discursivities

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Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that 'I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will.

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

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Baudrillard speaks of a control that goes far deeper than we are aware of or want to admit. Control through exchange. (Commodity & sign exchange) Exchange as control. For human societies exchange is order. This is why the natural events like death, disease, and the disasters caused by natural forces are repressed and feared by modern societies. They cannot be controlled through exchange. Magic tries to do this, or pretends to do it, and power resides in the kingly priest who make others believe it can control the uncontrollable. The paradigm shift from the “primitive” Giving - Sharing - Exchanging to; Killing -Possessing - Devouring.

Paul Adkin on Symbolic Exchange and Death

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[T]he entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archaeology that does not regress to a historical past but returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living.

Giorgio Agamben | ‘What Is the Contemporary?’ (via totalityandopacity)

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Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the (First) World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections  (via nemophilies)

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By their exceptional faculty for knowledge, human beings, while giving meaning, value and reality to the world, at the same time begin a process of dissolution (‘to analyse’ means literally ‘to dissolve’).

Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (via ofresonance)

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Hegel describes this [utilitarianism] as the relentless consumerism that appropriates, manipulates, and exploits the last shred of objectivity, including that of the social world. The human community will be reduced to a collective survival mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle dedicated to the rule of maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or “troop” (Trupp) rampaging like animals in the garden of Eden - Hegel’s startling anticipation of Nietzsche’s description of utilitarianism as a herd morality. “One hand washes the other” (PhG §560). Hegel darkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is a thinly veiled defense against what lies beyond the pleasure principle. This is why utilitarianism is a slave ideology: I learn to wait. I pace my pleasure, I dilute it, I diversify it, I experiment with it, I count it, I parcel it into bite-sized units, I want it to last forever, I make use of the world so as to curb my own unappeasable desire to consume it, to destroy it, to use it up. The utilitarian social contract is therefore designed to produce a maximum of happiness: it tries to give a term or measure to desire, to prolong pleasure within “natural” limits, which amounts to reducing it to the thinnest terms of self-preservation: pleasure can be enhanced only by stretching it out into the empty bad infinite self-reproduction - sheer animal survival. “’Measure’ or proportion has the function of preventing pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short; i.e., the function of ‘measure’ is immoderation” (PhG §560).

Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness, p. 67.

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The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and strange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its object – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.

adorno, from the last essay in minima moralia (via index-rerum)

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Data-driven identity systems perpetuate the social significance of categories while removing the negotiation of what any category means from the social, interpersonal sphere, placing them instead in opaque, private systems. Users trying to fulfill the norms of these categories have little choice but to provide more data to try to meet the moving targets. And, as Cheney-Lippold argues, “there is no fidelity to notions of our individual history and self-assessment” in the way the black-box algorithms classify us. The way we are classified is kept classified, and shifts depending on the context and what the algorithmic system is asked to do. Who we are depends on what is going to be done with us. Just as we don’t know how these systems calculate our identity and rank it for various purposes, we often don’t know why either. This means they can be used behind our back to mark us as persons of interest to police and border agents, or to single us out as an insurance risk or for other categorical forms of discrimination without any human agents having direct knowledge. They can render certain concatenations of data to be normal and others to be deviant and socially disqualifying. These machine-learned prejudices may not even have human names, which makes it harder for people to unite and fight against them. The labels cannot be reclaimed as principles of solidarity. Unmappable to any pre-existing social category, these submerged, unseen identities in theory can be pushed into the social world and made reflexive there. In other words, the systems can invent races, and perpetuate the logic of racism: that it is “rational” to seek data patterns about populations and make them overt and socially salient, definitive for those so identified. On an individual level, bespoke discrimination by algorithm may make it impossible to know when and why one is being excluded or singled out. “Who we are and what who we are means online is given to us,” Cheney-Lippold claims. “We are forced to exist on a ‘territory of the self’ both foreign and unknown, a foundation of subjective integrity that is structurally uneven.”

Rob Horning, “Sick of Myself”

( http://reallifemag.com/sick-of-myself/ )

@feralvoiid

(via kissingerandpals)

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In a time of verbal inflation, “fascism” is just a buzz word used by leftists to demonstrate their radicalism. But its use indicates both a confusion and a theoretical concession to the State and to Capital. The essence of antifascism consists of struggling against fascism while supporting democracy; in other words, of struggling not for the destruction of capitalism, but to force capitalism to renounce its totalitarian form. Socialism being identified with total democracy, and capitalism with the growth of fascism, the opposition proletariat/Capital, communism/wage labour, proletariat/State, is shunted aside in favour Of the opposition “democracy”/“Fascism”, presented as the quintessence of the revolutionary perspective. Antifascism succeeds only in mixing two phenomena: “Fascism” properly so-called, and the evolution of Capital and the State towards totalitarianism. In confusing these two phenomena, in substituting the part for the whole, the cause of Fascism and totalitarianism is mystified and one ends up reinforcing what one seeks to combat.

Jean Barrot, Fascism/Antifascism (via forestrebel)

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Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

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Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

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Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.

Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas. (via kuanios)

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Bodies and machines are defined by function: as long as they operate correctly, they remain imperceptible; they become a part of the process of perception, as the extension of the action that engages the Self with the world.[1]In a world defined by efficiency, the infallible performance of bodies and systems is often taken for granted. So, what happens when failure occurs?Then the transparency (of the body, of the object) is being removed and we can finally see and sense what it actually is. A broken pencil goes back to being wood and lead –rather than a tool that inscribes our thoughts on paper; a crashed computer becomes arrays of code, software and coloured light on the screen, rather than an interface that imitates reality.The true nature of the machine –and the wilderness hidden underneath the orderly surface- suddenly makes itself evident through a glitch.[2] A glitch is a rupture in information flow, which forces the digital file out of its flawless hyperrealistic design to a reality of randomness and imperfection.

“The wilderness in the machine”: Glitch and the poetics of error | CHRISTINA GRAMMATIKOPOULOU « Interartive | Contemporary Art + Thought (via overcoding)

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia