ÉLAN VITAL

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waddddduuupppppp

[fucktheory]

Ethics 101

[vandercunt-deactivated20181213]

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my fav scene <3

[chinaism]

cr:猫梳

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It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one perhaps, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to worship a god without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear.

The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt

[victortattoo]

[fucktheory]

In Which Steven Pinker Is A Total Ignoramus Who Should Go Read A Fucking Book And Get Himself Some Fucking Education

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Here’s what I want:  I want Steven fucking Pinker to take a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and explain one of the propositions to me.  Not all of them; not the whole book.  One.  Just one proposition.  I’ll even do him a solid - I’ll let him read it in English, instead of embarrassing him by making him try to translate Latin.  Or maybe the Critique of Pure Reason.  Can you explain that to me, Pinker?  Hell, can you explain any of Kant’s critiques?  

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “no."  In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb that Steven fucking Pinker has not read a single one of these thinkers he so casually and authoritatively name-drops since his undergraduate years, if then.  If Pinker has ever read all of Leviathan, I will eat my fucking copy of the book. 

Let’s be absolutely clear - not a single one of the thinkers this asshole claims for "science” were scientists.  Not a single one of them thought of themselves as scientists; not a single one had a concept of “science” that was anything like the concept Pinker is so anachronistically imposing on them.  All of these men, even if they didn’t think of themselves as “a philosopher,” thought of their work as “a philosophy."  It’s right in the texts, if you take the time to read them.  And the way you can tell Pinker has no fucking clue what he’s talking about is that he misses the two most important examples that would actually support his claim:  Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle.  Of the thinkers that he lists, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are the only ones who actually conducted anything that might even remotely fit the bill of "scientific experimentation."  Smith was an economist.  Rousseau was a dilettante. Kant…I mean, the idea of describing Kant as a an "evolutionary psychologist” is just…OMFG.  

“I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block.”  

Did you follow that, folks?  Stephen fucking Pinker, the great scientific genius, is going to go back in time to correct Spinoza’s arguments and “guide” him.  The idea that these thinkers wrote “in the absence of formal theory” is so reductive and offensive.  Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Spinoza’s Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and his correspondences with Olderburg and others, Hume’sTreatise…these thinkers were conscious of formal method and self-reflexive about it in a way few scientists today are even remotely capable of.  Incredibly, implausibly, each of these philosophers invented an inferential method, from the ground up, instead of taking for granted any assumption they were taught.  

Let’s be perfectly clear - “science” as we think of it today is a new thing.  It dates back to the middle of the 19th century, when the disciplinary divisions we today regard as entirely natural wereformalized by people like Hermann von Helmholz.  Before that there were no “scientists”:  there were thinkers, writers, philosophers, ethicists, geometers, and doctors.  There were also theologians, who Pinker dismisses out of hand, even though “science” would not exist without the precedent of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus.  “Science” is a fully historical product of the regimentation, organization, and professionalization of what used to just be people observing the world and thinking about it.  Science is the transformation of knowledge into a cliquish guild. 

But the best part of this verbal tripe is the fact that Pinker is so narrow-minded and unself-reflexive in his anachronistic, ahistorical claims that he doesn’t even realize the extent to which his critique of the humanities itself depends on ideas generated by the humanities.  Like this hilarious bit:  “The term ‘scientism’ is anything but clear…The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of 'queer’ and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend."  First of all - "flaunting”?  And second - isn’t that fucking rich.  Such an original concept!  We can already see how indebted the humanities are to science.  Or this bit here:  “we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today."  Oh, really?  You know that, do you?  And where did this concept of epistemological relativism come from, exactly, if not from the humanities? 

Assholes like Steven Pinker think that people in the humanities resist their ideas because we don’t understand "science."  But the truth is that many people in the humanities love and embrace the sciences:  there are historians of science, there are digital humanities, there are philosophers of technology.  What we resist isn’t "science”; what we resist are obnoxious fucking ignoramuses like you who come up in our house and tell us how ignorant we are, how much we don’t understand, and what we should be doing with our research.  This is not an issue of science vs. humanities - this is the nature of contemporary academic research and, indeed, human nature itself.  I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s healthy, but I am saying that in an era of incredible competition and increasingly narrow specialization, nobody likes people from other disciplines stepping on their turf.  The sciences don’t like it when the humanities do it - have you ever seen the absolutely hideously rude responses a humanities scholar gets when they try to deliver a paper at a science conference? - so why should you expect different when you do it yourself? 

