不知道 i don't know

As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that inform it, and in particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of having language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the necessity of an “experimentum linguae” in which what is experienced is language itself, and the limits of language become apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of language as pure self-reference. … Infancy and History … attempts to grasp and articulate the implications of such an experience of language as such. Consisting of a series on interconnected essays on concepts such as history, temporality, play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance to Agamben’s later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the eponymous essay of the edition on the concept of infancy understood as an experiment of language as such. In this, Agamben argues that the contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of experience, in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se but only undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the rise of modern science and the split between the subject of experience and of knowledge that it entails. Against this destruction of experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the subject such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation of experience entails a radical rethinking of experience as a question of language rather than of consciousness, since it is only in language that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then, conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a temporal or developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of language in childhood, but rather, as a condition of experience that precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of language. (Mills; emphasis mine)

• Mills, Catherine (2005) Agamben, Giorgio [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. [Online]. Available from: http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/ [Accessed 27 March 2010].

I’m (still) thinking about this whole issue of putting things into the world:

1. Technology has meant that we are creating more, apparently ephemeral things, which take up less physical space, but more of our time (by their quantity).
2. Things always take up time – but it was time with a particular purpose. For example, we would make time to go to galleries, which would then be dedicated to experiencing art, art-time for art.
3. (Maybe we got frustrated if the art makes demands from outside of art. Somehow cheating us of our time).1
4. These thoughts arose from time spent browsing through my blog reader, and not having enough time in general, but this general tendency towards less physical things and experiences is a good thing, maybe one day we will end up with no trace outside of some digital signature, and THAT reminds me of Flusser:

… to write is structurally the gesture of a historical and scientific being-in-the-world. Should this gesture fall into disuse, (and there are many symptoms at present which would seem to suggest this), the universe of history and science will fall into oblivion, or at least it will cease to be the universe we live in. Because that universe is a “fiction”, (the result of the technique of writing), and materializes only in the form of surfaces covered by letters. Thus if the art of writing is lost, it will not be missed by future generations. But for us, who are programmed by it and for it, not to be able to write means that life is not worth living.2

1. [I ended up with too many "quoted" words which I converted to italics for a change. I always think words need further clarification, and putting them in quotes suffices to indicate this, and I somehow think this is then enough explanation.]
2. Flusser, Vilém, The Gesture of Writing. Retrieved 16 June, 2009, from http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/08/the-gesture-of-writing.pdf

My work is about the body. My figures are never engaged in dramatic physical battles, it’s about the little gestures between bodies…The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn’t yet happened…»

• Dumas, Marlene (1996), Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes 1996,
  Iniva – Institute of International Visual Arts. Retrieved 10 June, 2009, from http://www.iniva.org/publications_shop/voices_on_art_amp_culture/a_fruitful_incoherence/marlene_dumas_in_dialogue_with_gavin_jantjes

I’ve now finished reading the selection of Roland Barthes’ essays published under the title Image, Music, Text. From these I can see how Barthes’ writings straddled both Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, in that they very strongly reveal systems at play in texts, while adding a definite historical context and contingency to those readings.

There were a couple of things which interested me that I’d like to write about. First I wanted to take a quick look at the last text in the book: Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers (Barthes, 1971, pp. 190–215), in which he lays out the distinct roles that these take in relation to the social production and activity of the Text.

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