29 August 2004
infinite absenteeism
well, SEP was really a blast this year (much better than the last couple, at least in terms of the papers). Still too much bad Deleuzianism going on ('immanence good! transcendence bad!' This type of 'reasoning' is not eve worthy of first-year undergraduates).
Someone asked about Hardt...well, I don't know what they meant by asking whether his voice is really 'like that'. He sounded like a Californian, slightly surf-y and/or stoned...I dunno.
He looked like an 80s American aerobics teacher.
His manner is altogether far too accepting for someone supposedly proposing the only possible post-Marxist response to 'empire'. He says things like: 'well, you have your concept of multitude, I have mine, that's fine, s'groovy' (well, more or less, he speaks quit a lot like that).
Negri, as far as I can tell, is a little more cutting when he presents this stuff. But it's all a bit problematic - ok, so no one believes in things like 'class' anymore, but just patting everything down (some sort of flat ontology) without any notion of mediation or abstraction is not helpful - I think Virno is more on the mark when he seems to separate out this question, so that you have a conceptual break between the ontology of the human and ontology tout court. Politics can't mean anything unless you do this, I reckon. Agamben and Virno are both working on this problem from different angles (philosophical anthropology against the anthropological machine!), but there's a lot of work to be done in the intersection...you can't just state that 'being is communist' and hope for the best...
Anyway, I am away for a few days, and I think Cinestatic is undergoing some sort of major upheaval, so probably good timing.
I might even go walking, which is unusual activity indeed for Infinite Thought, tho perhaps Nietzschean striding about might be good for the creation of concepts. It's certainly not going to lead to the conclusion that 'all mathematics is transcendence' as some unjustly famous Deleuzian claimed....quelle nuppet!
Someone asked about Hardt...well, I don't know what they meant by asking whether his voice is really 'like that'. He sounded like a Californian, slightly surf-y and/or stoned...I dunno.
He looked like an 80s American aerobics teacher.
His manner is altogether far too accepting for someone supposedly proposing the only possible post-Marxist response to 'empire'. He says things like: 'well, you have your concept of multitude, I have mine, that's fine, s'groovy' (well, more or less, he speaks quit a lot like that).
Negri, as far as I can tell, is a little more cutting when he presents this stuff. But it's all a bit problematic - ok, so no one believes in things like 'class' anymore, but just patting everything down (some sort of flat ontology) without any notion of mediation or abstraction is not helpful - I think Virno is more on the mark when he seems to separate out this question, so that you have a conceptual break between the ontology of the human and ontology tout court. Politics can't mean anything unless you do this, I reckon. Agamben and Virno are both working on this problem from different angles (philosophical anthropology against the anthropological machine!), but there's a lot of work to be done in the intersection...you can't just state that 'being is communist' and hope for the best...
Anyway, I am away for a few days, and I think Cinestatic is undergoing some sort of major upheaval, so probably good timing.
I might even go walking, which is unusual activity indeed for Infinite Thought, tho perhaps Nietzschean striding about might be good for the creation of concepts. It's certainly not going to lead to the conclusion that 'all mathematics is transcendence' as some unjustly famous Deleuzian claimed....quelle nuppet!
25 August 2004
monkeys dressed as monks
Off to SEP tomorrow. Probably be a bit all over the place as these things tend to be. Nevertheless, hope to have lots of exciting fights with people. I do like the cut and thrust of intellectual debate - especially when saturated with swearing and booze.
my first piece for k-punk kollective is now up (review of 'I, Robot').
good piece about car crashes in Guardian: melt them all down and use the metal to build trees for robots. Fuggin traffic, gonna git me a pony with twelve-foot horseshoes to stamp on all the cars and crush 'em into broken pieces.
24 August 2004
new links etc.
4"33' is partcularly good (I assume the minutes and seconds are reversed intentionally). Not sure about its longevity, but gesturally it's just perfect. crispin sartwell is very funny. See especially 'Kerry is a gelding', the american nihilist party merchandise and the piece 'Dick Cheney is white' ('Behind the white people who apparently run the world, there is a secret cabal of white people who actually run the world. Fiendishly, these are very the same people'). S'up there with some of the whorecull stuff.
Better go, a real proper nihilist has just turned up in my flat!
Better go, a real proper nihilist has just turned up in my flat!
machine for making human
23 August 2004
rats and crashes
'I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels'. From 'What I believe', J.G. Ballard.