Pinker is defending science against an extremely odd idea:  “The mindset of science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. It is, rather, indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”

So, first of all, I’ve been a scholar in the humanities for a while now and I’ve never heard anybody accuse science of genocide.  Unless incurable dweeb-hood is lethal, in which case run for the hills.  Second, “indispensable in all areas of human concern”?  Well, let’s think about that for a second.  If Pinker had ever read Spinoza and Hume, much less understood them, he would understand how basic claims from necessity function:  namely, if science is 200 years old and aesthetic and political theory are over 2,000 years old, then former is not necessary to the existence of the latter.  To borrow a formulation from Descartes - you know, the philosopher - both art and politics “can be and be conceived” without any concept of “science." 

But really there’s a point more important than all of these, which is this:  Science doesn’t cause genocide or war.  The humanities don’t cause genocide or war.  What causes genocide is the ignorant belief in an absolute formal distinction between two things where in fact there is only a spectrum.  Nobody has ever started a war under the mantra "let’s all get along” or “we’re all human,” but plenty of wars fall under the rubric of “us or them."  One of the most fundamental sources of human error, anxiety, and misery is this unreflexive tendency to set up absolute oppositions between things that have never been and never will be absolute opposites.  The supposed division between the sciences and humanities is not a question of method, or of epistemology, even - it’s question of disciplinarity and the economic structures of contemporary academic institutions.  Simple evidence:  you can get science funding to write about Bachelard, because he’s a "historian of science,” but you can’t get science funding to write about Bachelard’s student, Michel Foucault, because Foucault was a “philosopher." 

The best thinkers - throughout history, in every field of inquiry - embrace whatever insights and information that their thought requires.  The best scholars in the humanities respect the sciences; the best scientists are the ones who actually take the time to read the occasional book and can form a decent sentence.  The worst thinkers are the ones who insist on inane distinctions, who set up false binaries instead of knocking them down, and who think of knowledge as an either/or proposition instead of embrace the notion that knowledge is a mosaic of perspectives that together generate an evolving and diverse picture of existence. 

Personally, I think "science” can be incredibly useful to research in the humanities.  I have regular arguments about this with traditionalists in my discipline.  But I don’t think this because I want to “infuse” the humanities with science, I think this because I consider all human knowledge to be a single vast and manifold field, and I pick and choose what’s useful to me and not what the disciplinary guilds of contemporary academia think I need.  This true when literary scholars frown at my diagrams, and it’s equally true when obnoxious, ill-informed assholes like Steven Pinker tell me that evolutionary psychology is useful for literary criticism.  Don’t tell me how to do literary criticism, you self-important airbag. 

And don’t even fucking talk to me about Spinoza. 

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Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

Detail of the Fire, Richard Siken

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Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western World.

The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt

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That night, we drank whiskey on my porch and talked about the phenomenon of having a distant lover on the edges of things, whom you didn't want to talk about but also wanted desperately to talk about, and how this caused you to speak of this lover as a place and not a person, so you could talk about them without talking about them.

Mating Habits of the Asterik, Emily Meg Weinstein

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Those who have read have access to words, to history, and to the history of words. They know that language shapes, flatters, conceals, enthralls. He who reads reads language itself; he perceives its duplicity, it's cruelty, its betrayal. He knows that a slogan is just a slogan. And he's seen others.

Interview with a Torturer (excerpt from The Elimination), Rithy Panh

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It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

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Americans, then--both police officers and others--are regularly reminded about the inherent danger faced by police officers, even though the job is getting safer. But not only aren't figures about how many times cops shoot at, injure, or kill citizens publicized, the figures themselves haven't been tabulated. The federal government has been arming American cops with military-grade guns, vehicles, and other weaponry, but has little interest in knowing if all of that is affecting how and when police use lethal force against American citizens. Cops are told all the time that the public presents a threat to them, and that the threat grows more dire by the day. But as for what sort of threat cops pose to the public, the public isn't permitted to know. These policies have given us an increasingly aggressive police force in America, and a public shielded from knowing the consequences of it all.

Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko

[sadgrl22-deactivated20150406]

Ppl to avoid: Ppl who call racism/homophobia/transphobia/antisemitism/misogyny “opinions”

[hunspeach]

Visit Original Link

[dazeylo]

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman. I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Meditation at Lagunitas (via soy-chi)

[fucktheory]

Anti-Oedipus, An Introduction: Ab Initio

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.  It breathes, it heats, it eats.  It shits and fucks." What is ‘it’? That’s the question. That’s the question to which, in the broadest sense, Anti-Oedipus is entirely dedicated. Everything is wrapped up in this basic question. Nietzschean transvaluation, Spinozan ethics, Humean empiricism, Bergsonian intuition: all the modes of thought Deleuze spent the 1960s exploring come together in the question, as do the two great domains of thought which dominated French intellectual life in the 1960s, but which Deleuze, notably, never really bothered with before: psychoanalysis and Marxism. For most of its history, Western philosophy asked, “What am I?” It explorations of being, of consciousness, of existence, all began with the thinking subject. But the 19th century destabilized the idea of the self’s supremacy: first Schopenhauer then Freud established unequivocally the existence of forces in the mind beyond and outside of consciousness; first Hegel then Marx insisted that consciousness is not a transhistorical given but a product of material and social existence; and Darwin’s theory of evolution formalized the radical notion, hinted at much earlier in Spinoza and Hume, that humanity is not a quality outside and beyond nature - after Darwin, it could no longer be doubted that man was fully in and of nature, and that both human existence and human consciousness are fully within and entirely bound by the principles that govern natural things. Deleuze & Guattari’s position is explicitly clear: “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other.” Thus the formula of the Cartesian cogito - “I think, therefore I am” - in which subjectivity and existence are absolutely linked, was ruptured. Things exist beyond and before consciousness, before subjectivity and the self. What are these things? What underlies and underpins our ability to watch ourselves think and to say “I am”? This is the question to which inquiry now needed to address itself. To those relations and forces which affect and shape the individual mind but are outside individual consciousness Freud gave the name “das Es,” the German third-person neutral singular pronoun. “The id,” Freud’s English translators decided. IT. That…something. We say ‘it’ because “that which acts but is not the individual consciousness” is kind of bulky. But Freud’s concept is not adequate. “What a mistake,” D&G write on the first page of Anti-Oedipus, “to have ever said *the* id.” It’s not the idea of unknown forces that bothers D&G, but the singularity, the definite article, the oneness - the idea that behind the subject is simply another, deeper subject, a second, hidden self. What kind of explanation would that be? Like a dictionary definition that includes the word being defined, THE id, the irreducible singularity of the individual unconscious, is inadequate to explain the substrate of the self, the materials and forces from which the subject is constructed and the process by which that construction takes place. And without a doubt, it is a process that we are in search of here, not a thing. A thing is not an explanation. “Machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines…Something is produced, not mere metaphors.” To ask what “it” *is* is to return to the other of subjectivity the position of a subject - centered, stable, observable. The question must be reconfigured if we are to get anywhere at all. Hence the emphasis on processes, on becomings and relations. There are two questions which will guide D&G’s entire exploration: “How does it work?” and “What does it do?” Or to put it slightly differently: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” It is thus never a question of truth. Truth is a correlate of being - the simplistic Platonic question that asks, “What is it?” It is always a question of action and activity, of processes and becoming.  To say that the schizophrenic “resists” the forces of capitalism and acts on their “actual” desires is to reinstate the stability of truth as the substrate of the subject, to suggest that beneath the subject constructed by capitalism is an unconscious that is nothing but a deeper, truer subject - a subject more truly the subject than the subject itself.  Does that sound absurdly complex and incoherent?  Yeah, that’s because it is.  The subject has “desires,” but beneath those desires are not more true, “actual” desires, but desire itself, not a desire for or a desire to but desire as the flow, as force, as the energy that connects machines together.  The schizophrenic’s desires are schizophrenic precisely because they are not the schizophrenic’s.  Desire never belongs to anybody - the schizophrenic is simply in a much better position to recognize that fact.  The subject is an operating system - it’s nothing but a thin, reasonably coherent interface designed to facilitate a user experience.  Beneath it are endless series of programs, connections, links, chips, nodes, processers.  We want to strip back the screen and watch the bits and bytes connect.  We want to figure out what makes the damn thing tick.  It will be a wild ride. An expansive, immense one, spanning the whole of history and the entire surface of the world, every cell and organelle in the body and the entire human race’s collective orgasms.  How could it be anything else when the root of the entire problem is the idea of discrete entities?  Here, again, the Cartesian cogito furnishes us with the best example - the mind that can only become certain of its own existence by denying the possible existence of everything around it.  Individuals, unique and irreducible, trapped inside their unique and irreducible flesh suits.  Fuck that.  “The real truth of the matter - the glaring sober truth that resides in delirium - is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits.”  The analytic mode - breaking things down, separating them, examining things in antiseptic isolation - is not sufficient.  Everything relates to everything, everything connects with everything.  Any time we say that something is, the verb “to be” means the exact same thing.  All things are in the same way - this is the claim of substantial unity, the univocity of Scotus and Spinoza, that is the Deleuzian heart of Deleuze & Guattari.  Deleuze is the metaphysics; Guattari is the schizophrenia.  Everything is necessary.  It’s all a part of the same giant mess of quivering, stuttering connections and larval, productive flows. 

