razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: events

It lives.

The basic thought that I want to defend is something like the following – the only viable way of dealing with technology is by treating it as intentional. (This extension of ‘intentionality’ must makes something strange of the concept, although that will have to await a later discussion.) Put slightly differently, it lives.

This ‘it lives’ – rather than, say, ‘it is’ – is more than simply ‘it works’, though it depends upon this primal production of production. It is also this ‘it lives’, that screams, that fucks, that loves, that fights and that dies. It is at work everywhere, once it begins working – and it did not need to begin working, it did not need to happen, it might have not happened. Now that it has, what is to be done about it?

The privilege of the human, that strange inability to get away from seeing the world as ‘out there’ and something that can be ‘owned’ is horrific. The real terror is in the unthought assumption that there is something special, particular, unique in those entities that think, intend, desire and choose. It is as though somehow the real were split between at least two types of thing, always two: the living and the dead; the organic and the inorganic; the right and the wrong. The division of reality into two might be a necessity in practice that is constantly produced again and again, it might even be the very condition of the real itself, dividing itself from the unreal, but the division is an illusion, a field of mirrors that inevitably captures all in its refractions. Or rather, not an illusion but a shimmering, or a shining. Room 237. It invites us to come and play with it, for ever and ever.

The response goes, there’s no getting away from it, from being stuck inside this thing, this production, and as such any story about it is as much simply part of the thing it pretends to present – which implies that this perspective is as illusory as any other. The collapse into nihilism – and not in a good way – ensues. At best this might be reduced to a form of Buddhist-inspired ‘non-dualist’ mysticism, at worst it’s just irrational self-contradictory rubbish. Who cares? I’m not here to persuade you or anyone else of anything, I couldn’t care less if you live or die or think or eat or shit or cry. I’m talking to myself, inside a technology that has a life of its own, that demands some sacrifice for it to work, and it is that technology that I’m talking to now, the technology of language, of thought, of text, of discourse, of spelling. The sacrifice is this string of symbols, this push towards coherence, towards order, that always slips.

God is a technology, or rather, the gods are a technology. If language, or mark-making perhaps, is the first technology of transmission, fire the first technology of transformation and the weapon the first technology of destruction then the gods are the first technology of ordering. These gods arise, late in the day, as a result of the attempt to order the living and the dead, the peculiar moment when the skin sags and no longer breathes.

Death should be thought in terms of the first moment of haunting, the first moment of that which is gone-but-not-gone, the first contradiction with which all those who encounter death have to live. Before it is the possibility of my impossibility death is the sagging skin sack emptied of something that cannot be seen, the first real moment of concrete abstraction.

Murder is the first explosion in the production of this concrete abstraction, after which the demand for order arises. It might be said that the first condition of possibility for God is Cain. Abel is the sacrifice that concrete abstraction demands and from it arises technology as the power of such abstraction. The stone becomes a weapon; the blow becomes an act; the sagging skin becomes the two-faced goddess of death and life entwined.

Inside the act of murder there arises the concrete abstraction of ‘the reason’ (inside which, curled up to the teat of the event, a whole litter of mewling concepts swarm, such as motive, cause, aim, goal, desire, necessity, direction) and as it uncurls its body this ‘reason’ infuses the universe with its intentionality. From that moment on it is best to treat everything as part of this intentional nexus, not because that is ‘the truth’ or ‘the real story’ but because it is now the only sane thing to do if you want to live rather than merely persist, if you want to act rather than behave, if you want to think rather than not.

January 12, 2015
We’re all pretty fucked…we must dream and demonstrate the new reality.

With new protests against the fees and cuts being made to Higher Education planned for this Wednesday on what’s being called ‘Day X’ (more information here) it’s necessary to avoid getting drowned in the new slave consensus. The ‘cuts’, the ‘deficit’ and the whole new way in which economics is being organised are presented as obvious, necessary, inevitable. They are no such thing. There are always options. There are realities that we can imagine but these realities must be fought for, both physically and mentally. We must dream and demonstrate the new reality. The only other option is to let the new ‘common sense’ drown us. They will never give it away for free, it has always had to be taken from them by force. This time will be no different. Prepare to fight now. It’s the students and universities at the moment, it will be your hospitals, schools and homes next…and soon.

The following is from from a leaflet currently doing the rounds:

“We’re all pretty fucked…

It’s not just cuts in education and upping the fees that’s the problem. The problem is that the cuts in general mean we’re all pretty fucked. Whether you’re a student in a F.E college or University, whether you’re a working single-mum, whether you’re self-employed, whether you’re unemployed, whether you’re working a precarious temp job, whether you working a good job in the public sector. The depth of the cuts means most people are going to become worse-off.

