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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.
This is great stuff. I’m still digesting your comment over at my place but my first impression is that I can agree with you on most if not all points. Really enjoying this discussion.
I like this idea of branching modernity at Descartes. Toulmin (Cosmopolis) does something similar in seeing missed branches at Montaigne and Pascal. The common thread seems to be wholism and relation vs. Descartes’ vivisections. Of course Latour plays on this in We Have Never Been Modern too.
I remember that Martin Jay did a book on the optic metaphor; no time to track down the reference now; have you seen it?
With Downcast eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French thought
Alexei,
Are you recommending this book, or simply referring to it? I understand that it deals with the metaphors of vision, but does it deal specifically with the issue I raise? Spinoza is not much mentioned, for instance.
Ummm, I think ‘recommend’ might be too strong a word in this situation. Jay is essentialy a journalist of ideas: he gets the names and the places right and manages to convey the feel of a movement. But I’ve never fond him to be very penetrating.
Essentially, though, Jay charts the move away from “occularity” as the philosophical trope, hich is still present in Critical Thoery for instance,and argues that this move is ultimately ill conceived.
So there’s a consonance between you and him (the emphasis on clarity, for example), but there is certainly no overlap.
Yes, this is exactly as I intuited (for the worst) when I thought about purchasing the book during my Spinoza and Optics research. I just hate that kind of journalism of ideas, at least in book form. You open a book like that looking for a long drink of water, and you get a sip.
But at least it is interesting to me in topic. I’m not so much concerned with present occularity but interested in how and where it began, and at least provisionally I believe one of its main sources was Kepler and Descartes embrace of the hyperbolic lens.
Aside: Interesting to see Jay this way. I thought this of H. Stuart Hughes as well, his mentor at Harvard and mine at UCSD, who wrote an imposing series of books on late 19th/20th century European intellectual history starting with Consciousness and Society. He covered everything with a sort of magisterial sweep, but despite a rhetorical flourish about “retrospective cultural anthropology” the level of analysis was on the order of turning a personal preference for Freud into an invidious judgment that he was the towering figure of the age. (I should say that Stuart was always very kind and generous to me.)
My main advisor was David Luft, a very smart and interesting man who wrote on Musil and the Viennese scene and had also been Hughes’ student. Despite his quality and because of his relative lack of ambition David was sort of the red-headed stepchild of a Hughesian lineage that also included Dominick LaCapra and John Toews. And I ended up studying Western Marxism, which was Jay’s first field. But perhaps because of all this inbreeding in a basically journalistic practice of intellectual history, I tend to think that whatever I have to say that’s actually interesting is the product of accidents of marginal influence.
Yes Carl. This is one of the two-steps-back things that happen when Graham Harman tries to re-objectize Latour.
And I do like the evolutionary metaphor of a branch of thought/species unpursued.
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I think there’s amazing threads that tie together the issues buried in the infinity standard question and the hyper-centrality/overdefinition you speak of here, with its tendency to automatically and insensitively trim off the liminal/subjective in favor of “precision.” In psychoanalytic circles I’ve read it discussed as over-externalization, which might be the same as hyper-objectification. There is torture and self-sabotage in it as expressed in the use of the term vivisetion. Fabulous post, thank you. The themes you are Carl are tracing seem especially worthwhile.
I’m glad you see the connection in such a strong way. I don’t really see the limnal as “subjective” (which is largely determined in a subject/obect binary), but I follow what you are saying. It is for me “trans-subjective” in that it necessarily goes beyond the boundary of the central and moves to a kind of participation with the field.
I like the reference to “over-externalization” this is I believe very much in keep with Spinoza’s psychology which tried to go to the root of such, the strong valuations we make (good/bad) of things in the world through our imaginary investments. For Spinoza things in the world achieved a sort of false concretization by being seen as the direct and valued cause of our personal happiness or sadness. The very externality of these things in the world comes out of our blame or crediting of them for our internal states, and it is this fundamental binarization (which is really an imaginary projection of our own affects out into the world) that creates the subject/object dichotomy and really the hardened sense that we are apart from the world.
And yes, Carl’s use of vivisection is more interesting here, especially because Descartes, if I recall, used the cadaver’s eye of a cow (not vivisection, but rather intimate), and inserted it into a box to make a camera obscura lens and show how the eye and ultimately the visual mind worked, making a kind of cybernetic flesh camera. There is a sense in which the instrumentality which the subject/object dichotomy (affect projection) leads, the need to control the “object” is involved with cutting it out from the rest of the field that gave rise to it.
The concept of over-externalization is something I picked up from Marion Woodman. When I came across it in her book The Pregnant Virgin (I know, heavy handed title…) a bell rang.
The world I grew up in seemed very dangerous emotionally, a mine field, so I learned to study the externals very carefully and suppress what you might call the field or the ground of my being. This carried over into drawing, where I drew careful, realistic renderings of whatever was in front of me but it was all depressingly souless and bound to factualities, for the most part. I feel like I’ve been learning to relax into the field with its subtle richness for a very long time and I still have a long way to go.
At one point I used to have flashes of seeing myself and all that surrounded me as a composition, maybe similar to a Cezanne or a Vuillard. It was truly blissful thing that I can’t put into words, but the memory of it came back to me at just about the same time I read the article where you discuss privation, a blind man, the field. So you can start to see why your subjects are very important to me, greatly appreciated, and have fleshed out my various vocabularies and restorative practices with surprising potency.
It is good that my own journeys into Spinoza and else aid others in their’s as well.
Still thinking about the hyperfocus issues, I’m so fascinated, but will try not to get carried away. It parallels the dramas of fixation/entrenchement/overemphasis and their evils and various tortures and reductionisms: greed, jealousy, elitism, vengeance, prejudice. I know it sounds moralistic but I’m not judging anyone just stating that I’ve experienced too often these painfully narrow states of mind and I know they tithe more than a tenth.