andrewcrossley

[andrewcrossley]

Bresson's Movies

A movie of Robert  Bresson's showed a yacht, at evening on the Seine, all its lights on, watched by two young, seemingly poor people, on a bridge adjacent, the classic boy and girl of the story, any one one cares to tell. So years pass, of course, but I identified with the young, embittered Frenchman, knew his almost complacent anguish and the distance he felt from his girl. Yet another film of Bresson's has the aging Lancelot with his awkward armor standing in a woods, of small trees, dazed, bleeding, both he and his horse are, trying to get back to the castle, itself of no great size. It moved me, that life was after all like that. You are in love. You stand in the woods, with a horse, bleeding. The story is true.

-Robert Creeley

[andrewcrossley]

[G]eography adds a fascinating dimension to feminist analysis. Of course, you have to be willing to get beyond your middle school perception of geography: it’s not about colouring in maps or memorizing continents. Geography is about the human relationship to our environment, both human-built and natural. A geographic perspective on gender offers a way of understanding how sexism functions on the ground. Women’s second-class status is enforced not just through the metaphorical notion of “separate spheres,” but through an actual, material geography of exclusion. Male power and privilege are upheld by keeping women’s movements limited and their ability to access different spaces constrained. As feminist geographer Jane Darke says in one of my favourite quotes: “Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it…. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete."

-Leslie Kern, “Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World”

[andrewcrossley]

Aesthetics, particularly since Hegel, is the claimed domination of philosophy over art by which philosophy claims to unpack its meaning, truth, and destination after the event of art’s supposed death. … Art, for its part, resists this enterprise and rebels. We propose another solution that, without excluding aesthetics, no longer grants it this domination of philosophical categories over works of art, but limits it in order to focus on its transformation. It’s about substituting for the conflict of art and philosophy the conjugation of their means. … It is a so-called “generic” extension of art to aesthetics; the moment when thought in its turn becomes a form of art. It is a new usage of their mimetic rivalry, their conflictual tradition, which is finally suspended for a common oeuvre, a new “genre.”

//

I propose considering every art form in terms of principles of sufficiency and no longer in terms of descriptive or theoretical or foundational historical perspectives. To do this, one must construct non-aesthetic scenarios or duals, scenes, characters, or postures that are both conceptual and artistic and based on the formal model of a matrix. … These scenarios, by their inventive and constructive aspects, correspond to veritable theoretical "installations.” I propose an aesthetics in the form of conceptual installations of a new genre.

//

Aesthetics was always a carbon copy of art in philosophy and subsequently art was always understood as a deficient modality of philosophy. It is the phenomena of self-modeling of philosophy in regards to art, where philosophy finds its model in art, but a model which is philosophically pre-formed or pre-decided. … [W]ithout art, philosophy lacks sensitivity and without philosophy, art lacks thought, but also within the mode of excess, of overlapping, of mixtures and specular reflections. … Can aesthetics become a second power of art itself, can art engender or determine its own aesthetics instead of suffering it as being philosophically imposed upon it? 

//

Non-standard aesthetics is creative and inventive and its genre is that of a philo-fiction, a philosophical artistic genre that strives to make a work with pure and abstract thought, but not to create concepts parallel to artistic works. … Non-standard aesthetics is characterized overall as 1. an aesthetics, no doubt, with a conceptual materiality which is its technological or technical core; 2. equipped with an artistic and thus somewhat specific technological modeling; 3. but deprived of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, as a duplication of transcendence. 

//

We could ask, why should we thereby deprive ourselves of the benefits of philosophy? in reality, we are in no way whatsoever deprived of its benefits. Philosophy still serves to formulate photo-fiction and enters into it as an essential part of its materiality. We are only deprived of the excess of philosophy’s pretentions of the absolute. And, in the end, this is only to protect human subjects from philosophy’s sufficiency. For example, photo-fiction is efficient and produces fiction, which is to say a thought less sure of itself than philosophical discourse.

//

In photo-fiction, the objective appearances are materially the same as in the photo, but they do not auto-confirm themselves according to sufficiency; photo-fiction is lived (vécu) as an art without any bit of realism and it is in this way that it forms an even more intense chaos by the absence of the world or of its own sufficiency.

//

In this inversion of the object and its equal theory, the object that is first theorized by philosophy becomes the model for the constitution of a new, more complex, theory. A discipline to be created at a second level of which the standard philosophically received aesthetics is nothing more than the first level, or in any case, the symptom, the material, and in the end, the model. … Far from being a deficient, imaginative, and literary form of writing, fiction in its own way becomes a complex art, an art of interweaving disciplines as if imagination would acquire a more superior dimension of complexity by practicing an already existing art, in its form, material, and effects. 

//

A spontaneous objection is inevitable from philosophers who, for their part, cannot get around the elementary simplicity of their conception of philosophy and do not see its doubled nature. According to them, it would be useless to want to create a supplementary art that is apparently parasitic on what already exists.

//

It is fundamental for aesthetics to follow the movements in contemporary art in the most profound manner, not in order to describe the changes under the same codes, but to import these types of changes within aesthetics itself, and to build scenarios that are themselves “theoretical installations.” Instead of rehashing concepts of mimesis, we instead extend the ideal of art to the thought of art itself, obviously with a respect “within philosophy” for the new conditions of this transfer. The problem of a non-standard aesthetics or thought-art, is to treat this semantic block as an indivisible whole, including art and thought within a holistic apparatus. … It is no longer a question of a mixing (métissage) of art and philosophy without rules, left to the arbitrariness of taste and talent. These two poles conserve their material autonomy and local syntax, but they form an indivisible entity between each other.

//

To think “aesthetics” in the form of scenarios, quantically conjugating a variety of arts and philosophies, would enrich and liberate possible productive forces and would justify the existence of art not as thought, as was talked about with post-modernists, but a veritable thought-art, entirely specific and worthy of being called “contemporary.” … If there is a possible veritable invention of the order of thought-art, it must be the object of a concentrated revival (reprise), of a decision between utopia and heresy, under the gaze of what we call futurality rather than history.

//

Philo-fiction is a gushing (jaillissant) and subtractive usage of the means of thinking, of philosophemes-without-philosophy, of mathemes-without-mathematics, and from here, all of the dimensions of philosophy rid of their proper all-encompassing finality, an insurrection against the all-too great superior finalities. Language is a simple productive force without its superior or over-totalizing finalities, but with its immanent finalities, quartially (quartiellement) instituted. The artist of philo-fiction that refers to the photo, to the painting, or to music, knows how to stop at this insurrectional and creative plane of art, creative precisely because its most dominant finalities are taken out of play.

//

In the photo as in fiction, images or concepts are produced an in one sense, they are the same, but they are interpreted differently. They are still appearances of the world and objects, and thus on this point there is no difference between them. But in the photograph these appearances of the world refer to the world in a certain deterministic and realist relation (principle of sufficient photography) where the world returns and over-determines objective appearances, whereas in fiction the conceptual images remain objective appearances which are no longer lived as in themselves or are not reorganized a second time by the cosmic order. In fiction, the objective appearances are materially the same as in the photograph (the photograph of philosophy since philosophy is a photograph of itself) but they do not auto-confirm themselves according to sufficiency, and it is in this that they form a probable chaos via the absence of the world and its sufficiency, via hesitation or indeterminacy.

-François Laruelle, “Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics” (trans. Drew S. Burk)

[andrewcrossley]

“For Schelling, then, a complete work of art … is an original work whose theme is the expression of the inscrutability of its own possibility and the inexpressibility of its own ground. It is the Word falling in love with its anterior silence. … [I]n the moment of its greatest intensity, it grows silent [verstummt]. Verstummen is not a mere negative dialectical degeneration into muteness. Rather, in hearing the faint echoes of silence within discourse, discourse falls in love with always being underway toward its own inherent silence—a silence that speaks louder than words but which can only be approached (but never attained) through words.”

