ONTOSAURUS

2011-04-10T02:03:00.000-07:00

typical London bathroom

2011-03-31T16:35:00.001-07:00

Franz Rosenzweig suffered from the muscular degenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) and towards the end of his life had to write with the help of his wife Edith, who would recite letters of the alphabet until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended (or, at other times, Rosenzweig would point to the letter on the plate of his typewriter). They also developed a system based on him blinking his eyes.

Rosenzweig's final attempt to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: "And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—". The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night of December 10, 1929, in Frankfurt, the sentence left unfinished.

2011-03-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

For the last eight years, this was the governor of my state. What does this mean?

2011-03-17T15:02:00.001-07:00

the other side of something, articulately bombs through roads, twisting its nonsense beak, against the noon rise

2011-03-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight I listened to a recording of a Malek class circa 2008. The best part might have been the 5-minute pizza break:

Nathan Schradle: Maybe a cow died in a way that was inhumane to make this pizza, but it's delicious pizza.

Alex Wolf: It's very tasty Bestand.

2011-03-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

The example is first of all for others, and beyond the self. Sometimes, perhaps always, whoever gives the example is not equal to the example he gives, even if he does everything to follow it in advance, "to learn how to live," as we were saying, imperfect example of the example he gives--which he gives by giving then what he has not and even what he is not. For this reason, the example thus disjoined separates enough from itself or from whoever gives it so as to be no longer or not yet example for itself. We do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx--who died to this even before being dead--in order to inherit it: to inherit this or that, this rather than that which comes to us nevertheless by him, through him if not from him. And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself. ("What is certain is that I am not a Marxist," he is supposed to have confided to Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority to say likewise?) For Blanchot does not hesitate to suggest that Marx had difficulty living with this disjunction of the injunctions within him and with the fact that they were untranslatable into each other. How is one to receive, how is one to understand a speech, how is one to inherit it when it does not let itself be translated from itself to itself? This may appear impossible. And, we have to acknowledge, it is probably impossible. But since this sums up perhaps the strange subject of this lecture devoted to the specters of Marx, as well as to the avowed distortion of its axiom, permit me then to turn the objection around. Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their absolute forms, this is surely (certainly, a priori and not probably) what renders the injunction, the inheritance, and the future--in a word, the other--impossible. There must be disjunction, interruption, the heterogeneous if at least there must be, if there must be a chance given to any "there must be" whatsoever, be it beyond duty.

- Derrida, Specters of Marx

2011-03-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

Edward Said mentions at least 'three remarkable witnesses of Gaza':

Amira Hass, Sara Roy, and Gloria Emerson.

2011-03-07T15:16:00.001-08:00

Play that funky music, Jewish boy

2011-03-02T18:56:00.000-08:00

Leonard Cohen sings, or rather recites, his sexual past as if he were an art historian talking about his favorite painters of the baroque. Cohen does not sing, or he sings in a near-monotone, a murmur so slow that it is profane, as if to actively communicate the fact that he is a novelist and a poet, a failed novelist turned musician. He deflates a traditional mode of the love song with a kind of dismissive spiritual detachedness, the detachedness of a Buddhist, a Jewish Buddhist, or, as my aunt says, a 'Jew-Bu' (he is one of the few musicians to devote his life entirely to Buddhism at one point).

Whereas the white Africanist male singer would croon for the woman, his words the evidence of the irrational sacrifices he makes for the object of his desires, the Jewish balladeer, epitomized by Cohen and Bob Dylan, approaches the situation differently. Jews are still not white, try as we might, or, as Hannah Arendt put it, 'there is no escaping Jewishness' (and Jewishness is not, Judith Butler points out, the same as Judaism). Both Cohen and Dylan have not tried to escape their Jewishness, and this has been part of the key to their enormous success. There is a poetic moment to their sonic fictions, a theoretical aspect to their sonorous mobility, which can be traced back to the exegetical and the Talmud.

This is not to say that a Jew, someone like Neil Diamond, perhaps, is incapable of writing, and presenting him or herself, in a thoroughly non-Jewish mode, or that a non-Jew is incapable of displaying an intense Jewish influence. The description of an aesthetic, or, as Susan Sontag would say, of a sensibility, must allow for an articulation of the ways in which the sensibility, the movement, has moved, itself, through cultures, rubbing against others.

Bugsy (1991)

2011-02-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Bugsy Siegel is a fascinating character, and Warren Beatty did an incredible job of portraying him, especially for a gentile. Annette Bening is amazing as his love interest, and she is even more cruel and insane than he is.

What a bizarre episode in American history. Jewish gangsters, exiled to LA by anti-semitism, build Las Vegas. I think the reason Jews finally made it out of the ghetto is because they are brilliant at understanding the secret desires of white people. Secret, often shameful desires: money, sex, power, fame...just look at Al Goldstein or Howard Stern. Like Siegel, they realize that people will do anything to satisfy their guilty pleasures. And the creation of institutions or monuments to filth and excess creates, in turn, demand for such things.

Here's a beautiful, hilarious snippet from Wikipedia:

Siegel lost patience with the rising costs [of building the Flamingo Hotel], and his notorious outbursts unnerved his construction foreman. Reputedly, Siegel told him, "Don't worry — we only kill each other."

Remnants of Auschwitz

2011-02-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

"...the specific ethical aporia of Auschwitz: it is the site in which it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not"

"perhaps never before Auschwitz was the shipwreck of dignity in the face of an extreme figure of the human and the uselessness of self-respect before absolute degradation so effectively described"

"...Auschwitz marks the end and ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It is itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent"

"...what defines the camp is not simply the negation of life... neither death nor the number of victims in any way exhausts the camp's horror...the dignity offended in the camp is not that of life but rather of death"

"In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production"

"...the decisive function of the camps in the system of Nazi biopolitics. They are not merely the place of death and extermination; they are also, and above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical subtance to be idolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber"

2011-02-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

"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 their morality when we write" - Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge

2011-02-14T19:00:00.001-08:00

James Baldwin wrote that the idea of happiness, in the American experience, is a post-war, tragic illusion. The pursuit of happiness, a small phrase which has been turned into a hegemonic ideal, is, for him, the pursuit of a life without pain, without discord, distinguished only by the steady accumulation of wealth.

Joy, however, is a very real thing, an effervescent eruption that can occur in the most apocalyptic of circumstances. The young men in the video come from one of the most violent parts of the United States. Dancing on the corner where their friend was shot to death, one is wearing the suit he wore to the funeral. They've just witnessed, once more, one of the most glaring contradictions of the American dream, one of the greatest failures of capitalism. But the most sinister question on their minds, the question which they try to ignore, is does capitalism rely, for its smooth operation, on the murder of their friends?

