All posts filed under: becoming

Technoscience and Expressionism

Wednesday, July 16, 2014
by Joseph Weissman
comments 12
acceleration / becoming / control / Deleuze / machine / Nietzsche / subjectivity / virtual

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 […]

Edges

Sunday, December 8, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
acceleration / becoming / inhumanity / language / machine / ontology / radiation

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

Sunday, November 24, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / metaphysics / ontology

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

Saturday, October 12, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / freedom / machine / metaphysics / noise / secret / variation

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

Thursday, August 29, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / distance / language / machine / negation / territory

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

Friday, August 2, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
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acceleration / becoming / machine / ontology

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 […]

Speed of Time

Saturday, June 22, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
becoming / machine / metaphysics

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

Monday, May 27, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / difference / language / machine / ontology

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

Thursday, March 28, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 11
acceleration / becoming / language / metaphysics / ontology

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 […]

Risk

Thursday, November 1, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
aesthetics / becoming / difference / disaster / laughter / machine

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

Thursday, September 13, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comments 10
acceleration / becoming / exhaustion / labyrinth / metaphysics / ontology / potentiality

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

Saturday, August 4, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / metaphysics / Politics / sickness / thinking / utopia

“[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

Sunday, July 22, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / Deleuze / language / Nietzsche / ontology / Politics

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 […]

Differend

Wednesday, July 18, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / difference / language / literature / micropolitics / ontology

Light. Events are not inherently luminescent, but perhaps in a certain light (to careful observers) they may become perceptible. Part of the difficulty of this logic is that the event cannot be contained within a stable image or duration; they perhaps consist in this inconsistent stuttering of sign-particles, which are in turn capable of directly becoming cosmic, of becoming all the infinite senses of being. What vision could encompass such a multiplicity? Such a vision […]

Living

Wednesday, July 11, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
becoming / black holes / capitalism / creation / difference / language / metaphysics / ontology / power

What is modern? It can perhaps be discerned in the radical questioning of the status of piety, a questioning which slowly infects every discipline and discourse — a questioning, in other words, coextensive with a generalized instrumentalization, experienced at the psychic level as a new asceticism. Modernity in this sense includes souls no longer living; it embodies achromatically the spirits of wildly disparate eras. In this way we may perhaps be permitted to speak of the […]

Sorcery

Monday, March 5, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comments 8
automation / becoming / difference / event / Hermes / noise / ontology

Sorcery. What is the limit of what a noise can do? A certain noise means extinction for almost all regimes — not only of signs; it is an explosion of intensity or desire which renders the channel inert, background. Semiotosis. Sonority refusing to yield a signal: noise induces a traversal of infinite depths which bursts the strata into pieces, rupturing the semiotic-discursive chains. Noise is also a pure becoming, the becoming-sonorous of an incorporeal field of virtuality. […]

Metamorphosis

Sunday, January 29, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
comments 5
becoming / Deleuze / difference / ontology

Metamorphosis. There is a kind of explanatory knot or gap in every narrative model of world history; a thread of teleology which tightens around the throats of every minor voice, every parasite and schism. One of the gravest dangers of the line of the flight is the line itself. The notion of a trauma which fractures history itself is built into the problematic vision of a historical totality. It seems to me that it is […]

Occupy Theory!

Thursday, December 1, 2011
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / event / interconnection / language / philosophy / Politics / self-organization / society

The 99% movement sweeping the globe is indeed something new under the sun. Little molecular revolutions, the occupations are rhizomes; in this clear revolt against neoliberal “realism” who does not see the spirit of sixty-eight, dormant for a long winter of four decades, awakening once more? Thinkers have not only the opportunity but in many ways a profound obligation to help focus and organize the will of the people, to help inspire and to amplify […]

Spectral

Saturday, September 24, 2011
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / language / machine

