Hannah Lammin | The University of Greenwich (original) (raw)

articles by Hannah Lammin

Performance Philosophy 4(1), 2018

François Laruelle’s non-standard aesthetics proposes a framework for ‘conjugating’ philosophy wit... more François Laruelle’s non-standard aesthetics proposes a framework for ‘conjugating’ philosophy with the arts to articulate new models of thought (2012a). This posture of thinking is posed as a defence of man against the presuppositions that ground philosophy, which conceptually overdetermine the human and condemn thought to a perpetual state of crisis (Gracieuse et al. 2012). Laruelle’s epistemological approach holds a certain potential for the field of performance philosophy because it brings performance together with philosophy in a non-hierarchical arrangement that combines their respective means, producing an ‘art of thought’ (Laruelle 2012a, 5). This article examines the effects of bringing performance into thought in this manner, by putting Laruelle’s pragmatics into practice. It enacts a non-standard re-description of two sets of theoretical materials: one ‘philosophical’, the other from ‘performance theory’. The first, a deconstruction of the performativity of human rights declarations (Hamacher 2006), resonates with Laruelle’s concerns about the conceptual overdetermination of the human; however, it appeals to the Platonic scene of krisis as an alternative paradigm for presenting the human—which remains an event with a crisis-structure. The second, an aesthetic theory of performance conceived as a liminal event (Fischer-Lichte 2008), has a similar structure. By articulating these materials together, I will show how terms can be extracted from performance theory and used as a means to radicalise the scene of krisis, producing a stage on which the ‘human’ can be presented in an underdetermined mode. This allows us to achieve a non-predicative theorisation of the human that eludes Hamacher, whilst demonstrating through practice the abstract procedure by which ‘performance’ is utilised in the context of non-standard aesthetics.

Parallax 24(2): Barbarisms, 2018

Benjamin suggests that modern technologies bring about a poverty of conventional human experience... more Benjamin suggests that modern technologies bring about a poverty of conventional human experience, initiating a new barbarism by forcing thinkers to ‘start from scratch’ (1999b: 732). He observes that great creative spirits tend to ‘begin by clearing a tabula rasa’, by constructing ‘a drawing table’ (Ibid.). This article proposes that François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy constitutes one such levelling of the grounds of thought—which resonates with Benjamin’s own ideas. Laruelle’s approach begins from a simple axiomatic ground, on which he builds a syntax for thought that allows for a new vision of emergent concepts. His posture indeed seems “barbaric” to some—Jacques Derrida once suggested that Laruelle was close to practicing a kind of “terror” over philosophy (Derrida & Laruelle, 2012). Yet this axiomatic flattening of the terrain of thought suspends the authority of logos (which can be related to the authority of experience as Erfahrung) to propose a more immanent experience of thinking (which can be linked to Erlebnisse), and can thus be seen as an example of the positive barbarism that Benjamin calls for.

However, rather than building a drawing table, it is a new camera that Laruelle constructs (Laruelle, 2011; 2012). He thereby brings an imagistic media technology to the centre of his epistemological system. Accordingly, this essay explores Laruelle’s proposal to take photography as the model for a theoretical installation, in relation to Benjamin’s discussion of technological reproducibility in art. Benjamin suggests that the camera brings about a new mode of perception which ‘extracts sameness even from what is unique’ (2008: 24). Laruelle’s non-philosophical vision functions not to extract sameness, but rather to think according to the immanent identity of the concept. We thereby propose that his non-photographic posture be understood as a radicalisation of Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image”—‘that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (1999a: 462). Laruelle similarly characterises the non-photographic vision as a flash (2012), but rather than a temporal constellation, it is given as a transcendental superposition. Like Scheerbart’s glass buildings, the non-photographic lens reveals identity without reflection: it is ‘a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 734). This epistemological technology offers a new experience of the photo as an image of thought, at a time when the proliferation of image-based digital communication platforms are arguably instigating a new shift in human experience in general.

Transformations 31: Technoaffect: Bodies, Machines, Media, 2018

This article examines how the emergence of speech-driven interfaces for computational devices alt... more This article examines how the emergence of speech-driven interfaces for computational devices alters our affective relationships with machines, and argues that the rise of intelligent personal assistants such as Siri, Watson and Alexa calls for the question of affect to be brought to the centre of discourse around artificial intelligence (AI). It departs from the early imaginings and manifestations of human-computer conversations in the work of Turing and Weizenbaum, then introduces a Spinozan framework for theorising the transmission of affect and its ethical implications. It examines the affective economy engendered by vocal interfaces, drawing on a range of theories which focus on sound not only as an object of study, but also as a conceptual paradigm. It concludes by arguing that the machine voice constitutes a form of embodiment, and that according computers this " body " and inviting us to converse with them enhances our ability to enter into a sensuous relationship with them.