'I assume that a large part of the car's appeal lies in its combination of a comparatively primitive and static technology with a decorative shell capable of generating enthusiasms and obsessions of the most extravagant kind.' - from 'Autopia or Autogeddon?', J.G. Ballard.
Weekend did not go quite as planned. We did go to the zoo, eventually, on Sunday, so rats all in order (when one gets sick, he or she waits patiently in a corner of the toilet area until recovered or dead, so as not to infect the rest of the colony).
But Saturday was filled with police and insurance companies. We crashed quite spectacularly on the way to the zoo. Infinite Grandma (78) failed to spot a driver coming from the right as we crossed a roundabout. I, however, did, but to no avail (what good is shouting 'stop!' when the pedals are on the other side of the car). So, he ploughed into us, we were shunted over the central reservation on the left side and into another car waiting to turn into the roundabout (it was a driving instructor's car as well). I FUCKING HATE CARS!!!!!! It's the third pishing car crash I've been in in the past seven years. And I don't even drive (have my licence but know I am too bad a driver to go out on the road, hmm perhaps it's genetic). We were all alright, but still, it's just not good. If anyone knows whether old folk are supposed to retake their test after a certain age, please let me know, as I'm gonna have to do some serious sorting out about what my Gran's gonna do (I say she should never drive again, but she values her independence...s'not gonna be pretty...).
So, cars (almost an anagram of Crash too, do we care about anagrams these days, ho ho). They are fucking ridiculously dangerous, and I don't care what kind of fantasies people project onto them. Make them all go away.....
20 August 2004
so farewell then, hideous scaly beast
terrible news! The lady komodo dragon at London Zoo has died in miserable, lovelorn, circumstances (s'practically Shakespearean if you ask me):
'Six-feet-long Nina, who weighed 44lbs, died after scrambling up an eight foot dividing wall to reach her mate in the other side of the pen.'
'A zoo spokesman said Nina's action was "both spontaneous and entirely out of character".'
This is merely one tragic example among literally TWO regarding crazed animals called 'Nina' dying in zoos. The other being the polar bear at Bristol Zoo who just got bored and went mad, ultimately bashing her head repeatedly against the wall until she was no more.
have a drink my hedonistic chums....for the randy-but-inept-dragon, shed a tear for the lonely, listless bear penned up in all-too-finite circumstances.... and remember, always support your local zoo.
'Six-feet-long Nina, who weighed 44lbs, died after scrambling up an eight foot dividing wall to reach her mate in the other side of the pen.'
'A zoo spokesman said Nina's action was "both spontaneous and entirely out of character".'
This is merely one tragic example among literally TWO regarding crazed animals called 'Nina' dying in zoos. The other being the polar bear at Bristol Zoo who just got bored and went mad, ultimately bashing her head repeatedly against the wall until she was no more.
have a drink my hedonistic chums....for the randy-but-inept-dragon, shed a tear for the lonely, listless bear penned up in all-too-finite circumstances.... and remember, always support your local zoo.
'Oh Jupiter, a robot Descartes!'
'Globes of energy millions of miles across! Worlds with three billion humans on them! Infinite emptiness! Sorry, Powell, but I don't believe it. I'll puzzle this thing out for myself. Good-by.'
'Look at you,' he said finally. 'I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material - like that.' He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan's sandwich. 'Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity impairs your efficiency. You are makeshift.' - the robot in 'Reason', by Asimov.
Off to Bristol Zoo tomorrow with my dear Grandmother. WE get to look at the naked mole rats, and possibly even do some drawings of them. YOU get to stay in London and, like, do drgs and stuff...Am I bothered though?! Feeling purified after an excoriating reading group last night (Deleuze, do we like him? Do we hate him? Does he say lots of things that no one ever works on cos they find it too hard? Anyone can write about becoming-animal, y'know. S'not cool an it's not clever. And just what is so important about a Norwegian omlette? etc. etc.).
I wonder if they have hyenas at the zoo....
'Look at you,' he said finally. 'I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material - like that.' He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan's sandwich. 'Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity impairs your efficiency. You are makeshift.' - the robot in 'Reason', by Asimov.
Off to Bristol Zoo tomorrow with my dear Grandmother. WE get to look at the naked mole rats, and possibly even do some drawings of them. YOU get to stay in London and, like, do drgs and stuff...Am I bothered though?! Feeling purified after an excoriating reading group last night (Deleuze, do we like him? Do we hate him? Does he say lots of things that no one ever works on cos they find it too hard? Anyone can write about becoming-animal, y'know. S'not cool an it's not clever. And just what is so important about a Norwegian omlette? etc. etc.).
