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. >

Rate this:

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…

View original post 343 more words

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…

View original post 762 more words

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…

View original post 62 more words

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

Slum

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…

View original post 3,364 more words

Recollections of a Freudian

Larval Subjects .

Since last week I’ve been haunted by a discussion with a friend that I had over lunch about his hostility towards Freud. Mind you, I’ve never been an orthodox Freudian. In particular we discussed Freud’s theory of fetishes. He led me to reflect on why I value Freud and where I diverge. I’ve never bought into the gender stuff or Oedipus in Freud. What’s left? The mobility of desire: desire is not programmed, but rather anything can be eroticized. We all have our shine on the nose, our fix. As he said, there are as many genders or orientations as there are people. The entire world becomes a signifying system, a referential system, in terms of our loves and attachments. The Birds. Alice. There’s the theory of the repressed. Our desire, our wishes, our betrayals of ourself always return in some form. Poe’s Telltale Heart. We never escape the truth…

View original post 97 more words

Sleepwalkers of the American Hologram

There are far far too many people–of the people who count–who don’t feel that uncomfortable or oppressed–overworked and in debt though they may be (debt, after all, is American Wealth… until you max the last credit card, you got cash, and cash what matters)–who don’t see, want to see, refuse to see, those who are clinging to the edge, or already long in free fall–or worse, see the plight of those unfortunates as their saving grace, as deserving what they get, as threats to their own precarious, delusional security, when the reality is, every one of those unfortunates got hold the heel or pant leg of the oblivious We Okay Don’t Rock this Leaky Boat majority… if it is a majority, which you might think by walking down Walnut in Center City on any weekday, or 2nd Street after dark on a weekend, or watching the traffic jam up crossing Ben Franklin –all those happy people heading down the shore on a Friday evening.

The late Joe Bageant was right. Called it the American Hologram. Where those people–the ones who count–I mean, the one’s we supposed to believe are the Real America–where they live. In that bubble.
I’m not talkin the filthy rich, the 1%, the .001%. They think they count. And for now, as long as the Bubble People believe them, they do. Naw, don’t mean them. I mean those in the Bubble. The Oligarchs–the filthy rich corporate assholes who think they are in control–they know that. Why they work so hard to control the press, to jack up and maintain the hysterical addiction to consumption, they work them to exhaustion and entertain them to near brain death. Cause they have this righteous fear, maybe some even glimpsing the truth–that no one is in control. It’s all on mindless auto-pilot. They jerk on the levers and pull the switches and the lights flash on and off–but it’s all a show. The machine is self-perpetuating, self-repairing…. as long as those people who it really
depends on, the one’s who actually make everything work, even while the assholes suck the rewards of their labor out of their pockets and bank accounts their paychecks.

Why the political servants of the assholes talk about ‘saving the middle class,’ even while they don’t give a flying fuck about saving the middle class, except that’s the only way they think they can keep the Big Machine running. The Middle Class are that machines Soylent Green.

No election is going to change that. Elections are the Ambien of the Sleepwalker in the American Hologram. There is no democracy. There is only this endlessly repeated burlesque show. Those who have been pushed outside the bubble, who have been refused entrance, who have fallen though the cracks–consciousness at least is theirs, and with them–not in any damn President, lies the hope that a great awakening may yet come.
May it happen. May it happen soon. May all those who are not themselves asleep, work to make it so. And if we are outside the bubble–may we resist with all the power of truth, the temptation of
Assimilation. It is our very exile that is our salvation

The Idea of Onto-Cartography

Larval Subjects .

There is a gravity to language. In the case of physical gravity there’s not an attraction produced by forces, rather a bending, a curvature of space-time, along which another object then falls. That curvature of space-time creates a path defining the vector of the object caught within the gravity well. This is a good metaphor for power. If mountains exercise gravity, if they have a certain power, then this is because they create a path along which other entities move. I could, perhaps, climb the sheer face of the mountain to get to the other side, but this would be both dangerous and would require a great deal of energy. Instead, I move along the contour of the mountain to get to my destination because this is the path of least resistance or perhaps I find a pass, a ravine, through which I might get to my destination. Along the…

View original post 1,352 more words