Whoa. Somehow I totally missed that. Nicely written.

stiegler is the director of IRCAM???? what??

that was the weirdest abortion of a manifesto i've ever read. i thought it was ummm basically awful. first, it imediately alienates anyone not schooled in a certain philosophical tradition. second, it hardly says anything. and third, it stalls out on the most short-sighted list of 'objectives' for the institution which is a far cry from anything truly 'international'. as far as i can tell, they are no different than any other 'institution for the arts', dependent on public grants and national endowments. my summary of the 'manifesto':

'these technologies' (totally vague) must usher in a 'new epoch' ... insert pretentious and excessive scholarly references (but interestingly not derrida, despite the emphasis on hypomnesis)... some more empty anti-market rhetoric... we will schedule conferences! and plane flights! and publish texts! oh and maybe some art shows! end. ???

...insert dan's standard anticipated snarkiness....

dude. it is so weak. defend it properly or stop the ad hominem.

p.s.- i picked up stieger's tome I today. no index!! i think i might have to scan that shit.

i said it was nicely written, i didn't say i back it. but regardless, i'm not sure i see how any of your attacks are justified, save for that i'm inclined to agree that your fourth attack points out what could be the weakness of the manifesto. i don't know to what extent any of the members are invested in advocating public policy, but i got the sense that its actions would be focused on that or similar means of action.

also, i think that this is an abridged form of their mainifesto. i was in a bookstore last month and saw this: http://www.amazon.fr/R%C3%A9enchanter-monde-valeur-populisme-industriel/dp/2082105857/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210339989&sr=8-4
it appears to be A.I.'s more expansive 'manifesto' and when thomas dotted the manifesto online i thought it was an e-copy of the book.

anyways, yeah, i fucking hate stanford university press. they publish more indexless books than anyone.

i made three 'attacks'.. didn't i? what was the fourth 'attack'?
you are not really responding, so i am just restating what i already wrote.. but if your comment about the manifesto's supposedly abridged form was a sort of apology, i would additionally point out that this is their homepage. the website of the institution. the french version (http://www.arsindustrialis.org/manifeste) is identical in form to the english translation and it is advertised right there in the top frame of the page, so there really is no denying that this is their statement to the public. and so i ask, what public do they expect to be reading this? it is all too obvious: derridean scholars and po-mo philosophe-artistes. a very very limited demographic of the 'international' population. and the rhetoric was so so weak. international my ass. can you imagine this turned into a slogan, no matter how compelling an idea it might otherwise be?: "there must be in the poem a number that averts counting!" i mean the whole posturing of their objectives as a 'manifesto' is just simply laughable. and this line: "contributing to the invention of practices of spiritual technologies that can reconstitute objects of desire and experiences of singularity. We believe that the development of such practices is a fundamental condition for a peaceful future in the global industrial society." come the fuck on. organizing colloquiums and art events is nice and all, but is it a 'fundamental condition' of 'global peace'? could they jerk us off any harder? nope!

also-- is no one else surprised to learn that stiegler is the head director of the music art and theory institute that is housed in the same building as the pompidou?? that's what IRCAM is, if you hadn't known.
also2-- i was surprised to see that stiegler is close to virilio (according to the acknowledgements in t&t), considering they seem very much opposed on almost everything.

Yr 4 attacks:
1: alienation
2: "hardly says anything"
3: stalls on objectives
4: no different from any other institution for the arts.

Yes, it is a statement to the public, but Réenchanter le monde functions as the group's first collective publication and statement, despite the fact that it isn't as public as a website. although i wouldn't be surprised if more non-philosopho-pomo-artistes picked up their book than visited their website, given that the book is commonly found in most book=store-front windows (and given that it's pretty cheap).

They only say that they are international in scope and aim. A.I. "defines itself above all as European." i don't think they have pretenses to being the next international.

"There must be in the poem...": it would be laughable if this were their slogan, but it isn't.

Like i said, agree with you on the limited scope of their activities. they seem to conflate the practices they theorize with those which they actually practice. it does tend to make the manifesto less appropriate as the form or name of their communication. perhaps 'statement of purpose' would have been better, but i'm less concerned with what they call it than with what they lay out as a program for their research. i read it as the program of a thinktank, not as an attempt on the part of a handfull of intellectuals to display some form of grandiose militancy.

what's the big scandal with IRCAM?

have you read t&t 1 yet? by the end, what he has to say about speed, temporalization, and individuation touches down on virillio's territory, but it seems to me that major methodological differences keep them far apart.

ok well i am glad you are agreeing about it not being appropriate to call it a manifesto. but the fact that they did call it one, i think evidences their self-aggrandizement in an attempt to posture as a more 'militant' organization. and what's with the excessive citations? i mean who cares if burroughs was 'the first' to call it a control society? i don't even think d+g cite him in their actual essay, so why make a big to-do about every little reference, if not as cue cards to the very specialized audience to which they seem to be pandering. if you compare this to guattari's journal in the 70s (recherches) or even to semiotext[e] for that matter, it seems like a major step back into the ivory tower and away from the concerns and struggles of everyday life. and this is why i react so strongly to their evoking 'international' or 'global' motives and posturing as if they are the avant-garde ushering in some new epoch. i am sure they will publish interesting articles and maybe if they get access to television they will make some cool media broadcasts. but this is in no way a political necessity or a 'fundamental condition' as they say. and god if 'industrial art/politics of spirit' isn't the most clumsy phrase. but anyway. moving on.

