Monday, December 26, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
why does he project his own shadow outside himself?
At the café in the lobby of the central library there is a TCBY. There was a man sitting near the door with a laptop wearing a black t-shirt. His hair had flecks of grey in its wooly cut. He was wearing round wire-rimmed glasses like he had been raised in an orphanage abroad. A full page of writing was on the screen largely illegible from a distance. As I passed, I tried to read the last sentence, which was the beginning of a new paragraph. It read, full stop, the world is for peanuts.
The man sitting across from me is quite old, and wears the silence of a mad priest. He is reading intently in a chair by the information desk, where two dark haired librarians are chatting in the obscene tones of frustrated coworkers. One is in her fifties, and the other is just beginning her thirties. When I came in the room, the younger one was on the phone, clearly patient in the face of an un-spooled tangle of requests. The calls that public libraries receive from that infinite portal of the telephone are beyond the pale. Who out there finds the number of the public library, in what book, from what garden? The older man is still reading. He has one, and only one part, on his otherwise smooth rosy head. One wave of fronds like weeds clutched on a mountain bald, a part perfectly aligned in the middle, turned to one side like a flag in the wind, one perfect square shaved into the void. He is not wearing socks and his corduroy pants are frayed at the cuffs of a cut hem above his black, well-laced athletic shoes, the kind of shoes one used to find at a large department store. There were brands like Voit and Cuga, and they often featured Velcro straps. The children who wore these were marked by poverty—that is until such stores began re-branding these lines with updated, more derivative features. This shift is most likely the result of manufacturing lines being consolidated, and higher niche players such as Nike moving overseas. A cheap, Nike-like sneaker was available for retail manufacture. Yet, in what only appears as irony, the children who had always worn Nike shoes discovered a melancholy kitsch value in these Velcro shoes, which were called bobo shoes, and they bought them to wear to themed frat parties or to go fishing. If anything, Sketchers is the vanishing mediator here, despite whatever new york writers have to say about tipping points.
The empirical/finite I depends on external objectivity, on the non-I opposed to him, yet the absolute I is defined by the very fact that he transcends this opposition. Kant’s problem, on the contrary, is how and why the transcendental object qua intelligible entity is a necessary correlative not to the empirical I but to the I of pure apperception.
The transcendental object—this empty form of the object’s unity, a reference to which converts the multitude of sensible affections into a determinate and self-identical object—is possible only against the background of the unity of apperception of the pure-I: the transcendental object is identical to the I, it is the I itself—the primordial synthesis that ‘is’ the I—in its externality, in the guise of the objectivity opposed to the I, or as Hegel would put it, in its otherness.
Why does the I oppose himself to himself in the guise of an external object, why does he project his own shadow outside himself?
The man sitting across from me is quite old, and wears the silence of a mad priest. He is reading intently in a chair by the information desk, where two dark haired librarians are chatting in the obscene tones of frustrated coworkers. One is in her fifties, and the other is just beginning her thirties. When I came in the room, the younger one was on the phone, clearly patient in the face of an un-spooled tangle of requests. The calls that public libraries receive from that infinite portal of the telephone are beyond the pale. Who out there finds the number of the public library, in what book, from what garden? The older man is still reading. He has one, and only one part, on his otherwise smooth rosy head. One wave of fronds like weeds clutched on a mountain bald, a part perfectly aligned in the middle, turned to one side like a flag in the wind, one perfect square shaved into the void. He is not wearing socks and his corduroy pants are frayed at the cuffs of a cut hem above his black, well-laced athletic shoes, the kind of shoes one used to find at a large department store. There were brands like Voit and Cuga, and they often featured Velcro straps. The children who wore these were marked by poverty—that is until such stores began re-branding these lines with updated, more derivative features. This shift is most likely the result of manufacturing lines being consolidated, and higher niche players such as Nike moving overseas. A cheap, Nike-like sneaker was available for retail manufacture. Yet, in what only appears as irony, the children who had always worn Nike shoes discovered a melancholy kitsch value in these Velcro shoes, which were called bobo shoes, and they bought them to wear to themed frat parties or to go fishing. If anything, Sketchers is the vanishing mediator here, despite whatever new york writers have to say about tipping points.
The empirical/finite I depends on external objectivity, on the non-I opposed to him, yet the absolute I is defined by the very fact that he transcends this opposition. Kant’s problem, on the contrary, is how and why the transcendental object qua intelligible entity is a necessary correlative not to the empirical I but to the I of pure apperception.
