razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Author: Razorsmile

  • Principles and Functions – notes

    Principles and Functions – notes

    (Working notes, not likely to be accurate but part of the process of working through various thoughts as I continue writing – comments welcome if they bear this in mind.)

    my+heart+is+held+together..._34183563

    It is clear for anyone reading Kant that the priority of principles is central to his thinking. It is the clash between principles and experience which motivates the whole problem of the first Critique, we are told in the opening paragraphs of the ’Preface to the First Edition’(1). The nature of human reason is the problematic tension deriving from the combination of the rational principles and the sensuous experiences that constitute actual thinking. The sensuous experiences ’insure’ the ’truth and sufficiency’ of the principles – not, however, their production. The force of questioning which produces principles as answers or solutions soon finds that it goes far beyond, in its questioning, any solution we might propose. The force of questioning overwhelms the capacity to produce a testable solution. Of course, we might produce what appears as a solution, some abstract untestable principle that offers us a sense of solution to a problem but any real solution principle must needs be capable of being tested to be accepted or ’insured’ against falsehood. It is experience that is the testing ground and thus anything that is in principle beyond experience is untestable. The classic tension of the Kantian system is found in the fact that we can ask unanswerable questions.

    Of course, this is not simply a Kantian tension. The very idea of an unanswerable question is, whilst peculiar in itself, something we find at various points within philosophy – for example, there is a strange resonance between the way in which Kant establishes the key productive problem of his transcendental philosophy and the way the verificationists would rule out of court any talk of God or Soul, even though they soon fell foul of the reflective moment which revealed the unverifiable dogmatism of their own central principle. This, perhaps, is not so surprising given the shared model of philosophy as a practice of giving answers which both Kant and the Verificationists possessed. The scandal of a discipline of reason that cannot provide final and definitive answers can be imputed as a motivation to Ayer as easily as Kant.
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  • Reading ‘The Logic of sense’: Series 2

    Reading ‘The Logic of sense’: Series 2

    morrrigan+silkscreen+closeup_33875125(A slightly delayed note on the second Series due to preparations for the Volcanic Lines conference we held last week on Kant and Deleuze, a report of which is over here).

    One of the most fascinating lines here in this Series is the following: “For this reason the stoics can oppose destiny and necessity” (LOS:6). A footnote follows which refers to Cicero’s De Fato. A comparison with the Epicureans immediately follows this.

    What is crucial, at this point, is the way in which it is the causal relation, the cause-effect couple, which prompts these claims about the conceptualisation of necessity within the Stoics and Epicureans. The reference to Cicero is a peculiarity. I am currently reading Kant’s Logic at the same time as Deleuze’s LOS and a comment Kant makes there about Cicero offers a curious complication to Deleuze’s account. Kant claims that “Cicero was in speculative philosophy a disciple of Plato, in morality a Stoic” (Logic: Introduction, S4; 35). The complication in reading Deleuze seems to be that he is advanced as an example of the Stoic account of necessity, yet precisely in line with Kant’s characterization of him as a ’Stoic in morality’. It is not a logical account of necessity that Deleuze is focussing on, though in later sections he will refer to a notion of ’modality’, but rather the moral dimension of necessity which is tangled into the concept of ’destiny’. We might want to ask whether Deleuze too, like Cicero, might be classed as a Platonic in speculation and a Stoic in morality. There seem at least some who might want to assert just such a claim, at least in part – Badiou, for example, seems to claim a level of Platonism can be found within Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual / actual distinction.

    What happens in this 2nd Series of LOS, however, is a kind of philosophical-historical conceptual topography. Deleuze brings to the foreground the concept of the ’event’ which is plainly of central importance to the whole project of LOS. In the first Series he had indicated the role of the ’depth’ of ’mad becoming’ that was incapable of being contained within a model of knowledge. The motor force of the problematic relation to identity is found in what Deleuze names there as the ’paradox of infinite identity’ which is caused by a di-directionality of couples such as cause-effect (LOS:2). The name, that which “is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir“, is that which is lost in Alice’s adventures in the realm of becoming. The name is lost within the event and yet the event is communicated through language.
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  • The fluid body

    The fluid body

    The way in which we act towards objects has limits. There is no getting around the bluntness of death and injury, the bluntness of ‘objects’ however we conceive them. It seems, then, that my conception of objects somehow needs to acknowledge this inability to avoid the bluntness of death and injury whilst simultaneously getting around this bluntness to ‘carry on’. The conception itself needs to carry on and a conception which simply flounders in the face of the need to act is pretty useless and simply won’t survive. Well, perhaps it would survive – but at the very least we might wish it not to thrive.

    The Taoist central image for the manner of living, the act of living, is to act as water. Obviously if the problem is perceived as a riddle then the answer might be given as ‘water’. This metaphorical principle, “act as the water would act, flow, flow”, assumes something it is no help overcoming – which is that you are not already flowing. How to begin? No image of a principle that doesn’t enable us to ‘go on’, to act from the situation of the image, is ever going to enable us to learn anything. Even the Taoists need their words to learn the way.