Jason M. Wirth, translator’s intro to “The Ages of the World” by F.W.J. Schelling

[andrewcrossley]

“When he begins to specify the requirements for true solidarity Professor Falk sounds almost Upanishadic: the goal must be “the maintenance of living systems at all levels of complexity ... the exploration of space and the planetary character of economic, ecological and cybernetic complexity are building the foundations of an inevitable global consciousness.” We want a new principle of political order which does not depend upon or induce uniformity among peoples, but which, tolerant of complexity, promotes the fullest unfolding of their individual potential—which happens to be a definition of nonviolence.” 

-Michael N. Nagler, Afterword to The Upanishads (Eknath Easwaran translation)

[andrewcrossley]

Two Worlds

Here in America there is no difference between a man and his economic fate. A man is made by his assets, income, position, and prospects. The economic mask coincides completely with a man’s inner character. Everyone is worth what he earns and earns what he is worth. He learns what he is through the vicissitudes of his economic existence. He knows nothing else. The materialistic critique of society once objected against idealism that existence determined consciousness and not vice versa, and that the truth about society did not lie in its idealistic conception of itself but in its economy; contemporary men have rejected such idealism. They judge themselves by their own market value and learn what they are from what happens to them in the capitalistic economy. Their fate, however sad it may be, is not something outside them; they recognize its validity. A dying man in China might say, in a lowered voice:

Fortune did not smile on me in this world. Where am I going now? Up into the mountains to seek peace for my lonely heart.

I am a failure, the American says—and that is that.

-Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer; Dialectic of Enlightenment

[andrewcrossley]

Why it is better not to know all the answers

One of the lessons which Hitler has taught us is that it is better not to be too clever. The Jews put forward all kinds of well-founded arguments to show that he could not come to power when his rise was clear for all to see. I remember a conversation during which a political economist demonstrated—on the basis of the interests of the Bavarian brewers—that the Germans could not be brought into line. Other experts proved that Fascism was impossible in the West. The educated made it easy for the barbarians everywhere by being so stupid. The farsighted judgments, the forecasts based on statistics and experience, the comments beginning “this is a subject I know very well,” and the well-rounded, solid statements, are all untrue.

Hitler was opposed to mind and to men. But there is also a spirit which is opposed to the interests of men: its characteristic is clever superiority.

-Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer; Dialectic of Enlightenment

[andrewcrossley]

