All posts filed under: machine

Malabou

Friday, April 8, 2016
by Joseph Weissman
comments 7
affect / capitalism / creativity / machine

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 […]

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
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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 […]

Clouds

Saturday, October 12, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
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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 […]

Exchange

Friday, February 1, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
comments 10
culture / machine / ontology / Politics / work

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

Monday, January 7, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
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boundary / catastrophe / evolution / information / language / machine / noise / ontology / production

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 […]

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 […]

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’ […]

Earth

Sunday, March 20, 2011
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
acceleration / Deleuze / machine / metaphysics / motion / Nietzsche / ontology / Serres / sign

In the duplicity of beauty there is the strange trope of a presence which is the shadow of itself, of a being which, anachronously, lurks in its own trace. (Levinas, Otherwise than Being) Loyalty to Earth! There is a primordial immanence of the body, a primacy of lived experience; natural-and-spiritual forces are firstly constellations of singular point-signs, assembling lines of flight or death, and merely falsified (explicated at best) through signifying abstractions incapable of unleashing […]

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 […]

Break

Friday, May 1, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
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machine / Nietzsche / ontology / philosophy / truth

Nietzsche. That joy and vision should be brought to bear even in the darkest corner of the human soul — and especially upon that within it which surges upwards and beyond the human species entirely; above the world, and so finally able to see, from a vision born of flight. –To “survey” reality as though from an impossible distance, an incommensurate height. Joyful wisdom. Science is such that it can only truly be said to […]

Words

Sunday, February 15, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
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 […]

Guattari

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
desire / flux / globalism / guattari / machine / materialism / Politics

    On Guattari. The first ecosopher has arisen — but how to read his writings? There is not a single answer, everyone disagrees. To read Guattari without Deleuze seems like violence to the polyphonous fury of their mutually-authored works; yet to read Deleuze and Guattari seems like according primacy to the philosopher, to the authority of philosophy over psychoanalysis — asserting the traditional prerogative of philosophy over science, with the usual absent-minded condescension, a perverse […]

Infrastructure

Friday, January 2, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 11
channel / communication / flux / idea / knowledge / machine / network / system

    The essence of a channel is to transmit, to disseminate, to yield a flux. The problem of knowledge is correlative to constructing an adequate channel for the reception of an idea, the “proper medium” for a thoughts’ proliferation. Expressed in this way the “idea” is only an ideal problem, which in reality takes on an unsettling and radical complexity. The pure and implacable universality of the idea gives way to the realization of […]

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: […]

The Transformation of Psychoanalysis

Thursday, November 13, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
guattari / machine / machinic unconscious / ontology / Politics

From the back cover of Guattari’s L’Inconscient machinique (1979): The transformation of psychoanalysis into an essential component of the social order does not justify the renunciation of every analysis of the unconscious; no more than the deadends of revolutionary movements imply the generalized desertion of politics. Finishing with the tyranny of the cogito, accepting that material, biological, social assemblages are capable of “engineering” (machiner) their own kind and creating heterogenous complex universes: such are the conditions […]

Mind

Saturday, September 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 3
being / flaw / impossibility / knowledge / language / machine / message / metaphysics / ontology / trace / truth

Where is truth — in knowledge or learning? If truth is processual, it is therefore also non-definitional; if it therefore exceeds classification, it annihilates a priori any possibility of its subtraction or division as such. Hence truth is impossible; yet this “impossible” subtraction of truth from an inconsistency, once postulated, nonetheless functions, it even begins to produce something, the impossible even becomes possible — and so perhaps produces everything. Thus the question remains, like a […]

Implosion

Wednesday, July 30, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
desire / diagram / future / language / life / machine / ontology / outside / philosophy / thinking

Philosophy begins in aporia, with a paradox or inconsistent consensus. Thus, the most ancient metaphysical figure, which we also recognize as the most simple, the shadow of the parasite upon the unconscious: a thought which denies and provokes, which produces a paradox through its utterance, through its very way of existing. Precisely, then: a prohibition which prohibits its paradox from being thought. The most ancient trope of philosophy begins and ends with this “must,” which […]

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 […]

Warning

Thursday, June 26, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 16
death / ecology / exchange / flight / flux / force / machine / message / motion / possibility / power

      The evolution of an ecology expresses itself through both gradual and violent transformations. An ecological system is indeed a continuous system of exchanges, where functions actively extract themselves from an open horizon, producing a conjunction or interface, an active occupation of space.   We exist as these spatial and energetic languages, as regular translations between them, continuously enriching the ecological circuits upon which both they and we depend. Thus we realize the […]

Counter-mythology

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
being / event / face / gift / infinity / lacan / language / levinas / logic / machine / silence / turbulence / violence

Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123 Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering […]

Wandering Shadows: Reflections on Morality and Madness

Tuesday, April 15, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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architecture / banquet / language / machine / metaphysics / Nietzsche / ontology / Politics / time / unconscious / violence / wisdom

In the disparity between the awareness of unreason and the awareness of madness, we have, at the end of the eighteenth century, the point of departure for a decisive movement: that by which the experience of unreason will continue, with Holderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, to proceed ever deeper towards the roots of time — unreason thus becoming, par excellence, the world’s contratempo — and the knowledge of madness seeking on the contrary to situate it […]

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 […]

Expressive Networks

Tuesday, March 4, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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boundary / diagram / expression / form / knowledge / language / machine / network / organization / parasite / relationship / representation / topology / wikipedia

expressive networks towards a new diagrammatic model for the abstraction and representation of relational knowledge How can we apply distributed network theory to knowledge representation? In this paper, we advance a new hypothesis regarding the role of the network topology in information science. In particular, we argue for the need (and significant advantage) of thinking in terms of a parasitic or “counter-network” topology. While networks are certainly good at representing many things, we need to […]

Who’s in Control?

Sunday, February 3, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
being / control / energy / essence / flux / function / ground / heidegger / machine / order / power / revolution / technology

Who’s in Control? Heidegger and Technology We have for a very long time presumed to be in control of machines. We have claimed to be the masters, and pretended to “govern” technology. So Heidegger is more poignant than usual when he reminds us (in the 1969 Der Spiegel interview) that we do not even control that within us which drives us towards technicity. We are not masters of the secret desire which compels us to […]

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 […]

Deconstructing Cybernetics

Saturday, January 19, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
abstract machine / catastrophe / chaos / communication / conservatism / cybernetics / decentralization / derrida / distinction / exteriority / godel / humanity / machine / metaphysics / ontology / spencer-brown / spirit / writing

Notes on Derrida and Cybernetics Let us conjecture that the invention of the transistor — an auto-controllable circuit — indicates the attainment of a critical level of development in cybernetics, a “tipping point.” Then for writing the corresponding moment is the invention of the video camera, perhaps more precisely the photograph: now seeing is writing, literally marking. Visio-literature is the only kind that can ever exists for us today — even ancient literature is post-modern […]

Systems of Control: Derrida and Machines

Wednesday, January 16, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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automation / control / cybernetics / derrida / history / human / machine / metaphysics / nonhuman / system

(notes for an abstract) If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts — including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory — which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, written mark, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. […[E]ven before being determined as human… or nonhuman, the gramme — or the […]