuality;
economics and politics are more easily theorized than sensation, desire,
empathy, music, the wind, a kiss, aesthetic experience, spiritual
flourishing, you name it."

This is why I was so happy, yesterday, to read Bey and Lucille on this
list.  For what is more needed than an erotics of media?  Why did the eros
disappear from aesthetic theory?  

Wolfgang, how do you feel about this, pre- and postconceptually?  I mean
this idea, not necessarily me or Haraway, but this idea of the eros
disappearing and having to be reintroduced badly.  I want a philosophy of
love, a loving aesthetics, a theory of new media not along the lines of
market exchange but through the vectors of reciprocity, the lineaments of
mutual address, address in the flesh, address of bodies to bodies.  This is
what I am trying to work out.  For here there are more radical
possibilities than in the transposition of masculinist critical theory to
new media.  Wolfgang, I admire the depth and the range of your interests,
from Diana to cloned sheep, but where is the love, where is the
reciprocity, can we theorize beauty and radical interventionism adequately
if we continue taking women and animals as our objects?  Could we perhaps
work to create some new subject positions, with which we could start to
identify and disidentify anew?  

Bey and Lucille, what do you say?

Wolfgang, are you still with me?  For all our constructedness, a zwischen
requires two of something, you see.
Am I still with you?

How to theorize the zwischen.  Right that is what it is all about.
Aesthetic reciprocity.

Perhaps you should have me and my claimed subject position over for a
Summer in Saas-Fairy, Sassy-Fee, Fees-Sta, Fiesta, whereever you'd like to
go?  I would happily join you.  Sorry it's been so long since our previous
exchange, but I hope you will enjoy also this zwischen-vention from
Monique, then we will have a new tradition coming to the fore, primarily in
the conceptual arena, for sure, maybe even pre-conceptual also,
constructed, of course, nonetheless, a fine instantiation of a
Phenomenological Zwischen you and me!  And now with Bey and Lucille too.
It's time to travel to the field of reciprocity.

With love and kisses,
Monique



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