On breath-image and the terminality of sound

This is a text that accompanies my new piece breath-image, which will be performed next month in Vilnius, Lithuania by Ensemble Synaesthesis. ______________________________________ One of the main questions running through my recent work is that of emptiness and the radically unrepresentable, and how these categories can be mobilized through an experiential praxis in the field of aesthetics. Allow me a very brief primer now. We are living under a tyranny of representation, and a severe limiting of imagination and utopian thought. We are all of us, at bottom, utopians. We all have dreams for the future, and we all would like to see a world different from the one we have now. A better world, regardless of one’s particular political inclinations. However, to conceive of utopia means to conceive of something that is, by definition, radically unconceivable. Consider this: if we could imagine utopia, would it not instantly become a mere conceptualization, a representation of what we think utopia would look like? Would this representation not arise strictly from within the confines of what is, at present, imaginable? If this is so, such a conception of utopia would conform to what our current ideological or discursive moment defines as the limits of possibility, inherently negating its radical nature. This tyranny is effected on us not from without—not from some unseen “above” from which the “powers that be” control what can be thought. No, this tyranny arises from the very structure of logical thought itself. It is marked by a rupture at the very beginning of thought that permeates every subsequent thing with its primordial broken-ness. Consider the traditional rules of logic, as condensed by Bertrand Russell: the law of identity, or “whatever is, is”; the law of non-contradiction, or “nothing can both be and not be”; and the law of the excluded middle, or “everything must either be or not be.” Now consider the process of perception as it occurs in real time. Whenever an object—a sensation, a sound, an image—is perceived, it is first perceived just as it is. In that first moment of apprehension, there is no conceptualization, no naming, no categorizing, and no difference. The laws of logic have not arisen yet and what is apprehended both is and isn’t, at least in that very first moment. It is only later that the logical mind intervenes to counterpose the perception of the object against previous sense perceptions stored in the memory in order to identify it—this is, after all, the way in which we come to know that the color we are seeing is blue and not red. But, most crucially, it is at this moment that the distinction first arises between subject and object, between the seer and what is being seen. Why is this important? Allow me to be crude for the sake of brevity. It is entirely in the first moments of this operation of deliberative discrimination that the foundations are laid for all the suffering, injustice, and oppression that afflict us. Or rather, it is only in the moment that precedes conceptualization—what Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida calls “pure experience”—that true liberation can arise. Simply stated, the first decision—the decision to differentiate—solidifies and reifies conceptions of difference that are, in the deepest sense, mere mental constructs. Taking it, again quite crudely, into the realm of the everyday and the sociopolitical, isn’t it true that it becomes easier to oppress someone, to silence their voice, if one regards oneself as separate or different from them? True compassion can arise when this difference is pierced and seen as the illusion that it is. It is at this juncture that the work of critical thought is revealed, particularly as it relates to philosophy and art. Even at the surface level of specificity, we know that the role of critique is to prod at ideas and constructs that appear in everyday thought to be solid and unchangeable. As Marx famously wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.” Indeed, the rich tradition of critical theory inaugurated by Marx’s own thought is built on the idea that the first step towards emancipatory thought is to reveal the houses of cards upon which we build seemingly stable systems of ideas, from the philosophical to the interpersonal. This is where the most crucial work of philosophy can begin: to reveal the fluidity and ephemerality at the base of the gargantuan superstructure (to borrow Marx’s own terms) in order to more clearly see through the veils of ideology. To more clearly see things as they are. But the most radical of Marxist thinkers are not content with simply showing the illusory nature of most of our widely-held assumptions. For those who are willing to go ever further (I think here of people like Lefebvre, Rancière, Deleuze…) to open the door to true emancipation means opening the door to a complete deconstruction of even the most basic operations of thought—ultimately, to open the door to the unthinkable, that which resists conceptualization and representation, both verbal and aesthetic. This leads us back to that first ontological decision to constitute a subject that is separate from what it observes. Here is the true power of philosophy and critique: to follow the operations and lines of questioning that critical thought lays out in a thoroughly engaged, honest, and self-reflexive way means problematizing one’s position at every turn, and it must inevitably lead to the collapsing of the idea of a separate, fully constituted self in the name of radical liberation. Paradoxically, it is through logical thought that philosophy arrives at and actualizes the experience of non-dual awareness. As such, it could be thought of as an indirect path to it. Through progressively more profound questioning, philosophy opens up the possibility of, ultimately, doing away with conceptualization itself. But there is also a direct path to pure experience. In contemplative traditions, it takes the form of meditation—observing mental processes and expanding one’s awareness to fully encompass experience and perception before they enter into duality. But art, and music in particular, can accomplish the same thing. In a very real sense, the way in which meditative practices and aesthetic expression reveal pure experience is infinitely more powerful than the intellectual approach, precisely because the knowledge is apprehended existentially at the ground of being. It arises experientially, devoid of verbal associations or concepts. Pure sound, more than any other artistic medium due to its fundamentally non-discursive nature, is particularly well suited for opening these non-discursive and non-conceptual fissures in thought. Where deep listening is allowed to occur, deliberative discrimination necessarily ceases. breath-image is concerned with two primary questions. The title is taken from François Jullien’s book The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting. In his book, Jullien examines the idea of the nonobject, or the undifferentiated, through the lens of various classic treatises of Chinese painting, as well as the Tao Te Ching. He compares the dominant drive in Western art, that of individualization—the object that ‘reveals its essence as each motion of the brush specifies it […and] gradually eliminates all other possibilities of being until it makes the object appear as if that object could be nothing but itself’—with that of Chinese painting, which revels in the undifferentiated, the indistinct, and the evanescent. The concept of the breath-image, as Jullien writes, comes from the writings of Wang Wei. He writes: “When you contemplate painting, you must look first at the breath-image. […] Apprehension [...] proceeds from the more general-evanescent to the more tangible and rigid. Landscapes are great things. When we look at them, we must place ourselves at a distance to contemplate them. Then only do we perceive, in a single sweep, the breath-image emanating from the tension-forms of the landscape. […] At the lowest level are forms, the most tangible level but the most limited in effect. Then come the tensions that permeate them, conferring dynamism and vitality on them. Finally there is the breath-image emanating from it overall. The breath-image breaks free from the mire of forms and unfurls figuration beyond figuration, or rather upstream from it, opening it to the undifferentiated and making it available as the "great image.” The music follows the line of questioning arising from the idea of a breath-image. How and where does form emerge over time from the undifferentiated fount of pure sound? This question is asked not only in regard to large-scale form emerging over the span of the entire piece, but also of the smallest spaces within the sound itself—its “inbetween-ness”. Can forms emerge there? This is the spirit of the question asked in the final page of the piece: Where is the sound blooming? What about the locus of the unfolding of this sound? Where does it bloom from? This inbetween-ness—not only the spaces between the sounds, but the spaces within the sounds—is at the heart of the second line of questioning. Sound is a unique representation of the physical world in all of its impermanence. Every single sound is at once permeated with the seed of its own cessation: silence. Sound arises and passes away at every moment, and as Stewart Cox writes, ‘it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world.’ The fact that sound is constantly enveloped by silence constitutes its terminality, in the sense of a terminal disease. Eric Cazdyn describes terminality as a positioning  of the future as ‘that which is already included in the present, while maintaining it as that which is radically separate from the present.’ So indeed, while all sonic phenomena as they occur naturally present a fruitful opportunity to contemplate terminality and impermanence in their passage from audibility to silence, the provocation I wish to present is that we can contemplate the silence contained in sound already from its emergence. As such, breath-image revels in the idea of terminal sound—the fragile, the subtle, the barely audible—but also in the idea that terminality flashes through from within all sound, even—no, especially—that which seems at first most stable.

