@bedouins - Tumblr Blog

on study

“When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, “oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.” To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.”

From The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Harney & Moten

#study #fred moten #undercommons #fugitive

on the production of subjectivity

“Thus it's not simply a matter of remodelling a patient's subjectivity - as it existed before a psychotic crisis - but of a production sui generis. For example, certain psychotic patients, coming from poor agricultural backgrounds, will be invited to take up plastic arts, drama, video, music, etc., whereas until then, these universes had been unknown to them. On the other hand, bureaucrats and intellectuals will find themselves attracted to material work, in the kitchen, garden, pottery, horse riding club. The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual-group-machine. These complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallised into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. In such a context, the most heterogeneous components may work towards a patient's positive evolution: relations with architectural space; economic relations; the co management by patient and carer of the different vectors of treatment; taking advantage of all occasions opening onto the outside world; a processual exploitation of event-centred "singularities" - everything which can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation with the other. To each of these components of the caring institution there corresponds a necessary practice. We are not confronted with a subjectivity given as in itself, but with processes of the realisation of autonomy, or of autopoiesis.”

–Felix Guattari

#desubjectivation #guattari #autopoiesis #graft #autonomy

on destratification

“One of the things that amazes me is that the Himalayas – which people think of as the paradigm of the stable – are still moving up one millimeter a year because India is still clashing with Central Asia. They’re a ripple in the surface of the Earth. We cannot conceive of a clash that would last millions of years – our time frame is too limited. Imagine an observer with a time-scale so large that he could see this clash. He wouldn’t even see us. Species to him would seem like vast amounts of bio-mass in constant change. He would see evolution. Everything that matters to evolution happens across millennia. That observer would see species mutating and flowing. He would probably worship flows – unlike us, who, because of our very, very tiny time-scale of observation, tend to worship rocks.

We are completely seduced by what is stratified. We surround ourselves with permanent buildings, we speak about a rock-solid relationship, we strive for the solid. But it’s becoming clear that everything that’s structured is just historically produced constructions that became hardened and sedimented. All the action is in stuff that flows. I think we’re gonna find out that at a certain limit point of destratification, destratified geological stuff, destratified organic stuff, and destratified mental stuff seem to coexist together. It’s another world. It’s a limit point that you perceive when you’re tripping. It’s happening all the time and we’re not aware of it.”

Interview with Manuel De Landa by Erik Davis

#destratification #rocks #geology #deleuze