“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.” (Montaigne) Protocol. Perhaps one dimension of the aesthetic appeal of the mechanical is in the ‘purity’ of the interleaving of dynamisms — the quality of being a kind of ‘moving’ and even ‘living’ diagram that excites certain sensitivities. Each machine is already a manifold network of various configuration-spaces (involving significant mechanical, environmental, logical factors, etc.) — its singular and intricate behavior produced ‘simply’ […]

Statement

Thursday, July 15, 2010
by Joseph Weissman
comments 6
assemblage / becoming / code / differentiation / disorder / escape / grammar / heresy / language / Nietzsche / structure / virus

Hypermediation. What is a statement? But the problem is already determining the singular projection of the statement onto life: both to identify the variously formed matters contained within it, with each of their constituent speeds and trajectories; but also the strata which capture and isolate (or ramify and merge) these intensities through one another. A statement is attached to productive networks which run throughout society; it is an auto-projection of the truth of society onto […]

Return

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / difference / flow / recurence / structure / transversality / truth

Will. The question of the will is not whether to emphasize cycles or fluxes (identities or events, structures or processes, concepts and percepts or acts and effects); still less how to conduct a grand unifying synthesis of the two — events and processes as differing stages or aspects of what is ultimately some overly ideal dialectical Unity; the question is rather, first and foremost, to determine how we can possibly proceed (vis a vis the […]

Other

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 6
badiou / becoming / difference / force / function / metaphysics / ontology / virus

A science of being is not enough. This subtraction which purifies, this selection and division which makes holy, which ‘invents’ and ‘discovers’ truth — how could ontology do anything but give us theories of the One, of the Law, of the Real, of the existing-as-such? How could it do anything but carefully induce multiplicity to subtract itself into unified theory, divide itself into functions and axioms; endlessly seduce differences into homogeneity, and minorities into conformity; […]

Involve

Tuesday, November 25, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
becoming / language / metaphysics / ontology

    Transiency hurls itself everywhere into a deep state of being. And therefore all forms of this our world are not only to be used in a time-specific sense, but should be included into those phenomena of superior significance in which we partake, and of which we are a part.   Rilke     Ideas arrest and extrude contents from a flux and thus illuminate forms from chaos. An inversion or involution, not the […]

Diagram

Sunday, November 16, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / Deleuze / machine / ontology

    “We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression. Substance is a formed matter, and matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically. Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct from each other, function has only ‘traits’ of content and expression between which it establishes a connection: […]

There Is

Saturday, July 26, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
becoming / mathematics / metaphysics / ontology

  “There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation. Charles Hermite       “By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in […]

Immersion

Monday, July 14, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
badiou / becoming / Deleuze / form / language / machine / myth / notion / ontology

    At the height of its concentration, the art of the [twentieth] century — but also all the other truth procedures, each according to its own resources — aimed to conjoin the present, the real intensity of life, and the name of this present as given in the formula, a formula that is always at the same time the invention of a form. It is then that the pain of the world changes into […]

It Means Becoming Human

Sunday, July 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
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 […]

Minority

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
A Thousand Plateaus / abstract machine / becoming / Deleuze / language / machine / ontology / Politics

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101 Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by […]

Affectivity, or What is an Event?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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affect / becoming / body / celerity / cosmos / double / event / freud / God / gravity / Interpretation / liberation / machine / model / outside / resonance

Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work? When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to […]

Imperceptible

Monday, March 3, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / assemblage / becoming / code / cosmos / diagram / God / intensity / language / molecular / segmentarity / semiotics / sign / subject / truth

“Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is […]

Outline for a Philosophy of History

Wednesday, January 30, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / celerity / confinement / control / history / humanity / intensity / multiplicity / nature / Politics / power / production / spirit / swarm

If we listen closely to the breath of the spirit as well as to the word of being, an entirely new kind of history may become possible. Disclosing a lethal truth (into) power, organization trembles before the disorganized generativity of decentralized multiplicity. Are we transmitting history backwards through time? Are languages transforming themselves through us? Is it by nature that we are socially-oriented creatures? Or does “humanity” on the contrary mark with precision a moment […]

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.