<nettime> Philosophical Invention and the Battle of Innovation

[Monique Roelofs <Monique_Roelofs@brown.edu>]

How Innovative: A Philosophical Battle!

I think that sweeping generalizations about philosophical figures or
styles, either pro or con philosophy, are not the most creative ways of
thinking about clashes of perspectives and media.  A more radical and
inventive approach is to look at specific biases of specific approaches
within any kind of theory/medium as it is being worked out in its specific
context. 

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 has little to do with what philosophy or
new media are in essence -- think of Irigaray, Wittig, Cixous, Butler,
Grosz; think of feminist performance -- but concerns material and
discursive constructions of action, mind, selves, relations, culture,
politics.  Any medium is full of possibilities to intervene in these
constructions, but this requires a great deal of in-depth experimentation
and open-mindedness, a lot of which can benefit from old-fashioned
training within a specific discipline, but none of which any medium shall
every be able to produce as a mere medium. 

Surely, in their masculinist constructions, new media theory and dead
philosophy have a lot in common.  But then they're not the only
alternatives for philosophical radicalism and feminist invention. 

Yes, my syllabus did feature the Phaedrus, in Fall semester.  Coupled,
however, not only with Derrida's Pharmakon, but also Kristeva's s/m
allegories and Irigaray's fecund caress.  Toward an aesthetics in the
feminine.  Which of necessity precedes any philosophical anthropology (but
didn't Dewey predict that?).  In any medium. 

Monique Roelofs



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