The transcendental object—this empty form of the object’s unity, a reference to which converts the multitude of sensible affections into a determinate and self-identical object—is possible only against the background of the unity of apperception of the pure-I: the transcendental object is identical to the I, it is the I itself—the primordial synthesis that ‘is’ the I—in its externality, in the guise of the objectivity opposed to the I, or as Hegel would put it, in its otherness.
Why does the I oppose himself to himself in the guise of an external object, why does he project his own shadow outside himself?
Uli Kunkel, Hans Gruber, and Martin Heidegger. What is Metaphysics? (1929)
Every metaphysical question ‘always encompasses’ the whole range. Each question is itself always the whole. As such, what question, if indeed thinking, escapes being embedded within this question: What is metaphysics? “The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics.” In the spirit of this reading of Heidegger, I would like to emphasize the next sentence down to the word. That is, Heidegger defers the question of metaphysics, he says that the very question is held under standard interrogation, the awakened expectations that any question presupposes. Yet, Heidegger claims that ‘we’ will ‘forgo’ a ‘discussion’ about metaphysics. For this moment, let us naively give the question of translation over and rely upon at least one meaning of the word. To forgo is to give up, to forsake. Thus, to forsake, to give up upon the discussion of metaphysics is to admit an alternative that a-waits in negation of the desired thing.
Finite knowledge is noncreative intuition.
“Might not chora mean: that which separates itself from every particular, that which with draws, and in this way admits and ‘makes room’ precisely for something else?”
I love the preppy old Chinese men that I see along my block: their prim nautical selves, the crew of Ulysses. The trope of the figure standing-against time, an adventure of the lonely, lovely signifier: the mechanic at Far East motors; the easily affable paternal figure who is somehow exempt from the seduction of mother, from the production of the couple that so easily dominates a kind of post-mythic curvature (the artist formally known as narrative, or writing, or text in those uninformed genetic terms available for mixed or popular use). Like that phantom automaton that prostitutes systemic control with individual jouissance, like a video game (without a hero, there is no event) that offers its re-payment over a duration of investment; the video game sanctions its reward via a subjective exchange of control. The player inserts his subjectivity like a coin at the very sli(t)p of formal identification where mortality is effaced and exchanged in the docile embrace of an object-commodity. The civility of the commodity implies the highest good and organization of the state. While this statement lacks immodesty, it is merely the transcendental imagination that consists the horizon of democracy, and what lies beyond some immentionable meridian of terror, of hymenic puncturing, of utter irruption of the total horizon of the world.
How far out does the horizon sound? What are the tidal moments of one’s knowing?
I love the preppy old Chinese men that I see along my block: their prim nautical selves, the crew of Ulysses. The trope of the figure standing-against time, an adventure of the lonely, lovely signifier: the mechanic at Far East motors; the easily affable paternal figure who is somehow exempt from the seduction of mother, from the production of the couple that so easily dominates a kind of post-mythic curvature (the artist formally known as narrative, or writing, or text in those uninformed genetic terms available for mixed or popular use). Like that phantom automaton that prostitutes systemic control with individual jouissance, like a video game (without a hero, there is no event) that offers its re-payment over a duration of investment; the video game sanctions its reward via a subjective exchange of control. The player inserts his subjectivity like a coin at the very sli(t)p of formal identification where mortality is effaced and exchanged in the docile embrace of an object-commodity. The civility of the commodity implies the highest good and organization of the state. While this statement lacks immodesty, it is merely the transcendental imagination that consists the horizon of democracy, and what lies beyond some immentionable meridian of terror, of hymenic puncturing, of utter irruption of the total horizon of the world.
How far out does the horizon sound? What are the tidal moments of one’s knowing?
Ideally isolated system
But it
is the extreme naked weirdness of the past, the residue of history as itself a
process of becoming, that in turn demands the appreciation of the equally
extreme possibilities of becoming in the here and now.
A
standard object is an arrangement of variations in proximity to some set of
qualities that are understood to be an object sharing a number of functional
characteristics. Each standard object is the result of what Whitehead called an
‘ideally isolated system.”
Behavioral
psychology considers the individual as a system connected to the world whose
evolution is determined by his environment, which acts on him through the
messages that he receives from the inert world or from other individuals, who,
according to the existential thesis, remain as alien to him as the external
world.