    The word is the central tool of the sorcerer. If they have any force, then such as it exists manifests in a word, a verb, it happened. What if the event, however, only ever occurs in the pure past? What if the event has always only ever happened. Happened. Not happening but happened. What happened? This is the space into which sorcery slips. It slips into this space because the sorcerer forced it.

    The sorcerer breaks open the word (or perhaps even those who break open the word open into sorcerous practice). To break open the word is to make something happen. The word is trapped inside itself, manifest only through gutturality, warped into actuality. The word is the concept is the god goddess mythopoetic manifestation of manifestation, that moment of machinic production, law like, immutable, eternal. That moment which has always happened and is never happening.

  • Reading ‘The Logic of Sense’: Preface and Chapter 1

    Reading ‘The Logic of Sense’: Preface and Chapter 1

    from+greenwich+to+london+bridge4_1082387720This is the first in a series of posts, initiated by the suggestions of Evan Duq in his blog ‘Working on concepts‘. I’m in the throes of some intensive writing practice over the summer as I try to get the first draft of my new book into shape and currently am working on a paper for the ‘Strange Encounters: Kant and Deleuze’ conference we’re organising at Greenwich…so throwing LOS into the mix should be good.

    I’m using the Athlone 1990 edition and all references are to that unless otherwise stated. Whilst this is a re-reading (in my case) of LOS I am going to approach it to a large extent as though it were a fresh reading…inevitably this will be slightly distorted by the existing annotations in the text but what I want to note is that these are reading notes rather than sustained critical commentary. Certain comments are inevitably going to be extremely tenuous and at times plain wrong…the freedom to be wrong, however, is part of the nature of the internet and why students quoting texts and online commentaries should remember caveat emptor!

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    LOS begins with a rather short and sweet preface that takes on a quite traditional role of introducing the text rather than philosophically positioning the reader in regard to the text. The first thing of note is the reference to ‘modern reader’ and a set of elements to be found within Lewis Carroll that would ‘please’ such a modern reader. The elements seem to refer to structuralist type aspects of form, as well as aspects of a psychoanalytic interest (children’s books “or, rather, books for little girls” and an explicit mention of “a profound psychoanalytic content“). Who, then, is the ‘modern reader’? Someone embedded within a psychoanalytic practice of reading? Someone embedded, moreoever, in a specifically structuralist psychoanalytic reading, ie; a Lacanian? Is the suggestion – perhaps – that Deleuze is presenting a text which should be of profound interest to the Lacanian reader and as such a common ground of discussion or theoretical concept creation? It seems likely, at least at the moment, that this is the case. If so this suggests a certain ‘audience’ for LOS – viz, the Lacanian reader, but an audience that needs to attend to something usually forgotten. “Over and above the immediate pleasure” Deleuze says (and I would want to check the French edition here to see whether jouissance is the specific term at work in this sentence) “there is something else” in the work of Carroll, that being the play of sense and nonsense. This “connection between language” (one form of sense) “and the unconscious” is readily present, Deleuze says, but he then indicates again the ‘something else’ he wants to bring to attention, “what else is this marriage connected with” (xiii). (more…)

  • embarrassment

    embarrassment

  • Principles and Facts – notes

    Principles and Facts – notes

    There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

    This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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  • Books I like and some hardware/software as well

    Books I like and some hardware/software as well

    Books I like and some hardware/software as well (not much)

    (This is a list produced by Alan Sondheim – not me – and something that he does maybe once or twice a year. I’ve known Alan online for a good few years now, in fact since I was first at University as an undergrad, and his eclectic and curious reading patterns are reflected in his strange and fascinating work as both a theorist and artist. He also simply offers leads and possible avenues of research that I simply couldn’t find anywhere else and as such is a fantastic connection to plug into. In this list I’m particularly interested in the The Alpbacj Symposium 1968 papers, the Steve Talbott, The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus and the Olympus WS-300M, …the last list of these I posted was in November last year and you can see some of Alan’s current work on avatars, utilising the Second Life interface, over here on YouTube.)

    I’m behind in my reviews; the last few months have been a mess. I may be missing some books. I may have misplaced. others. I hunger for reading, but it’s all transparent, pathetic, collapsed. There’s nothing to say about reading that hasn’t been said before. Humans compress history’s repetition until the world’s squeezed out. If I’m missing a book in what follows, forgive me; the oversight wasn’t deliberate, just an effect of physiology. The following books are in no particular order; for the most part, they’re books that have been more than useful, have been inspirational, works I’ve returned to at times. I’m including some miscellaneous reviews of software/hardware as well. (First off, apologies for the poor style below; it’s hard for me to convey sustained excitement, but such underlies most of what follows.)

    Buddhist Dictionary, Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka. This is an amazing and often technical work, documenting the terms of the Pali Canon and beyond; it has information I literally haven’t found elsewhere. The Pali vocabulary is extensive, often highly structured conceptually, and this has proved, not only to be an invaluable guide, but also an interesting read in itself.

