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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.
Yes. It’s rather amazing how he the cool can be lost to entropy (somewhat like your comments to Michael’s recent thread 😉 Maybe someday my notebook will be online, but here’s what i wrote a few ours ago:
Graham Harman complains: “I have little idea what Shaviro means by ‘absolute existence, in and of itself’. Really? It’s perfectly clear to me that he’s referring to Levi’s claim that “All objects are INDEPENDENT of one another”, and to Graham’s own claim that “by no means do I exist solely as a function of my relations” (uh, who brought the sole into this ?)
You pick exactly the right quote to cite. The cartoon flip-book seems the perfect metaphor for change as immanent generation (in the Whiteheadian sense that Steve highlights). The alternative seems to be almost Badiouian. GH wants exactly what the “continental avante garde” wants; namely, a difference that makes a difference only to this hypostatized, rationally-formed identity that is supposed to be frozen by an evnt, or in ‘fidelity’ to select conscious choices..
Was also rereading your 9/27 post on Stonier today, in conjunction with the above, and it seems that the OOP insistence on fixed boundaries is as illusory as the distinction between “causal and ontological dependence”.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for sharing your notebook here. Glad there is some kind of coincidence. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “Badiouian” unless you mean something like the “count-as-one” which is a bit Idealist in my view (perhaps in parallel to the buried idealism in Harman’s dreamworks of objects). Perhaps though you can expand on that – and the coincidence between what the jr OOPists want, and what the “avant garde” wants.
I also found Graham’s incomprehension of Shaviro’s phrasing curious.
I do appreciate you rereading my Stonier piece. It is precisely these fixed boundaries (born of optical metaphors of consciousness, and of representationalist thinking) that I find most troublesome (together with the idea that these boundaries are in some kind of retreat, rather than fundamental participation).
I cannot help but think how much immanance solves much of this mystification and projection of abstract entities.
I’m not sure what I meant by “Badiouian” either, other than my sentence following that word: “rationally-formed identity that is supposed to be frozen by an evnt, or in ‘fidelity’ to select conscious choices”. This is probably not an accurate description of either Badiou’s or Harman’s projects, and I shouldn’t have suggested that it was. I am simply not well-read enough to understand the distinction between “causal and ontological dependence”.
Well, causal and ontological dependence are mutual in Spinoza’s thinking, so I’m probably am not well-read enough either.
p.s. Mark, I’m glad you mention entropy and cold. I’m working on a tentative but radical post on Absolute Zero in relation to D and G’s BwO and Spinoza parallelism of thing and Idea. Should be good if I can drive it out of me.
That would be interesting.I’ve recently been considering Schopenhauer and the differences between “Spinoza’s parallelism of thing and Idea” and WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION. I don’t suppose you’ve posted on anything like this before?
I’m not familiar with “Absolute Zero”, but have been trying to grasp some sense of Nihilism (if that is not an oxymoron).
Also, I think my re-mixed(up) mind may have been conjugating Badiou and Agamben a bit too intimately, since I had been reading Alexander Galloway’s CTHEORY review of Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s _L’esprit du nihilisme_ (which is also available at http://post.thing.net/node/2843 — and MBK is, as someone once mentioned, “a novelist, philosopher, filmstar and, er, Badiou’s mate” ; )
To aggravate / aggregate this mashup beyond where someone using a real name should be going, I was also reading Lorenzo Chiesa’s “Georgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology” (in THE ITALIAN DIFFERENCE) just the other night and it struck me, this morning, when I first saw the news, that we now have a nearly perfect example of Agamben’s MUSSELMAN..
Mark: “That would be interesting.I’ve recently been considering Schopenhauer and the differences between “Spinoza’s parallelism of thing and Idea” and WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION. I don’t suppose you’ve posted on anything like this before?”
Kvond: No, not big on Schopenhauer, but I do recall reading in Spinoza recently that because he defines the conatus as both striving (or willing) and also as essence, he admits in a sense that everything is willing, or the essence of everything is willing. I can’t recall the passage, but it is in the Ethics, and seemed to be in a scholium in one of the 3rd or 4th parts.
But the notion of representation instead of immanent expression pretty much falls on the wrong side of the philosophical divide. I hope to touch on this in the next post on thinking through Cold.
Indeed Graham’s thinking ALLOWS cars to be crushed and ice cream to be eaten, as he proudly proclaims, but his theory of cause and effect seems to fall even below the threshold of “illusion” when it comes to change itself. Instead vacuous objects retreat into ghost worlds connected through subterranean mojo mixed with the mysteries of intention, becoming all the more inapplicable at the level of bowling-ball type objects that the theory is supposed to rescue.
Kvondique the brilliance of this is why I have always singled you out as my favorite bitch even when dr. Sinthome was disapproving.
The worst part however and related to our previous conversation is the interpretation of ANIMATION as the ”illusion of movement”
Perhaps you can appreciate the title of my blog more now.
To add, I always wondered why “animation is the illusion of movement” should trump “animation is the illusion of objects”, and why one should not drive a wedge right down the middle of these two.
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kvondique i don’t have the academic backing to follow your kind of language, but i intuit what you mean, so that doesn’t really matter
Cool.
Thanks Kvond, now you’ve mentioned ‘mojo’ I’m unable to think of Harman without thinking of Austin Powers. “I must go back in ancestral time, to a time before humans, to rescue the radioactive isotope containing my mojo!”
Well, I certainly hope he can find it.