IRCAM isn't a scandal, i was just surprised to see that stiegler holds the position. music theory?

i haven't gotten into t 'n t hardly at all. but i've been reading echographies of television, which i just realized i have had on my shelf for ages. have you read it? it mostly deals with derrida's specters of marx period. i didn't realize how closely stiegler follows derrida. the more i read the more i am understanding him in terms of derrida. especially his (over)emphasis on husserl. i have yet to really understand where they differ, but everything derrida says about the trace, arche-writing and the supplement seems to presuppose the whole tekhnë argument in tnt. but yeah i've only read like the first twenty pages or so, then i had to put it down. i am stuck reading michael albert on parecon right now. i am ready to go back to other stuff.

i'm not that concerned with the citations. as a general rule, i'd rather be accused of flashing cue cards than of being lazy or even more pretentious by not giving cred where it's due. but, as an extension of my agreement with you and on the point of conflating the theorization of practices with their actual practice, yeah, the ivory tower bit might be justified, if only cuz A.I. doesn't state what they've been doing in the public sphere aside from their academic activities.

in stieg's two volume work, de la misère symbolique, he's dealt a ton with cinema and music.

i think the emphasis on husserl (and on heidegger) is largely historical. t&t1 seems to comment on them only so as to recognize the history of the problems and concepts he's dealing with (planetary technology and individuation in heidegger, tertiary memory in husserl). more recently, it seems that he's positioned his problems in terms of people like deleuze, freud, aristotle, and kant among others. it's my impression that simondon is probably his main influence...

yeah i saw that his third tome is apparently devoted to cinema, at least that's what i gleaned from the title. he is a rather prolific dude. there is a new translation out called 'acting out', i forget the french, something about l'acte though. i tried to worldcat it but it is too new. same deal with the trans of the second tome.
you should check out the echographies book. it shows his indebtedness to derrida... which at least seems to be the case up into the mid to late 90s. but yeah, the problematic nature of that manifesto is only more striking in context of my recent readings of albert on ParEcon. i think i am fully decided on not going to grad school at this point, which mostly has to do with these issues of feeling isolated and alienated from what i see as the most pressing political concerns. going back to the manifesto, if there is anything like a 'fundamental condition' for radical social change, i think it must involve a re-emphasis on economic questions of class, private ownership and the market as a means of allocation. but taken up in a more positive oriented critique that would move directly into a new formulation of anti-capitalist values able to find expression in concrete social practices. i think michael albert achieves this with ParEcon, which hinges on 'empowerment' as understood through the values of self-management, solidarity, diversity and equity. maybe it is too analytic or pragmatic for your tastes, i dunno. but its where i am at these days politically.

lol, are you takin' cheapshots now?!?

stieg's indebtedness to derrida also comes out at the end of t&t1 fo sho. i plan on checking out echographies soon. what do you find innovative about michael albert? it seems like almost everyone on the far left has been saying these things for the last 40 years, no?

no...? i was just saying i find it much more politically relevant than most philosophy or 'theory' i read these days, and that maybe you would find it frustrating because it doesn't really engage a lot of the concerns of people like stiegler or heidegger at all, but that i really honestly don't know what you'd think. i mean he is basically a utilitarian economist. and there is quite the stigma to that line of thinking in the post-structuralist/deconstructionist/foucaultian/etc camps.
to respond to your other question-- no albert is not just re-hashing old ideas. you can find a number of his lectures on youtube obviously he is endebted to marx and council communists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc. but also to modern economists who do not use the labor theory of value like sraffe etc. he reads well in conjunction with the middle period lyotard. if you're curious, check out the youtube lectures. one put off might be that he tends to repeat anecdotes and examples, but they are usually worth repeating so i don't mind. otherwise he is like an economist version of chomsky plus a little jewish new york humor.

p.s.- i am gonna pick up stieg again starting tomorrow. eventually i will have a reply to your reply from a while back. i am still learning and most of my reply just consisted of suspicious requests for clarification on various points.. which may be irrelevant in a few days.

chomsky is actually the first person that came to mind when you first mentioned michael albert. and i like chomsky (in the way that people appreciate his poli-sci history and anarchism without digging his linguistics). i'll check out albert's lectures when i get some downtime.

also, the meat of stieg's treatment of heidegger comes toward the end of the book in it's last 70 pages or so, but i don't recommend reading it without looking at his treatment of gille, leroi-gourhan, and simondon. i made that mistake my first round through and learned very little, save for some basic hypotheses and the general direction of his work...