Samuel Weber - Quotes

Aesthetic judgment is still a form of judgment; it is not simply hallucination...
Weber, Samuel.

In the age of media, things, people and places come to pass, in an event more sportive than any sport event, and more spectacular than any spectacle. How do ‘technics’, film and television, the ‘setup’ and the ‘set’ change our relations to places, positions and emplacements? What happens to reality when our traditional access to it — sense-perception — is no longer restricted to the individual body? What comes ‘after deconstruction’?
Weber, Samuel.

Heidegger, Derrida, de Man, and countless others: It makes a difference whether those names serve as end points or as points of departure, or perhaps even as places where you catch your breath before setting forth again.
Weber, Samuel.

An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful if there is none in the forest to admire her. He hid in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his premise but made him happy.
Weber, Samuel.

Where there is aporia, there is no way out, no simple solution or resolution.
Weber, Samuel.

The power and prestige of scientific knowledge was in large part based on its ability to establish replicable sequences of procedures under carefully controlled conditions. Its perspective, then, was oriented less towards the past, towards the notion of an origin constitutive of a universal 'human' essence, and more towards the future. By developing certain procedures under carefully controlled conditions, experimental science thus could lay claim toward providing the basis of moving towards a mastery of the future.
Weber, Samuel.

death now leads nowhere, and least of all, toward any sort of it is only to return as revenants, as ghosts. Instead of defining identity, death returns as the shadow that splits life into a life that consists largely in passing away, and a death that has nowhere to go but back to the living. Living and dying tend to overlap. Mourning...responds to this confusion with the theatrical reanimation of a world emptied of meaning.
Weber, Samuel.

If we try to reconstruct what Benjamin calls the “eigentlichen Zusammenhang”—the “authentic context” for Cohen’s remark, by juxtaposing it with Benjamin’s images, then the “sun” of the comic character appears to be overlaid with the “tragic plot” described by Cohen: both cast the shadow that is the “comic plot.” The “tragic plot” however is what according to Benjamin seeks to break through the net of destiny. That breakthrough, then, would take the form of the “comic plot,” marked now not by the silence of the hero, as in tragedy, but by the “singular trait.”
Weber, Samuel. "Toward A Politics of Singularity: The Single Trait.". in: ECT Seminar: The Collective. (UCLA Project in Experimental Critical Theory, Year 2.) May 14, 2009.

The single trait is thus “comic”, lends itself to laughter and to amusement, by presenting itself in isolation, and yet never being absolutely cut off from its surroundings, its past and its future. This is why the singular trait is always tendentially on the move, on the run, drawing away from something and towards something else. It always seeks to place itself at the center of its world, whether as the sun in a solar system, or the chandelier in a theater. But it seeks not so much to make visible as to blind to whatever surrounds or approaches it. It seeks to do this…but remains comical in never attaining what it seeks. Its non-attainment is already inscribed as the comic dimension of its singular trait.
Weber, Samuel. "Toward A Politics of Singularity: The Single Trait.". in: ECT Seminar: The Collective. (UCLA Project in Experimental Critical Theory, Year 2.) May 14, 2009.

Comedy has long been understood to have an eminently social significance. And one can see how this tradition is continued in the ambivalence of Benjamin’s singular trait. But what about politics? Can there be a politics of the singular trait? Would it be a comic politics?
Weber, Samuel. "Toward A Politics of Singularity: The Single Trait.". in: ECT Seminar: The Collective. (UCLA Project in Experimental Critical Theory, Year 2.) May 14, 2009.