Privatization, globalization, neoliberalism, late capitalism: all of these processes operate by means of what Bataille called the restricted economy. The restricted economy restricts flows of capital even as it persistently expands flows of people and resources. It agglomerates by mobilizing mechanisms of deprivation: there is no privation without deprivation. These images were taken in one of the most deprived places in the First World, because East Oakland has suffered not only from a paranoid white flight but also from a recent black flight, so that those left behind are only those who are forced to stay.

There is no happiness in East Oakland. It would be stupid to call its inhabits 'happy,' on the whole. But there is a joy which bubbles and boils over in moments of art such as these and in its vibrant musical sensibility.

2011-02-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche wants a therapeutic thinking. A truly alien idea to our world of Ritalin and self-medication. A developed country with developed illnesses. Nietzsche says that thought itself is therapy, and an irreplaceable one, because one of the most insidious illnesses is the illness of ressentiment. The illness of the sheep who decides that the bird of prey is evil, that the bird of prey eats the sheep out of malice, and begins to say it is unjust that the bird of prey eats the sheep.

Ressentiment - the re-sentiment, the apparation of a sentiment when it is no longer needed. The compulsion to repeat, and a simultaneous inability to cope with repetition. The shock at the return of the sentiment, a shock which repeats itself.

Bataille, in the next century, thought that the thinking of waste might be the most therapeutic thinking. But therapeutic might not be the right word any longer, embroiled as it is in the politics of risk-management (Cf. the films of Adam Curtis). The thinking of waste brings life about, allows for life and virility to bloom in the way Nietzsche argued for. It is the ressentiment of this blooming that, in Altizer, makes the Christian church Satanic: the church has turned in on itself, or turned against the teachings of Jesus, in trying to prevent life from flowering, in trying to shut down effervescence through self-punishment. The church does this for profit.

So the thinking of waste is at once against the church and against the state, although it is not necessarily atheistic. It asks what it could mean to believe after the death of God. To be religious without the church.

The thinking of waste can release us from ressentiment. In a state of peace, there is no more common crime than spousal abuse. A man feels as if his attention, and his affection, toward his beloved has been a waste. She, let's say she's a woman, does not merit his affections, because these affections do not appreciate into currency. This currency is whatever the man has been seeking, and the woman may be unable to give it, or the man may be unable to accept it. It could be that she gives it freely, and he does not recognize its worth, or it could be that she cannot give it. If he does not recognize its worth he does not recognize her, nor does he recognize the relational character of their relationship.

The relational lives in the excessive. That is to say, there is no relationship--between peoples, between nations, between organisms--without the unnecessary or accidental exchange. This encompasses the gift and the tragedy at once. You hear about the natives, the 'savages,' giving gifts to the Europeans, and you hear about the Europeans trading with the natives to receive more. This is the difference between a relationship and a conquest: giving and trading. Relation and extraction, exuberance and privation.

Men are told that women are to be conquered. But part of us knows that if we approach them in this way that it will end up like colonialism ends up. We must reject the logic of equal exchange, even as we accept the logic of equal rights with women. If women are our equals, that still does not mean that a relationship will consist of even, rational transactions. It cannot. If I give a woman something: a compliment, a favor, a gift, and my intention is, directly, to get something from her, to acquire her sex, I'm sabotaging myself, because the sex is deprived of its value. It is deprived of value as it is assigned a value: the price of a bouquet of flowers, the price of a thoughtful compliment. For if this banality is its value it is inadequate: rationally, I ought to find another woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Prada bag. And then she, again, is inferior to the woman who will not sleep with me until I buy her a Rolls Royce. And so on...

This logic of banal escalation is a motor of capitalism. The reduction of men to objects of money is just as integral to its functioning as the reduction of women to body parts on billboards, although it reduces them to utility just as easily.

I'm not ENTIRELY Comfortable with being human

2011-02-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

First Violence: July 30th 1987--I didn't ask to be born.
Second Violence: Happy Birthday--was I born in a year, on a day, at a moment?
Third Violence(s): "Celebrating Birthdays is trite." ('Happy Birthday!')--"you're welcome"!

2011-01-29T02:46:00.000-08:00

The night began with some of the most ambiguous words in the language: "I'll text you."

And I think it ended with the words "don't go liking me or anything."

This is where machines intervene. Robots have no feelings, but they carry and distribute intimacy. Identity lives in databases and your heart moves there when you don't think about it.

Love becomes an automatic piloting mechanism, like the mind that actually keeps an airplane upright, a computer. You enter a connection and recognize its flaws, its weak points, its liabilities and greatest assets, and then you power it without working. One disturbance here affects something across the world. One change of lighting, one word, changes the entire arrangement. Love is a matter of balancing pressures, finding media, finding that one is medial, mediating between and without.

A medicated generation

2011-01-15T17:31:00.001-08:00

Can you (begin to) explain these statistics?

2011-01-06T08:03:00.001-08:00

Many ignored causes...

Oakland, CA: population 399,000
London, England: population 7.5 million

In 2009, London had 15 murders.
Oakland had more than 100 (the SF Chronicle website on the topic is no longer updated...)

Xei the Ghost & Supa Ape

2010-12-26T03:59:00.004-08:00

micro hip hop

The pneumacosm: a softer, warmer machine

2010-12-17T07:16:00.000-08:00

ke: These days there are a lot of amazing r&b productions. I watch a lot of mtv and there are all these r&b artists like Ginuwine, Missy Elliot, tlc and Timbaland Productions. You listen to them and they are all processed, a bit fast, a bit android, The rhythms are very stop-start, they judder, they falter. The register is very trebly... When I was writing my book this had not started yet, so if I'd be writing it now I'd include a huge section on r&b. I'm currently preparing a long piece about Androids in r&b. It's all about the new-style r&b, which has totally changed itself and moved over the border to the posthuman. It's not posthuman in the Underground Resistance/techno sense. It's not militant. It's inside love, it's a softer, warmer machine.

dvw In their video clips they depict themselves as successful citizens, defined by their surrounding objects and architecture. They are defined by the space; architectural surroundings designed especially for the clip.