Critique of Judgment
He who imitates a model shows skill, but only shows taste in so far as he can judge of this model itself. Thus, the highest model, the archetype of taste, is a mere Idea, which every one must produce in himself; and according to which he must judge every Object of taste, every example of judgment by taste, and even the taste of everyone.
Idea properly means a rational concept, and Ideal the representation of an individual being, regarded as adequate to an Idea. The archetype of taste, which rests on the indeterminate Idea that Reason has of a maximum, but which cannot be represented by concepts, but only in individual presentation, is better called the Ideal of the beautiful. Although we are not in possession of this, we yet strive to produce it in ourselves. It can only be an Ideal of the imagination, because it rests on a presentation and not on concepts, and the Imagination is the faculty of presentation.
Idea properly means a rational concept, and Ideal the representation of an individual being, regarded as adequate to an Idea. The archetype of taste, which rests on the indeterminate Idea that Reason has of a maximum, but which cannot be represented by concepts, but only in individual presentation, is better called the Ideal of the beautiful. Although we are not in possession of this, we yet strive to produce it in ourselves. It can only be an Ideal of the imagination, because it rests on a presentation and not on concepts, and the Imagination is the faculty of presentation.
Animales! Asquerosos! Asesinos!
Critiques of the most general sort state that the country is depressed.
Our bright, competent ones nearly swoon over the idea of a country before the counter-culture, before the appropriation that almost ruined us. It was a war. Everyone seems to say. There is a particular interest in those moments of the early sixties, so our writerly television shows seem to argue. Before we would even think to claim that television would have no part in the revolution.
Hillary Clinton rises in the polls, while anecdotes emerge of her reading the Methodist theologian Carl Olgafi, a man who gave all to the new Left before it was simply a style to defend.
Many of the philosophy books I regard here in Claremont have been systematically marked. The title page of many books features a similar system of notation: accent marks on the relevant words of the title, along with smaller slashes that would be like quotation marks misplaced below the relevant spaces of the name, as if to include in clear penciled script the full name and the time of death. Henri /// Louis Bergson, 1859-1941.
I left the house later than usual on this Monday. The weather here is gray, which makes the whole town swell in bloated prison tones. No city wears its gloom like los angeles. Sullen trash frames the boulevard dullness of something gone completely wrong. Dwarf hedges and casket plywood cover the plumbing that emerges from the dank, catpiss soaked earth. In the night, an owl pursued its low notes of reed and organ. Another animal screeches in some mode of touching, which causes the dog to awaken in consternation, a sybaritic breeching recalled from some unneutered consciousness. I watch as she sorts the blackness beyond the biled streetlight, her prim diaphragm contracting in the symmetry of a taste for mucus, pheromone, and all those things that reveal what cannot be opened without movement. In the evening, teenage chemistry will have come to the block to leave desperate, puerile writings on the wall outside. Some father will have moved a purple sofa onto the sidewalk nearly beneath the graffiti. In such moments time collapses under the sign of a mediocrity that the youths will try to violence with their scowling features and their blighted obscene voices. The Sunday father is told to take the couch to the trash, and now sufficiently drunk, he moves the loveseat down the street, just past the building with all the gringo punta. What wild, embarrassed thoughts he must have, for who the fuck is really going to say anything. Punta. Vagrants will come to take the cushions, and leave the carcass of the couch to rot on the sidewalk. The writers will pass by like rapists to seize the opportunity of something exposed: meca, uek, aimeo. These boys have no taste for blood or bureaucracy, which is why they paint in fast food designs. They will write their resistance to the fate of the father, who is never allowed to snort methamphetamine off a marble notepad filled with practice in the lighter light of the park to lose nine hours of the night in the animal perfection of transcendent purpose.
Our bright, competent ones nearly swoon over the idea of a country before the counter-culture, before the appropriation that almost ruined us. It was a war. Everyone seems to say. There is a particular interest in those moments of the early sixties, so our writerly television shows seem to argue. Before we would even think to claim that television would have no part in the revolution.
Hillary Clinton rises in the polls, while anecdotes emerge of her reading the Methodist theologian Carl Olgafi, a man who gave all to the new Left before it was simply a style to defend.
