All posts filed under: ontology

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Theory 1: Epigrams and Involutions

Sunday, July 22, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
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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
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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 […]

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 […]

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
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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; […]

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: […]

The Transformation of Psychoanalysis

Thursday, November 13, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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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 […]

Overcome

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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continuity / modernity / noise / ontology / Politics / question / reality / signal / silence / state / subtraction

  A situation tends to bring about the specific conditions of its overcoming. Thus advances in transportation and telecommunication technologies are slowly bringing about not only the collapse of the classical temporal and spatial interval as such, the annihilation of the discrete; but also a simultaneous collapse of classical distribution or dissemination as such, a self-destruction of the sign through optimal transmissivity, and hence finally the death of the voice along with the signal, the […]

Family contra the State: Problematizing Aristotle and Confucius

Thursday, October 9, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
Aristotle / ontology / Politics

“..for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modeled.”—Friedrich Nietzsche.  For centuries, the history of philosophy has explored the general opposition set up between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, especially concerning their respective “origins.” Generally speaking, it has been assumed that Western and Eastern philosophies differ over the metaphysical […]

Mind

Saturday, September 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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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 […]

Ontology and Science

Tuesday, September 16, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 4
being / heidegger / ontology / science

We could say that Heidegger’s introduction to Being and Time is rigorous and formalized to the extreme, like any other great (self-satisfied) German philosopher. Yet Heidegger also denounces any smack of self-satisfaction that would creep up in a philosophico-ontological investigation. What I want to do here in this short essay is to illuminate how Heidegger formulates the question of Being through Dasein, what this has to do with the ontological tradition and its destruction, and […]

Syntax

Sunday, September 14, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
axiom / form / image / multiplicity / noise / ontology / parasite / real / spirit / theory / writing

    The actual trace or cutting edge of theory is a veritable penetration into reality, not a moment but a certain force or intensity of thought which maintains its position in relationship to the real (understood as the indeterminate gap between syntax and spirit, or between an axiom and the imaginative power which both conditions and evades its’ grammar.) Reality and image, disjoint but co-present, conjoined only asymmetrically at specific suture points of flux: […]

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 […]

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 […]

Badiou on Logic

Saturday, July 5, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
badiou / godel / logic / mathematics / metamathematics / ontology

Stellar cartographies has translated two different selections of course notes from Badiou’s lectures circa 1980-82 here and here. This translation is short, but extremely concise, so there’s a lot of material to absorb. In particular, the notes help to explain Godel’s achievement and his theorem and offers good insight into Badiou’s own mathematico-ontological project. Definitely check it out for a quick read on a slightly neglected aspect of this philosopher’s expanding corpus. Also be sure […]

(Non-)Epistemology and Ontology: Three more definitions from Laruelle’s Dictionnaire

Thursday, July 3, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
comments 3
Aesthetic / axiom / badiou / epistemology / form / Laruelle / legitimacy / matter / non-philosophy / ontology / science / transcendental

Laruelle, Francois. Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris, Kime, 1998. Original translation by Taylor Adkins. Non-epistemology Unified theory of science and philosophy that takes for its object and material the discourse which lays claim to a particular mixture of science and philosophy: epistemology. Philosophy recognizes epistemology in two ways which are not always exclusive. It can treat it as a continuation of traditional philosophy of science, crystallized around the Kantian question of the possibility of science, […]

Hegel and Universality

Friday, May 30, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 8
awareness / Hegel / justice / language / law / levinas / objectivity / ontology / Politics / reason / society / teaching / time / tyranny

[Photograph by Will Godfrey] In an essay Hoffmeister suggests was written in 1808 or 1809, Hegel — certainly not without some irony — identifies an important ethical connection between abstract thought and power: Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself […]

Difference, Primacy and Peace: Deleuze and Levinas

Saturday, May 24, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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courage / death / Deleuze / dialogue / filiality / identity / levinas / metaphysics / ontology / peace / Politics / state / technology / violence / war machine

Preface It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets. Levinas, Totality and Infinity 24 I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts […]

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 […]