ke: That's Hype Williams, the director of video clips for Busta Rhymes/Janet Jackson, TLC and Missy Elliot, who also gave them their animatronic cyborg look. He's always using this fisheye lens, so everything always has this anamorphic look, and the aspect I like is that this relates muscular tension to the environment. So when they dance in the video, the whole space dances with them, or when Missy Elliot blows off a kiss the whole image kisses you as well. Everything they do, their whole world does with them. So he has managed to make this total intimate relationship between muscular effect and world. I relate it to this sixties architectural concept of the pneumocosm. Groups like Coop Himmelblau designed all these pneumatic structures, like the inflatable buildings in Woody Allen's Sleeper. In the Pneumatic Cosmos, each gesture you made, no matter how small, would instantly be transmitted throughout the entire environment you are in. Like the sixties dream where your room would be a heartbeat, where your heartbeat would be instantly transmitted into the room you're in, so that your room would have the sensitivity of your heart. A complete collapse of interior and exterior space. When I look at Hype Williams I see that thing as well; the tiniest movement Missy Elliot makes is transmitted throughout the entire space. The closeness and softness of it; the kind of intimate technology you'll also find in William Gibson's work. When I watch r&b I can clearly see the same tendency towards touch, towards liquidity and new forms of computer love. Zapp, Roger Trautman, a big producer from la who just died, is very important in my book because of his tracks More Bounce to the Ounce and Computer Love. These are like r&b before r&b in the early eighties, but they promote this idea of soft love. It's like going back to Burroughs' Soft Machine, but taking the terror away from it and re-interpreting it as this intimate love. That's why I got obsessed with human-robot sex. r&b seems to be preparing us for this. This aspect of r&b fascinates me because it shows a kind of cyborg aspiration that isn't overtly avant-gardist. It's not terrorising or traumatising at all. It's intimate and it's clinging.

dvw: The weird thing is that it's supposed to do something about alienation. It's singing about getting closer, but in doing so it radicalises a lot of alienating principles, which are also liberating.

ke: Steve Beard and I went to a showing of Crash and the novelist Ian Sinclair, who had just written an introduction to Crash, was quoting Ballard. Ballard, who was such a key figure for us, was saying that you always have to access inconceivable alienations - alienations that previous eras didn't even think of - and that you have to go through them. This made a big impression on us all over again. So then we saw Crash, the movie, and it was completely reduced to these extreme sexual encounters in crashes. But after we watched it we couldn't remember anything about it. Crash has this aggressive amnesia quality, this positive quality of forgetting that we were really amazed by. We would relate it to Nietzsche's concept of this active forgetting, where it is useful to forget whole stretches of history in order to move forward. But R&B, too, has this a lot. Sometimes an r&b clip is really memorable and really forgetful at the same time. You think, Oh my God, this is really incredible! and then it falls out of your head. This also has something to do with the fact that it doesn't really access all the familiar points of the classic avant-garde life. They don't have any interest in this whole way of talking.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/5703/en

2010-12-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

I don't talk to my boyfriends. That's why people think I am weird back home. One of the reasons, at least. They want me to talk to them more than I want to talk to them. The girls are supposed to want emotions, but not me. I want romance and all that, but I don't like when they are so needy! They want to possess me then, when I let them be needy. They give me needy face. Like a little boy who wants a toy and it is not sexy. Then I can't feel anything for them anymore.

So I meet nice Western guys. Australian, French, English. They think that China is just a big pile of sex and money for them. Not much different from their grandparents. They say they come for English jobs, but they really come to get paid and laid. Sleep with so many girls. But we are happy because they are something different. Not as traditional, not as controlling. Gives us something to look forward to besides the same thing every day.

---

Since my cell phone bill came I have thought about telemarketing again. Mom yells at me every night 'I am paying your college bills so you pay your phone bill!' but it is shit right now in jobs. Nobody can get them. And when you do, serve chicken to people all night, get covered in oil and grease, and make 40 quid a week. When there's guys in the neighborhood making ten times that by selling pills to white kids.

My cousin works a nice job across the river but he looks like a punk wearing his suit every day. Not to mention that he has no friends anymore. He gets on the train at 8 every morning and comes back at 7 or so, and when there's snow it's later, and his boss makes him stay later a lot because he has to 'make his mark.' He says it will all be worth it but he don't even believe himself.

---

I meet a guy from the US. I say in my head 'I would do him.' He is a nice guy, but not right away. I'm more curious about him than anything else.

I told him about how scared I am of the black people around here. He is from US so I think he might know something. Why are they always looking at me like that? When white guy sees me, I don't think he thinks bad things, but I know that black guys does. I am sitting in a large lecture and the black guy keeps looking at me. I know they are violent and I don't want to walk by myself, even during the day! The American guy says I am paranoid, that I should act like I am not scared. But then black guy might see that as an invitation, like I am slut. I am more vulnerable.

But I am not afraid of being raped. I know there is nothing I can do then. I told him that I am ready to be raped and it is not a problem. He says that's crazy and he doesn't believe me. But really there are worse things, like back home, that I won't tell him about.

deep, baroque, requires multiple listenings

2010-11-30T14:29:00.000-08:00

Fred Moten on Kant

Truth is a woman?

2010-02-09T13:33:00.001-08:00

the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nor anything of woman. Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not.

- Jacques Derrida

2010-01-16T21:51:00.001-08:00

"college instruction is a brand of popular culture; the universities are poorly run mass media." - Sontag, Sept. 1956

Message to the free world

2009-12-15T23:09:00.000-08:00

If you don't stop
(This is a warning)
Someone's gonna lay in your bed
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna eat your food
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna wear your clothes
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna fit your shoes
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna get your keys
(This is a warning)
And someone's gonna open your doors
(This is a warning)
Someone's gonna get your check
(This is a warning)

2009-11-21T00:08:00.000-08:00

"This woman held in the fastness of her tomb the key to all of those mysteries he so longed to unlock. It was she who had known his father in a life where John was not, and in a country John had never seen. When he was nothing, nowhere, dust, cloud, air, and sun, and falling rain, not even thought of, said his mother, in Heaven with the angels, said his aunt, she had known his father, and shared his father's house. She had loved his father. She had known his father when lightning flashed and thunder rolled through Heaven." - Go Tell it on the Mountain

My cousin once told me that everybody feels like a reject, because in some way or another, during the history of their social maturation, they are a reject, for some reason or another. This is the origin of their feeling "different," and the origin of the pathologizing of difference in general..

In any case, one of my many differences (from the idea of a norm, not from any real average) is that I was raised almost exclusively by women. This separated me from all the private school kids I knew, most of whom (at least, of those who had straight parents) had a father in their lives.

At his very best, he was a confidant to his children, somebody who could be trusted and understood and forgave his children for their imperfections without encouraging them to do better. To be mensches, as my grandmother says.