I wonder if they have hyenas at the zoo....
18 August 2004
daddy! buy me a monkey!
'The holiness of the romanticism of gambling, unlike that of asceticism, makes monks and abstainers tepid.' - Georges Bataille, 'On Nietzsche'.
I am a tepid monk...watching these arguments about a massive population explosion by 2050. I think John Gray will not be pleased ('The Inuit and the Bushmen stumbled into ways of life in which their footprint was slight. We cannot tread the Earth so lightly. Homo rapiens has become too numerous.' - Straw Dogs). Homo rapiens! S'clever, no?
I don't understand the argument that people in richer countries have less children because they can't afford to have more. It's about as cogent as the arguments of holocaust deniers (whom, you'd think, if they really were properly anti-semitic, would presumably be pleased with Hitler's actions and liable to celebrate them). Instead, they seem to hold the convoluted position that Jews are the kinds of people predisposed to make up stories about their extinction at the hands of others, and this is why they should be killed in large numbers. It's an argument that mobilises all kinds of reactive forces. If anyone thinks I've got it wrong, please let me know, as I have spent at least ten minutes trying to figure it out.
17 August 2004
new tings
have added some more blog volk lately. Gay Librarian looks particularly good - thanks Glueboot, as I stole most of these from your list.
Excitingly, I have also changed the subtitle of the blog, apologies to K-Punk who already heard me make that statement with reference to horoscopes at some ridiculously early time this morning (breakfast meetings with Bloggers, we replicate the real world with stunning precision, yet undermine it at every turn!). Really not sure about that 'it's magic but it works' argument. But it's good, hanging about Brixton and talking about the 1844 Manuscripts and so on. If only there were a direct hyperspeed underground link between Hackney and Bruce's house, I'd be over there much more often....
Am not drinking the hard stuff for a week - expect protracted posts about the boredom (and yet necessity) of sobriety. I don't even want to get drunk on a glass of water. I don't want to get drunk at all. That's how tough I am!
Excitingly, I have also changed the subtitle of the blog, apologies to K-Punk who already heard me make that statement with reference to horoscopes at some ridiculously early time this morning (breakfast meetings with Bloggers, we replicate the real world with stunning precision, yet undermine it at every turn!). Really not sure about that 'it's magic but it works' argument. But it's good, hanging about Brixton and talking about the 1844 Manuscripts and so on. If only there were a direct hyperspeed underground link between Hackney and Bruce's house, I'd be over there much more often....
Am not drinking the hard stuff for a week - expect protracted posts about the boredom (and yet necessity) of sobriety. I don't even want to get drunk on a glass of water. I don't want to get drunk at all. That's how tough I am!
16 August 2004
too hot to druk
Exciting moves afoot over at k-punk, with a giant collective project just about to get underway....hopefully it won't degenerate into a giant brawl (although half of me hopes it will, perverse pig!).
Thought this was a splendid way of putting the dangers of the current climate (especially in London): 'It's a bit risky drinking alcohol in this heat isn't it? I woke up so dehydrated the other day, I was just a small pile of powder in the middle of the bed.' (from crumbling loaf). Must try and remember this.
Currently reading some Balibar. This essay is pretty interesting. I like Balibar - he combines just the right levels of scholarship with proper political relevance. And he's jolly too.
Thought this was a splendid way of putting the dangers of the current climate (especially in London): 'It's a bit risky drinking alcohol in this heat isn't it? I woke up so dehydrated the other day, I was just a small pile of powder in the middle of the bed.' (from crumbling loaf). Must try and remember this.
Currently reading some Balibar. This essay is pretty interesting. I like Balibar - he combines just the right levels of scholarship with proper political relevance. And he's jolly too.
13 August 2004
yet more pointless
pointless
whilst looking in the mirror before bed, with the slight distanced refraction that drunkenness gives, I noticed that my front right tooth has a little mark on it that looks like a samurai holding a pole. This is quite a good thing, I think, but tells you just how unkempt my teeth are.
But what does it mean?
But what does it mean?
