desilentio-blog

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“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

Henry Miller, 1950. 

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Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) Amériques New York Philharmonic Conductor: Pierre Boulez

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In Order to Live in the Flux of Desires

We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses, our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion parts and works in an ignoble mechanism of production which links capital, exploitation, and the family.

We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory~territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access.

We can no longer permit our nervous system to serve as a communications network for the system of capitalist exploitation, for the patriarchal state; nor can we permit our brains to be used as instruments of torture programmed by the powers that surround us.

We can no longer allow others to repress our fucking, control our shit, our saliva, our energies, all in conformity with the prescriptions of the law and its carefully defined little transgressions. We want to see frigid, imprisoned, mortified bodies explode to bits, even if capitalism continues to demand that they be kept in check at the expense of our living bodies.

This desire for a fundamental liberation, if it is to be a truly revolutionary action, requires that we move beyond the limits of our “person,” that we overturn the notion of the “individual,” that we transcend our sedentary selves, our “normal social identities,” in order to travel the boundary-less territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lies beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and the repertories of normality.

~Félix Guattari

“In Order to End the Massacre of the Body” (Tr. Jarred Becker) ~ Soft Subversions ~ NY : Semiotext(e), 1996 / pgs 31-2

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theinfiniteconversation:

No, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you.

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing~with a rather shaky hand~a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us our morality when we write.

~Michel Foucault

The Archaeology of Knowledge. Quoted in “The Laugh of Michel Foucault” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other ~ Michel de Certeau (Tr. Brian Massumi) ~ Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1997 / pg 193

No, No, I'm Not Where You Are Lying in Wait for Me, but Over Here, Laughing at You

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theinfiniteconversation:

For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that… . You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life.

~Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia ~ (Trans. Brian Massumi) ~ Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 2005 / pg 262

An Hour, a Season, an Atmosphere, an Air, a Life

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theinfiniteconversation:

Who is the “I” of the dream? Who is the person to whom one attributes this “I,” admitting that there is one? Between the one who sleeps and the one who is the subject of the dream’s plot, there is a fissure, the hint of an interval and a difference of structure; of course, it is not truly...

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The "humaneness" of the future

The "humaneness" of the future--When I contemplate the present age with the eyes of some remote age, I can find nothing more remarkable in present-day humanity than its distinctive virtue and disease which goes by the name of "the historical sense."  This is the beginning of something altogether new and strange in history: If this seed should be given a few centuries and more, it might ultimately become a marvelous growth with an equally marvelous scent that might make our old earth more agreeable to live on.  We of the present day are only just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful future feeling, link for link--we hardly know what we are doing.  It almost seems to us as if it were not a matter of a new feeling but rather a decrease in all old feelings; the historical sense is still so poor and cold, and many people are attacked by it as by a frost and made still poorer and colder.  To others it appears as a sign of stealthily approaching old age, and they see our planet as a melancholy invalid who wants to forget his present condition and therefore writes the history of his youth.  This is actually one color of this new feeling:  Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend.  But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit--an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility--the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one's soul with all of this--the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling--this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars!  This godlike feeling would then be called--humaneness.  

La Gaya Scienza, Nietzsche, Book Four, 337

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janealbertson:

thesmolderingscreen responded: 

While this notion is poetic and certainly well-suited to chess or anything game-theoretic, I think it might be an agonizing way to live life. The human brain (at least mine) can hardly parse the present, let alone an infinite array of...

Jane:    It is true that the potentialities are infinite if you are looking at each piece in a vacuum.  However, when you consider them in context, their movements are constrained by certain additional factors: the placement of other pieces on the board (yours and your opponent’s), the relation of the piece to the opponent’s king (end goal), various assumptions about human psychology (which may result in blindnesses or weaknesses in yourself or your opponent), what the rules allow and prohibit, etc.

What happens when you view the board - or any set of factors - as a whole is that the entire thing sort of takes a certain shape; future tendencies are impressed within the present.  It’s like when Donnie Darko sees the shafts of light/ether that show the path that a person will take through the present:

It is possible to see the whole like that as well, as a “thing” whose shape is determined by the current arrangement of the individual members, which have their own tendencies and relations to the whole.

Then, if you so desire, you can adjust the members within the space as necessary to achieve the end-shape you have in mind. 

--------------------

Wow.  Brilliantly said. 

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‎"No member of a verbal community can ever find words in the language that are neutral, exempt from the aspirations and evaluations of the other, uninhabited by the other's voice. On the contrary, he receives the word by the other's voice and it remains filled in that voice...His own intention finds a word already lived in." -Bakhtin

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I can't believe I did not know about this guy before today.

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damn I loved this girl ..

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I say: a flower!

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels, restoring perceptible breath to the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence.

...

What good is the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its almost complete and vibratory disappearance with the play of the word, however, unless there comes forth from it, without the bother of a nearby or concrete reminder, the pure notion. 

I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.  

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People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture that they were brought up in. People have attention spans of 5 seconds and as much depth as a glass of water

David Bowie  (via clonazepamm)

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mialjibe:

Ghost before breakfast (1928) [Vormittagsspuk], by Hans Richter (1888-1976).

The nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as “degenerate art”.

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I can't help but find something extremely interesting about this music video.  There is something schizophrenic about it, also something that would not be possible without Gaga's Fame Monster.  Something also not possible without Britney Spears:  the most internationally successful pop artist since Michael Jackson and Madonna, but also the one who has went nuts in the process.  Her insanity is less a function of her personality than of this generation.  Perhaps Lady Gaga and the digital-electronic-techno aesthetic is allowing expression of something unheard in pop music until now--perhaps still unheard of--only the stuttering is intelligible...

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Knowledge of Life: Thought and the Living

By Georges Canguilhem

To know is to analyze. This point is more easily stated than justified, for the attention every philosophy preoccupied with the problem of knowledge gives to the operations of knowing distracts it from the meaning of knowledge. At best, one responds to the latter problem by affirming the sufficiency and purity of knowledge. And yet, knowing only in order to know is hardly more sensible than eating in order to eat, killing in order to kill, or laughing in order to laugh, since it is at ' once an avowal-that knowledge must have a meaning-and a refusal to find in knowledge any meaning other than itself.

If knowledge is analysis, the matter is surely not to be left at that. To decompose, to reduce, to explain, to identify, to measure, to put into equations: all this must involve a benefit for intelligence, since, manifestly, it comes at the cost of enjoyment. One enjoys not the laws of nature but nature itself, not numbers but qualities, not relations but beings. And, all told, one does not live off knowledge. Vulgar? Perhaps. Blasphemous? But why? Must we believe that, because certain men dedicate themselves to a life of knowledge, man can only really live in and through science?

We accept far too easily that there exists a fundamental conflict between knowledge and life, such that their reciprocal aversion can lead only to the destruction of life by knowledge or to the derision of knowledge by life. We are then left with no choice except that between a crystalline (i.e., transparent and inert) intellectualism and a foggy (at once active and muddled) mysticism.

Now, the conflict is not between thought and life in man, but between man and the world in the human consciousness of life. Thought is nothing but a disentangling of man from the world that permits us to retreat from, to interrogate, and to doubt (to think is to weigh, etc.) in the face of obstacles that arise. In concrete terms, knowledge consists in the search for security via the reduction of obstacles; it consists in the construction of theories that proceed by assimilation. It is thus a general method for the direct or indirect resolution of tensions between man and milieu. Yet to define knowledge in this way is to find its meaning in its end, which is to allow man a new equilibrium with the world, a new form and organization of his life. It is not true that knowledge destroys life. Rather, knowledge undoes the experience of life, seeking to analyze its failures so as to abstract from it both a rationale for prudence (sapience, science, etc.) and, eventually, laws for success, in order to help man remake what life has made without him, in him, or outside of him. In consequence, it must be said that if thought and knowledge are inscribed within life so as to regulate it-as is the case with man-this very life cannot be the blind and stupid mechanical force that one likes to imagine when one contrasts it to thought. Besides, if it were mechanical it could be neither blind nor stupid. Only a being that searches for light can be blind; only a being that claims to signify can be stupid.

