All posts filed under: Thought

Special Operators

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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being / cur(s)e / discovery / dust / fold / gift / knowledge / language / map / speed / spirit / Thought

How to begin to understand? Yet what is knowledge but the degeneration of learning? “Knowledgeable” thought waits, jealously, to snatch away our hard-won jewels of real experience — why this false patience, this impatience, this now-congenital haste? Thought and speed: thinking, the very light of speed in which all distinctions are blurred, internalized, folded — made significant again, logicized, facified. As though it lived only upon a vulnerable or delicate surface, in which it consumed […]

Learning to Fly

Friday, May 2, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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acceleration / anti-gravity / Bachelard / belief / brother / celerity / change / dream / dreams / feeling / flight / future / laughter / love / memory / reality / texture / Thought / transformation / truth / Uncategorized / world

Psychologists — and more especially philosophers — pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairy tales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed […]

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 […]

For Lacan

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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attention / barrier / deconstruction / lacan / language / metaphor / signifier / structure / subject / Thought / unconscious

The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your attention [lit. “watchfulness.”] Lacan To identify a “subject” is not only difficult, but truly impossible: we always only ‘nominate’ in the last instance one of its barriers; or rather, we indicate only what is barred, but we do so by signifying the barrier. How can we understand this barrier — this imaginary line of symbolic exchange? In what […]

On Asceticism

Monday, February 18, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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asceticism / attunement / commerce / desire / exteriority / instinct / metaphysics / Nietzsche / noise / nothingness / spirit / strength / Thought

We know what the three great catchphrases of the ascetic idea are: poverty, humility, and chastity. If we now look closely at the lives of all great, prolific, inventive spirits we’ll always rediscover all three there to a certain degree. Not at all (this is self-evident) as if it were something to do with their “virtues”—what does this kind of man have to do with creating virtues?—but as the most appropriate and most natural conditions […]

Language is not a Signal: Notes on Wilhelm von Humboldt

Monday, January 28, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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concept / decision / dialogue / distinction / humboldt / language / metaphysics / order word / protoype / representation / segmentation / sign / Thought

Language is not a Signal: Notes on Wilhelm von Humboldt One of the earliest and most strident critiques of the signifier, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language refused the even-then-canonical concept of a “sign” by questioning the universal conceptual image of a language as representation. Beneath the semiotic aspect of language — the “common sense” idea of language as utterance, signalling, communicating, “saying” — Humboldt catches sight of a more profound function of language, where […]

The Horizon of Language

Wednesday, January 23, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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assemblage / channel / communication / diagram / forgetting / form / intensity / language / media / memory / multiplicity / parasite / Plato / signal / Thought / wisdom / writing

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many […]

Questions for an Ontology of Aesthetics

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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abstraction / art / becoming / expressivity / history / imagination / light / ontology / Thought / transubstantiation

Are we escaping or returning, gathering together or tearing apart? We find ourselves suddenly in need of a post-conceptual way of thinking. Perhaps this problem of art and machines has always already begun to make itself felt. We are discovering that its appearance at this critical juncture signifies a bifurcation point, a new kind of possibility. Imperceptibly we have moved beyond imagination into the abstract, from dreams to decoding.

Being and Revolution

Tuesday, January 8, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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critique / decision / determination / epoch / expression / freedom / history / illusion / Marx / metaphysics / networks / Politics / practice / production / religion / slavery / struggle / Thought

  The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. Karl Marx

Liquid Generations: Decay, Creation and Morphogenesis

Tuesday, October 30, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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abyss / autopoeisis / chaos / creation / death / decay / deviance / fecundity / health / inevitability / libido / life / machine / nature / parasite / space / symbiosis / Thought

Flow The moment of death is uncertain and inevitable; its shadow approaches from an unknown region like a silent stranger. Death does not need to follow us; it just meets us where we will be. Like a memory fragmenting, bodies rush towards singular points of annihilation, just as the very possibility of negation is implied by the presence of the law. Protection is absurd, insulation a pure minimum; there is but the most fragile and […]

Fractal Cognition

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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assemblage / Cognition / desire / Fractal Structure / machine / multiplicity / Thought

Ignoring the obvious inadequacies of a functionalist line of thinking–namely it’s inability to conceive of reality as anything else than a series of static points connected by lines of force–let’s here call forth a question that allows itself to momentarily detained as a function, even if it ultimately shall cause our functionalizing schema to splinter: What is the nature of cognition? Is it a fundamental process or a secondary production? What is the relation between […]

The Cognition-Dissimulation Hypothesis

Thursday, February 15, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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Cognition / Dissimulation Hypothesis / Fractal Structure / Interpretation / Thought / truth

No one has proposed, so far as I know, a correlate in cognitive science to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: let’s call it the cognition-dissimulation hypothesis. It would state something like “Though there exist a multiplicity of legitimate modes of analyzing cognition, there is an upper limit on how much we can understand about our processes of understanding.” That multiple modes are possible is not incidental; this indicates a single explanatory appartus is insufficient to explain the […]