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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.
Very, very interesting. Thanks for linking to this Kvond, otherwise I would’ve missed it. I also thought that Robin (urbanomic)’s comment (“I do think that we shouldn’t lose what’s important – the specificity and heterogeneity of each thinker’s work – in the excitement of a ‘next big thing’ and in the drive to determine affiliations and mark out territories”) was pretty fantastic.
Pretty fantastic, but can such a conception operate within a marketplace of Name-meme association and idea branding? I mean this seriously. What is interesting about the said thinkers of SR isn’t what supposedly, very losely joins them (and none of them associate themselves the way that Harman does with the group). I see the whole notion of their thought as some kind of movement as detrimental to the import of their positions, and it seems that though bonding together so as to brand themselves may have helped Network connections, it is really Harman whose thinking is the least compelling, least appealing to our philosophical problems, that has to most to gain from such an invented kind. It is actually in thinking of all four as a Four (with Levi trying as hard as he can to wedge himself in) produces one great yawn for me, while each as each, well, maybe of interest.
Agreed. I find Meillasoux’s work to actually be especially interesting, even if I don’t agree with him at times, and am not familiar enough with Brassier or Grant’s work to really say. But it definitely seems as though the quasi-mythical and constructed “fourfold” of SR and the intense effort to market the movement and turn into some kind of “new orthodox,” to use Robin’s phrase—an effort largely perpetrated by Graham Harman and his zombie horde of desperate grad students—is really to the detriment of the kind of ingenuity and heterodox thought that first emerged out of Collapse. For the sake of their journal and its future, they *really* ought to distance themselves from much of the increasingly rigid doxa emerging on the Internet, as Robin correctly, if hesitantly, diagnoses.
Additionally: I am waiting for the inevitable moment when Robin’s remarks begin to feverishly circulate around the SR blogosphere, but then each blogger immediately believes that they are of course not the ones being referred to in the message (the inverse process of ideological interpellation). It must be those *other*, *bad* SR bloggers… thereby increasing even further the orthodoxy of the SR blog movement, when new rounds of finger-pointings, more anathemas, and alleged deviations from the Party-line get slung around.
What is a bit humorous is that Harman has been somewhat alienated from the said SR, as the other authors don’t seem at all to embrace the Identity as signficant to their work. Harman found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place. He gained some sort of notoriety by saying “I’m with them!” but then he really wasn’t of their substance, so to speak, so then he tried to leverage himself via the Internet and got himself caught in the mess of blogging. This got him a bunch of cheap networking connections, grad-students and the what-not, and then a bizarre ally in Levi, who opposes almost everything Harman stands for, but who is trying the same old “I’m with them!” that temporarily worked for Harman. Harman distances himself from the blogging because a) it brought too much criticism to his work, b) it genuinely infuriated him to be exposed to some of the more unpleasant attacks that come with putting yourself in a position of importance and c) it all ate away with his time. This left him with only Levi and the remaining grad-students who think his theory is vaguely interesting (most of whom seem not to have read much of it critically), and Levi Bryant who is hanging on for dear life. All the while the image of a movement is still floating out there in some sort of autonomous internet phenomena, represented nothing of compelling substance.
That’s at least how I have seen it play out. I actually feel a bit sorry for Harman for having to hook his horse up to Levi’s wobbly cart. But hell, he’s got a splinter group, what more could you want? Harman’s stuck between being a “real” author and an “internet” author.
Bryan: “Additionally: I am waiting for the inevitable moment when Robin’s remarks begin to feverishly circulate around the SR blogosphere, but then each blogger immediately believes that they are of course not the ones being referred to in the message (the inverse process of ideological interpellation). It must be those *other*, *bad* SR bloggers… thereby increasing even further the orthodoxy of the SR blog movement, when new rounds of finger-pointings, more anathemas, and alleged deviations from the Party-line get slung around.”
Kvond: Urbanomic’s criticism of the blogged reality of SR and its “defense” identity is very subtle, if at all. He simply says that if you want an update, its better to check out all the blogs. Which blog, who knows. Levi has a new theory ever five minutes, and Harman just lets us know how many words he typed, or what odd passage he found in Aristotle today. The Big SR authors don’t blog. So, I suppose he means the gradish students that post long link pages, and say how mean and unfair everyone is to Graham Harman. Is this the new orthodoxy?