Melody and Morphogenesis
Melody and Morphogenesis Refrains of Culture, Crystals of Time by Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman
Author: Joseph Weissman
Derrida and Ends
Derrida and Ends: Deconstructure, Teleosophy, Katapoetics Joseph Weissman An investigation of deconstructive technique through the lens of the Post-Card. ∴ Download Derrida and Ends as PDF
Phaedrus Beyond
Oedipus, Narcissus, Odysseus
Oedipus, Narcissus, Odysseus Notes Towards a Theory of Temporal Structure in Homer and Sophocles Joseph Weissman
Theory Talk: Love, Pleasure, Friendship and the Good Life (with James Winchester)
We are delighted to present this conversation to you: an interview Taylor conducted with James Winchester, an author and professor of philosophy, who was also our undergraduate philosophy professor. His teaching was profoundly influential on us. Please enjoy. Transcript The transcription below was provided by Taylor Adkins.
Theory Talk: Dark Deleuze (with Andrew Culp)
Transcript The transcription below was provided by Taylor Adkins.
Theory Talk: Roundtable on Deleuze (with Justin Murphy) with Transcript
Transcript The transcription below was provided by Taylor Adkins. (The roundtable picks up around the 26-minute mark.)
Isocritique
Isocritique: Minor Diagrams Towards a Critique of Speculative Reason Joseph Weissman View as PDF Max Ernst, Birth of a Galaxy (1969) Introduction How to become a transcendental detective Yet by this I do not understand a critique of books and systems, but a critique of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all the cognitions after which reason might strive independently of all experience, and hence the decision about the possibility […]
Cloudbank
Critique of pure laughter. Laughter plays madly through the body, as though suddenly accessing another layer of reality. The shock of the abstract. A pure line is embodied in the spatiotemporal dynamisms of the laugher — which are in the same ‘order’ as that of the joke… –Laughter shakes loose the world, discovering something which doesn’t belong; that which the world hides from itself. Things hidden since the foundation of the world (Girard has a […]
Getting Started with your Xerocomputer
After a difficult rift expedition, the committee has recently recovered a fragment from the introduction of Programming Your Xerocomputer, a text whose very existence was once widely-disputed. A translation of “Section iii: Getting Started With Your Xerocomputer” is offered below, with associated Gamma-spectrum xenotational commands for the machine.
Theory Talk
Taylor and I are pleased to present to you the initial results of an ongoing experiment: recording our theoretical jam sessions, so we could capture our thinking more immediately. We invite you to take a listen. iTunes | Stitchr | soundcloud | RSS
Metafiction
Some inchoate thoughts on curvilinear transition and navigation between radically alien milieus. Schoenberg : Xenakis :: Joyce : Negarestani Cyclonopedia comprises a downward spiral into hyperstitional collapse or crack-up, alongside an outward spiral towards another universe. It may seem to perversely unfold a nightmare crypt of the death-drive, but this monstrous theoretical depersonalization is operating through the harshest singularities of space and time; it resounds in the howling of the magnetosphere, and echoes the cries of […]
Malabou
Catherine Malabou has created a meticulous and profound new concept of the brain. Malabou analyses the functions which neuroscience has discovered, conducting a contemporary synthesis of neuroplasticity, crystallizing a new concept which acts as a curious new abstract machine with many parts. She names this concept plasticity after the plastic multiplicity of the brain; and one component of this concept expresses the brain’s power to learn and to heal, and even to reconfigure itself. Another component is transdifferentiation, or the power of […]
Obliquity
Demodulation. There is always a monadic resonance to which a repetition is coupled in order to form a motor or compose an operational line, assembling at the limit a free phylum of machine interconnectivity. Every machine an operator or operand of another functional aggregate, assigned to an eternal repetition of variability, sweeping out a transversal trajectory through a self-constructing milieu of heterogeneous forces. The abstract machine injects new consistencies into turbulence, extruding flowing lines of fusion and […]
Rivers
The line of the river is a line of terraqueous flight; a flow flush with the substrate, conditioning and mutating its own channel, both wandering over the territory and slowly reconfiguring it, in a gradual mutation or decryption… A river system is composed of intensive aqueous lines diffracted from a fusional substrate — a vorticial assembly of multiple planes of consistency in chaotic metastability.
