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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I’ve been re-reading Anti-Oedipus again (is one ever finished reading this work? – that is to say, Shall we ever come to the end of our writing?) . A passage I came across seems to suddenly jut its ugly head up out of the pages, one in which that duplex figure of Deleuzeguattari seem to become almost utterly angry, ready to cry out to the world: Freud, you are wrong: the Oedipus triangle – Father, Mother, Son do not reside in the psyches of modern humans. Then as if coming upon a truth they’d only just now registered in the midst of their struggle with Freud’s familial romance they insert an offhand dismissal: “The family is by nature eccentric, decentered.” This bit of news sits there between two vast metonymic onrushes of the eccentricity of the family with its brothers in the military; a cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of a…

A musical piece composed by Odvk and Seetyca inspired by Onto-Cartography and other works of contemporary theory.

Grey Walter was another of the marginal figures in the Macy Conferences and pioneer of the cybernetic field, but he is best known for his biomedical engineering and the development of electroencephalography (EEG) and in his engineering of modern technology work on radar.1 But as Johnston observes he was known for one other astounding thing. –

He also developed a method of measuring what is called the readiness potential in human subjects, which permits an observer to predict a subject’s response about a half to one second before the subject is aware of any intention to act. As Walter J. Freeman notes, this cerebral phenomenon can be interpreted as evidence “that intentional actions are initiated before awareness of such actions emerges, and that consciousness is involved in judging the values of actions rather than in the execution of them.” (ibid. 47) The notion the our conscious mind is non-intentional rather than intentional…