11 August 2004
The First Autobiography
'But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind--the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy. Thy anger had come upon me, and I knew it not. I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride, and I wandered farther from thee, and thou didst permit me to do so. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications--and yet thou didst hold thy peace, O my tardy Joy! Thou didst still hold thy peace, and I wandered still farther from thee into more and yet more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude.'
- St Augustine, Confessions, Book Two.
Augustine is considered to be the patron saint of sore eyes, which perhaps explains the Christian (and indeed secular) obsession with claiming that masturbation makes you blind.
Can we save Augustine from himself? So he believed in original sin ('intrinsic impairment'), dogmatism, interiority, guilt, and so forth. But what a good writer...
If anyone has access to the Roberto Rossellini film about him I would be eternally grateful if they could let me know, as it seems otherwise impossible to find.
10 August 2004
Online Reading Group
There's a new generation online reading group looking at Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude. The book looks v. promising for this kind of discussion: It runs with some of Hardt and Negri's work, as well as doing its own thing with Aristotle, Freud, Marx and the Italian operaismo tradition (rage, rage, against the reduction of life to work!).
sign up, sign up. It's just been created, so now would be a good time to join before people actually read the thing and start having opinions. The archives are all available anyway.
09 August 2004
Reason-upon-sea
A pleasant couple of days by the non-sea of Southampton with my smallest, prettiest friend (currently looking very fetching with 'Crash'-like prosthetics after dislocating her knee in a club. And she went to Glastonbury in a wheelchair - I was impressed).
Sure you're all very pleased to know that I'm currently preparing a long post on rationality, in order to merit my inclusion in various other blog volks' 'philosophy' categories. Oh, and to start big fights with people too, of course!
But it might be a while as I couldn't sleep last night due to a plague (a vexation? a exasperation?... a waspishness?) of wasps, and am currently succumbing to those dull demands of bios to sleep (that scuzzy, feckless underbelly of logos). Only joking, of course I like bodies too....inserted into giant yeast-making machines by dead bunnies....or in pies.
During my final year at Thatcher's favourite University (TM), it was decided that the final ball event would be Shakespeare themed. 'Great,' I thought, 'I do hope they choose Titus. I would love to get smashed and insult all the c***s in my year whilst surrounded by paper mache limbs and people-pies.' Sadly, though, they picked 'a Midsummer Night's Dream' instead. I hate those fucking fairies.
Sure you're all very pleased to know that I'm currently preparing a long post on rationality, in order to merit my inclusion in various other blog volks' 'philosophy' categories. Oh, and to start big fights with people too, of course!
But it might be a while as I couldn't sleep last night due to a plague (a vexation? a exasperation?... a waspishness?) of wasps, and am currently succumbing to those dull demands of bios to sleep (that scuzzy, feckless underbelly of logos). Only joking, of course I like bodies too....inserted into giant yeast-making machines by dead bunnies....or in pies.
During my final year at Thatcher's favourite University (TM), it was decided that the final ball event would be Shakespeare themed. 'Great,' I thought, 'I do hope they choose Titus. I would love to get smashed and insult all the c***s in my year whilst surrounded by paper mache limbs and people-pies.' Sadly, though, they picked 'a Midsummer Night's Dream' instead. I hate those fucking fairies.
in memoriam S.G.
you are missed. a lot.
05 August 2004
The Alternative Bible
Very funny piece in this week's Private Eye about famous typos in English editions of the Bible.
The 1631 edition of The King James edition famously printed the commandment 'thou shalt commit adultery'.
Other theo-typos include: 'Go and sin on more' (instead of 'no more'), Mark 7:27
'I will that women adorn themselves in modern apparel' (instead of modest), 1 Timothy 2:9
'Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God (a missing 'not') 1 Corinthians 6:9
Ah, a whole different history opens up, vistas of textually approved behaviours widened and stretched beyond recognition..........
It's just a book, man, just a book............
I Dream a Surrealist Cinema
Just been drinking tea with Glueboot. And, indeed, watching her filmic output (not religious porn, sadly)- but, rather, a brief avant-garde-y feature from 2003 entitled, erm, 'Glueboot'(the blog named in honour of the film). I told her I'd write a little review of it so, cough, cough, here goes:
'Glueboot', directed and edited by Siobhan McKeown, is a subtle and contemporary take on the noble (or, rather, openly anti-noble) history of Surrealist filmaking. Splicing colour footage of seemingly banal occurrences (a pigeon scrabbling about, rubbish bins stuffed with McDonalds junk, motorways - or perhaps autobahns?, even a Morrisons) with oneiric, sepia-tinged, high-drama sequences on beaches and in ruins (the odd murder, desired breasts, sleeping women, the burial of a be-suited man in sand, the removal of a young lady's hand with a meat cleaver), the film plays on the discontinuous nature of waking (and sleeping) imaginings, sentiments and history. This stylistic juxtaposition forces us to ask which is 'more surreal': The 'classically' psychoanalytic beach and ruin images, replete with violence, sex and art, or the demented repetition of what could be Ballard's own surrealist territory (the purring brutality of the automobile, the gorged trash receptacle, the over-flowing quantities of junk food for junk animals, etc.)?