At his worst, which seemed, unfortunately, more common, the wealthy white liberal father would be a kind of emblem of success, a seal of approval for their children once they were old enough to build a resume. He was a deadbeat with a great reputation, a man who shared a house with a family he barely knew and a woman he had once, maybe, enjoyed sex with. When they were grown, his children often didn't harbor resentment or love towards him any more than most workers do toward their boss. They saw him as a useful contact, a convenient person to know. The paradox of his wealth was the fact that he often did not have time to spend with his children and family, all of his time having been already converted into money.

This was not necessarily the case with the children who had less money, whose dads were schoolteachers or worked at nonprofits...some of these dads had sacrificed money for time. And it was not always the case with the wealthiest kids, some of whom had dads who had made a lot of money and were in the process of opting-out of enormous amounts of work, because they wanted to be able to get to know their kids and wife. But there is an unfortunate world between these two, one we could call the petit-bourgeois or managerial class lifestyle. This is the home of striving, as Dale Wright might say. A world defined by the sensation and the intense fear of inadequacy and scarcity.

So I had many fathers, and I was lucky enough for them to have been good role models. One day at the grocery store near our house, my mom met the manager of the store and within a few weeks he was babysitting me and taking me places. This says a lot about her trusting nature, which I like to think was more wisdom than naivete, and it also says a lot about him. He escaped rural Iowa and a drunken, abusive father. One time he showed me pictures of his family growing him, him and his siblings standing by a tractor. The picture was brown and grainy, he was trying to make a muscle out of his scrawny arm, and I realized I had never met white folks like those before--poor ones, ones with fathers who abused them directly rather than in absentia. He told me that he didn't see a black person until college. Leaving rural Iowa and everybody you know and love must not have been easy. He left in terms of geography, economics, culture, and also morality. He owned a head shop in Ohio, going against his upbringing in almost every conceivable way. This is a rebellion that created a situation against which I do not need to rebel. And thanks to his courage, I had a father figure at a young age.

2009-11-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

We spend our days fighting the ghost of failure, the failure that our parents tell us about, that lives on the other side of town and in the history books, and in the back of our grandparent's eyes. We are afraid, almost exclusively, of underachievement, underqualifying, and this spurs our quest for accolades.

But what about being overqualified? When do we prepare ourselves for the feeling of being too well-prepared, so well-prepared that we are unable to do the work we are presented with? Where do these qualifications go?

The scholar

2009-11-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.thaformula.com/doc_ruthless_to_death_row_thaformula_music.html

D.O.C., the guy who ghost-wrote verses which defined the California gangsta sound, from Eazy E to Dr. Dre, says "I've never really been a street kinda dude. I'm more of a thinker."

Here's an excerpt:

"I was always a reader as a young kid. I was never outside in the streets sellin' this doing that. I used to read books, that's what I did. I actually read books so that I could trick my parents into thinkin' that I was going to school and shit. But once I got to the West Coast, it was just such a thrill to be in California. I had been to L.A. as a kid or young child, but as an adult I had never been to L.A., so my vibe was so great I was putting songs together in fuckin' 5 minutes back then. I can't remember one rap I wrote that Eazy didn't love, and muthafuckas in L.A. from Dre's relatives to Eazy's relatives to Cube's friends didn't love. Muthafuckas were like, "Doc you the shit!" Once they came in like that it was hard for me to come back to Texas because Texas never showed me that kind of love."

Nietzschean Note

2009-10-30T03:20:00.000-07:00

Jack Canfield is the major contemporary self-help sage, and he has published several dozen books since the 1970's. He's created an enormous franchise entitled "Chicken Soup for the Soul," which has generated over $1.3 Billion in branded merchandise. Chicken soup, just like his grandmother used to make, but for the soul, not the body.

What better example of the Nietzschean priest could there possibly be? Like chicken soup, the priest's teachings are intended for invalids. And like chicken soup, the religion of the priest does not actually address the cause of the illness--rather, it assuages the symptom, allowing the invalids to accept and reaffirm their illnesses, but to go on living with the illusion of health.

Mr. Canfield's son, Oran, has written a tell-all memoir about his days of living in flophouses and rehab centers, strung out on heroin, finally pulling his life together after several years of living on the edge. Here's a nice excerpt:

Over 9,000 people on ED

2009-10-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the website http://encyclopediadramatica.com

It is one of the most consistently perverse, offensive, stupid, inane websites ever made, but it is designed and maintained in an erudite, careful way. Its perversion and obnoxiousness is rationalized by its thousands of readers by its sense of humor: anything and everything is fair ground for vulgar satire.

Encyclopedia Dramatica says a lot of stuff that isn't funny, because it goes way too far in belittling people who probably have very little to do with the readership or the authors (women, blacks, etc.). It would be much funnier if it didn't alienate huge segments of the population by being assholes to them, because then they could be involved with it. There is a difference between racy jokes and the resentful ill will betrayed by the commentary on blacks and women on ED. Too much of it is nearly devoid of humor, like this snarky little sub-article:

Apparently, if you're racist towards an African-American, you'll most likely lose your job and get involved in a lawsuit.
HOWEVER, if a nigger is racist towards a whitey, you can't do a damn thing about it, Obama is a perfect example of this hypocritical duality. But if you DO decide to, everyone will just say "Who gives a fuck?". Because no one really cares.
ANY QUESTIONS?

The commentary on women shows more resentment than ignorance. The authors have a bone to pick with women, and to shove down their throats. I remember this mentality from middle school: women are worthless, treat them like shit and you're on the right track. This is the idea of a vulnerable little boy, who too often never grows up and lives inside the mind of a middle-aged man. Vulnerable little boys, which are all little boys, feel like they've lost over a decade of their lives not fucking beautiful women. They feel like they're investing with debt when they enter the sexual arena, and it's women's fault for not fucking them thus far. And the less successful they are, the more resentful they get that women aren't taking pity on them, or if they are, that their pity does not lead to sex. And sometimes even if they do get laid, they're annoyed that this doesn't translate into a non-relationship with a slave who does your bidding because she's scared of being called a slut.

Resentful thought patterns lead young men away from women, and away from IRL (In Real Life) socializing in general, and toward the wonderful world of video games, computers, forums, anime, movies, popular culture, etc. The men who isolate themselves in this world engage in increasingly speculative conversation about women and blacks and whoever else is not part of their virtual world. This is why if the authors of ED left their rooms more often, listened to women, visited other neighborhoods, their site would be both funnier and more true to life.

I really hope that one of them reads this blog post and makes a page about how I'm a "fucktarded Jewfag." I haven't even started praising them yet.

