Tag Cloud
Achilles
Affect
Affects
affectuum imitatio
Antigone
a thousand plateaus
Augustine
Autopoiesis
Badiou
Being
Campanella
capitalism
Causation
Cause
Christiaan Huygens
Davidson
Death
Deleuze
Descartes
Epistemology
Ethics
Freud
Graham Harman
Guattari
Harman
Hegel
Heidegger
Huygens
Idea
Imagination
Immanence
Information
Johannes Hudde
Kant
Lacan
Language Game
Larval Subjects
lathe
Latour
Lenses
lens grinding
Letter 39
Letter 40
Levi Bryant
Massumi
Metaphor
Metaphysics
microscope
Negation
Nietzsche
object
Object-Oriented Philosophy
Ontology
OOP
Optics
panpsychism
Parables of the Virtual
Philosophical Investigations
Philosophy
Plato
Plotinus
Poetry
power
Rorty
Sophocles
Spinoza
Subject
Substance
Telescope
Triangulation
Truth
Van Leeuwenhoek
Vico
Wim Klever
Wittgenstein
2001: a space odyssey Achilles Alan Gabbey Antigone Antonio Negri Arne Naess Art Criticism Augustine Avatar Badiou biosemiotics Bousquet Brian Massumi Caliban Campanella Chalmers Christiaan Huygens Colerus Conjoined Semiosis Critical Theory cybernetics Dante David Graeber David Skrbina Davidson Deleuze Della Rocca Derrida Descartes Duns Scotus Epistemology Ethics Euripedes Exowelt Felix Guattari Foucault Graham Harman Greek Tragedy Guattari Heidegger Helvetica Hevelius Hockney-Falco Thesis Hume Huygens Information John Donne Kepler Kubrick L'occhiale all'occhio Latour Leibniz Letter 39 Letter to Peter Balling Literary Theory Martha Nussbaum Marx Metaphor Micrographia Milton Morality Nicola Masciandaro Nietzsche Optica Promota Ovid Painting panpsychism Parables of the Virtual Patricia Collins Philosophy Philosophy of Mind Photosynth Plato Plotinus Politics Rhetoric Rilke Robert Hooke Rorty Sappho Simulated Annealing Skepticism Slavoj Zizek Sloterdijk Specilla circularia Spinoza Spinoza's Foci St. Paul The Buttle Principle Three Varieties of Knowledge Tommaso Campanella Uncategorized Van Leeuwenhoek Vico Walter Benjamin William of Auvergne Wittgenstein Zizek zombies Zuggtmoy
Recent Comments
Dana on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Kevin von Duuglas-It… on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Dana on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… | |
Prof. Brian J Ford on The 1661 Technique of “G… | |
Charles M. Saunders on As Lensmaker: A Quick Ove… | |
Kevin von Duuglas-It… on Spinoza Doubt? The Sephardim a… | |
George W. Singleton… on Spinoza Doubt? The Sephardim a… | |
Dean on The Objective truth of Ro… | |
Billy McMurtrie on A Book that Explodes All Books… | |
Kevin von Duuglas-It… on Conjoined Semiosis: A “N… |
Recent Posts
- Mark Taylor Attempts to Take Down AAAARG.org
- Mitochondrial Vertigo: The New Blog
- Amazing, Surreal Film of the Thai Protest Conflict
- Going Dark
- The Becoming-woman of Machine in Avatar
- The Difference Between a Description and an Explanation: Deficits in Latour
- Peking Opera and the Aesthetic Freedoms of Avatar
- Transcendence or Immanence: Cake-and-eat-it-too-ism
- From Affect to Mutuality, Openness to Rational Co-expression: Massumi to Spinoza
- Is the Medium the Message? Avatar’s Avatar
Blogroll
- Accursed Share
- alex-reid.net
- An und für sich
- Anodyne Lite
- Click Opera
- Critical Animal
- Dead Voles
- Deontologistics
- Ecology Without Nature
- Eliminative Culinarism
- Fido the Yak
- Grundlegung
- Immanence
- In the Middle
- Loxogonospherical Moods
- Lumpen Orientalism
- Metastable Equilibrium
- Methods of Projection
- Naught Thought
- Necessarily Eternal
- Para(s/c)ite
- Perverse Egalitarianism
- Pinocchio Theory
- Pirates and Revolutionaries
- Planomenology
- Prōlogus
- Quiet Sun
- Shaviro's Workblog
- Slawkenbergius’s Tales
- Speculative Heresy
- spinoza research network
- spinoza.blogse.nl
- Splintering Bone Ashes
- The Whim
- Utopian Realism
- Varieties of Unreligious Experience
- Velvet Howler
- Violent Signs
- Working Notes
Spinoza Primary Sources
- Ethics, Emendation, Tractatus and Letters, in Latin
- F. van den Enden website
