Slavoj Zizek: On Ecological Catastrophe

The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

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It is not only the continuity of History which is threatened today—what we are witnessing is something like the end of Nature itself.
– Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

The double trap to avoid is thus, on the one hand, to attempt to “de-ideologize” the issue, by reducing ecological catastrophe to a problem solvable by means of science and technology, and, on the other, to attempt to “spiritualize” it in the sense of New Age mythology. What both these approaches lack is a concrete social analysis of the economical, political and ideological roots of ecological problems. Science is necessary, but it cannot do all the work: it cannot show us how we should transform our lives, because such transformation has to rely on basic socio-political “normative” ideas of what kind of life we want to lead. We have thus to reject as insufficient a series of solutions which…

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Goby’s Journal: Interview with Toby Altman from 2011

In 2011, I wrote a chapbook, self-published (if you can call Kinkos generated pages, “published”); I called it, Overriding Genesis– from the Hebrew text of the 1st creation story in the book of Genesis.

In transcribing pages from the journal, I found a reference to this interview–which I’d totally forgotten, from Damask Press, on the occasion of their publishing pages from a longer poem, Chronos Chronic Kairos, as a chapbook. Damask Interviews: Jacob Russell. This was published on September 16, 2011… the day before the first day of Occupy Wall Street.

The text of the interview following the break Continue reading “Goby’s Journal: Interview with Toby Altman from 2011” →

Goby’s Journal, July 13, 2015

Cat on my desk beside me, head on my arm. Somethin been working on my mind… just under the surface. Can feel the ripples but don’t know what kinda fish is stirring the waters.
Finished a new piece–first this month.

Making art is something that just happens. It’s all the ways the making and then what’s been made is connected to the rest of the human world that’s difficult and confusing and dangerous. And it is connected. Doesn’t come from within like from a well apart from everything else… the well itself, the waters you draw from it, are fed by countless springs, and it won’t do just to let the pieces sit there. Artists avoid dealing with that, or rather, think that they’re dealing with it by entering the market game, the selling and promoting and galleries and all that shit, even to believing that’s how you know you’re doing it right–even though they say something else. Just about how to make a living, they say, pretending that they haven’t sold themselves to the machine, the fucking empire of money and death just by accepting the idea that that’s what you have to do.

But that’s not what’s been on my mind. Or only a piece of it. I light incense. I have really good incense. I put a piece of window screen over a jar with a candle, and put some pieces on the screen over the flame. Because it involves my body, my senses–without thinking about it. The fragrance. The candle light flickering on the wall and ceiling.

But those fish, or whatever they are… swirls on the surface of the pond. It’s time to sleep. To take this up in dreams.

Personal note: Goby’s Journal

It’s difficult for me to work at more than one thing at a time. 2007-2011: poetry. 2012 to end of June, making art. This last phase isn’t over, but low energy from gastritis—no new work since end of June. Distressing.

So now I’m reading 8 hours a day.

This made college difficult, with its 4 and 5 different subjects to study. HS not so much, cause I mostly didn’t need to study. Could coast off my own reading. If you don’t fit the cookie cutter pattern in school, you learn to assert your own way or perish. I would never have made it even to a B.A. today. Too expensive. Managed to get a decent education while it was still possible—not being rich.
This is so … I don’t know the word. Young people coming up are caught in this horrid capitalist net–privatizing their very souls. I have tremendous admiration for those who manage to make space for themselves, and who keep learning any way they can. No wonder fantasy fiction is so popular. The worlds described in books like His Dark Materials, come closer to evoking reality–that is, describe the psychic/affective conditions that shape our lives–connect the dots of this otherwise fragmented disorienting hologram we live in more powerfully, on a gut level, than anything in conventional fiction.

Breakfast:
2 slices multi-grain toast, buttered w. honey
small bowl of applesauce
8 oz OJ
1 cup coffee

Not likely to have much more rest of the day.

This is not a diet. I have no appetite. Above, enough to make me feel full.

Alain Badiou on Greece

This is brilliant. Please share!

Some exerts:

3. The fact that this is happening in Greece and not – as ought to be the case – everywhere else in Europe, indicates that the European “Left” has sunk into an irreversible coma. François Hollande? German Social Democracy? Spain’s PSOE? PASOK in Greece? The Labour Party? All these parties are now overtly the managers of globalised capitalism. There is not – there is no longer – a European “Left”. There is a little hope, which is still not very clearly defined, in the wholly new political formations linked to the mass movement against debt and austerity, namely Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. As it happens, Podemos repudiate the distinction between “Left” and “Right”. I do, too. It belongs to the old world of parliamentary politics, which must be destroyed.

