Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

On 2021-04-24 08:10, Geert Lovink wrote:
> And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions
> coming from the nettime scene… neither East nor West or
> continental… https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view

We could track contemporary versions of the so called ‘depth narrative’ 
back to structuralists such as Levi Strause arguing that beneath the 
surface of the social world is a structure or a grammar. As well as 
seeing the antecedence of Marx and Freud who don’t believe that whats 
happening on the surface tell you as much as knowing what is going on 
below in the depths. Geology is the model here for way of knowing about 
how shape of the landscape came to be the way it is by digging below the 
surface.

This depth narrative has never been without its critics later 
structuralists and post-structuralists inverted the story by celebrating 
the surface at the expense of depth. Particularly Barthes who was 
famously uncomfortable with “meaning”, which he described as heavy, 
sticky declaring that “I’ve always wanted to be exempt from meaning the 
way one is exempt from military service”. “ As a realist he recognised 
that he couldn't escape it altogether but applies for some kind of 
temporary exemption, a rest from meaning.” From a visual arts standpoint 
I have always seen this tussle as echoing the arrival of Warhol on the 
scene whose slippery serious anti-seriousness effectively disrupted 
Abstract Expressionism’s existentialist claims to psychological depth.

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