[andrewcrossley]

‘You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second—what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because listen—we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge—so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions—even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking—that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these? Your history?’ -David Foster Wallace; Good Old Neon

[andrewcrossley]

‘[A] new medium establishes and is established by a series. Each instance of the medium is an absolute realization of it; each totally eclipses the others. For all our claims of "inevitability" in the working out of old masterpieces, we know that, say, a given fugue might have worked out differently, not merely in the sense that other fugues might have been written on the subject, but that this one might be more or less otherwise than it is, that there might be alternate versions. Then to call one version "inevitable" would be to praise it. But with a Pollock all-over line painting, or a Louis stripe, or a Noland chevron, or a Stella Z-form, any change (of an angle, a shift of color or a color's width, or its distance from another color) would simply create a new instance, an absolutely new painting. If one speaks of a given instance as inevitable, that is no longer a term of praise, but a statement of its existence. These are works every one of whose properties is essential to them. This is the definition of a Leibnizian monad. Like a monad, like the world there is, the only fact about these paintings that does not follow analytically from a complete idea of them is that they exist in space and time. Existence in this world, like the existence of the world itself, is the only contingent fact about them. They are themselves, I feel like saying, contingencies, realizations. Nothing but our acceptance of an instance determines whether its series is worth realizing, or how far it is worth going on generating its instances; when we find that a series is exhausted, it is absolutely past, over. As instances, they declare the evanescence of existence in space and time. (Literal or material objects do not declare evanescence, however transitory they or their arrangement may be. Metaphysically a pyramid is as evanescent as wrappings are, or as a flash of neon.) I think it is sometimes felt, by those angered or suspicious of such paintings, that no object the actual making of which is so unimportant could conceivably bear the major importance we have attached to works of art. It is true that their existence as instances is carried on their face; labor is not in them; they look as if they might as well have been made instantaneously, and that their use should take no longer. But the fact about an instance, when it happens, is that it poses a permanent beauty, if we are capable of it. That this simultaneity should proffer beauty is a declaration about beauty: that it is no more temporary than the world is; that there is no physical assurance of its permanence; that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim autonomy, to become free. Acceptance of such objects achieves the absolute acceptance of the moment, by defeating the sway of the momentous. It is an ambition worthy of the highest art. Nothing is of greater moment than the knowledge that the choice of one moment excludes another, that no moment makes up for another, that the significance of one moment is the cost of what it forgoes. That is refinement. Beauty and significance, except in youth, are born of loss. But otherwise everything is lost. The last knowledge will be to allow even that knowledge of loss to vanish, to see whether the world regains. The idea of infinite possibility is the pain, and the balm, of adolescence. The only return on becoming adult, the only justice in forgoing that world of possibility, is the reception of actuality—the pain and balm in the truth of the only world: that it exists, and I in it. […] Because these abstractions retain the power of art, after the failure of representations to depict our conviction and connectedness with the world, they have overcome the representativeness which came between our reality and our art; overcame it by abstraction, abstracting us from the recognitions and engagements and complicities and privileged appeals and protests which distracted us from one another and from the world we have constructed. Attracted from distraction by abstraction. Not catching our attention yet again, but forming it again. Giving us again the capacity for appeal and for protest, for contemplation and for knowledge and praise, by drawing us back from private and empty assertion. These works exist as abstracts of intimacy—declaring our common capacity and need for presentness, for clear separateness and singleness and connection, for horizons and uprightness and frontedness, for the simultaneity of a world, for openness and resolution. They represent existence without assertion; authority without authorization; truth without claim, which you can walk in. It is out of such a vision that Thoreau in Walden ("The Pond in Winter") speaks of nature as silent.’ -Stanley Cavell; The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

