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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.
Frames /sing 
LOL… Yes, I like how even the kind gesture of the hot dog man is somehow a reification of the System… really sort of paranoiac…
Anybody who lives in NYC (esp Brooklyn) for any length of time certainly knows the type. It’s ironically always the ones who profit the most from the “System” who are looking for this radical break from it–they usually have the most unattainably “morals” regarding what’s ok to do and what isn’t to get ahead within it, too. Of course, they’ve never had to actually be in a position to make any of these tough moral decisions. And most of them seem to go about their everyday lives more or less exactly like the rest of us.
Really, their affects are all they got to set them apart, if you look at it this way…
Yes, I see the Brooklyn, as well as the East Villiage type clearly. But I also see the entire dysphoric ethic, the pleasures of unhappiness that seems to qualify much of the revolutionary talk in academic quarters.
I think we’ve talked about this briefly before: the death drive is still a proper *drive*, even for Freud. When libido inverts, it’s still libido, just rerouted.
It feels good to feel bad, etc.
Yup, it’s all pretty silly.
I wonder if “the pleasures of unhappiness” here are a defense mechanism, since we’re invoking Freud. In two senses. On the one hand, for these ludicrous intellectuals they redirect the blocked energy of actually feeling bad about things one doesn’t have the power to change (a classic masochistic syndrome). On the other, for those intellectuals’ critics they provide an easy vantage for mockery without requiring any empathetic investment (a classic schadenfreude syndrome), and perhaps a second-order diversion from their own powerlessness.
Or, for the critic of the critic of these intellectuals an even easier, even less attached empathic investment, giving them the sense that they stand above all in the fray, something of the order of a “God”…oops, I mean “Historian”…
Funny how the diagnostic logic composes a sword whose edges cut in so many directions you can’t even hold it.
I’m not really interested in diagnosising the Revolutionary Spirit, as locating its effects. Asking the simple questions, Who is it for? What does it Accomplish? What are its truer Goals? I neglect of course the paranoic thesis that the reason why Revolutionary Spirit has been so foiled in producing a radical break is that “the System” has in dominance anticipated its ever move and like an octopus wrestled it with every hand.
For sure, good point.
I think the answers to all of your questions are likely to be plural; ‘the system’ seems to me not so much a coherent malevolent demiurge as a sort of schopenhauerian Will, each tentacle of the octopus lashing out its “I Want” in its own pattern and rhythm. Or to be fanciful a different way the whole thing’s a hodgepodge of this and that loosely assembled within some pretty minimal boundary conditions. Contesting it is not so much like fighting an 800 pound gorilla as punching a net-bag full of scraps of bubble wrap.
Agreed. I’ve tried to argue this before but it is impossible to highlight to people how silly the revolutionary academic really is but only if that person happens to be such an academic. Thanks for the video link.
Yes. Academic revolutionary spirit makes me feel like I am talking to a fan of the Matrix about the Matrix.
Carl: “Contesting it is not so much like fighting an 800 pound gorilla as punching a net-bag full of scraps of bubble wrap.”
Kvond: I just don’t get it? Why punch it, why not weave something out of bubbles, or as Sloterdijk says, “spheres”? The contested imaginaary opposition is unhelpful, at least most of the time.