If ED makes you smile or laugh, it is more than likely that you fall within a certain age group (15-30), race (white or asian), gender (male), and that you, at the very least, have nerd leanings. I pass these tests, so sometimes it does make me laugh. If it were narrowed down to a single maneuver, its funniest asset is its ability to produce, digest, and recycle memes, making them, in a few hours or days, into something truly grotesque and absurd. Here's a good example:

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Over_9%2C000#Over_9.2C000_penises_on_Oprah

Oprah makes a statement about "9,000 penises" supposedly poised to rape your children. The irony-mongers at Encyclopedia Dramatica take it and run with it. This was for me a great example of semi-political commentary on their part: this is an example of Oprah being idiotic in the way that the mainstream media tends to be--overemphasizing irrelevant and often marginal dangers in order to get ratings--and ED recognized that and lampooned it.

This article is more controversial, and I didn't read it without wincing, but I also thought it was funny. I guess it's because, as a Jew, I think it's clear that there are too few Jew jokes today, which is a bad sign. Also I think a lot of contributors to ED are probably Jewish, and that's why Jew (like on South Park) becomes acceptable to joke about.

Interrogating Torture: Heidegger

2009-10-11T14:43:00.001-07:00

A properly Heideggerian analysis proceeds to the true ‘by means of what is correct’ (QCT 6). This approach finds in everyday common sense a particular attitude towards the question of being – through it we access the manner in which the world is made present to us, and at the same time access history that reveals the singularity of such a comportment toward things. So in considering torture, it is fitting to begin by staking out the terms in which it is presently discussed. What is the correct way to talk about it? For this we look to arguments given ‘for and against’ torture, the first by President Obama and the second by former Vice President Dick Cheney. These speeches were delivered almost simultaneously on May 21, 2009:

Obama: I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more… I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation…. they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.

Cheney: The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

What is taken for granted in this debate? What are its limits? Notice how both Obama and Cheney speak about torture in terms of its efficiency in ‘advancing our war and counterterrorism efforts,” and in “preventing the violent death of thousands…of innocent people.’ Both sides take for granted that the ultimate horizon for the validity of torture is its success in serving our national security interests. Accordingly, both consider torture a means to an end. That is why the debate around torture has waged within this narrow line of questioning: Do the enhanced interrogation techniques constitute torture according to its juridical definition? Are there circumstances wherein torture is justified? Do such techniques produce good, ‘actionable’ intelligence? Do the benefits of using such techniques outweigh the costs? Are they the best way to advance our counterterrorism interests?

This essay draws on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (enframing) in order to go past this level of questioning, whereby we attend to torture only on the basis of its effectiveness in meeting our discrete objectives. Instead we ask: How do we characterize a general comportment to the world that restrains our questioning of torture to an inquiry into its efficiency? What is our relationship to truth such that, when in a state of urgency, torture appears the most surefire means by which to access it? What is truth considered as intelligence?

Heidegger begins his Question Concerning Technology by interrogating the ‘correct’ definition of technology, which, like torture, treats it as a means to an end. This is what Heidegger calls “the instrumental” definition of technology, and we find the same definition of torture in both Obama and Cheney’s reflections. For Heidegger, the instrumental, ends and means, belongs to the broader consideration of causality. When viewed in relation to the Greek’s thinking of the four causes, causality becomes in turn a question of how things are brought forth into presence – a question of how things are made present to us[1]. “Technology is therefore no mere means,” he says, “technology is a way of revealing,” (12). Heidegger uses the word Gestell (enframing) to name this mode of revealing at work in technological instrumentality. Gestell is the manner in which technology reveals the world, makes it present to us. In translation, gestell (enframing) requires an exhaustive enumeration of approximate definitions, which required extensive footnotes from the editor. Herausfordern, literally ‘to demand out hither’ or ‘to challenge’ is one such approximation: “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such,” (14 QCT). In the same discussion, Heidegger says that gestell is “…a kind of setting-in-order…it sets upon in the sense of challenging…sets upon to yield…expedites in that it unlocks and exposes,” (14-15 QCT). All this language could easily be used to describe the manner of accessing truth at work in the torture under discussion. This truth is approached as something to be extracted from the detainees in the manner that we extract oil from the earth. Gestell may be alternatively described as a way of revealing the world through “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Gestell does not merely designate a comportment toward the physical world or toward information. It proclaims the manner in which the world is made present, which means that it is operative at the most fundamental level of phenomenal experience. Far from describing a simple relation, Enframing conditions what is present at any given time to relate to in the first place. Man is not the arbiter of revealing or the source of enframing. As a mode of revealing, enframing conditions the way in which humans too, are made present to us:

‘when … man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. …man stands within the essential realm of enframing (QCT 27, 24).

Man, along with the rest of the world, is enframed, demanded-out-hither into presence by the mode of revealing that ‘sets upon to yield.’ Heidegger’s term for what is brought forth in this way is bestand, which roughly translates as standing reserve. Bestand denotes the ontological status of a resource, something at all times available for ordering and for use. Bestand does not have the character of an object that stands over-against man, but of a kind of homogenous baseline of raw material, appropriated, transformed, and circulated at whim. As we have seen, gestell confers this status upon man himself. Having established gestell as the mode of enframing, that it brings the world to presence as standing reserve, we can now approach questions untouched by our conventional discourse on torture[2].

A central point when drawing out the implications of gestell for the CIA torture program is that the detainees were rendered as standing reserve long before they arrived at the detention center. Andrew Mitchell presents this problem succinctly in Torture and Photography:

Prophylactics: What is troubling in these digital photographs from Abu Gharib are the questions they raise concerning a world already transformed into so many piled bodies, a world that can only reveal itself as tortured, and this by the very technology that has traveled out from Iraq and into the wired homes of American to bring us these insistent images of cruelty and abuse. The camera calls attention to the filth that it itself creates.

When revealed as bestand, the detainees are ordered about in the manner that corresponds to their way of being present, which curiously precedes their interrogation process. It is precisely in this sense that Heidegger proclaims “the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, already happened,” (The Thing, 164). Gestell accomplishes the annihilation and debasement of the detainees at an ontological level - long before they become detainees.