Many of the philosophy books I regard here in Claremont have been systematically marked. The title page of many books features a similar system of notation: accent marks on the relevant words of the title, along with smaller slashes that would be like quotation marks misplaced below the relevant spaces of the name, as if to include in clear penciled script the full name and the time of death. Henri /// Louis Bergson, 1859-1941.
I left the house later than usual on this Monday. The weather here is gray, which makes the whole town swell in bloated prison tones. No city wears its gloom like los angeles. Sullen trash frames the boulevard dullness of something gone completely wrong. Dwarf hedges and casket plywood cover the plumbing that emerges from the dank, catpiss soaked earth. In the night, an owl pursued its low notes of reed and organ. Another animal screeches in some mode of touching, which causes the dog to awaken in consternation, a sybaritic breeching recalled from some unneutered consciousness. I watch as she sorts the blackness beyond the biled streetlight, her prim diaphragm contracting in the symmetry of a taste for mucus, pheromone, and all those things that reveal what cannot be opened without movement. In the evening, teenage chemistry will have come to the block to leave desperate, puerile writings on the wall outside. Some father will have moved a purple sofa onto the sidewalk nearly beneath the graffiti. In such moments time collapses under the sign of a mediocrity that the youths will try to violence with their scowling features and their blighted obscene voices. The Sunday father is told to take the couch to the trash, and now sufficiently drunk, he moves the loveseat down the street, just past the building with all the gringo punta. What wild, embarrassed thoughts he must have, for who the fuck is really going to say anything. Punta. Vagrants will come to take the cushions, and leave the carcass of the couch to rot on the sidewalk. The writers will pass by like rapists to seize the opportunity of something exposed: meca, uek, aimeo. These boys have no taste for blood or bureaucracy, which is why they paint in fast food designs. They will write their resistance to the fate of the father, who is never allowed to snort methamphetamine off a marble notepad filled with practice in the lighter light of the park to lose nine hours of the night in the animal perfection of transcendent purpose.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
august snohomish washington
I do not care for puzzles, but they are capable of teaching the sophistocation of work, and the essences delved from its construction.
There is no thought to labor, except as labor, by what is necessary to the straits of conditions. What is won is repetition, but this is not to say that stakes do no occur and turn and congeal and find themselves swelling into further entailments that wait to be called forth and named as strategies. Create a puzzle that takes twice as long to complete as to make, or so the movie's dialogue reminds us. You have one minute, six months, forty hours, etc.
What is the difference we can examine between privilege and prerogative? How are they not interchangeable, or in what ways might they be kin? No one cares for this style until they discover it themselves, even as themselves. One can be said to possess privilege but not prerogative. From here, one can imagine many unhappy souls who imagine those less fortunate, yet. And one can, on the other hand, imagine still many others that take the prerogative without privilege. Such would be the happy shame.
There is no thought to labor, except as labor, by what is necessary to the straits of conditions. What is won is repetition, but this is not to say that stakes do no occur and turn and congeal and find themselves swelling into further entailments that wait to be called forth and named as strategies. Create a puzzle that takes twice as long to complete as to make, or so the movie's dialogue reminds us. You have one minute, six months, forty hours, etc.
What is the difference we can examine between privilege and prerogative? How are they not interchangeable, or in what ways might they be kin? No one cares for this style until they discover it themselves, even as themselves. One can be said to possess privilege but not prerogative. From here, one can imagine many unhappy souls who imagine those less fortunate, yet. And one can, on the other hand, imagine still many others that take the prerogative without privilege. Such would be the happy shame.
City and the idea of the south
Points made to reckon with excess and expansion. Opportunity arises from excess, a foamy piece without part, without the manic fold of interior belonging, which de facto forms a portal to the outside, which in fact is the possibility of the outside. This would be a violence.
The city is made to be a place of a diversity that we could call cosmopolitan: the birthplace of a certain comparitive naturalism. I say birthplace because the unionization of contigency, or the thinking of multitude as the multiple modes of tourist, civilian, and immigration control--is almost always a certificate of seeming.
You only care about today. Yesterday,
not so much. And then you lie to define anything, at all.
The city is made to be a place of a diversity that we could call cosmopolitan: the birthplace of a certain comparitive naturalism. I say birthplace because the unionization of contigency, or the thinking of multitude as the multiple modes of tourist, civilian, and immigration control--is almost always a certificate of seeming.
You only care about today. Yesterday,
not so much. And then you lie to define anything, at all.
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