Do the Humanities have a future? Is there a place for the study of literature, of art, of language and of philosophy in a world progressively dominated by an economic logic of profit and loss? What possible purpose can such disciplines fulfill in the face of technologies that seem to be rapidly rendering obsolete what was perhaps the most defining function of 'man' at least since the European Renaissance: the function of productive labor?
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

First and foremost, perhaps, the notion of 'humanity' as a form of life that is privileged insofar as it fulfills its destiny through productive, wealth-producing activity.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

The dimension of alterity was thus condemned to serve as a sort of inverted mirror-image of the Self: as res extensa, for instance, as opposed to the res intensa of self-consciousness.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

In cutting itself loose from the bonds of traditional (religious) authorities, this skeptical, nominalist, essentially Protestant move affirmed the foundational privilege of the indivisible Subject of self-consciousness precisely in and through its separation from the world and from others.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

Thus, the certitude assigned to the Cartesian Cogito requires it to be conceived as being neither essentially temporal nor spatial in structure. Rather, it must be thought as an instant conceived to be above and prior to space and time (you will notice that it is difficult if not impossible to articulate such a position independently of temporal and spatial figures of speech: 'above', 'prior to', and so forth). Both these two characteristics - positioning through demarcation and separation, and positioning as an instant prior to temporal and spatial alteration.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

The political institution that was fundamentally associated with the modern University, whether directly, as its source of financial support, as in Europe, or indirectly, as in the United States or in Britain, was therefore that of the nation-state. For the nation-state is the institutional manifestation of the unity and wholeness of a given society, above and beyond the diversity and often the disunity of its component groups, whether these groups are defined ethnically, economically, regionally, religiously, or, as more recently, in terms of gender, 'race' or sexual preference. The way in which even the most stable of 'societies' individuate themselves, the way they set their defining limits, for instance, through laws of immigration and of naturalization, always entails a more or less conflictual process.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

The unity of the university remains profoundly bound up with the notion of a universally valid essence of the 'human', which is the anthropological correlative of the epistemological universalism that resides at the core of the university as an institution. The tension, which has been exacerbated by what is known as 'globalization', in all of its senses, is the result of a conflict between local, particular or even national problems and a universalist vocation that claims to respond to them, or rather, to transcend them.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

Particular skills can be both taught and discovered at institutions and in situations that need not have anything to do with what are called 'universities': the specificity of the university as an institution, paradoxically perhaps, or perhaps dialectically, has to do with the fact that in it, knowledge ceases to be simply directed towards specific objects and instead, or rather also - for this is a parallel feature rather than an alternative - relates to the more general ability of human beings to learn and to know, independently of the specific use to which knowledge can be put.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

For Knowledge presupposes a correlation between thinking and the phenomenal, sensible world, and it is the accessibility of this relation, bringing together the particular and the universal, that the 'human', and its study, the Humanities, were long called upon to guarantee.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

If science can thus be designated as the first historical challenger of the Humanities, a second more recent challenge to the synthetic and totalizing claims traditionally associated with the Humanities has come from a group of discourses that is difficult to classify or to name univocally, for one of the things they share is precisely the radical questioning of all such univocity.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

Any attempt to provide a simple answer to the question of whether or not repetition is 'possible', whether or not 'there is repetition', presupposes that the notion of the 'possible', and of the 'there is' are simple and straightforward. It is precisely such simplicity and straightforwardness, however, that the problematic movement of repetition calls into question.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

For wherever it is a question of repetition, technology and telecommunication are never very far away. Why? Because, as Benjamin was perhaps one of the first to clearly state, the mode of being of modern technology is repetitive and reproductive. The 'work of art', so Benjamin insists, must henceforth be discussed with respect to its intrinsic 'reproducibility'. And such reproducibility involves inscription: the tracing of traits: photography, cinematography and now, we might say, videography.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

The media also provide an immediate answer to their own question, again and again: the answer of a repetition that presents itself as the return of the same, as ultimately self- contained, and in this sense, as just that self-enclosed separation for which the modern subject has always, in a certain sense, yearned: the self-contained space of the 'in-dividual'.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

I want to point to two other elements, in both cases of which the disappointment with the expropriative effects of Gjentagelse, of repetition, that takes again without giving back, are defined not simply in negative, privative terms, as loss or lack, but as apossibility of freedom: albeit, of a freedom that is no longer defined in terms of individual autonomy and self-fulfillment. What is the essence of this freedom then? It involves the aporetic possibility of remaining open to the trace of the other in repetition even while confronting the same. The possibility is aporetic insofar as this opening to the other can never be free of a degree closure, of assimilation and of appropriation.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

What is the most immediate form of an 'actuality' that 'emerges as transcendence' if not that of the present participle? It is 'transcendent' in never being identifiable with itself, always open, on-going, but also always taking leave of itself in the very process of coming to be. In this, the present participle articulates a phenomenon that assumes a central role in Constantin Constantius’ effort to discover whether or not 'there is' repetition.
Weber, Samuel. "The Future of Humanities: Experimenting." in: Culture Machine. 2000.