[andrewcrossley]

‘In the locus of emptiness, beyond the human standpoint, a world of "dependent origination" is opened up in which everything is related to everything else. Seen in this light, there is nothing in the world that arises from "self-power" and yet all "self-powered" workings arise from the world. Existence at each instant, Sartre's self-creation as "human," the humanization in which the self becomes human––all these can be said to arise ceaselessly as new accommodations from a locus of emptiness that absolutely negates the human standpoint. From the standpoint of emptiness, it is at least possible to see the actuality of human being in its socio-historical situation in such a way that one does not take leave of "actual" time and space. In the words of the Zen mas­ter Muso: “When acting apprehend the place of acting, when sitting ap­prehend the place of sitting, when lying apprehend the place of lying, when seeing and hearing apprehend the place of see­ing and hearing, and when experiencing and knowing appre­hend the place of experiencing and knowning.”’

-Keiji Nishitani; The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism

[andrewcrossley]

“When you no longer occupy” your self, says the Zhuangzi, “in your self, forms and things appear by themselves”. Obviously, “occupy” circumscribes and attributes a territory to the self, separates “what” you occupy from “what” you do not occupy, establishing, however little, permanence and rigidity. The Zhuangzi teaches us to de-occupy ourselves, but not because the “self” is detestable and we must flee it or ascetically deny it, but because we need to recover from the consistency of the subject and to rid ourselves of it and “forget” it, in the terms of the Zhuangzi––that is the Zhuangzi’s principal, systematically conducted philosophical operation––in such a way that we no longer have to posit the world as an object opposite us, to be known and manipulated. Or, to repeat terms already introduced, by undoing the possibility of a nature (as object), it thrusts us back into (reconnects us to) the natural (as process). Once we no longer assail the world with our investigations, the Zhuangzi continually tells us, once we no longer impede it by carving it up and codifying it, once we no longer set it in opposition to itself as a function of our disjunctions, once we no longer contract it with the clenching of our desires, once we stop invading it with our fears and aspirations, [something of the world] comes “to light” on its own. We no longer know “it,” but the world “illuminates” [itself].” Let us not only emancipate ourselves from all the toolkits of the knowing mind; let us rid ourselves of the desire to know as well. It is this voluntarism that, on its own, encumbers and obscures; it is this desire for truth that, on its own, forms a screen. When you renounce any position as an “occupier” (there is no longer “self” and “other” facing off), no longer orienting yourself or digging in as a result (in one direction or the other), [you are] able to embrace [the world] in every direction––without “direction” or “horizon” (wu fang)––and solely in accord with the initiative of the transformation under way. “Your movement is like water,” continues the Zhuangzi, “your motionlessness like a mirror”; “you respond like an echo, evanescent as if not being there and calm as if being pure.” -François Jullien; The Great Image Has No Form, or, On the Nonobject Through Painting

[andrewcrossley]