This observation calls our attention to a number of disturbing facts about the torture controversy that were never rendered controversial within the narrow confines of our conventional debate. Perhaps the most pressing is the fact that some of the most heinous and dehumanizing treatment occurred during the ‘softening up’ process, prior to any formal interrogation. The state that the interrogator found his detainee literalizes in a profound way the manner in which gestell renders everything always-already-debased:

…on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. – Email from FBI agent 11 (Seton Hall Law School Report)

The infamous pictures of the Abu Gharib abuses come from this part of the interrogation process – namely, the part without any interrogation. They were preliminary to any pointed effort at gleaning the truth or obtaining intelligence. Rather, they were designed to create the conditions under which to extract the sought after information. Utterly dehumanized, the detainee shivering naked on the floor is the coarse literalization of bestand, “the mere final emission of what has long since taken place.” A passage from Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead explicates how this ‘fixing of conditions’ belongs to the essential movement of Enframing:

…the will’s surrounding itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something behind itself, in order on the basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere bounds off the constant reserve of what presences (ousia, in the everyday meaning of the term for the greeks) that is immediately at the disposal of the will. This that is steadily constant, however, is transformed into the fixedly constant, i.e., becomes that which stands at something’s disposal, only in being brought to a stand through a setting in place. 83-84

The detainees were “brought to a stand by a setting in place,” that is – made present to the interrogators as something “fixedly constant,” “standing at [their disposal].” Again – this movement is accomplished preliminary to the posing of an actual question. The detainee lying fetal in his own waste is the condition for the US being able to ‘contend for its own security’…”necessary to prevent the violent death of thousands” (Cheney).

Another place we can trace enframing is in the character of the ‘truth’ that the interrogation process was supposedly designed to obtain. A passage from the CIA Inspector General Report, issued in 2004, orients us to the kind of ‘truth’ under consideration:

The agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the US and around the world. The CTC Detention and Interrogation Program has resulted in the issuance of thousands of individual intelligence reports and analytic products supporting the counterterrorism efforts of the US Policymakers and military commanders. 100

This report provides an essential reworking of the instrumental definition of torture. We saw how for both Obama and Cheney, torture is considered as a means, good or ill, for advancing US counterterrorism interests. But in the ‘wherefore’ in this report is altogether different; torture is instead evaluated for its capability to produce “intelligence” and “analytic products” that may in turn serve those working to advance our counterterrorism interests. The immediate end to which torture is a means is, explicitly, the “issuance of analytic products.” This is an important distinction that conventional discourse overlooks. It shows how the ‘truth’ extracted for the detainees holds the same value of the detainees themselves: that of a resource, available at whim, mobilized toward a specific purpose. That is why the entire interrogation process bears only a nominal relationship to the truth, and also why the great majority of the detainees were innocent men picked up on bounty, far from the “high value suspects” that Cheney consistently evokes. They were merely the material condition for the CIA’s data mining (The quality of the intelligence/data is of little consequence – recall Iraq and the WMD controversy. I am yet to make full sense of how, despite the fact that the invasion was arbitrary and inevitable, the Bush administration went to such lengths to provide false evidence). It should come as no surprise in a today where vast amounts of human resources are mobilized in the service of information, where inconceivable lives of arduous toil are deployed to produce its smooth surface.

[1] I have omitted a number of Heidegger’s conceptual maneuvers (the fourfold, occasioning, poesis) in order to expedite the analysis to the question of enframing and how it applies to the data on torture.

[2] I have also omitted a discussion on Gestell as the consummation of Western metaphysics. This would involve a (long) detour into the revelation of truth as something esoteric and hidden, to be accessed by a kind of process. I chose to focus instead the ‘softening up’ process that the CIA treats as a condition of possibility for interrogation itself.

Spinoza and textual interpretation

2009-10-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

In his Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza enumerates explicit protocols for the interpretation of Holy Scripture. These directives appear in the middle of the manuscript, and call forth many of the essential philosophical positions that he formulates throughout the rest of the text. In this paper, I will address them in a different order than appears in the book, and they may be summarized as follows: 1. Scripture must be read in its original Hebrew 2. One must attend to the historical context from which Scripture emerges 3. One must not be hasty in resolving apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in the text. These three protocols signify a single commitment to reunite Scripture to the diversity of its origins. The harsh response to the publication of the TTP shows that this commitment yields philosophical consequences that strike at the foundations of established religious doctrine.

Spinoza insists repeatedly in the TTP that Scripture be studied in its original language of Hebrew. He argues that the true meaning of Scripture can only be approached by a strict adherence to the economy of words contained already in its pages: to “investigate from established linguistic usage, or from a process of reasoning that looks to no other basis than Scripture” (89). By restricting his lexicon to ‘established linguistic usage’, Spinoza commits to understanding every word within its specific context and with respect to its specific connotations.

Adherence to Hebrew exposes within the text many contradictions and inconsistencies that had been rationalized and smoothed over in translation. In many cases, these rationalizations radically changed the tone and character of the specific passages, producing in turn their own paradoxes and insoluble conflicts. Spinoza pointedly warns against such hasty attempts to rationalize scripture from outside its Hebraic context: “I term a pronouncement obscure or clear according to the degree of difficulty with which the meaning can be elicited from the context, and not according to the degree of difficulty with which its truth can be perceived by reason” (88). Here Spinoza breaks with the metaphysical tradition of interpretation, which seeks a true meaning lurking beneath the surface of the text. This approach supports the idea that there is an esoteric content to Scripture that awaits a future revelation through a kind of exegetical rationalization, a translation from myth and obscurity into logic and reason. For Spinoza, the text is a surface without depth. To seek an esoteric meaning beyond what is already present in the text is to add meaning and subtract from the original message. Spinoza rejects the style of interpretation that seeks to synthesize and cohere divergent biblical texts. His own protocols seek instead to recover areas of dissonance and contradiction where translators had surmised harmony and unity.

Spinoza’s break with the metaphysical approach also marks a significant shift in the temporal dynamics of religious observance. The metaphysical tradition held that the esoteric content of Scripture remained hidden until some future time when its true meaning could be illuminated by the divine light of reason. This futural orientation is what Spinoza refers to in the preface to the TTP, where he criticizes the piety that rests on hopes and fears; as hope and fear inevitably turn away from the present to what is to come. It is hope and fear, Spinoza says, that provide the ground for superstition and the usurpation of religion by illegitimate authorities. By insisting that the meaning of Scripture is immanent to the text itself, Spinoza refuses to defer its revelation indefinitely into the future. This gesture goes against a distinctly Christian/Platonic temporal structure that situates humankind behind a veil of tears, amidst ephemeral appearances, which, like Scripture itself, must be penetrated beyond. The Christian doctrine of salvation rests on this orientation to the future, which is one of the many reasons for the harsh response to the publication of the TTP.