In Marx we find a history of social processes that never adequately explains interiority.  In Freud we find a history of interior processes that never adequately explains sociality.  The series of binaries that govern this separation - inside/outside, self/other, personal/social, private/public, mind/body - are the false divisions, the inadequate analytic distinctions that pry open the subject only to find…another, deeper subject.  More of the same.  This is the problem of hermeneutics, of interpretation.  Interpretation seeks to determine what a thing truly is.  In the Freudian concept of repression no less than in the Marxian concept of false consciousness, there is the supposition of the latent and the manifest, the visible surface which we see and the true thing hiding beneath it, the real meaning of the things we perceive.  But this is sleight of hand, because every hermeneutic in fact presupposes knowledge of the thing it supposedly sets out to discover.  D&G do not want interpretation.  They want schizoanalysis, an open-ended process of discovery the parameters and protocols of which are discovered as we go along.  Things will get messy.  But that’s OK.  Because things are messy.  Sometimes there will be tautologies and dead ends and circles, because life is a series of feedback loops, not a clearly sign-posted highway.  

Speaking of clearly sign-posted highways:  if interpretation and the lure of the hermeneutic is the first thing we reject, we equally reject teleology, the idea of a destination known in advance, of a future that emerges clearly and inevitably from a present that is taken for granted as fully understood.  No, no.  We sort of see the past.  We barely understand the present.  Who the fuck knows what the future will bring.  The inevitability with which Marxism, especially, claims to see the future unfold out of the present is an error, to Deleuze & Guattari.  The idea that “schizophrenia is capitalism’s annihilating angel,” as Peretti’s article suggests, is not what D&G suggest at all.  The inevitability of teleology as just as invalid is the certainty of interpretation - in both cases, there is a claim to know in advance what is yet to be discovered.  Nonsense.  Again, what we are interested in are processes - connections, shifts, movements, relations, changes.  Not beginnings and endings, not stages of dialectical development, not aims or truths or any of that knowing, presumptuous horseshit.  These are all things.  Processes do not have beginnings and endings, they only have magnitudes:  more, and less.  Changes are not conclusions or inevitabilities, but simply oscillations.  Faster and slower.  Bigger and smaller.  Stable and chaotic.  What goes up must come down.  What deterritorializes must reterritorialize.  What escapes coding in one place must be coded in another.  History isn’t a straight line, it’s an insane, stuttering doodle.  What was can be again - but different, because you can never piss in the same river twice.  Heraclitus said that.  Or maybe it was Patti Smith.  One of those growly old punk dudes, anyway. 

Anti-Oedipus is revolutionary.  No doubt about it.  But it’s not revolutionary in that it’s a handbook for revolution, or a manifesto for one.  Not for your revolution, anyway, or for the one you think you want.  Enough with the teleology, already.  There’s nothing revolutionary about a revolution you can already see coming.  And anyway, we’ve already established that what you think you want isn’t actually desire, anyway.  Stop assuming.  Stop interpreting.  Stop waiting.  Dive in to a sweeping, sweaty, swirling morass of concepts and connections.  But for fuck’s sake, don’t do it because you think you know what you’ll find.  If you want to read things that will reflect the reality you already assume exists, stick with Buzzfeed and Fredric Jameson.  If you want to reinvent the world, to patch together a new infinity from lacerating shards of chaos, Deleuze & Guattari are waiting.