- Hyperlinked Ethics, Emmendation, Tractatus and Letters
- Nicholas De Cusa’s “De Visione Dei”, English Translation
- Selected Letters, Elwes Translation
- Spinoza’s Complete Works, Shirley Translation
- Spinoza’s Works in Latin
- Spinozahuis
- The Life of Spinoza, by Johannes Colerus (1705)
Archive
- April 2010 (3)
- January 2010 (2)
- December 2009 (26)
- November 2009 (21)
- October 2009 (21)
- September 2009 (15)
- August 2009 (8)
- July 2009 (18)
- June 2009 (23)
- May 2009 (21)
- April 2009 (20)
- March 2009 (26)
- February 2009 (24)
- January 2009 (28)
- December 2008 (16)
- November 2008 (17)
- October 2008 (12)
- September 2008 (23)
- August 2008 (26)
- July 2008 (40)
- June 2008 (40)
- May 2008 (54)
Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
Humanists are funny, even when they don’t mean to be.
They are the types who readily admit that women are objectified, but can’t for the life of them see that men are too, and that, in fact, according to the same psychoanalysis that they hold as holy writ, there is no desiring subject that desires anything but other objects. Not even women can desire men-subjects, but only men-objects.
So, in reality, even according to their Theory Scriptures, men are equally as crapped on and subjugated by gender binaries as women are. But this is glossed over because it gets in the way of perpetual (and pure) female victimhood.
Humanists like victims. Especially pure ones. Purer victims make more sympathetic victims.
One day, when the revolution comes, after the Rich Educated White Men figure out exactly how this should happen through Conferences sponsored by Universities (run on charitable contributions from corporations and philanthropists/aka venture capitalists with tax sheltered funds that need donating– or better yet, the State), nobody will be a victim anymore.
Humanists are sure of this, because they know that people are essentially good, see, and it’s just that our power structures are all imbalanced. Take away the imbalance by doling out all the funds equally and– voila–goodness and light are the order of the day.
Anodyne Lite, agreed.
I think you hit right on a fundamental picture here, “Humanists like victims. Especially pure ones. Purer victims make more sympathetic victims.” This does not mean that there are no victims in the world, and humanists make them up, but rather, victimhood plays a role in the humanist economy (at least some versions of it). And many times it is a victimization that presses towards a certain purity. Perhaps this comes from Marx’s need to find a leverage point in the existing condition upon which to launch his radical break in history, someone, or something that was entirely not invested in the process…the imagined, constructed and idealized Proletariot. Always the question must turn, WHO is doing the constructing of the theory, and for WHOM.
There must be innoncence for there to be violence.
Again, Sloterdijk’s thoughts on the anger of the Left are interesting.
I think though that there are strains of humanism, particular those that came out of, or return to Renaissance humanism (a fairly innovative and tubulent time not completely unlike our own), that have very little need for the victim, pure or otherwise. Those that see the breakdowns of customary relations as potentialities for greater wholes in communication. Now I read this strain as actually post-human, or more accomodated by post-human thinking, wherein the subject and the object are much less interesting categories, so to this aspect of Renaissance humanism I have some affinity, for whatever that affinity is worth.
Hmmm.
Incidentally, ‘middle aged’ hardly applies to AT.
Which may be why I wrote “largely”, as in “the words being spoken by largely white, middle aged men, the respective stars of academia”. Perhaps though, aside from the question of generation those of race, gender, economic standing, and most siginificantly, the Institutional/Textual status of these persons is what matters.