Apocalyptic Cybernetic Theatre: ACT Oedipus, was performed by Studio for Electronic Theatre at Ta... more Apocalyptic Cybernetic Theatre: ACT Oedipus, was performed by Studio for Electronic Theatre at Tate Britain in November 2011. The piece, a re-working of the Oedipus myth for the digital age, involves a combination of physical performance and audio-visual media, including projections of digital images taken in real time from the live performance, which create an effect of doubling the action. This simultaneous presentation of body and image highlights differences between them, the digital technology allowing for the images to be manipulated in various ways, and for multiple perspectives to be presented in the same space and time.

This paper uses ACT Oedipus as a jumping-off point to explore how the use of digital technology in a live performance environment produces a complex experience of the image, and argues that this reveals an apocalyptic structure inherent to representation. “Apocalypse” – which means both revelation, the act of showing, and a coming end or limit – is proposed as the sign of a double temporality that generates intensity through an indeterminate play between imminence and immanence. The digitally mediated performance stages the internal rupture that constitutes this apocalyptic movement, complicating the relation between presentation and representation and distorting the theatrical space that re/presentation presupposes.

The internal division exposed within re/presentation reflects an ontological rupture in the structure of subjectivity that is symbolised by the figure of Oedipus. It will be shown that, although in this instance digital technology is the medium that reveals this rupture, it is an intrinsic division that can be seen, in different forms, in both Sophoclean tragedy and in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject. Digital logic, because it dispenses with the need for a point of origin, allows us to conceive of the rupture as an opening in subjective identity which re-structures the audience/performer relation, transforming the theatrical enclosure into a fluid, network space.

Hegel, in his Aesthetics, proposes the Tower of Babel as an architectural symbol that is foundati... more Hegel, in his Aesthetics, proposes the Tower of Babel as an architectural symbol that is foundational in the establishment of social unity. This article argues that Babel is a paradoxical symbol for unity, and is emblematic of the difficulty that Hegel's philosophical system presents for understanding community. This problem is shown to be structural, deriving from the essentially architectonic logic of dialectics, and connected to language at a fundamental level. Drawing on the thought of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, the spatiality of Hegel's system is turned inside-out, with an “anarchitectural” topology proposed, instead, as the ground of community.

Conference Presentations by Hannah Lammin

François Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics proposes that a conjugation of philosophy with aesthe... more François Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics proposes that a conjugation of philosophy with aesthetic practices has the potential to reorient thought's relationship with the real. Such a conjugation produces " philo-fictions " that provide a non-philosophical syntax for new forms of thought, which are determined by the radical immanence of the real whilst also acting as part of that immanence. The creation of such philo-fictions alters both philosophy, and the aesthetic practices with which it is conjugated. This paper aims to articulate a theatrical philo-fiction. More particularly, it investigates how the use of digital media in live performance can help us to revision " theatre " as the site for the production of subjectivities, both individual and collective. Studio for Electronic Theatre's digitally mediated staging of Oedipus (Salihbegovic, 2011–13), which re-imagines the ancient myth in a near-future digital dystopia where presence itself is at stake, is used as a case-study. The paper argues that the fragmented presence invoked as digital imagery is interpolated into live theatrical space is not born with the " new media " environment, but has been implicit in the ontology of theatre ever since Aristotle took Sophocles' Oedipus as the exemplar of tragedy. By bringing this originary fragmentation to the surface, digital mediation thus assists in the process of re-conceiving theatre in a non-standard mode. On this basis, this paper will move toward an articulation of the subject as a radically non-anthropocentric organon of thought. Before I start, a remark on the title—which is slightly different from the draft version. This is because when I started writing I realised it probably should have been non-fragmented