‘More and more, we are grasping that the perfect crime of capitalism is built right into the system itself and scarcely needs to be hidden or disguised within false rhetoric. But then why are so few interested in any type of systemic critique? Part of the problem is that an older form of capitalist ideology is getting in the way. Even if we try, many of us cannot help but take the system’s pharmaceuticals, wear its sweatshop-made clothes, and use its products and services (of course, this primarily refers to the minority of the world’s population who actually have access to these goods and services). We can cognitively map the system and learn where our coffee comes from, how are shirts are made. In the end, however, we cannot avoid transgression. In an earlier Fordist moment of capitalist production, workers were bought off on the level of desire (tempted more by what type of upholstery to outfit their new cars with than by organizing revolution on the factory floor). Today, it is more about being bought off on the level of conscience, since it is impossible within commodity culture to be clean. Perhaps we no longer experience the old Fordist desire, with its accompanying moment of forgetting (“I would really like to have that commodity, no matter how it’s made and how the workers are treated, and therefore I will let myself forget how the system works so that I can enjoy my new purchase”). Instead, we increasingly experience its opposite: we don’t want to have that commodity, because we know (and don’t want to forget) how it’s made and how the workers are treated. Nevertheless, we cannot conceive of how to get by without purchasing it (because we see no alternative option) and we cannot prevent feelings of guilt over our participation in a loathsome system. Therefore, we let ourselves forget the vulnerability of the system precisely so that we can enjoy our purchase knowing that we could not have done otherwise. While the Fordist statement was, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is actually rotten,” today’s statement is, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is capable of being terminated.” In both cases, something like amnesia or “memory washing” has occurred. But the causes and effects are qualitatively different. And again, in the new chronic moment, what we cannot make ourselves bring to consciousness is cognizance of, let alone desire for, the system’s final end. However, the radical action available to us today is not a “waking up” to our duplicity and hypocrisy, in which we let ourselves experience all the attending guilt we are currently managing by various amnesic strategies. Rather, the challenge is to mobilize our hypocrisy in a way that relies less on moral categories and more on an objective critique of the total system that has left us––via false choices––with “hypocritical” lifestyles.' -Eric Cazdyn; The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness

[andrewcrossley]

‘Something is changing, but this can only be understood when we understand crisis and disaster as nonspectacular and in everyday terms. This is the present challenge for counterglobalization movements: to bracket the more spectacular political scandals, corruptions, and disasters and turn to everyday economic activities (and the crises inherent in them) in order to understand larger formal problems. Instead of treating the political spectacles as chronic (as problems to manage), the economic minutiae should be treated as acute (as something to be radically changed).' -Eric Cazdyn; The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness

[andrewcrossley]

‘At his death Gasan Jōseki left behind him these lines: It is ninety-one years Since my skin and bones were put together; This midnight, as always, I lay myself down in the Yellow Springs.' […] ‘From the standpoint of absolute selfhood, life and death of themselves both belong to the self, each at its own time and each in its own Form. At each of their moments, life and death are constituted completely from within “time.” Inside and out, through and through, they are temporal. But at the same time, from one moment to the next and in their very temporal mode of being, life and death are ecstatic. The are ecstatically. Viewed from the standpoint of absolute selfhood, there is no change in life at death. That is the sense of the words in the death verse just quoted: “This midnight, as always.”’ -Keiji Nishitani; Religion and Nothingness 

[andrewcrossley]

‘The method to be practiced is as follows: you are to doubt regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead men would also hear sounds…. You must doubt deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be. Pay no attention to the various illusory thoughts and ideas that may occur to you. Only doubt more and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything in advance, without intending to be enlightened and without even intending not to intend to be enlightened; become like a child within your own breast… But however you go on doubting, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. Doubt deeply in a state of single-mindedness, looking neither ahead nor behind, neither right nor left, becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. When this method is practiced more and more deeply, you will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Doubt, “What is the subject that hears?” and doubt still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Doubt but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of doubt, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment, as if you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived.' -From the Sermons of Takusui; quoted in Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness

[andrewcrossley]

I’ve uploaded a paper I wrote recently on Pierre Bourdieu, Deleuze, and the drive for self-improvement, in case any of the more academically inclined of you are interested in any of those subjects.