Songbird Solander

Whispers of Inspiration and Grand Horizons

[songbirdsolander]

"Postmodern theory implies an increased emphasis on the reflexivity of reflexivity, thereby taking up the moment of reflexivity already contained in much modern theory and strengthening it. Hence it underscores reflection on thinking itself, and on what human thinking and culture are able to produce, communicate, and bring forth"

- Jan-olav Henriksen, Reconstruction of Religion

[songbirdsolander]

"Authority is what makes heresy possible. Heretics denied authority apart from themselves."

- Jan-Olav Henriksen, The Reconstruction of Religion

[songbirdsolander]

The movement into modernity brought with it an imperative of critical reflexivity where one cannot maintain a belief or idea without also noting its weaknesses and faults, as well as the contextual and historical conditioning that made such beliefs or concepts possible.

In religious life this errodes social commitment to institutional imperatives of doctrine and replaces it with a subjective reflexivity so that religious beliefs are pluralized and individualized based on subjective reflexivity. This is why we see plenty of deeply religious people reject formal doctrines that line up identically to institutions but instead create their own metaphysics based off personal background and experiences. Religion has been atomized out of the rigid institutions into the reflexive realm of subjectivity.

[songbirdsolander]

If Kafka's work is a rhizome, then its expression does not crystalize into a unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth. The work resembles crabgrass, a bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections. Reading can participate in these connections; a reader makes connections as he reads. He need not interpret and say what the text means; he can discover where passages in the text lead, with what they can be connected. The result is not an interpretation but a map, a tool with which to find a way. The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."I The reader becomes a nomad; to borrow a phrase from Lyotard, reading becomes "a nomadic of intensities." As such it does not threaten minor perspectives; instead it entertains them, and minor literature works to produce a reading which will constitute its own affirmation.

Robert Brinkley

[songbirdsolander]

Jean Baudrillard remarks, there is always a desire not to be interpreted, not to be produced and expressed in the terms that an interpretation employs. Typically the interpreter is an agent of a dominant social code; the interpretation reproduces the material it considers as instances of the code. The desire to escape such codification- for codification Deleuze and Guattari employ the word "territorialization"-the desire to de-code or to deterritorialize seems particularly crucial for minorities who want to remain minorities and affirm perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit.'

Robert Brinkley

[songbirdsolander]

nowadays when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin—which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an explanation—a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations, and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something which must be surmounted.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

In the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole, an important refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in "origin," the mark of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the MORAL one: the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. Instead of the consequences, the origin—what an inversion of perspective! 

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without the art of NUANCE, which is the best gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of all tastes, THE TASTE FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL, is cruelly befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists of life.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe PURE air.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever any one sees, seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks "badly"—and not even "ill"—of man, then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man.

Nietzsche, Beyond good and evil

[songbirdsolander]

The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

The wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

In the third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an EMOTION, and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey"—this consciousness is inherent in every will

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. 

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? 

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[songbirdsolander]

TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil