All posts filed under: institution

The Language Mechanism: Notes on de Saussure

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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continuity / diachrony / evolution / institution / language / linearity / linguistics / logic / sign / synchrony / time

A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions. Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 105) After having investigated the physiological mechanisms of speech, Saussure turns to consider the nature of linguistic signs. In his […]

The Future of Culture: or, Beyond Eschatology

Friday, September 14, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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decadence / hope / institution / Nietzsche / nihilism / Politics / religion / socialism

Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence… “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eve for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life… (The Case of Wagner, 51) The social relation requires re-evaluation in light of […]

A Question for Institutions

Tuesday, September 4, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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culture / identity / institution / Science / Mathematics / Technology / speed / survival

Establishment always occurs simultaneously with a change in focus, a reconstitution at a higher level of analysis. The origin of institution lies in an emergent super-organization, capable of responding to abstract summarizations of events, persisting as a kind of discipline, a higher and orderly vantage point with which to regard the chaos of local ecosystemic coordinations. Institution is a concept-State: its function is to designate a new layer of coordinated activity which is to established […]

Nietzsche’s Historical Chemistry and the International Scene

Wednesday, August 22, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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culture / habit / history / institution / Nietzsche / pleasure / Serres / universal politics

“Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You […]