Another reason for the negative reactions is that Spinoza’s position undermines the authority of the intermediary figures that interpret scripture for the masses. If the true meaning of Scripture can be found within its pages, then it does not rest on the approval, translation, or interpretation of any establishment that claims access to its esoteric content. If it were the case, Spinoza argues, that the meaning of Scripture were esoteric and hidden, “it would follow that the common people, for the most part knowing nothing of logical reasoning or without leisure for it, would have to rely solely on the authority and testimony of philosophers for their understanding of Scripture, and would therefore have to assume that philosophers are infallible in their interpretations” (101) - and not only philosophers, but the many political authorities that claim interpretive authority over holy Scripture. Spinoza’s protocols undermine such authorities: “There is nothing…in our method,” says Spinoza, “that requires the common people to abide by the testimony of biblical commentators” (101).

Spinoza’s fidelity to the original Hebrew implicitly undermines the authority of the many Latin translations of Scripture, and in bypassing these translations Spinoza makes another serious philosophical gesture. This is because Hebrew is a language that resists many forms of philosophical dualism that lie at the foundation of Christian dogma. The Divine Logos, the domination of Spirit over matter, the primacy of Heaven over earth – these cannot be found within the Hebraic forms that appear in original Scripture. Rather, these distinctly Christian dualisms inhabit the many Latin translations and commentaries. In his return to Hebrew, Spinoza gestures towards a collapse or a sublation of these binary oppositions.

Spinoza is most explicit on this point in relation to the separation between God and Nature. He says regarding this distinction: “what they mean by the two powers, and what by God and Nature, they have no idea, except that they imagine God’s power to be like the rule of some royal potentate, and Nature’s power to be a kind of force and energy” (71). This cosmology that divides God and Nature depicts God as an omnipotent sovereign and Nature as an inanimate flux. Spinoza counters this view: “since nothing can be or be conceived without God, it is clear that everything in Nature involves and expresses the conception of God in proportion to its essence and perfection; and therefore we acquire a greater and more perfect knowledge of God as we gain more knowledge of natural phenomena” (50). For Spinoza, God is not a sovereign with the power to intervene in Nature. God is entirely immanent and coextensive with his creation; in no way is He “numerically distinct” from it.

Despite Spinoza’s strict loyalty to the original Hebrew, he readily concedes that no version of Scripture, Hebrew or otherwise, is “uncorrupted” and pure. Yet he does not think that this poses an insurmountable challenge to the understanding of Scripture. This is because his protocols call for special attention to the historical context of the biblical texts, their diverse origins and many authors. Spinoza thinks that “…Scripture conveys and teaches its message in a way best suited to the comprehension of all men, not resorting to a chain of deductive reasoning from axioms and definitions” (153). Its meaning does not proceed from a transcendental axiom or truth, but is communicated in a way suited to the understanding of all men, which means that it has been communicated in different ways to men of different times and places. This is true even of the prophets themselves, to whom “God was revealed in accordance with [their] understanding” (28). Spinoza thus approaches Scripture inductively, seeking from particular instances of God’s revelation the universal doctrine of the text. He does not begin from any pre-established interpretation or truth to which the divergent Biblical narratives and commandments must conform. This approach frees Scriptures from the constraints of rational justification, which to this day make it seem inconsistent, outdated, and fraught with error. By reconnecting Scripture to its diverse origins Spinoza reclaims its authority from the demands of science and reason, to which he grants a separate province.

The Social between Tarde and Durkheim

2009-10-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

There is either society or there is sociology – Gabriel Tarde

I came to the works of Gabriel Tarde by way of a book entitled Reassembling the Social by French sociologist Bruno Latour. In it, Latour explores the philosophical underpinnings of a new school of sociology based on Tarde’s work along with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, among others. Actor Network Theory is based on the radical premise that there is no such thing as ‘society’ as an empirical unit or agent. It argues that social phenomena are far too numerous, complex, and multidimensional to ever constitute the discrete totality of the ‘social whole’ or ‘social organism’. Latour locates this radical break with what he terms the ‘sociologists of the social’ in the disagreement between Emile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, his lesser known rival and predecessor. This paper is intended as a brief investigation into their debate and its philosophical ramifications.

There are several points in Durkheim’s Division of Labor that betray his conception of society as a totality. The first and most prominent is his use of the ‘organism’ as a metaphor for society. As he says in his introduction: “…the law of the division of labour applies to organisms as well as to societies…the division of labour in society appears no more than a special form of this general development,” (DOL 3). This view implies that the division of labor responds to a sort of biological necessity, that it has a specific function. It indicates that Durkheim believes in a social end or purpose in relation to which the division of labor can be considered as a means. This is made all the more evident when he poses the question: “… is it our duty to seek to become a rounded, complete creature, a whole sufficient unto itself or, on the contrary to be only part of the whole, the organ of an organism?” (DOL 3). Either we strive for a complete society or we strive for society to complete a part of a larger organism: what is taken for granted in this choice? In both cases Durkheim frames social life as aspiring to a wholeness and completeness, either for itself or something larger than it. That the question is posed as one of duty further betrays his notion, for duty is here, as in John Stuart Mill, the ethical dimension of being part of a whole. Consider the two following excerpts:

“In short, in one of its aspects the categorical imperative of the moral consciousness is coming to assume the following form: equip yourself to fulfill usefully a specific function,” (4)

And later, as he introduces his method: “…we shall first investigate the function of the division of labour, that is, the social need to which it corresponds.” (6)

In the first passage Durkheim implicates the problem of ‘fulfilling a specific function’ with the emerging division of labor in society. Yet as his first gesture toward this problem he manages to perfectly reproduce it: he interrogates functionality by analyzing its function[1].

We may also locate Durkheim’s idea of the social totality where he speaks of ‘society’ as having a kind of agency: “thus punishment constitutes essentially a reaction of passionate feeling, graduated in intensity, which society exerts through the mediation of an organized body over those of its members who have violated certain rules of conduct,” (52). In this sentence, ‘society’ and ‘its members’ are portrayed as separate agents, acting upon each other from positions so ontologically separate so as to require the ‘mediation’ of organized bodies. For Durkheim, society is enough of a complete whole that he can speak of it as distinct from its constituent elements, conceived necessarily as mere ‘parts’ serving a specific function. It is on the basis of this notion that Durkheim may then declare some societies to be abnormal or incomplete in their composition, and permits him to draw sharp lines between different societies conceived as mutually exclusive ‘types’.

