mxmlsm

July 20, 2010

"The history of European atheism, from its Greek and Roman origins in Lucretius’ De rerum natura to modern classics like Spinoza, offers a lesson in dignity and courage. Much more than with occasional outbursts of hedonism, it is marked by the awareness of the bitter outcome of every human life, since there is no higher authority watching over our fates and guaranteeing the happy outcome. At the same time, atheists strive to formulate the message of joy which comes not from escaping reality, but from accepting it and creatively finding one’s place in it.

What makes this materialist tradition unique is the way it combines the humble awareness that we are not masters of the universe, but just parts of a much larger whole exposed to contingent twists of fate, with a readiness to accept the heavy burden of responsibility for what we make out of our lives. With the threat of unpredictable catastrophe looming from all sides, isn’t this an attitude needed more than ever in our own times? (…)

What makes modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilisation in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post. This is most emphatically a European legacy worth fighting for.” "

— Slavoj Žižek, Violence. Six Sideways Reflections, London: Profile Books, 2008, pp. 117-118. (via msodradek + amiquote)

1:45pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/836261226

(Notes: 15)

July 16, 2010

"This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead? It means that you look at things the way they are as such, you look at the object as such. To perceive the object as such implies that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the bottle as such means to see the bottle as it would be without me. If I were dead the bottle would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object as such means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense."

— Jacques Derrida: As If I were Dead (via theguywhoinventedfire, fuckyeahphilosophy)

1:28pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/819246601

(Notes: 98)

Filed under: materialism philosophy truth knowledge

June 20, 2010

mthing:

montycantsin:

mattermedia:

RT @Naxos Toward Freedom written by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze http://is.gd/cVvt8

11:56pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/719788490

(Notes: 15)

Filed under: identity materialism philosophy psychology politics language theory

June 20, 2010

Deleuze on relationship between identity and difference

“Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that “X is different from Y” assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, “given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus.” That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences.

Apparent identities such as “X” are composed of endless series of differences, where “X” = “the difference between x and x’”, and “x” = “the difference between…”, and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself. “If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference.”

— Gilles Deleuze, Wiki, quotes from “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2003), cited in Ordinary finds via amiquote rawsilk + naxos

11:49pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/719769577

(Notes: 13)

Filed under: identity materialism philosophy

May 30, 2010

Myth is a type of speech

“Of course, it is not any type: language needs special conditions in order to become myth: we shall see them in a minute. But what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form. Later, we shall have to assign to this form historical limits, conditions of use, and reintroduce society into it: we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.

It can be seen that to purport to discriminate among mythical objects according to their substance would be entirely illusory: since myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones. Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self- indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.” from Myth Today by Roland Barthes, h/t @dimalb

10:26pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/647805707

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: discourse materialism language communication

May 30, 2010

via mthing + touba

5:02am | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/645608937

(Notes: 118)

Filed under: religion philosophy identity materialism ethics network

May 28, 2010

"Cast as unreliable and unruly, the human body in the age of technology is less and less the primary site/cite of military representational practices. The triad more is appropriately understood as such: the hardware has come to represent a whole range of advanced high-tech weapons; the software represents information and communication technologies; and the wetware represents the embodied human soldier, which significantly is the weakest link (see Der Derian 2003; Kundnani 2004; Harris 2003). Thus what constituted the cyborg in its earlier manifestations, as explored and detailed by Foucault, no longer fully captures the shifts motivated by the current fetishisation of advanced technology in the military. Alternatively, what we are witnessing, and indeed participating in, with the constitution of the cyborg soldier is a radical rearticulation of subjectivity. Contemporary military techno-scientific discourses have profoundly altered the subject of discursive power productions, with the fleshy body of the soldier no longer standing in as the agent of politics by other means, or in this case, war by other means. With the discursive positioning of military technologies as superior to the human soldier, machines are now the subjects of the text."

—

Cristina Masters, Cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities /via wildcat2030

Auto reblog for that “site/cite” - I think I despair…

1:14pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/640588705

(Notes: 4)

Filed under: war discourse philosophy materialism genre academia language technology

May 26, 2010

from ‘The Turtlenecked Hairshirt’ by Ian Bogost

“We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists’ clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

If there is one reason things “digital” might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.”

source via hacking the academy, h/t butterflyhunt

Don’t be marginal.

12:11am | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/632537785

Filed under: academia technology materialism philosophy identity politics

May 25, 2010

Typically modern

via dissemination, tentacular writes:

“It may seem at first illogical that a radical theory of rationalism and consciousness, fit to puncture ahistoricism & the nostrums of both right & Fabian simpering, should be, in inchoate form, outlined in the short introduction to a 1936 collection of horror stories.

‘The writer of the ghost story should be a rational man, otherwise he cannot build up the matter-of-fact framework which is so horrifyingly shattered by the incursion of the Impossible. Any credulity would make his readers sceptical from the start; and he would underestimate the amount of preliminary mining and sapping of their confidence in the rational which it is necessary to undertake before he shows his hand. But though he must be by habit a materialist, he must be one with chinks in his armour. He must be devoid of simple faith and also of completely honest doubt - in other words, he must be a typically modern writer.’ - C. St. John Sprigg, Uncanny Stories

Christopher St. John Sprigg = a ghost identity of the incomparable Christopher Caudwell.”