    I am a Cat (three volumes), Soseki Natsume, translated Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson. The original Japanese work appeared in the first decade of the 20th century; it’s an amazing rumination on everything by a cat. The work is reminiscent of Sterne and I found myself enveloped in it (in a manner similar to reading something like The Journey to the West); it says a great deal about Japanese modernization and city life, and is beautifully written. It’s not an ’animal’ story in any sense of the term. The work’s available from Tuttle. (Alexanne Don introduced me to this years ago.)
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  • Various essays in progress…

    Various essays in progress…

    This time of year is always slightly hectic, with marking and ’student progress boards’ and the like – and for me it’s the first time I’ve been really involved because previously, as a visiting lecturer, most of this work was left to the full-timers. What’s good about it of course is seeing the students work come to fruition and knowing that this step is done with and the next is to come but at the same time it’s a time when my own research and writing has to be put on hold. So it’s curious to take a break and look back at what’s going on in your own work…

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  • Meditation group – week 2

    The new meditation group met for its second week, four of us again though a different four. The basic outline we developed last week seemed to be transferable, though the new person along suggested some elaborations to the Kabbalistic Cross / LBRP practice which she might bring along for us to consider. The middle pillar chanting is fantastic and an absolute joy to do, that’s the most noticeable thing for me so far.

    The role of the voice in a public group is one of the most curious things I’ve come across. A good ritual leader can be a bit of a performer and that’s necessary, though the surface manipulation can sometimes be a little too apparent. I love both Derren Brown and Ray Mears for their ability to manipulate a surface – and I’ve quoted both in lectures to philosophy students – but there’s something remaining of the ‘audience’ when there’s a performer, inevitably and factually, without any real value placed on this fact. The fact, however, even if considered valueless in itself can be the ground for values – that a split exists between the performer and audience is a necessity of the form but other forms do exist and their mode is that of union, more specifically of an ecstatic union. (The extreme paradox, and I mean _extreme_ paradox, of the concept of an ‘ecstatic union’ is something I still find wonderful.)

    The voice involves the practitioner, opens up a space that is phenomenally embodied, and I mean that in the most technical sense. Each person hears their own voice in various ways and part of the process of solitary practice, of moving from the arm-chair to the circle of art, is the sound of ones breath and word intermingling in your ears, in the space around your ears, in the space other ears invade. In voice meditation during the middle pillar it’s not the ears that are the hearing organ, it’s something more vague, the body or the throat or the heart chest torso – something I feel and know through that feeling.

    We had a first run through of a rough and ready pathworking this week too after the twenty minute no mind meditation that followed the first practices. The pathworking consisted of reading through the attributes list at the head of the Malkuth chapter in Fortune’s ‘Magical Qabbalah. I read through it five times, doing a kind of ‘shipping forecast’ pathworking, a series of notes really. The four tarot cards were out and after reading through the list and then ten minutes or so of quiet relaxation I read out the names of the four cards whilst placing them in front of everybody. The four Tens were oppression, the ten of wands; perfected success, the ten of cups; ten of pentacles, wealth; ten of swords, ruin. The gate. The gate of death. The gate of the garden of Eden. ‘…black, with gold flecks’. Magical Image: A young woman, crowned and throned.

  • Revision tips…

    As my students are now entering that end of year revision period we’ve been doing a lot of tutorials and revision classes.  These are always interesting as often the students seem to talk more and be willing to communicate what they know at this point because the onus shifts to them nedding to do so…I can only encourage them to do this more during the year – the more you articulate your own understanding of ideas verbally and in communication with others the easier it becomes to write student essays in situations like exams as your fluency with the arguments improves.

    Anyway, aside from the core of all revision (get to know the material indside out!!) there are a couple of tips I’d offer:

    1) The psychological anchor – lock some phrase, formula or quote into your memory.  Do this repetitively during the time you are revising and really learn it off by heart so you can recall it at any time.  This anchor will then be the tip of the iceberg, easily brought to mind and when you bring it to mind it will help connect you to the revision work your consciousness has taken in and filed somewhere you’re not sure of deep in your brain.  Think of it literally like an anchor – it provides a key to access the material you’ve taken in through activating a psychological connection.  It also enbales you to write something down when you get into the exam rather than encounter than dread silence of the mind when faced with the blank paper – instead of worrying about what to do, write down the anchor and then begin making a list of the various points that will come to mind, after which you can assemble them into the order in which they will be approached.

    2) Use keywords and phrases (ie: intentionality, the a posteriori argument from design etc) – then ask – what does this mean, what does it do, how does it work.  Expklain these things when you introduce a concept and you will find things almost come naturally.

    3) When writing and in the middle of a paragraph or line of argument a stray thought pops into mind, one that you know is relevant but which isn’t immediately relevant, write it down on a piece of paper to the side of the essay you’re workign on, then leave it alone and return to what you were writing.  Finish off the line of thought you were on and then look at the notes you jotted down and ask yourself how do I fit this in, what do I need to do to get to it?  This will stop the essays flitting about and enable you to write a coherent piece rather than meerely spewing up as much as you can as fast as you can – remember, the argument is the star, coherent essays with 6 main points are better than incoherent essays with 6 points.  Fluency and coherence are more than simple stylistic features, they form the points of knowledge into an inferential pattern with power and force rather than a set of random thoughts.

    That will do for now – good luck in your exams all!