Studio for Electronic Theatre has produced a series of digitally-enhanced performance works (ACT ... more Studio for Electronic Theatre has produced a series of digitally-enhanced performance works (ACT Oedipus, 2011; Oedipus-Code Breaker, 2013) re-imagining the Oedipus myth in a virtual-reality age. These works combine physical performance with audiovisual feedback and augmented reality effects, with the aim of producing a new turn in the tradition of "total theatre" which transforms the experience of time and space, producing a non-representational experiential form. Using the performance pieces as a starting point, this paper will examine the figure of Oedipus as a mythological foundation – both to our understanding of theatre since Sophocles' work was taken as the epitome of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics, and to modern conceptions of subjectivity, as rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis. I will argue that, by re-staging the ancient tale in a near-future telematic environment and highlighting the disjunctures between the virtualized hyper-reality of the digital age and the brutalities that persist in the mundane reality of crisis spaces such as the war zone or refugee camp, SET's work figures something of the instability and indeterminacy that constitutes the identity of Oedipus, who is both foreign and native to Thebes, both husband and son to Jocasta. Drawing on Lyotard's libidinal philosophy, which takes the structure of the theatre as the paradigmatic form of subjectivity, I will argue that the non-linear, synaesthetic experience of SET's Oedipus generates an intensity that opens onto the fluid surface space Lyotard names the " Great Ephemeral Skin " , thereby energetically de-structuring the theatrical architecture of the subject.

Hegel, in his Aesthetics, locates the origin of art in the symbolic architecture of the Tower of ... more Hegel, in his Aesthetics, locates the origin of art in the symbolic architecture of the Tower of Babel. He says that the tower “was built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community of those who constructed it.” This structure, which functions as a symbol of “national unity”, forms the foundation of aesthetics, understood as a dialectical telos which moves toward the total conceptual and social unification of Absolute Reason. However, Babel is a paradoxical symbol for teleological unity considering that, according to myth, its construction was never completed, and the project resulted in the confounding of tongues whereby a people who had previously had one language could no longer understand one another, and were scattered across the earth.

This paper shows that the choice of Babel as an exemplary symbol of national unity is emblematic of the difficulty that Hegel's unifying philosophical system presents for understanding community. It will be argued that this problem is structural, deriving from the essentially architectonic logic of dialectics, and connected to language at a fundamental level. Drawing on the thought of Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, the spatiality of Hegel's system is turned inside-out, with an “anarchitectural” topology proposed, instead, as the ground of community. This reorientation suggests that the dialectical telos, like the Babylonian tower, is constitutively incomplete and reveals an intrinsic opacity to language. As such, Babel is shown to be an appropriate symbol for community – not for its unifying function, but because of its impossibility as a project, and the disjunction in communication that it represents.

Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of community challenges the notion of communion, which he argues ... more Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of community challenges the notion of communion, which he argues is Christian in origin. Rejecting the idea that a group of individuals can, or should be fused into a unified collective body, Nancy proposes that community names an originary experience of “sociality” which precedes the formation of subjectivity. This placing of social experience as ontologically prior to the individuated subject has implications for the way in which the embodied “self” is understood.

Nancy follows Georges Bataille in claiming that community is constituted through an ecstatic relation to death, which reveals the essential incompleteness of singular beings. Bataille links death to eroticism through a dialectic of transgression, in which communal relations are conceived in terms of the interpenetration of bodies. However, Nancy identifies an impasse in this logic, claiming that the essentially subjective basis of Bataille's thinking is incommensurable with the problematics of sociality. Nancy opens up the interiority of the subject, figuring corporeality as a topological surface which is constituted as it touches the outside.

This paper explores the relations between community, death and embodiment through an examination of ecstatic collective experiences in two adjacent buildings in East London: firstly, the consecrated space of a church; secondly, the abject space of a disused abattoir which was occupied by squatters and used as a venue for “raves”. Drawing on Bataille's ideas about the ambiguity of the sacred, two contrasting “religious” experiences are identified which operate according to different temporal logics, and different relations to death. These divergent temporalities engender distinct libidinal economies, thereby generating differential experiences of embodiment. It is argued that underground dance music culture creates an environment in which bodies in movement constitute an experience of ecstatic sociality that escapes the closure of collective hypostasis that Nancy critiques in the Christian tradition.

This paper explores the idea of “theatrical space” by examining contemporary guerilla performance... more This paper explores the idea of “theatrical space” by examining contemporary guerilla performance practices, such as Augusto Boal's Invisible Theatre and the Recombinant Theatre proposed by Critical Art Ensemble, which take performance out of the black box and into quotidian environments.

The staging of performance events amongst an unsuspecting public can be seen as a form of political activism that aims to expose the representative nature of the everyday and thereby challenge the normative order. These interventions, which perforate the audience/performer divide, are necessarily created collectively with unpredictable results. As such, they stand against the established Romantic notion of the individual artist-genius.

Guerilla performance will be considered in relation to the Bakhtinian logic of carnival, understood as a turning upside-down of the established order, and Lyotard's notion of a pagan theatrics which reveals the difference between play and madness; simulacrum and truth; clowning and seriousness as being illusory. Tension arises from the incompossibility of the normative understanding of social space and the different use (or détournement)to which it is put. This intensity founds a new kind of theatrical space that effectively pierces the 4th wall of hyperreality, exposing the representational and ideological nature of everyday experience.