Technoscience and Expressionism
Technology and Control The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense) Gilles Deleuze’s indication of a certain affinity between technocrats and dictators seems […]
Abstract for DeleuzeConf
Technoscientific machines are collective assemblages "easily matched" with modes of consciousness and styles of composing realities.
Machine Fusion
You can simulate transparency, but behind your back an overheated network will condition your component lines. It is remarkable indeed the degree of encryption, not to mention extreme speeds and slowness, which a signal may be made to endure. Gentle decelerations, frenzied accelerations, stationary null journeys: real movements which the machine or a part undergoes — or else sudden breaks, unforeseen shutdowns, severed lines. The differential logic of the signal system mutates continuously according to […]
Edges
Beyond telepathy. At long last, after centuries if not millennia, and perhaps only if conditions will have it such that the voice may reach its fullest expression and height, we may foresee it finally passing; into the imperceptible. In this future beyond the future, the noontide of vocal expressivity; the death, or at least becoming invisible, through an unrecognizable transformation, of speech. At the outer limit of writing, beyond telepathy, an opening onto new luminous […]
Solidity
Negativity. I want to think the movement of thought, movement within stillness; the movement of nothing within the negative. To think the immediacy of this active movement or flow; to think in the very middle of what is unthought within thinking. An impossible or recursive landscape. The psychic architecture underlying cognition is not contingently but necessarily in blindness and without-vision; alien, obscure and encrypted. This labor, of thinking itself; the first work of thought which […]
Clouds
A sky englobes and illuminates a terraqueous sphere in the same way a biosphere recollects the scattered spirit of an earth. The sky breathes, soul of the world. Exposing nature and history to free and limitless dynamism, to an open field of differences distributed in depth. The outer limit of vision or terrestrial abstraction. The sky opens onto a virtual whole, exposing a cosmic membrane to continuous creation. How to begin with aerial roots? What […]
Binding
Hard right. Eternity and history do not enter into the pure multiple without an absolute translation or relative transfiguration, an intensive traversal of the code against the code. The decryption of time and an encryption of the future, or connective activation of infinite resonance. Remembering or becoming every property, trait, characteristic; everyone; everything. Traversal of the open virtual whole. Glare beyond which it is unendurable to go. Binding. A crowd networks without distance or depth, […]
Surf
Soaring above the waves, the surf line finds or creates a means of encrypted communication with the conjoint or conjugal striation of the surface and the disjunct or disastrous perplexity of the depths. A nomad geometer, the navigator of singular and extraordinary waves, the surfer of the pure multiple of the sea, journeys in place to remain in place. The surfer occupies a finely balanced territory, between infinitesimal inclination and infinite extension; an absolute survey […]
Remember
A signal develops conditions suitable for conviviality of noisy lines, conjunction of colored planes, convergence of pure volumes. Development emerges encoded from the remotest and most alien depths of the sea. Chaos filtered: decrypted or machined. Evolution or the pure differentiation of a life? From a crystalline substrate, from the earth to the navigation of the world. Analysis of stratigraphic zones and synthesis of degrees of proximity. Integration of the night, the indifferent — the […]
Between Planes
Relata. Noise (always-already virtually present) vibrates, and only indicates in becoming-channeled. Primary indication is extinction, dis-embodiment (subject), dis-articulated (sign), dis-simulated (situation). Immediate indicia; omen or axiom? –At any rate the percept and the affect are in a troubled relation. We attempt to attune a machine to this relationality; its speed approaches infinity asymptotically; it is exologically “determinative” insofar as:
Speed of Time
Acceleration physically denotes a second-order or cybernetic speed of speed; analogically, celerities in the technological phylum, mutation-rates of technologies of inscription (framing, writing, coding), permutational-vectors in expressive media, denote a cybernetic speed of time. A time in a way which is without past or future; an eternally ephemeral or transitional time which is light, spacing, energy. Already a kind of quantum power plant: a device to activate emergence; a virtual machine which permits transduction of […]