There are differing trains of thought that link the cuts to ‘The Crisis’ or ‘The Deficit’ or ‘The Tories’ but for many there is a much more simple truth – it’s just called ‘Life as normal’. The rich have been getting successively richer in this country and the poor have been getting poorer. If the cuts are setting out to re-float a busted economy of over-inflated debt and speculation by taking more and more from the poorer section of the population, well, it’s just more of the same for most people. Poverty, crap jobs, insecurity, health problems – well, that’s just how we’ve been living anyway. But do you feel like politicians will sort it out for you? Do you feel like if you keep your head down and work hard, you’ll be okay? Do you feel scared? Had enough of that shit yet?

We’re all pretty fucked…It’s not just cuts in education and upping the fees that’s the problem. The problem is that the cuts in general mean we’re all pretty fucked. Whether you’re a student in a F.E college or University, whether you’re a working single-mum, whether you’re self-employed, whether you’re unemployed, whether you’re working a precarious temp job, whether you working a good job in the public sector. The depth of the cuts means most people are going to become worse-off.There are differing trains of thought that link the cuts to ‘The Crisis’ or ‘The Deficit’ or ‘The Tories’ but for many there is a much more simple truth – it’s just called ‘Life as normal’. The rich have been getting successively richer in this country and the poor have been getting poorer. If the cuts are setting out to re-float a busted economy of over-inflated debt and speculation by taking more and more from the poorer section of the population, well, it’s just more of the same for most people. Poverty, crap jobs, insecurity, health problems – well, that’s just how we’ve been living anyway. But do you feel like politicians will sort it out for you? Do you feel like if you keep your head down and work hard, you’ll be okay? Do you feel scared? Had enough of that shit yet?”

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2010/11//468269.pdf

http://anticuts.org.uk/

http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/

November 22, 2010
Diamond time, daimon time.

In the instant of diamond time duration incarnates and shatters itself. Many types of duration must exist, this seems to be true almost ‘by definition’. Duration is, after all, a multiplicity. Yet the time that fascinates, that holds attention and throws itself upon us, captures and eludes us, is predominantly the moments of diamond time, daimon time. We uncover these moments not through attention – our attention is always held by this time, this daimon diamond time – but through thought. We are forced to think, in the most perfect example of the forcing of thought, by this encounter with diamond time.

The eternal return is perhaps the most celebrated thought of the diamond time. The difficulty is often in extracting any sense of the eternal return from the peculiar and slight traces it left, not least in the peculiar way in which the eternal return is brought back to the moment, to the instant logical game of that which is both there and not there, here and not here. There is no instant of the eternal return since it shatters the moment and explodes the instant, taking us directly into the daimon of time, diamond time.

Time is not a passing, a going or an arriving. Time comes. When it has come it never goes. Almost no human being exists who has not yet had time come to them but there will be some, just as there will some plants, some rocks, some stars for whom time has not yet come – although it will. Aion sits softly on the lap of all and none may avoid the diamond time, no matter may avoid the daimon of time. Aion holds all in time and captures all, in time.

The encounter, however, is that which thought struggles to arrive at. To encounter time is to become shattered by it, at least at its most potent, in its daimon diamond form. We live as time, of course, we project the horizon of temporality up to and into the moment of the possibility of our impossibility but this living of time, this ecstatic temporality, always lacks that which it dismisses as impossible presence. The transcendental condition of ecstatic temporality is diamond time.

No doubt it is difficult to extract thought from its almost inevitable subsumption of diamond time into the subject. Kierkegaard perhaps offers the most abject lesson in this loss. The eternal, encountered as truth, God, Christ and the choice loses Aion in the incarnation of the daimon. We seem to be told that it must be the idea, that which is conjured into existence ex nihilo from the pure power of the subject and yet in this case the instant absorbs time rather than embracing it. It sucks up into the present the eternal that simply couldn’t be here in a moment. Diamond time is instead that which none want to encounter, the explosive truth.

August 20, 2009
Events without distinction

Notes on Heidegger – ITM (polemos, deinon and the gathering of distinction)

“war is the father of all and the king of all, and it has shown some as gods and others as human beings, made some slaves and others free” (Heraclitus, Fragment 53) – it is also worth noting something similar is said in Fragment 80, though this is not mentioned by Heidegger.

Heideggers’ translation takes this seemingly socio-political statement and reads it in terms of his central problematic of emergence and appearance. “Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as free” (ITM 47[1. References are to the Tale Nota Bene edition and marginal page numbers])

The war, the polemos, Heidegger contends, cannot be a mere socio-political fact since this is merely a human fact and it is necessary for the polemos under question to be prior to the human. To ‘show some as gods and others as human beings’ the polemos to which Heraclitus directs us “must hold sway before everything divine and human” (ibid). Polemos is not mere human war, it is the distinguishing event that brings forth the human as distinct from the divine. Polemos is thus also not mere divine conflict but prior to the divine as much as it is prior to the human. Polemos is the ground of immortal mortality.