Well, you kind of have it both ways – you’re both not talking about the car, and not not talking about the car! Incidentally, what is ‘Textual status’ (especially with a capital ‘T’)?
I’ll admit to being quite “old aged” – not sure what it has to do with anything – my comment about the car was rather accidental, I thought Toscano’s talk was very interesting, if I had time, I would certainly take a closer look at it and engage it. In addition, I think the very idea of this conference was quite interesting, if I was in the vicinity, I would certainly attend, even if only to hear Zizek has the same things over and over again about the need to theorize… He’s coming to Syracuse in April, I wonder if he will have changed the tune by then?
“say the same things” instead of “has the same things” – pardon…
“I think though that there are strains of humanism, particular those that came out of, or return to Renaissance humanism (a fairly innovative and tubulent time not completely unlike our own), that have very little need for the victim, pure or otherwise. Those that see the breakdowns of customary relations as potentialities for greater wholes in communication. Now I read this strain as actually post-human, or more accomodated by post-human thinking, wherein the subject and the object are much less interesting categories, so to this aspect of Renaissance humanism I have some affinity, for whatever that affinity is worth.”
I don’t entirely condemn the best efforts of humanists, but I only wish I could believe like they do…I think you’re right about there being a certain Renaissance humanism that might be salvaged, but we’ll need to first get at this post-human entity, maybe a post-subject(?), before we’ll get anywhere, theoretically or politically. This cyborg stuff is just a little too easy.
We also need to get past this “pure” victimhood nonsense, in every theoretical sector. It gets us nowhere. Here we are 150 years and a technological-digital revolution later arguing about industrial utopias.
We need to think the post-industrial utopia, and quickly.
Thanks for your comments,
Infinite Thought: “Well, you kind of have it both ways – you’re both not talking about the car, and not not talking about the car! Incidentally, what is ‘Textual status’ (especially with a capital ‘T’)?”
Kvond: Actually, I was talking about the prohibition telling us not to talk about the car. But yes, I see that the car in several ways embodies the inherent contradiction of the “Party” those the accumulate the wealth and power talking about how bad wealth and power are.
As for “Textual status” my use of capitalization is somewhat like Blake’s. It comes and goes for emphasis. But my point is, these are primarily persons who are text producers. That is, their raison d’être is to produce texts, and to do so primarily for university system participants who are significantly skewed by class and race. If they were telvision show producers their “message” would be critiqued in view of their industry which they work to support, and the audience whom they seek to entertain. Their “revolution” is in many ways “the revolution show”.
Mikhail: “I would certainly take a closer look at it and engage it. In addition, I think the very idea of this conference was quite interesting, if I was in the vicinity, I would certainly attend, even if only to hear Zizek has the same things over and over again about the need to theorize…”
Kvond: With all this I agree. I could listent to Zizek endlessly, perhaps just as I can listen to the endless remmixes of phat new beats. The man is amazingly engaging. I would certainly attend. But if someone drove up in a rolls with a soviet flag I would hope that fidelity to the revolution, or even the hieght of my investment would not be measured by whether my eyes turned to the fetish of the car, the delusionary commodity of the poor labor of the poor. This is precisely the problem with the entire conception of a “radical break” in history. Contrary to Badiou and with sympathy to Leibniz, History, just like Nature, makes no leaps. It already is happening. The breaks we want from history are the breaks we want to make between human beings, placing THESE people on the wrong moral side of the historical wave. We talk about the right things, THEY talk about the wrong things (either we can cure them and help them talk about the right things, or we make them our enemies).
Anodynelite: “I don’t entirely condemn the best efforts of humanists, but I only wish I could believe like they do…I think you’re right about there being a certain Renaissance humanism that might be salvaged, but we’ll need to first get at this post-human entity, maybe a post-subject(?), before we’ll get anywhere, theoretically or politically. This cyborg stuff is just a little too easy.”
Kvond: For me this area if found theoretically in panpsychism (perhaps without coincidence a thread in Renaissance philosophical humanism), and in a cybernetic notion of the human as a technology.