The title of these remarks consists of the two terms that bring us together in this Workshop, "Religion" and "Media", and in the middle, not the "media" but a third term: Repetition. A term that is not usually associated with the other two but which, perhaps, contains a key to their enigmatic and yet indissoluble relationship. To think the relation of Religion and Media today is, I submit, to reflect upon the history of the notion, and term, "repetition".
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

"repetition" and its various "faux amis"--répétition, Wiederholung, Gjentagelsen to name just a few - emerge and gain prominence precisely to the extent that they mark and re-mark a certain blockage of the concept, and of the various logics and projects to which it gives rise: above all, the logic of "identity" and the project of appropriation. And it is this blockage, in turn, that gives rise to the configuration of "religion" and "media" that increasingly demands our attention and concern.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

What distinguishes the so-called "natural" from the "artificial" blockage of the concept, then, is the degeneration of the generality of the concept into an irreducible proliferation of atoms, or better, words.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

To understand the media therefore is to retrace its emergence in the place and site of this mediation.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

Constantin not only accurately predicts the future of modern philosophy: he also foreshadows the future of modern media, in more ways than one. Here, for example, his concluding "example", demonstrating ex negativohow repetition must make humans happy, foreshadows the litany of modern media advertising: "Stay with us ... we'll be back in a moment, after this brief message." "Don't go away, we'll be right back..." "Ne coupez pas..." In media advertising - and such messages are increasingly inseparable from the media - the promise of happiness is tied to repetition under the same conditions that Constantin describes: the condition of staying tuned in.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

But as those of you who may remember this text will confirm, the disjunctive, slapstick, parodic quality of its scenario is not something that is peculiar to a selective résumé such as the kind I am presenting here: it belongs to the very tonality and texture of Gjentagelsen itself. And indeed, a major reason for this disjunctive quality has to do with this "good Danish word" itself, which can not simply be translated into English as "repetition" without losing a decisive dimension of its specificity. If the question ofGjentagelsen could have so blocked Constantin Constantius and generate so much passion, hope and disappointment, this is tied to the fact that in Danish it does not simply designate "recurrence".
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

It is this experience of space as the medium which is beside itself, as space itself being beside itself, that was at the heart of Walter Benjamin's initial attempt to think the "mediality" of language as what he called, in German, Mitteilbarkeit, im-part-ability, thus designating the possibility of a medium (here: language) to divide and distribute itself, and in so doing, to im-part itself. The so-called "communicability" of the medium, its ability to communicate, is predicated upon its capacity to "come-going," to arrive-leaving, to with-draw. This constitutes a very different approach to the question of the medium, and the media, from that which had dominated Western philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

Aristotle thus introduces the notion of the medium as a condition of continuity and constancy - exactly what Constantin Constantius would like to define as the possibility of repetition. But instead of such continuity, he encounters disjunction and doubling in the theatrical "coming-going" of Beckmann. The clear-cut separation of "recollection" and "repetition" breaks down with all other distinct oppositions, producing an uncanny,unheimlich home that is empty in its very plenitude, isolated in its separateness.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

If this uncanniness describes the first trait or feature of the "media", whether that of performances in the Königstädter Theater, or that of the electronic media of our time, Constantin's response to it points to the second parameter that serves to frame, and contain, the uncanniness.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

This feminine figure of youth and innocence fascinates Constantin Constantius who sees in it the very constancy that he fails to find in or as repetition. The image of the girl returns to him as a source of consolation and repose, promising a life without loss and a time without trace.
Weber, Samuel. "Religion, Repetition, Media." in: Stanford University. Paris, France. December 14, 1997.