However, just as the carnival's reversal of the established order is always contingent, so the apparent chaos caused by the appropriation and redirection of public space recedes after the event. On repetition, such theatrical interventions can take on the quality of rituals which form a rhythmic oscillation between order and disorder. Through this ritualisation the pagan theatrics are recouped by the system and become a form of new-Romanticism.

Random Document is a short video piece that takes an aesthetic approach to the difficulties of re... more Random Document is a short video piece that takes an aesthetic approach to the difficulties of recording event art. It is comprised of footage from ‘Temporary Autonomous Art #13’, an open-access exhibition staged in a squatted building in London in 2007. The event involved a large number of self-organised artists transforming the venue over a period of days. TAA can be seen as a deterritorialization, a fluid space in which non-hierarchical social relations are formed through creative practice. Thus a rhizomatic connection is revealed between art and the socio-political sphere: the social is expressed aesthetically.

In attempting to document TAA13 two problems were raised. Firstly, given the ephemeral nature of the event, and the fact that it is characterized by the relations formed between a large number of participants there is no vantage point from which to take a definitive record of what “really” happened. Secondly, in an environment where representation is seen as an imposition of power, is it ethical to take such a record at all?

The Random Document presented is a work in progress, which attempts to translate the experience of the event through an assemblage of audio-visual fragments edited with attention to rhythm and texture. It makes no claim to be definitive, representing only a partial view. It documents an environment where nobody is merely a passive observer by making a stylistic response to that experience.

Conference Announcements by Hannah Lammin

Echoes of Fascism in Contemporary Culture, Politics and Society SUSSEX CENTRE FOR CULTURAL STUDI... more Echoes of Fascism in Contemporary Culture, Politics and Society
SUSSEX CENTRE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES Annual Conference

FRIDAY MAY 26TH 2017, University of Sussex

Keynote speakers:

Dr Gholam Khiabany (academic and political journalist, author of Blogistan)
Dr Angela Nagle (author of Ireland Under Austerity and Kill All Normies)
Professor Arlene Stein (author of Reluctant Witnesses, The Stranger Next Door, Sex and Sensibility)
Dr Sarah Tobias (feminist theorist and activist, author of Trans Studies)

To book: http://onlineshop.sussex.ac.uk/product-catalogue/conference-seminars/school-of-media-film-and-music/echoes-of-fascism-in-contemporary-culture-politics-and-society

Within the past year, we have witnessed a number of alarming social and political developments in the UK and globally. The success of the Brexit campaign in the UK, the election of Donald Trump in the USA and his recent imposition of a travel ban, have all been dependent on racially charged ideologies, and accompanied by a notable rise in racist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks in the UK and in other Western countries, as the Far Right mobilises and becomes more legitimated.

In broad terms, this conference poses questions around our ethical responsibilities (as academics, community organisations, and human beings) vis-à-vis these developments:

as the neoliberal consensus frays, how do we respond to resurgent nationalism?
how can, or should, we respond to the backlash against pluralism, the rise of the alt-right, and the waves of ‘populist’ movements that are sweeping across the West?

More specifically, the conference will provide an opportunity to consider the historical backdrop of contemporary conservative movements. Parallels have frequently been drawn in the media between, for example, 1930s German fascism and the contemporary political and social landscape. We thus seek to question:

to what extent are we currently seeing ‘echoes’ of past fascist movements?

If every age has its own fascism, as Levi has argued:
can we learn from the history of fascist movements in a way that will help us to understand our contemporary situation?

Finally,
how can we put these lessons into practice as we mobilise against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia?

The conference is particularly interested in: past fascist movements and their bearing on the present; the rise of the alt-right and new right-wing populism; the right-wing critique of neoliberal globalisation; the current state of, and threats to, human rights, reproductive rights, rights of freedom of movement, LGBTQ rights, and social democracies; feminist activism (past and present); and racialised public discourse. We will also consider these issues through the prism of film, visual culture, literature, memory studies, and creative practice.

Books by Hannah Lammin

Zētēsis, The International Journal for Fine Art, Philosophy and the Wild Sciences. , 2013

Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this ... more Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this uploaded version here). Please read both together!

From the Preface:

Preface
We Libidinal Economists! Daybreak, Version √2

With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk.

We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules.

This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care).

So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why.

Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.

Johnny Golding Editor