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J.-P. Caron – Breviário, pictures from the booklet+CD released by Estranhas Ocupações, Recife, Brazil, December 2015 [Bandcamp]

Music-wise, Breviário is a fine mix of metropolitan recordings, concrete sounds, conservatory rehearsal rooms and manipulated sounds. Hints of musique concrète and noise. Beautiful piano abuse on track #10. Prolonged cymbal abuse on closing track #11. The booklet includes drawings and graphic scores.

Brazilian composer and improviser Jean-Pierre Caron, from São Paulo, Brazil, was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1982. He’s currently preparing a degree in Philosophy of Language at Paris 8 university in France. As a musician, Caron is interested in both contemporary and noise music. He played detuned piano in an improvisation duo on Oco in 2013 [Bandcamp] and explored solo synthesizer drone music on 8³ in 2014 [Bandcamp].

Thanks Joseph for this one.

heteroglossia

“[W]hat distinguishes thinking from mere consciousness, in other words, the capacity to represent your own representation… [t]o be able to have this reflexive distance, so that your representational world is not simply transparent vehicle but something that is itself represented. Precisely this distancing, which makes thinking in philosophical sense possible […] if transparency is a special form of darkness then consciousness itself or brute consciousness is darkness. Animals live in darkness. Precisely because their world is completely transparent.”

— Ray Brassier in conversation with Thomas Metzinger

kenotype

“Execution by guillotine is a perfectly rational death, unlike forms of public execution carried out in medieval society. The guillotine administers death which is allegedly painless and maximally efficient. Because of its efficiency it deprives execution of any symbolic pathos. Death by guillotine is coldest and meanest of all deaths. The individual’s refusal to conform to requirements of the general will is not invested with any kind of internal meaning or significance. No spiritual significance. […] Here Hegel links with Kant - Hegel sees in the terror of absolute freedom a prefiguration of Kant’s categorical imperative…” -Ray Brassier on the Phenomenology of Spirit + + +

011011100011000101110100011010

“My contention here is that the condition whereby philosophy embraces the necessity of a subtractive ontology (and simultaneously abjures its ontological pretention) is provided by a quasi-condition that is transversal to the four regimes of truth acknowledged by Badiou: capitalism as ‘over-event’ of universal unbinding. There is something like a “quasi-truth” of Capital as condition for conditions, rendering the philosophical identification of being as void not merely possible but imperative.”

— Brassier’s evil essay

shituationist

there’s a perfect sociocultural congruence between [Sonic Youth] as individuals and their audience: that burgeoning of a vast college educated middle class audience for “alternative rock” in the 80s and 90s: graduates wanting something a little bit artier and recherche than pop, metal or hardcore, but nothing too foreboding or intimidating: SY fitted the bill perfectly: indeed, Moore and Gordon are the mirror image of their audience: nice, vaguely bohemian/arty middle class urban professionals: Gordon’s links to the NY artworld very symptomatic: and of course art too became an attractive and materially rewarding profession for middle class hipsters in the 90s….

Ray Brassier quoted by Mark Fisher

noirepistemology

Disagree here, but funny

affirmation--negation

This is the whole point of Sellars’ critique of the given. Once you have dispensed with the idea of the given, you realize that nothing is either abstract or concrete in itself: there is no metaphysical fulcrum for this distinction. Even at the level of perception, no immediate experience would provide you with a litmus test for distinguishing the two. Ray Brassier, Prometheanism and Real Abstraction

fundgruber

“With his suave and unctuous prose, Latour presents the urbane face of post-modern irrationalism. How does he proceed? First, he reduces reason to discrimination: ‘‘Reason’ is applied to the work of allocating agreement and disagreement between words. It is a matter of taste and feeling, know-how and connoisseurship, class and status. We insult, frown, pout, clench our fists, enthuse, spit, sigh and dream. Who reasons?’ (2.1.8.4) Second, he reduces science to force: ‘Belief in the existence of science is the effect of exaggeration, injustice, asymmetry, ignorance, credulity, and denial. If ‘science’ is distinct from the rest, then it is the end result of a long line of coups de force’. (4.2.6.) Third, he reduces scientific knowledge (‘knowing-that’) to practical know-how: ‘There is no such thing as knowledge—what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary, crafts hold the key to all knowledge. They make it possible to ‘return’ science to the networks from which it came’. (4.3.2.) Last but not least, he reduces truth to power: ‘The word ‘true’ is a supplement added to certain trials of strength to dazzle those who might still question them’. (4.5.8.) 17. It is instructive to note how many reductions must be carried out in order for irreductionism to get off the ground: reason, science, knowledge, truth—all must be eliminated. Of course, Latour has no qualms about reducing reason to arbitration, science to custom, knowledge to manipulation, or truth to force: the veritable object of his irreductionist afflatus is not reduction per se, in which he wantonly indulges, but explanation, and the cognitive privilege accorded to scientific explanation in particular. Once relieved of the constraints of cognitive rationality and the obligation to truth, metaphysics can forego the need for explanation and supplant the latter with a series of allusive metaphors whose cognitive import becomes a function of semantic resonance: ‘actor’, ‘ally’, ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strength’, ‘resistance’, ‘network’: these are the master-metaphors of Latour’s irreductionist metaphysics, the ultimate ‘actants’ encapsulating the operations of every other actor”

— Ray Brassier - Concepts and Objects

improvisedliturgy

I want to propose that the cardinal epistemic virtue of Enlightenment consists in recognising the disequilibrium which time introduces into knowing. Knowing takes time, but time impregnates knowing. In this sense, the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment affirms the disequilibrium of time. […] If disequilibrium is an enabling condition of cognitive progress, then we have to find a way of defending the normative grounds that allow us to make sense of this very assertion. We have to defend the normative status of the claim that things are not as they should be, and that things ought to be understood and reorganized. And doing this requires that we be able to defend the intelligibility of the question ‘What can we make of ourselves?’ In this regard, Prometheanism is simply the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world.

Ray Brassier, "Prometheanism and Its Critics"

improvisedliturgy

So, rather than trying to preserve the theological equilibrium between the made and the given, which is to say, between immanence and transcendence, the challenge for rationality consists in grasping the stratification of immanence, together with the involution of structures within the natural order through which rules can arise out of physical patterns. According to this conception of rationality, rules are means of coordinating and subsuming heterogeneous phenomena, but means that are themselves historically mutable. The ways in which we understand the world, and the ways in which we change the world on the basis of our understanding, are perpetually being redetermined. What unfolds is a dynamic process which is not about re-establishing equilibrium, but superseding the opposition between order and disorder, and recognizing that the catastrophic overturning of intention, and the often disturbing consequences of our technological ingenuity, constitute no objection to the compulsion to foresee and control.

Ray Brassier, "Prometheanism and Its Critics"