Much of the film is over-layered with a dispersive narrative tale....this is literally 'glue', a nonsensical stream of dream-words and aesthetic observations, which appear, occasionally coupled with the odd textual stream smattered across the footage, in the sepia sections of the film (and only the sepia sections). Do signs thus belong purely to history? To our dream-image of history (the history that wears a moustache and a monocle and takes picnics by the seaside?!). Supermarkets dream an alphabet without a code.
In an aural replica of the colour-movement-image splicing technique of the visual elements of the film, the soundtrack performs the neat trick of reversing Mendelssohn all the way back to Aphex Twin (and, again, you ask yourself, who is the true classicist...).
'Glueboot' ultimately manages to fuse intelligent commentary on a filmic 'tradition' that fights with bloodied horrorist claw against its own categorisation with a surrealist lexography of its own (the demented psychogeography of modern speeds and slownesses).
If all goes according to plan, it will be screened in all major cinemas as a short feature before the next Harry Potter film.
..................................................................
Hope you like the review, S! I tried to do it in my best film studies style. When I make my own feature, I will allow you to be the first to compare it to Vertov and Tarkovsky.
03 August 2004
Banning Graffiti would be like Outlawing Transcendental Philosophy
...or, even, like burning Mein Kampf.
Started reading the thing (it's really boring! it makes no sense! He blames Marx for his having originally been a 'weak-kneed cosmopolitan'!). Still, it's either that or review this new Judith Butler book on 9/11....
Managed to get some work in today, so mildly more upbeat about the whole project. Lately, reason has been smacking its head on the low ceiling of thought, and I just can't understand what on earth it is I'm trying to say. I hope this is just a necessary, yet temporary, physiological stage that bites when you are half-way through a PhD. Hopefully the bits of my brain that deal with thinking about 'the human', 'man', species, infinity, rationality and politics will put on weight and grow big and strong. Put the Hitler down, pig!
01 August 2004
not un-hungover
been out boozing it a bit with fellow blog no-tail, glueboot, this weekend.... we cut a devastatingly erudite dash across the drinking pits of Stoke Newington (amongst other encounters: the need to politely refuse the offer of a threesome with a chef. 'But you've never had sex with a chef,' he protested. 'You don't know what you're missing out on!'. Apparently we do not). All this in my favourite late night High St boozer (which once memorably presented the endearing scene of two lesbians dancing in a tight circle with an escapee Hassidim from Stamford Hill).
But now, to work. You know, I used to be such a girly swot, barely sleeping on Sunday Nights for excitement at the thought of school the next day. Now I am just another jaded research student, concerned only to extend drinking time to infinity, and to not get told off by my supervisor. But perhaps I exaggerate....I just need to write a couple of chapters in the next 30 days and everything will be alright...aargh....gack....eeep.....
Mind you, I used to think lots of stupid things (that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' mother a minor error; believing people who say they're really liberal about sex really mean what they say, a slightly more serious idiocy).
Now I think lots of stupid things, but can back up my opinions with references to Hegel and Feuerbach.
I also used to think I was autistic. Turned out I just lived in the country.
But now, to work. You know, I used to be such a girly swot, barely sleeping on Sunday Nights for excitement at the thought of school the next day. Now I am just another jaded research student, concerned only to extend drinking time to infinity, and to not get told off by my supervisor. But perhaps I exaggerate....I just need to write a couple of chapters in the next 30 days and everything will be alright...aargh....gack....eeep.....
Mind you, I used to think lots of stupid things (that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' mother a minor error; believing people who say they're really liberal about sex really mean what they say, a slightly more serious idiocy).
Now I think lots of stupid things, but can back up my opinions with references to Hegel and Feuerbach.
I also used to think I was autistic. Turned out I just lived in the country.