An article from the Political Science Quarterly, dated 1897, succinctly orients Gabriel Tarde’s work against the dominant conception of the ‘social organism’: “At that time the infatuation of sociologists for the Spencerian conceptions, however misapprehended, was at its height. The metaphor of the ‘social organism’ was the motto of the day. After his debut, the unknown magistrate from Sarlat [Tarde] took a firm stand against the dominant doctrine… Tarde necessarily assumes the non-identity of social and biological, and regards their typical and differential elements as irreducible” (504 PSQ). This article establishes Tarde’s posture against the dominant idea of the ‘social organism,’ which brings with it the injunction to interpret all social phenomena as being ‘organs’ within a more or less homeostatic system. For Tarde. ‘differential’ elements in society are ‘irreducible’ to an organic function, and cannot be represented as part of a coherent unity. Tarde here uses the word “identity” in refuting this idea of social unities (aka ‘the social’ or ‘society):

To exist is to differ ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different. One has to start from this difference and to abstain from trying to explain it, especially by starting with identity, as so many persons wrongly do… To begin with some primordial identity implies at the origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason. M&S pg. 73

In this passage, Tarde calls society “a prodigiously unlikely singularity” – and criticizes those, like Durkheim, who treat it as an axiom. For Tarde, one must begin with the social in all its inconsistency, difference, and multiplicity. He cautions sociologists to ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by rationalizing incongruous elements into functions of the social whole, or of any whole whatsoever. Gilles Deleuze, the theorist largely responsible for Tarde’s resurgence, explained the matter concisely: “Durkheim’s preferred objects of study were the great collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded… Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative matter,” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 217). Tarde’s attention to ‘subrepresentative’ detail derives from his rejection of the great representations of social life in the form of social unities. Again we find the same warning: the sociologist must inhabit the diversity and irreducibility of social phenomena; they must remain there and ‘abstain from trying to explain it’ by an order exterior to it:

"It is always the same mistake that is put forward : to believe that in order to see the regular, orderly, logical pattern of social facts, you have to extract yourself from their details, basically irregular, and to go upward until you embrace vast landscapes panoramically ; that the principal source of any social co-ordination resides in a few very general facts out of which it falls by degree until it reaches the particulars… I believe exactly the opposite.'' p. 114 L/S [viii]

Here Tarde cautions against an ‘upward movement’ that recalls Plato’s ascent from the cave of illusion. What he commits to instead is a going-under that speaks more of Zarathustra’s descent or of Frued’s downward journey into the unconscious. It is in this focus on the actual and material, in this turn away from the heavens, that Tarde’s debate with Durkheim assumes its Nietzschian character (it is no accident that Gilles Delueze and Bruno Latour, the thinkers most responsible for Tarde’s recent resurgence, are devout readers of Nietzsche). Tarde’s affinity to Nietzsche is represented here in these passage from Nietzsche’s Will to Power.

Basic Error: to place the goal in the herd and not in single individuals! The herd is a means, no more! But now one is attempting to understand the herd as an individual and to ascribe to it a higher rank than to the individual - profound misunderstanding! ! ! Will To Power # 766

For Nietzshe as with Tarde, the ‘basic error’ is ‘understanding the herd as an individual’ which is the same as conceiving of society as an organism or a unity. And to ‘place the goal’ in this false unity, to furthermore ‘ascribe to it a higher rank’ is for Nietzsche a dangerous proposition. What he means when he says that “the herd is the means” is that, despite not being the reality of social life, the representation of social relations in the form of social unity (ie. Durkheimian sociology) is a means by which to achieve an end that is always already political.

im aware citations are off. to be posted soon.

[1] Nietzsche: Modern socialism wants to create the secular counterpart to Jesuitism: everyone a perfect instrument. But the purpose, the wherefore? Has not yet been ascertained. Will to Power # 757

Mnemotechnical aids

2009-09-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

Benjamin needs to be broken out of his "high theory" prison and brought back to earth. He belongs in Oakland, or Oakland belongs with Benjamin, a spokesman of another ghetto, far away geographically but very close in terms of a common sentiment. He made his name during the absolute void that was post-Weimar Germany as a radical Jew, and eventually died in a situation so abysmal that nobody is sure if it was suicide or murder. The suicide-murder death is a trademark of a brutal war such as the one Benjamin was in when he was cornered at the border of Spain and France, the Spanish Republic in shambles and Franco rearing his nasty monarchic head.

So it is ironic that his idea of the flaneur, the city stroller, is seen as an uninvolved, impartial observer: the flaneurs, although they look at the city rather than run its maze, are very much a part of it. The non-flaneurs are almost everybody in a time like this or Benjamin's, a time of staggering economic horror and collapse. But these berserk racing people, always distracted by reminders of their various and desperate purposes, are in a way less part of the city than the flaneur, because they always have an excuse for being somewhere. The flaneur, without meaning to, bears witness all the time. There is nothing else to do.

The Metreon is a great place for flaneurs-- it is the postmodern equivalent of Benjamin's beloved Arcades-- in fact, it is rife with arcades, except these kind have flashing lights and metal claw machines. All of the hope and glory of the new economy has left the Metreon, which surrendered its once-proud Discovery Channel Store, selling a wide variety of overpriced guilty garbage, to a "farmer's market" which is a kind of affordable food court. An IMAX movie costs $17, so it's really no wonder nobody goes there. But it takes up just as much space as it did in 1999 when people were lined up to get in.

The situation is different in Oakland. Broadway is still the Auto Row, but in the interstices everything seems to be breaking down. People are everywhere, but none of them are involved in the commerce of this ostensibly commercial district. All the people I saw on Broadway today, walking from 19th St. to W MacArthur, were flaneurs of a sort...definitely not the petit bourgeois people you see a mile north on Piedmont Avenue. There were a decent number of people who were well dressed and carried themselves well, but they weren't shopping. The street has been thoroughly infected by "For Lease" signs, and 19th St. and Broadway is like a tragic hood Manhattan, which is what is left when wealthy flamboyant moguls decide, all of a sudden, to pack up.

http://oaklandliving.wordpress.com/

re: Invisible Committee

2009-09-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

Video

Tarnac 9 info

The Coming Insurrection (full text)

Glenn Beck loves the committee

more texts from the committtee, in several languages

Achille Mbembe

2009-06-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

link to "Necropolitics" article.

"On the Postcolony" - 2001

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory.

This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays—his first book to be published in English—develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity — violence, wonder, and laughter — to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century.

This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism. - University of California Press

Alain Badiou

2009-06-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

Also check out this blog, Stellar Cartographies: http://stellarcartographies.wordpress.com/

Manuel DeLanda

2009-06-06T14:56:00.000-07:00