7. I continue to think that the hardest ideological blow that could be struck against the current European system is represented by the demand for the complete elimination of Greece’s debt – a speculators’ debt for which the Greek people bears absolutely no responsibility.[…] Europe’s governments – urged on by financial lobbies – want to punish Syriza, punish the Greek people, rather than resolve the debt problem. The best way to punish these punishers themselves would be to default on the debt, whatever the risks that this would entail. Argentina did it a few years ago, and it isn’t dead – far from it.
10. But whatever comes of this outside help, the situation in Greece will be resolved by the Greeks themselves. The principle of the primacy of internal factors applies to this situation, too. Now, the risks are all the more considerable in that Syriza is only formally in power. We know – we can feel it – that already the old political forces are engaged in intrigues behind the scenes. Even beyond the fact that state power very rapidly corrupts, when it is acquired in regular and non-revolutionary conditions, we could obviously pose some classic questions: is Syriza in complete control of the police, the army, the justice system, the economic and financial oligarchy? Certainly not. The internal enemy still exists, it remains almost intact, it is still powerful, and it enjoys the support in the shadows of Syriza’s foreign enemies, including the European bureaucracy and the reactionary governments. The popular movement and its grassroots organisations must keep a constant watch over the government’s actions. To repeat – the “No” in the referendum will only be a true force when it continues into very powerful independent movements.

11. International popular support – a ceaseless one, one that demonstrates, one that catches the media’s attention – must devote all its forces to Greece’s possible call for Mobilization. >

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Beauty

Larval Subjects .

Increasingly, as I turn to questions of ethics, I find myself wondering about things we could describe as “absolute values”. These are things we esteem and value for their own sake such as love, friendship, beauty, compassion, health, and so on. It’s easy to see why we value things such as health, beauty, and friendship for their own sake (though maybe these are more mysterious than they might initially seem). It’s more difficult, I think, to understand beauty. This is above all the case within a naturalistic framework. When I read architectural theory written during the Middle Ages, Rennaissance, and early Enlightenment period, beauty is an index to truth. It resonates with us because our ability to discern it is a sort of index of the divine that dwells within us; it is that which draws us towards the divine or God and that which indicates God’s signature on his…

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Landscape and Space

Larval Subjects .

Landscape is neither in space, nor is it of space. Indeed, landscape had to be evacuated and erased in order for space to come into being. In this regard, space is a historical fiction that is all too real in its consequences. Space was formed as conceptual space through a historical process that involved the invention of writing, the development of mathematics, and the rise of capitalism and colonialism. Before that there was only landscape. However, while a certain form of humanity is a necessary condition for the emergence of space, landscape is in no way dependent on the human nor any other living being. Where space is a epistemic category, a cultural category, landscape was there well before any humans or any other living beings existed and will be there long after the demise of all these beings. Landscape is in no way dependent on the gaze of the…

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The Archeology of Matter

Larval Subjects .

In late September, October, or November this Fall I hope to teach a New Centre course entitled “The Archeology of Matter” inaugurating and outlining a project that might be referred to as “hyletics”. It is often suggested that Descartes is responsible for mind/body dualism; however, philosophy has had a tendency towards idealism and dualism since its inception. Indeed, while it takes different forms, the tendency towards idealism and the erasure of matter is not unique to Western philosophy, but appears to be a cross-cultural phenomenon. Similar in ambition to deconstruction, hyletics explores the conceptual mechanisms and motivations by which materiality is repressed so as to open a space of thought proper to materiality. Far from a scientistic orientation of thought seeking to assert the primacy of the sciences over all other forms of cultural production, hyletics explores the repression of material labor, the living and lived body, the desiring body…

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Important correction to 1st Printing of Ari Figue’s Cat

MIssing epitaph! First printing of Ari FIgue’s Cat. Head of chap. 41, A Game of Pool, should be a quote from Plato’s Gorgias:
“…he who does injustice, the unjust man, is utterly wretched.”
Polus is incredulous, when Socrates tells him that the tyrant, who wields power freely and takes what he wants–that his life is wretched.
Ari Figue tells a story — seems he met Socrates in a bar in Overbrook (in the guise of Rufus). In the story, they play a game of pool as they consider the merit of this claim.
There are other errors (there always are)–but this one bothers me more. I think it’s important to the content.

SLAVES BY CHOICE: Slavoj Žižek On The Jouissance of Servitude

The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

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A longing common to both the wise and the foolish, to brave men and to cowards, is this longing for all those things which, when acquired, would make them happy and contented. Yet one element appears to be lacking. I do not know how it happens that nature fails to place within the hearts of men a burning desire for liberty, a blessing so great and so desirable that when it is lost all evils follow thereafter, and even the blessings that remain lose taste and savor because of their corruption by servitude. Liberty is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist; for surely if they really wanted it they would receive it. Apparently they refuse this wonderful privilege because it is so easily acquired.
SLAVES BY CHOICE by Estienne de La Boetie,
Written in French around 1548

Reading Estienne de La Boetie’s treatise today one…

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