All posts filed under: difference

Machine Fusion

Friday, December 27, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
difference / information / language / sign

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 […]

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 […]

Risk

Thursday, November 1, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
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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 […]

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
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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 […]

Genesis

Thursday, February 3, 2011
by Joseph Weissman
comments 12
capitalism / death / difference / disaster / expressivity / future / health / humanity / language / machine / metaphysics / modernity / nihilism / Politics

Genesis. Enormous psychosocial and political transformations were necessary in order to put into place the global transhistorical capitalist institutions we take for granted. Capitalism is different, genetically as it were, from all previous ways of organizing human society. It dissolves society in favor of the decoded flows of pre-individual traits and elements which will form abstract labor and commodities. This dissolution is what previous forms of society had attempted to prevent. They had precisely developed […]

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 […]

Noises

Friday, March 20, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 9
capitalism / concept / desire / difference / event / language / parasite / problem

    Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs.  Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign. Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within […]

Words

Sunday, February 15, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
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channel / Deleuze / desire / difference / habit / language / machine / memory / ontology

    Jargon. A word decodes by assembling: a mobile army, a mob or mass of “blocks,” segments extruded from heterogeneous flows: flows with and without codes, flows of energy and of waste, flows of debt and of money, flows of food and of goods, flows of women and children, flows of pulsing affects and flows of intricate concepts. Speaking assembles together, connects and conjoins or pervades and envelops as many radically divergent elements as possible. Language […]

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; […]

Everywhere

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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darkness / determination / difference / form / Hegel / infinity / iteration / Lao-Tzu / light / multiplicity / Plato / purity / safety / situation

    What is the nature of the difference between reflection and immediacy, between the orders of thought and of our inescapable exposure to light, to noise, to the proximity of another person? Between blindness and synesthesia, a word — a universe. Between the instant and the timeless, a positive indetermination which ruptures with the order of both image and essence, disrupting the fragility of duration as well as agitating the eternal time of truth […]

Arpeggio

Wednesday, July 16, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 6
birth / creation / difference / glare / outline / parasite / religion / resonance / signal / silence / singularity

We are not one, but two. Dimorphs, in between, always escaping the fold and the unfold, running off madly in both directions. We are more viral — composed of parasites, miniature bodies without organs — than we are “hominid,” more “dead” than alive. The origin of religion is the veil, the simplest tomb: the meaning of birth is not death but exposure, a novel opening into what admits of nothing but pure exchange. The two […]

Invisible Writing

Sunday, June 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 6
alterity / desire / difference / freedom / imperceptible / language / metaphysics / nobility / outside / Politics

The outside, or Other, is accorded an incomparable eminence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In his penetrating account, metaphysics desires an elsewhere. It persists within an alibi, in which we assert true life as absent. But then our idea of the other would seem to hinge upon the imperceptible — that is, upon an Other which is not other like the bread I eat, or the land in which I dwell. It is not […]

Outside

Thursday, May 29, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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alterity / awareness / being / difference / inequality / inhumanity / language / levinas / love / metaphysics / Politics / reason / truth / tyranny / Uncategorized / violence

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, […]

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: Towards an Ethics of Expression

Sunday, April 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
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 […]

$

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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barrier / break / capital / cycle / difference / economy / energy / flow / paradox / Politics / space / subjectivity

Capital is nothing without energy, without a working which it desires to measure in terms of itself — and often wishes to imagine itself coincident with (and even more original than) this working — so much so that capital is often said to “represent” the flow of energy into the machine. On this reading, the economy is a largely imperceptible field of forces which, like a magnetic field, disappears instantaneously when the flow of energy […]

On Learning

Saturday, March 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / code / Cognition / diagram / difference / energy / entropy / identity / knowledge / learning / memory / problem / structure / Thought / unconscious / wittgenstein

One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting […]

Metaphysics beyond Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious, Language and Reality after Heidegger and Deleuze

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
anti-philosophy / badiou / deconstruction / Deleuze / difference / heidegger / lacan / levinas / mathematics / metaphysics / negation / poetry / psychoanalysis / unity / writing

Metaphysics beyond Psychoanalysis 0: Entryways “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” Lacan “Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives.” Badiou Questions, not meanings, are forgotten. May we therefore at last refrain from inquiring what psychoanalysis means, or asking what it is supposed to signify? And, since this alone is clearly insufficient, could it also be possible to take a cautious step “backwards,” simply in order […]

Intensive Depths: Notes on Difference and Repetition

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
affirmation / Deleuze / depth / difference / Difference and Repetition / extensity / heterogeneity / illusion / quality / representation / sensibility / unground / volume

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze proposes what we may be permitted to term a differential phenomenology capable at last of setting mathematics and logic themselves upon a proper “ground” — that of difference, and multiplicity… Not only is it possible to overturn representation, but we can begin right away — if we immediately cease to encode relationships between singularities as identities, oppositions, analogies, and so on — but instead in terms of constitutive inequalities. Deleuze’s […]

Happiness or Justice? Ethics and the Politics of Friendship

Tuesday, January 29, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
Aristotle / difference / ethics / ethnology / friendship / happiness / humanity / justice / light / Plato / Politics / science / society / spiritual evolution

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world. Aristotle In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds. A true friend is one soul in two bodies… ibid There is […]

