power – Fractal Ontology

All posts filed under: power

Living

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

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 […]

Trajectory

Sunday, December 7, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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consciousness / disaster / event / fantasy / intensity / power / recognition / wager

A series of imminent and necessary breakdowns are inherent to the production of desire: first, because desires connect up to an outside, with something which is always unrecognized, which is totally foreign; next, because desire is brought to turn upon itself, it is seduced into betrayal (by resentment, fear, hate, etc.); finally, because desires are always collective, but the individual makes these collective desire their own, digests and reintegrates them. In each case, there is […]

Warning

Thursday, June 26, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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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 […]

Evaluating Value

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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aristocracy / Christianity / evaluation / evil / good / human / judgment / life / morality / nobility / origin of language / power / psychoanalysis / question / reality / subject / the future / utility / value

Under what conditions did men invent for themselves these value judgments good and evil? And what inherent value do they have? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around—do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, the future? Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the Genealogy of Morals Why is this work […]

Who’s in Control?

Sunday, February 3, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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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 […]

Outline for a Philosophy of History

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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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 […]

Temporality and Power: The Politics of Absence

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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alterity / concept / critique / ethics / infinity / language / metaphysics / morality / ontology / Politics / power / production / theory / time

In the relation of the human being to language, a process is reflected that extends to the relation of the human being to beings in general: The scientific knowledge has become the standard knowledge! The other: thinking, spirit of language, history, culture is still there, yet dragged along into a certain indeterminateness. It is decisive that the consciousness was lost as to where this other belongs and of what kind must the reflection be in […]

The Will to Virtue and the Morality of Capture

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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capture / Christianity / domestication / herd morality / individual / Manu / morality / Nietzsche / power / virtue / war / Zarathustra

“Neither Manu, nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (Twilight, 505). Nietzsche despises the improvers of mankind because they have typically been priests, otherwise known as […]

Nietzsche, Pity and Virtue: From the Superfluous to the Exceptional

Thursday, November 29, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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Antichrist / breeding / Christianity / corruption / exception / individual / kant / morality / Nietzsche / overman / pity / power / species / Spinoza / suffering / superfluous / values / virtue

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance (The Antichrist, 570). In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche raises the question of what type of man shall be bred, continuing a line of thought developed in Twilight of the Idols in relation to the Laws of Manu. In former times, Nietzsche argues, the exceptional human was a fortunate accident; […]

Nietzsche and the Capture and Domestication of Peoples

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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apparatus of capture / culture / custom / decay / democracy / genealogy / image of thought / individual / instrumentality / Nietzsche / nomad / overman / Politics / power / religion / society / sovereignty / state / unground / universal / universal politics / utopia / war / war machine / warrior / Zarathustra

“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man (Beyond Good […]

Science and Parasites: Michel Serres and the Unification of Human and Natural Sciences

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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banquet / communication / epistemology / fractal / history / humanities / information / interruption / logic / matter / michel serres / narcissism / ontology / parasite / physics / power / relation / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Serres / symmetry / time / topology / turbulence

Theorem: the history of science obeys the law of diminishing returns. The first attack on the narcissism of science… Second: if we examine the set made of the problem and of the actions that transform it, there is no doubt that it is, at the beginning, more complex than the thing itself or the process. Clearer perhaps, yet more complicated. The question can then be reexamined in order to try to illuminate this new complexity […]

Freedom and Becoming

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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artaud / becoming / chance / change / freedom / hunger / necessity / power / religion / structure / Theory / Philosophy

Jacek Yerka, Port Artaud writes that there is a possibility in theater for the creation of a new freedom, under the light of a “strange sun, [with] an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium.” His unusual description points to the possibility for a radical transformation of psychic and social capability; it also points to the very real likelihood (though not certainty) that all such […]

Empiricism and Power

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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becoming / control / empirical / fascism / freedom / health / history / liberalism / power / Science / Mathematics / Technology / tradition / transhuman

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or […]

Translation: Francois Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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abstraction / French Translation / Laruelle / non-Marxism / non-philosophy / Politics / power / Uncategorized / Untranslated Theory

The following is the preface from Francois Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle pp. 1-9 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins 10/09/07. Stylistic Caution A: But if everyone knew this most would be harmed by it. You yourself call these opinions dangerous for those exposed to danger, and yet you express them in public? B: I write in such a way that neither the mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of any kind […]

The Power to Will: Nietzsche and Becoming Free

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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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 […]

Reconstructing Reality

Monday, October 8, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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capitalism / geometry / God / ideology / power / revolution / simulation / state / subversion / technology / unconscious / war

Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are […]

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

Sunday, September 30, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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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, […]

The Sense for Custom and the Feeling of Power: Nietzsche’s Joyous Denial of the Old Ways

Thursday, September 13, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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custom / force / morality / Nietzsche / Politics / power / society / sovereignty

We should take Nietzsche seriously when he asserts that Daybreak is the work of the subterranean man, one who constantly undermines the foundations of our belief by illuminating the mixed origins from which those beliefs emerge (Preface 1). While Nietzsche indicates briefly that it is the scientist who best represents this figure, the subterranean thinker could stand in general for anyone who conducts thought experiments that examine and dismantle our faith in morality. The active […]