All posts filed under: art

Philo-fictions and Experimental Texts: Philosophy as Artistic “Whatever” Material

Thursday, March 30, 2017
by Taylor Adkins
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art / experiment / Laruelle / non-philosophy / philosophy / text / textuality / Uncategorized

A few years ago, I took a graduate seminar on experimental texts at Emory University. Some of the work I have done during my studies I have put up on Fractal Ontology, but I never included this one. I will run you through the basics of the project. First, I wanted to showcase the “consumption” of philosophical texts that I have participated in over the course of my reading. This usually entails me, pen in […]

It Means Becoming Human

Sunday, July 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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animal / art / becoming / flesh / freud / guattari / human / lacan / machine / ontology / space / territory

But he [Lacan] did not realize the consequences of his rupture with Freudian determinism, and didn’t appropriately situate “desiring machines” — whose theory he had iniated — within incorporeal fields of virtuality. This object-subject of desire, like strange attractors in chaos theory, serves as an anchorage point with a phase space (here, a universe of reference) without ever being identical to itself, in permanent flight on a fractal line. In this respect it is not […]

Vessels

Friday, July 4, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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art / becoming / dimension / encounter / experiment / force / molecule / resonance / time / variable / vortex

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. (Aldous Huxley) Through saturation an artist brings all the diverse elements of experience into a real interfusion, an affirmative disjunction. The artist opens passageways, a vessel for engendering a pure becoming. An encounter with an outside, presenting a pure force which art can only express — art as transistor, as […]

The Voice of Silence

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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1 = 0 / art / clarity / contradiction / courage / cruelty / daybreak / future / God / identity / nature / noise / parasite / science / signal / silence / Uncategorized

Flow. There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words. It’s not as bad as you think. It’s worse. There is no beginning which is not also an end. The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time. Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million. One equals Zero. A flock of birds. […]

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: Towards an Ethics of Expression

Sunday, April 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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art / cruelty / difference / language / love / metaphysics / morality / nature / Nietzsche / Politics / rigor / science

Introduction: Rationality and Affect The lofty prize Of science lies Concealed today as ever! He has no thought To him it’s brought To own without endeavor! Goethe, Faust (1st part, 2567-2572) Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostasizes the dismemberment of man into functions. Praise of the simpleton has an undertone of anxiety lest the severed parts reunite and put […]

The Meaning of Science

Tuesday, February 19, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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art / ascetic ideal / chaos / efficiency / history / humility / illusion / improvement / irony / meaning / Nietzsche / order / problem / religion / resentment / science / socrates / spirit / will to power

What is the Meaning of Science? Nietzsche and the History of the Human Spirit What is problematic about science? What does the “progress” of science mean about human beings? I believe this question turns everything which is unsettling, mysterious, and uncanny about the course of human development (and not only human); who can exhaust what is figured within the folds of this strange question — science thought as a symptom, science grasped as a problem? […]

Questions for an Ontology of Aesthetics

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstraction / art / becoming / expressivity / history / imagination / light / ontology / Thought / transubstantiation

Are we escaping or returning, gathering together or tearing apart? We find ourselves suddenly in need of a post-conceptual way of thinking. Perhaps this problem of art and machines has always already begun to make itself felt. We are discovering that its appearance at this critical juncture signifies a bifurcation point, a new kind of possibility. Imperceptibly we have moved beyond imagination into the abstract, from dreams to decoding.

Producing Alterity

Sunday, January 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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art / delirium / emptiness / extinction / interruption / noise / production / transportation

(Joel-Peter Witkin)     The canvas is empty. It situates itself beyond the situation. It is a serrated vacuum, resonating upon a rupture/screen which is not a nullity but a determination, already a milieu. An emptiness at once expressive, in some sense a transcendent enterprise which calls us to specific responsibility. Art is not just freedom, it produces freedom. Transform the world; but you must already be somewhere to begin to form it, and you […]

Energy and Culture: Notes on “Postmodern” Science

Saturday, November 24, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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art / communication / complexity / culture / energy / form / history / individuation / information / knowledge / legitimacy / narrative / noise / non-linearity / ontology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / self-organization / transcendence

Science, Information and Time There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. Alfred North Whitehead It is necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a pure speech-act, creative story-telling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters. It is also necessary to go beyond […]

The Future of Information

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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art / counter-symmetry / creativity / culture / difference / divinity / enlightenment / equilibrium / history / image / information / life / nature / noise / probability / revolution / Science / Mathematics / Technology / separation / symmetry / war machine

In reality, goals are absent. Nietzsche Rivalry is only a spectacle; it is the state of appearance. Equilibrium is phenomenal, and the distance is real. The law of opposition belongs to phenomenology; the law of irreversibility or of falling downstream is real. Behind all representation. Michel Serres A Genealogy of Modern Science Science appears to begin with the Greeks: somehow, somewhere, a resentful pre-scientific impulse begins to criticize the unity of life and culture. Some […]

Aesthetics, Asymmetry and Weakness: Nietzsche and the Beautiful

Wednesday, September 26, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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aesthetics / art / beauty / becoming / chaos / human / will

Improvisation (Kandinsky) “I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life.” – Nietzsche, [from a letter to Lou Salome] I cannot help but admire Nietzsche when he writes in Twilight of the Idols that there is nothing beautiful but man. For Nietzsche, vanity is ‘the first truth of aesthetics.’ He even supplies a corollary: ugliness is precisely the ‘degeneration of the human.’ Here Nietzsche method allows us to see possibility for new forms […]

Reality (Emptiness, Humor, Freedom)

Saturday, March 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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art / censorship / freedom / humor / resistance

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions–and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no […]

In the end?

Friday, January 19, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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aesthetics / art / horizon / universal / void

Perhaps the most subtle instant of artistic insight: knowing when the work is complete. Knowing a thing is done is always a decision, a superego injunction to believe, to accept; art lives precisely in this deception, that it is possible to be told what to believe, or put another way, that we can ever know what other people actually want from us. What is the terminating stroke if not precisely the final “cutting” of the […]

Art, Meaning, Love

Monday, April 10, 2006
by Joseph Weissman
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art / love / meaning

“There is a reason for everything.” How can I trust anyone who says this? No one can tell you the reasons for everything. We learn reasonable justifications for many things. But these explanations rely on what? Further explanations. Every rationalization involves an obfuscation; the double movement of knowledge represents a drawing towards a clearer understanding and pushing further away from the truth. Truth becomes untruth when we tell stories, the essential human act which defines […]