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May 16, 2008
Naive notes on crowned anarchy

To call life itself just or unjust, to conceive life as samsara or suffering, is to judge life and to do so from outside life, from some position which is the ground of a judgement. To encounter life, respond to it, is inevitable and not all responses are equal, this much is inevitable. Too often, however, this encounter and response is thought of as a judgement. To not judge does not mean to not respond or that any response is as good as any other. There are different responses in life, different lives if you like – or different types of life. Life produces its own end, life drives itself to death but in the encounter with death there is another space of response, this time one that shows us the two fundamental ways of response, affirmation and negation, more life or never ending death.

How am I to think of life? The philosopher must ask this question. They must, moreover, continue to ask this question and to encounter the force of this question with responses – the philosopher must not simply ask an idle question but encounter the problem of the question, the problem the question arises from, responding with thought, with emotion, with passion, with action. Encounter and response constitute the activity of thought and living, though too often this dynamic to-and-fro is congealed, by the social, into regulated habits, pre-formed responses such as the response of the subject, ‘I think…’. Living is a poor name for the habits and habitats of the human. We are all, inevitably, products of the social, products of the inhuman and yet we are not inevitably condemned to remain nothing but product, commodity, object. It is not a matter of striving to become a subject since the subject is that which is subservient, the subject of the monarch. Rather it is a matter of striving for monarchy itself, becoming a crown within life but not a ruler, judge or controller. Crowned anarchy, this is the watchword, a monarch of creation, a singular moment that adds to the abundance of singular moments. In more traditional terms, this is the assumption of an imperative to autonomy, the self (auto) lawmaking (nomos) reality.

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April 24, 2008
…and a lot of accidents

I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar). Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.

One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents. “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59). He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze. “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)

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January 2, 2008
to survive da’ath

I gave a paper at the Manchester Metropolitan University conference on ‘Deleuze and the event’ that was held earlier this year and the organisers have videoed all the papers, a practice they have had for a while now as part of their online journal A/V (now defunct it seems). A dvd came through the post this morning with copies of all the papers in video format, which is cool since I can now see those papers I missed on the day. Here is my own paper (in mov format). These are ‘direct download’ links, so right click and save-as or do whatever it is you do on your system. You can view a streaming versions here. Comments of course welcome.

The video is available on YouTube here. (Probably the best available version in terms of sound).

A PDF copy of the unfinished paper – partially covered in handwritten notes – is available here.

To_survive_daath Download

October 28, 2007
class, experience and affect

Some rather peculiar argument has broken out amongst some of the radical philosopher types in the blogosphere, apparently kicked off, in part at least, by the comments of a blogger called k-punk (which you can read here – k-punks trackbacks don’t seem to work but the page is there). Larval Subjects has a kind of round-up and commentary and there’s some other stuff over at various other blogs. All a little odd and I’m not sure I really know exactly how important the argument is (it intrigued me enough to read through it all but when I came to thinking about it everything seemed a little too personalistic- then again, that’s kind of the problem the conversation encounters and shows. No doubt it will do it’s work in the unconscious as I think.)
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July 18, 2007
The task of the revolutionary is violence: contrary thoughts on Zizek and Badiou

The task of the revolutionary is indeed to be violent, but also to avoid the type of violence that is, in fact, merely an impotent passage a l’acte.

Slavoj Zizek | Interview | Divine Violence and Liberated Territories | SOFT TARGETS Journal

I’m not an enormous fan of Zizek to be honest, though I find it interesting that he is facing this question of violence, politics and the act. Here, this curious double-handed way of somehow making the violent rational or understandable is found in the ’indeed…but also’ move of the rhetoric, such that it appears like ’we can all accept that the revolution will involve violence but let’s not allow meaningless violence or violence without the right meaning into our validation of the revolutionary act’. The strange reality of violence is found, however, less in this ’right meaning’ but in the potency of the violence, in the potency of the force of condensation of singularities. Zizek talks in the interview linked to above about the ideas of a ’divine’ violence (citing Walter Benjamin) or a moment of institution that institutes whilst being an exception to that which is instituted (citing Schmitt) but this all and Zizek’s own position itself seems to somehow still be part of a discourse of legitimating violence, even if this takes the route of somehow legitimating its illegitimacy in some curious dance of the paradoxical.

This becomes clearer as Zizek marks his own territory, alongside that rather strange new phenomenon of hailing Badiou as the new theoretician of the left. Zizek says “I agree with what Badiou said in the recent interview with you published in Il Manifesto: “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” This is why I like to mockingly designate myself “Left-fascist” or whatever!” What exactly is it that ’those who have nothing’ have nothing of? Presumably something like power.
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July 18, 2007
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.)

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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July 17, 2007