Transmission
The emancipation of a line of difference; Movement thinking itself; Becoming-imperceptible; Demonic signatures; Degrowth of vision; Experiment cautiously; All maps are provisional; All nodes are networks The emancipation of a line of difference Only in extinction, annihilation before the rising ground, can a process of differentiation emancipate itself from its repetitive articulation in both directions at once, break free from the entanglements and alienation of preconditions: situation, signifiance, subjection. How does a difference exceed the […]
Eternity
Since before memory, certainly the Greeks, a temporal continuum supervening upon the physical universe delimited the scope of ontological speculation. This delimitation of vision to a vertical axis transpiercing the cosmos necessitates a moment of insight generated through a brutal acceleration or jerk into clarity/modernity, or alternately futurity/sightedness; at any rate unleashing an irreversible and continuous transposition of subjects, translation of signifiers, transversalization of situations. The fluidity of this image of time is experienced only […]
Exchange
Markets effect the generalized dispersion and annihilation of collective power. Along with the material inputs to industrial production, labor is brutally dismantled by the process, decrypted, dissolved; we sink into the soil or melt into the sky (to become plague-vector of planetary toxicity.) Creation disappears beneath commerce, enfolded within the commodity, its tiny molecular flux occluded by continuous and irruptive exchange. Work in every sense today is turned by the market against itself, against people, […]
Mutable
The movement of the signifier through history is toxic, viral, plastic — a fiery line of abolition interposing nullity into intensity, linking pure space to the absolute threshold. It is only in following an escape-trajectory out from language, from the territory, and in concert with a dynamically consolidated assemblage of enunciation, that the sign reveals an intimate and internal logic of affirmation: dispassionate and frozen core of the signifier smoking beneath the burning skin of […]
Notes towards a Metaphysics of Light
Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created. (Heisenberg) I would like to think light as the dynamic interval between events, as a kind of singular tension between time and space, determining in the last instance both the simultaneity of the event as well as the order of succession for chains of causal relations. Light as the luminous matrix of the substrate and the glare of its utter annihilation; as […]
Risk
I began writing this before disaster struck very close to home; and so I finish it without finishing it. A disaster never really ends; it strikes and strikes continuously — and so even silence is insufficient. But yet there is also no expression of concern, no response which could address comprehensively the immense and widespread suffering of bodies and minds and spirits. I would want to emphasize my plea below upon the responsibility of thinkers […]
Exology of the City
How to think the infinity of the city, where all is fire and shadow? How could we hope to see into its opaque and terrible darkness; or hope to enjoy a view unblinded by its brilliant light? A city explodes into a world; perhaps under the tension of this polar opposition — fragments under the weight of its multiplicity — becomes a cosmos, all streams of flowing light and immense structuring voids… The dromology at […]
Utopian
“[U]topia is a fictive representation of an ideal social structure…”[1] Michel Serres names heaven the rejoining of the rational and the real. Is there not truly a disquietingly infinite distance between the celestial dream of this adjoining and the hell we have made of the world? What then is the utopian? A first provisional approach might highlight temporal disjunction, utopia as uchronia: a no-when as well as a no-where; utopia denoting a world, a city, a […]
Theory 1: Epigrams and Involutions
Theory 1: Epigrams and Involutions “When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes.” Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake “We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” Nietzsche, Daybreak, II.103 “The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.” Montaigne Preface. These collected epigrams, my thoughts of the morning — and occasionally late evening — this […]
Fractal Ontology 