Anodynelite: We also need to get past this “pure” victimhood nonsense, in every theoretical sector. It gets us nowhere. Here we are 150 years and a technological-digital revolution later arguing about industrial utopias.
Kvond: Agreed. The “victim” (pure or otherwise) becomes nothing more than the matter for our personal role in redemption. And speaking on behalf of the victim is often something to be critiqued for those that become victim-oriented often are invested in perpetuating the victimization reality if only to maintain their position in the discourse (hence, the need for the continous view of “ever-the-victim”: the poor worker, the poor woman, the poor black, the poor jew). This is not to say that these categories do not reflect concrete conditions that we want to change, but touching the category of victimization is a particular jouissance/pleasure.
Anodynelight: We need to think the post-industrial utopia, and quickly.
Kvond: The utopia is the here and now. Now is the “no-place” in which we are already operating. The change is immediate. The primary problem with “radical break” thinking is that it refuses to see by definition that the unimaginable future is already under occurance. We are already interacting in ways that even 10 years ago no one would have vividly pictured. We don’t need to become post-human, we already are.
But acknowledging that “now” is all we ever have takes away the ability to feel the moral indignation about what *others* aren’t doing, and forces a person to take a good long look at what they themselves need to do, the difficult choices they might have to make, the comforts they will have to give up immediately.
I was talking to a psychotherapist earlier about the revolutionary mindset, and certain extremist points-of-view, and why some people cling to “pure victimhood” in their politics… the words that kept coming up were what you might expect: displacement, projection, fantasy, investment. There does seem to be a sense in which the “pure victim” is really just a site of projected investments, where (in this case) the left has found a locus for all of its latent ideals, whether they’re explicit or implicit. Such victims end up not being able to live up to these ideals in reality– in the “now”–so the revolutionary act or moment always has to be deferred to some indeterminate point in the utopian future (a nowhere), when everybody is finally going to magically wake up and spring into action, and all of those ideals are going to be validated.
This creates a buffer zone between the zealot and their ideals, so that they themselves don’t have to, for instance, stop working (taking money from capitalists), or deny themselves an inheritance, or a cushy salary, or a vacation home. It’s ok, because they’re working for the revolution! They have their anger ducks all lined up in the right row.
Anodynelite,
I do wish I could have access to more detail of Sloterdijk’s Zorn und Zeit crticism of the Left, the way supposedly the Left has “banked” anger to an incredible degree. He would not agree with any psychoanalytic description, finding in psychoanalysis much of the problem of the promotion of Eros over Thymos.
The thought that victims need to be able to live up to their victimhood as an interesting one. I do see the “logic” of having perpetually failed victims.
I’m not thinking very well right now, but this is very interesting, so I’ll just point at an old post of mine related to some of this discussion here.
Boiling some of this down to the disappointing mismatch between the ideal and the real, and how we might use various strategies to embrace or distance ourselves from this, a possibly related (but long) post here. Sorry to be all self-referential, but as I said my brain’s a little mushy right now so I’m leveraging my earlier self to fill in.
Victims needing to live up to their victimhood; self-defeating self-creation, perversity squared when victims host their defenders as parasites. But that’s not fair if victimhood is real, is it?
Carl: “perversity squared when victims host their defenders as parasites.”
Kvond: I somehow like this very much. I don’t see why the idealized victim should not take advantage of their idealized position. Every pan handler on the street does this.
The begging poor have had to take advantage of the fact that in presenting themselves as pathetic (pathos), they are given the power to award a “blessing” to the rich that bow to them and toss a dollar into the hat.
As to who and what are parasites, generally the term applies to those that cannot live without their host. Can the revolution (of what ever kind) live without the host-bodies of the innocent and down trodden? It would seem not.
Thanks for the post reference. I’ll definitely take a look at it.
Carl,
I’m not entirely sure of the connection you are making between your thoughtful past post, and the subject of the thread (or the discussion that followed). Are you suggesting that Nina at Infinite Thought has idealized her audience like LS does in your post, and thus is headed towards sure disappointment?
