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…

In Anna Longo’s essay The Contingent Emergence of Thought in Quentin Meillassoux’s Time without becoming she explicitly states that Meillaussoux’s goal is to demonstrate that reason is not only able to know the in it-self but also to know it as completely heterogeneous and totally independent: thought can know dead matter as something with which it shares nothing, not an origin, nor the condition of its being.1 Two things this does: first, it makes of Meillassoux an absolute dualist; and, second, it seems to align him with the trope “dead matter” or the inorganic that has been a staple of both mechanistic philosophy and scientific naturalism for centuries. As she tells us Meillassoux’s materialism is defined by its ability to “access things as a total exteriority, to access them as completely different from the living intelligent subject. This materialist assumption entails an original solution to the question of the genesis of…

Modern societies, in pulling down all the old barriers, all the prohibitions, rituals, and symbolic conceptions that once worked to curb human violence, unleashed new forces of unprecedented creativity. But these were counterbalanced by new forces of unprecedented destructiveness, so that the world was transformed into a single community of human beings living under the threat of being reduced to ashes, scattered among piles of radioactive rubble.

Little by little, Economy emancipated itself from the shackles of the sacred. Once held in check by religion, and then by politics, it has today become both our religion and our politics. No longer subject to any higher authority, it cannot decide our future, or make us a world in which to live: it has become our future and our world. Advanced postindustrial societies have been well and truly mystified, in the original sense of that word, and their politicians hoodwinked. The result…

 

Finally able to begin a back log of reading material that I’ve put off for several months. Several works in the past year or so have come out dealing with Speculative Realism (SR). Four in particular I’m in process of reading are

1. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects by Peter Gratton
2. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro
3. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism by Tom Sparrow
4. Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes by Peter Wolfendale

For personal reasons I started with Tom Sparrow’s work which outlines a case against the anti-realist tradition of phenomenology which he argues lacks both a method and a hard core kernel of realist philosophy. He takes Merleau Ponty to task in his appraisal of phenomenology as a style of philosophy, when Ponty states that in his opinion: “the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practised and…