Unruly Heritage

Early assemblages.jpg
This post, Unruly Heritage, like so many of Levi’s, feels like a confirmation of what I do in making art (what drives me, if not often in what I actually accomplish!) . It was my fascination with detritus I’d find on the street that got me started again, after a 40 year detour. That all these things, these fragments, in being broken and discarded–existed in a present– that was also, a Time of shattered chronology–like the shards of broken mirrors I often used–and represented, for me, a kind of freedom. The former use-identities still clung to them, but thinly, like dust, that in rearranging them, they asserted a new identity in their assemblage. It felt very political. Yes, I thought, or felt — THIS is what we have to do to make a new, and humanly habitable world!

Right to left,  above:  #10 “A piece of the Puzzle,”  #1, and #131. In the center, the first piece I made, July of 2012, in this numbered series that’s now at #903.

larvalsubjects's avatarLarval Subjects .

For weeks I’ve struggled with how to compose this post because my thoughts feel all chaotic and jumbled.  However, the name of this blog is “Larval Subjects”.  This blog is a place for the development of half-formed, perhaps ill advised or poorly conceived thoughts.  For no thought can be thought before it is thought, and thinking a thought has a certain element of materiality to it, found within speech and writing.  Contrary to Aristotle’s Peri hermenaias, where speech is a sign of thought and writing is a sign of speech, such that thought is conceived as an origin or spirit that precedes speech and writing, there is always something nachträglich in thought.  One never truly knows what they think until after they have done, said, or written it.  Thought is not what precedes our action, speech, and writing as an arche or origin, but is what will have…

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Svaerholt– Encounters With The Real

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It is June 9th, 2017.  I have earlier given a well attended talk on object-oriented ontology and the ontology of folds at the Litteraturhuset in Oslo, Norway.  I’ve been brought here by the Oslo Center for Advanced Studies and the After Discourse:  Things, Archaeology, and Heritage in the 21st Century.  It is late in the evening and I am sitting in a bar with Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir.  While I am delighted to be here, I’m not entirely sure why I have I have been invited.  I don’t yet understand archaeology and don’t see the connection with my work.  The year before—but it had been coming for a long time –I had made the decision that the purpose of my travel would be to learn from others and what they are doing in their disciplines and why.  I had decided that my philosophical work would be…

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Entanglements and Why Change is So Difficult

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Why is social change so difficult?  In Entangled, Ian Hodder outlines four forms of entanglement where people, as it were, become enmeshed in the world in ways that render alternatives or change difficult.  These entanglements are forms of dependency forming series or chains.  There are, first, human – human entanglements (HH).  These are what the social sciences, political philosophy, and political critique largely focus on.  HH entanglements are the realm of representation, norms, laws, signs, and power.  In my last post, I spoke of an HH entanglement with respect to citizenship status.  Although citizenship or being categorized as undocumented is not a material determination but the result of a signifier or what Deleuze and Guattari call an “incorporeal transformation”, it nonetheless has profound material consequences for the person that falls within the web of these signifiers, determining what movements and forms of life are possible for that person.

The…

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