I don’t know. First of all, Idealizing goes two ways. The first is the one you mention wherein the “best” in us is projected out there,
“as LS puts it, “we project our highest aspirations and desires onto another being, but then experience these qualities not as existing in and from us, but in something else. God is thus an alienated and distorted image of our own essence or nature.” Right, and not just God.”
This indeed is the kind of expectation that LS seems to engage in (that is, at least to my ear, he wants to hear other agree with him, he wants to encounter himself), but thisi projection drags with it the opposite. We see in others who then fail us in the world really what is the worst in us. We project our failings outward.
For example: Graham Harman, another theorizer who had radical difficulty with the democracy of the internet, finally shutting down his blog and implicitly declaring that the new one would be based on the idea that intellectual activity is not a democratic process, writing:
“What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that I believe in democratizing access to intellectual life, not in democratizing intellectual life itself. The blogosphere, like the billiard halls and race tracks of old, has become a hangout for a pretty unbearable, unproductive cross section of the populace.” here.
once mused about the post he wanted to write in which he would list all the a**hole actions anyone had ever done to him. I thought to myself, what an interesting list it would make. There would be only one common factor that drew all these events together, Graham himself. While correlation is not causation, perhaps it would deserve a moment of reflection. He did not as far as I know post his a**hole list.
I think when one is horrified at the democracy of responses which shatter the positive Feuerbach projections outward, generally these are reverse projections of what is worse in oneself. When someone is a crazy in response, and that crazy is not a part of you, you largely shrug it off.
I still am unclear though of the connection you find here. If Infinite Thought indeed is disillusioned by the shallowness (or worse, fetishistic commodity orientation) of the internet readership, are we really only to chalk this up to her looking for a perfect reader instead of being symptomatic of the expectations that political discourse have, including the tendency to proscribe and prescribe thought behaviour?
Re: Graham, it quickly became clear that he was either a puppy or an open wound. Either way, given his philosophy his decision to withdraw and seal off seems, in retrospect, inevitable and existentially authentic. I’m kind of glad he took his eggshells somewhere I won’t be tempted to tread on them, because that’s the kind of a**hole I try hard not to be, with only moderate success.
To be honest the specific connection to that particular post may not exist. I was sort of wandering around in a daze and by the time I got to it, my thinking had become pretty impressionistic. But the link got triggered by this part at the end:
“The other reason to blog is to have (more of) these difficult conversations in which our selves are literally destroyed and recreated in dynamic interactions with really other others. Here self is not stabilized by being closed off from further (exhausting, painful) interaction but metastabilized by embedding in networks and assemblages of relationships. I realize this is a bit of a salto mortale, especially for selves whose interactive history is confusing or oppressive.”
The contrast with Graham is clear enough here, and I think what triggered my association with this post was the contrast between a victim-oriented relation to the world, which is a sealed, defensive and static one by both the victims and their protectors, and the model of growth by creative destruction Mead offers.
It strikes me here that Graham’s interest in Latour, the ‘prince of networks’, is downright perverse.
Carl: “Graham, it quickly became clear that he was either a puppy or an open wound. Either way, given his philosophy his decision to withdraw and seal off seems, in retrospect, inevitable and existentially authentic.”
Kvond: I agree, it certainly was authentic. Significantly I found myself ruminating to myself the other day when discussing Graham’s thought with another on the very interesting point you made that you found yourself investigating Object-Oriented Philosophy and perhasp SR in general, because the persons that forwarded these ideas were compelling. I liked that very much because this is how I felt as well, and I do think that being drawn to someone’s ideas through their person is a valid intellectual path. But then the irony of how it ended with some very rough, less than compelling edges being exposed.
Carl: ” I think what triggered my association with this post was the contrast between a victim-oriented relation to the world, which is a sealed, defensive and static one by both the victims and their protectors, and the model of growth by creative destruction Mead offers.”
Kvond: I like this very much. There is always a question of modulation and threshold, but one’s thresholds do also speak loudly for what one is, and what one is becoming.
As to the Prince of Networks and perversity. Hilarious. One need only be reminded that the title was not the King of Networks…