Counter-action: Reflections on Sensory Anthropology

Wednesday, January 23, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
counteraction / difference / ego / experiment / infinity / information / intensity / light / machine / media / metaphysics / monad / noise / origin / society / structure / transcendence

Towards a Metaphysics of Noise Let us return to the ‘alternate’ origin in noise, the conditions for any structure. From background noise to blank nothingness to signification: three distinct moments. Back again to the process of the development of the other structure: from noise into information. Mediation: the propagation of light which opens up space by filling it, makes absence present, sensible. The other structure: from spirit to letter; from ruptures, an alien coherence; from […]

The Thought of Language

Friday, January 11, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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alterity / being / difference / expression / harmonics / history / language / memory / post-modern / radiation / science / time / transcendence / writing

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (Karl Marx, from the introduction to Grundrisse) Between being and language there is an interval, a purified difference articulated through individuation, a difference in time or development: language is in such a way that it always is yet to be as a being. Language becomes […]

The Future of Information

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 5
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 […]

Translation: Two Entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book on Deleuze’s Vocabulary: Univocity and Pre-Individual Singularities

Saturday, November 3, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comments 8
A Thousand Plateaus / definitions / Deleuze / difference / Difference and Repetition / French Translation / intensity / Logic of Sense / nomadic distribution / ontology / pre-individual / singularities / Theory / Philosophy / transcendental field / univocity / Untranslated Theory / Zourabichvili

The following are two entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07. Pre-individual Singularities * We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental […]

The Power to Will: Nietzsche and Becoming Free

Tuesday, October 9, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
culture / difference / God / grammar / human / labor / literature / Nietzsche / Politics / power / text / theory / will to power

Reaching Out The will to power is not essentially political; it aims beyond politics towards a more subtle possession. The will to power is articulated as a higher expression of the will to live, as opposed to the will to survive. It is the will to exercise power. Its primary function is to be functional, that is: dynamic, active and creative. This kind of willing indicates not a static ideal will rather an energetic, even […]

Imaginary

Tuesday, October 2, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
difference / flux / God / image / imaginary / individuation / insanity / logic / metaphysics / symmetry / void

Wild Magic of the Unbeliever (Dave Makin) How much of our lives are caught up, inextricably, with the imaginary? A dangerous question only because it is silly, and stupid; why? Because it’s answer is both simple and impossible. For we know: none of it is imaginary, it is all real; and we also know: nothing is real, all of it is imaginary. A dangerous idea, a poisonous idea: there is contradiction at the origin. An […]

Nietzsche and the Unconscious: Ethics, Desire, Politics

Sunday, September 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
daybreak / desire / difference / ethics / freud / joy / Nietzsche / Politics / style / text / unconscious / Zen

Cy Twombly, Untitled [1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: © 2004 Matthew Septimus] Granted that nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other ‘reality’ than the reality of our drives – for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another: is it not permitted to make the experiment and […]

Power and Cruelty, Difference and Sexuality: Towards a New Sexual Politics

Sunday, September 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
body / caress / cruelty / difference / ethics / geometry / God / image / joy / materialism / Politics / power / sex / the void

Reproductive knowledge is power itself. Self-organizing, libidinal desire is the only kind worth (re)producing. Sexual desire annuls systems of control, unties authority, opens the future itself to re-ordering. It unleashes a molecular intensity which vibrates across orders of scale, provokes spontaneous self-organization. Reproduction is entire, mystically whole in its transversal rejuvenation. Paternity is miraculous, the creation of the world. How to teach one’s children is also how to make children. We must close down mythologies, […]

Nietzsche and Sexual Politics: Energy and Difference in Power Relations

Saturday, September 29, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
bodies / culture / difference / Foucault / freud / identity / Marx / Nietzsche / overman / Politics / posthuman / sexuality / time

Dionysos and Ariadne We do not generally recognize how temporary our concepts and customs are. Foucault has argued our modern concept of sexuality is rooted inextricably in the specific marriage rituals in late Western society. His genealogical-historical method is reminiscent in many ways to Nietzsche’s. Both will explain by turns how this or that concept has its true origin in a (relatively) quite recent conceptual matrix, as opposed to some ancient transcendent intervention. Both show […]

What Can We Create?

Friday, September 28, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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chaos / dialectic / dialogue / difference / family / God / multiplicity / nomad / Politics / state / time / war machine

If there were an exact center to the current political impasse, the short circuit of process, it would be this fact: that free discourse first demands a difference. It could be said that truth is always in conflict with destiny. An illegality, more universal than the universe, breaking the symmetry spontaneously and opening the way onto a new reality. In other words, beyond non-identity, there is yet a non-equality which goes deeper than a face-to-face […]

Bergsonism, or Philosophy of Sub- and Superhuman Durations

Friday, September 21, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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assemblage / Bachelard / becoming / bergson / Deleuze / difference / duration / image / intuition / memory / metaphysics / metapsychology / ontology / problematics / time / virtual / Whitehead

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991. Bergson on several occassions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefited in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience—just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements that they perceive of the real curve, ‘the curve itself stretching out into […]

Against Culture

Friday, March 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
culture / difference / freedom / love / name / non-life / other

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The “I am” is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity– and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the […]