If Theater for Artaud - and not just for him - is always a question of "doubles" and of "ghosts", could it be that the Theater of Cruelty is in some sense haunted by Aristotle? By the very tradition against which Artaud also rebels? And if this were so, what would it tell us of the relation of "doubles" and "ghosts" to their "originals"? And hence, of the nature of theater as the medium of such duplicity?
Weber, Samuel. "The Virtual Reality of Theater." in: The Hydra. University of California, Irvine. Sydney, Australia. September, 1996.

Action can thus do without character (ethos) but never without plot (mythos). And it is here, with respect to this "mythological" dimension of Aristotle's conception of plot, that the difference to Artaud begins to emerge. What is at stake is not simply a question of representation, for Artaud never envisaged simply eliminating or abandoning representation entirely in favor of pure performance (as is evident from his own stagings and proposals for the Théâtre Alfred Jarry).
Weber, Samuel. "The Virtual Reality of Theater." in: The Hydra. University of California, Irvine. Sydney, Australia. September, 1996.

It is no accident that Aristotle does not treat of theater as such in his Poetics, but rather only of those forms of it that he considers most worthy of discussion: tragedy, and secondarily, comedy. From this choice everything else follows more or less necessarily. Above all, the subordination of everything peculiar to the medium of theater to its thematic content, which Aristotle identifies, first with the action, and then with its structured representation as plot, mythos. Much of Aristotle's discussion of tragedy, therefore, focuses on the question of how effective tragic plots are constructed.
Weber, Samuel. "The Virtual Reality of Theater." in: The Hydra. University of California, Irvine. Sydney, Australia. September, 1996.

We should keep in mind, of course, that Aristotle's discussion of theater in the Poetics did not take place in a vacuum, but like much of his thinking was intended as a response to Plato, and in this particular case, to the latter's categorical condemnation of theater and mimesis in the Republic and elsewhere.
Weber, Samuel. "The Virtual Reality of Theater." in: The Hydra. University of California, Irvine. Sydney, Australia. September, 1996.

The construction of plot therefore has to serve this purpose: it must represent the action as a unified and comprehensible whole, with beginning, middle and end. More specifically, "it must be possible for the beginning and the end to be seen together in one view" (63, 59b). Such unification requires, however, a certain type of narrative.
Weber, Samuel. "The Virtual Reality of Theater." in: The Hydra. University of California, Irvine. Sydney, Australia. September, 1996.

It might seem odd to go to a text on repetition when discussing questions of the image. However, as soon as you start to realise that the image is not something inert, something once and for all, that, on the contrary, it implies some type of temporal process in its production, reception, and circulation, then a temporal category such as repetition is not in principle as alien or as strange to it as it might seem were you to regard an image as something absolutely self-contained, instantaneous, as purely spatial. If you are at all interested in questions of contemporary theory or of theory in general, there is no concept or category that leads more directly into what is specific about contemporary theory - or certain aspects of it - than repetition.
Weber, Samuel and Terry Smith (Interviewer). "Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the theatre of the image." in: Stanford University. Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. September 16, 1996.

Theatricality is not quite the same as theatre, it doesn't have to be identified with actual theatrical productions and institutions. So from the point of view of the history of art, we might ask what the rethinking of theatricality has to do with the reinterpreting of images.
Weber, Samuel and Terry Smith (Interviewer). "Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the theatre of the image." in: Stanford University. Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. September 16, 1996.

Recollection here refers to the famous Platonic theory of anamnesis elaborated in the Phaedo. According to this theory, knowledge is only possible as re-cognition: things are recognizable to us only because we have known them elsewhere, in some other existence. We can only know something because we have a faint memory of already having known it.
Weber, Samuel and Terry Smith (Interviewer). "Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the theatre of the image." in: Stanford University. Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. September 16, 1996.

a repetition cannot be recognized as such without there being some sort of recollection. So, to the extent that repetition entails its recognition as such, the two cannot be separated or simply opposed to one another.
Weber, Samuel and Terry Smith (Interviewer). "Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the theatre of the image." in: Stanford University. Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. September 16, 1996.