What light are we then so sure we are contemplating that we declare all eyes other than man's to be blind? What meaning are we so certain of having given to the life in us that we declare any behavior except our own gestures to be stupid? Doubtless, the animal cannot resolve all the problems we present to it, but this is because these problems are ours and not its own. Could man make a nest better than a bird, a web better than a spider? And if we look closely, does human thought manifest in its inventions an independence from the summons of need and the pressures of the milieu that would legitimate man's pity-tinged irony toward infrahuman living beings? Does not a specialist in technological problems tell us that "nobody has ever encountered a tool created wholly for a use yet to be found, on materials yet to be discovered? " l We ask that one reflect on this: as ruptures with simple life, religion and art are just as specifically human as is scienceyet what sincerely religious spirit, what authentically creative artist pursuing the transfiguration of life, has ever used his effort as a pretext to depreciate life? Whether because he has lost it or, more exactly, because he senses that other beings possess it, what man is searching for is an unproblematic agreement between exigencies and realities-an experience whose solid, definitive unity would be guaranteed by the ongoing enjoyment derived from it. Religion and art point him toward this, but knowledge, so long as it refuses to recognize that it is part and not judge, instrument and not commandment, distances him from it. From there it follows that man sometimes marvels at the living and sometimes, scandalized at being himself a living being, forges for his own use the idea of a separate kingdom.

Even if knowledge is the daughter of human fear (astonishment, anxiety, etc.), it would not be very insightful to convert this fear into an irreducible aversion to the condition of beings that experience fear in the crises they must overcome so long as they live. If knowledge is the daughter of fear, this is for the domination and organization of human experience, for the freedom of life .

Thus, the universal relation o f human knowledge to living organization reveals itself through the relation of knowledge to human life. Life is the formation of forms; knowledge is the analysis of in-formed matter. It is normal that an analysis could never explain a formation and that one loses sight of the originality of forms when one sees them only as results whose causes or components are to be determined. Because they are totalities whose sense resides in their tendency to realize themselves as such in the course of their confrontation with their milieu, living forms can be grasped in a vision, never by a division. It almost seems that, in keeping with its etymology, to divide is to make a void [vide] , whereas a form existing only as a whole could not be voided of anything. "Biology," says Kurt Goldstein, "has to do with individuals that exist and tend to exist, that is to say, seek to realize their capacities as best they can in a given environment."2

These affirmations do not involve any prohibition. The determination and measurement of the effect of such and such a mineral on the growth of an organism, the establishment of a measure of energy expenditure,3 the pursuit of the chemical synthesis of a suprarenal hormone, the search for laws for the conduction of nervous influx or the conditioning of reflex-who could seriously think of holding all this in contempt? Yet, on its own, all this hardly amounts to biological knowledge, so long as an awareness of the meaning of the corresponding functions is lacking. The biological study of alimentation does not consist solely in establishing a balance sheet, but in seeking, within the organism itself, the sense of the organism's choicewhen free in its milieu-to seek sustenance in such and such species or essences while excluding others that could, theoretically speaking, procure it equivalent energetic provisions for its maintenance and growth. The biological study of movement begins only when one takes into consideration the orientation of the movement, for only then can it distinguish a vital movement from a physical movement, tendency from inertia. As a general rule, analytically obtained knowledge can influence biological thought only when it is informed by reference to an organic existence grasped in its totality. According to Goldstein, "what biology in general believes to be the basis of its body of knowledge, the 'facts,' becomes the most problematic," for only the representation of totality permits us to attribute value to established facts by distinguishing those which have a real relation to the organism from those which are insignificant to it.4 In his own manner, Claude Bernard expresses an analogous idea:

In physiology, that analysis, which teaches us the properties of isolated elementary parts, can never give us more than a most incomplete ideal synthesis . . . . We must therefore always proceed experimentally in vital synthesis, because quite characteristic phenomena may result from more and more complex union or association of organized elements. All this proves that these elements, though distinct and self-dependent, do not therefore play the part of simple associates; their union expresses more than addition of their separate properties. s

But in these propositions we find the wavering that is habitual in Bernard's thought: on the one hand, he senses the inadequacy of analytical thought to any biological object; on the other, he remains fascinated by the prestige of the physico-chemical sciences, which he hoped biology would come to resemble, believing it would thus better ensure the success of medicine.

For our part, we think that a reasonable rationalism must know to recognize its limits and to incorporate the conditions of its practice. Intelligence can apply itself to life only if it recognizes the originality of life. The thought of the living must take from the living the idea of the living. Goldstein says: "it is evident that no matter how much [the biologist] employs the analytical method for obtaining real knowledge, for real insight into the depths of nature the departure from the 'immediately given' will always dominate."6 We suspect that, to do mathematics, it would suffice that we be angels. But to do biology, even with the aid of intelligence, we sometimes need to feel like beasts ourselves.7