12:06pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/631002983

(Notes: 3)

Filed under: modernism materialism horror philosophy literature history

May 24, 2010

Re-Link: The Physcial Network of Data

“With an estimated 1,733,993,741 users and a global growth rate of 380% since 2000 , it is easy to think of the internet as a free-flowing cloud of information accessible by all. However, unlike popular belief, our connection to the internet is not mediated by an uber high-tech network of satellites (or any of the other usual suspects). In fact, satellite links account for only 1% of all internet connections. Automatically, and incorrectly, thought of as a complex metaphysical network of information, the Internet consists of a highly physical network of lines and nodes; a simple system with inherent complexities. […]

The lines and nodes of the internet, much like any other physical infrastructure, are prone to an array of politico-economic issues. Closely related to the politico-economic reading of the hierarchical structure of the world, much of this understanding of internet has to do with its very physical backbone. Areas with the least number of users get the best connections and others, like most of Africa, get nothing. We can clearly make out the users from producers. The redundancies of the submarine lines to North America and Europe have caused internet prices to plummet, which in turn has encouraged not only higher usage of internet but an active participation in the information world. Meanwhile, you can count the number of lines feeding Africa on one hand. As a result, prices are so high that even the lines that are already in place become meaningless, because of lack of use.” /via @endlesscities

3:42pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/628333922

Filed under: network data materialism history internet communication media technology visualization economics africa europe

May 24, 2010

"The result is an encounter with capitalism stripped of the resources made available by over a century and a half of Marxist scholarship. Meanwhile, the relentless global search for profit and the extraction of surplus value goes on, not least in the very places - universities - where poststructuralist scholars ply their trade. The constant hunt for revenue, the prostitution of research agendas to corporate concerns and visions of national ‘competitiveness’, and new forms of speed-up and deprofessionalisation are unintelligible without a firm grasp of the logics of capital.In a world increasingly subject to the workings of an informational and multinational mode of capitalism, characterised by flux and instability, hybridity and fragmentation, it is also hard not to see the poststructuralist dismantling of the subject, as in the widely influential writings of Laclau, Mouffe and Judith Butler, as unintentionally complicit with that world."

— Mark Laffey: The red herring of economism, p. 468 /via theguywhoinventedfire, zettelkasten

12:58am | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/626426987

(Notes: 24)

Filed under: academia capitalism identity philosophy marxism materialism discourse theory critique economics

May 22, 2010

Marxism in a Buddhist Perspective

via @thewarmjets

10:16pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/623021798

Filed under: marxism religion materialism philosophy history

May 22, 2010

wildcat2030:

The New Tree of Life

How will we classify what is natural or unnatural when life is built from scratch? Synthetic Biology is turning to the living kingdoms for its materials library. No more petrochemicals: instead, pick a feature from an existing organism, locate its DNA code and insert it into a biological chassis. From DIY hacked bacteria to entirely artificial, corporate life-forms, engineered life will compute, produce energy, clean up pollution, make self-healing materials, kill pathogens and even do the housework. Manufacturers will transcend biomimicry, engineering bacteria to secrete keratin for sustainable vacuum cleaner casings; synthesise biodegradable gaskets from abalone shell proteins and fill photocopier toner cartridges with photosensitive E. coli. Meanwhile, we’ll have to add an extra branch to the Tree of Life. The Synthetic Kingdom is part of our new nature. Biotech promises us control over the natural world, but living machines need controlling. Biology doesn’t respect boundaries or patents. And in simplifying life to its molecular interactions, might we accidentally degrade our sense of self? Are promises of sustainability and unparalleled good health seductive enough to accept such compromise? (via Alexandra DAISY Ginsberg)

3:42pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/622158545

(Notes: 5)

Filed under: science philosophy materialism

May 22, 2010

"Sometimes science reveals distinctions to be false. Time and space were thought to be distinct, separate things, until Einstein showed that they were fundamentally intertwined. Graphite and diamond were thought to be made of distinct substances, until Tennant showed that they would release the same gas when burned. In a similar way, progress in the field of synthetic biology is eroding the longstanding moral and theoretical distinctions we make between life and machinery. The recent breakthrough by Venter’s group proves that life may be built from its component parts, and set into motion, just like inanimate machinery. No divine spark is required, no soul need be blown into the cells. Life no longer even requires a parent or progenitor. One of the most widespread and longstanding moral beliefs is that there is an important difference between living organisms and inanimate machines. Nearly everybody agrees that there are moral boundaries on our treatment of living things. For vegetarians or vegans, this may include a belief that we should never intentionally kill another living being. For others, it may include a belief that we ought never to interfere with the cellular mechanics of a living being, as we do when we produce genetically-modified foods. By contrast, nobody thinks that it is wrong to destroy, create, or tamper with a machine — even if the machine in question is exceedingly complex. This moral distinction is put in crisis by the synthetic biology projects of Venter and others. Going forward, we will need to find a more meaningful moral distinction than the line between the animate and the inanimate. Failing that, we are faced with an unacceptable set of alternatives: either to grant machines the moral status we currently accord to living things, or to treat living things in the manner of machines."

— Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate /via wildcat2030

3:33pm | URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/622139591

(Notes: 13)

Filed under: science philosophy materialism history

May 21, 2010