All The Lonely Places

Visp Bus Station, Wallis, Switzerland

The Empty City

Timothy Morton mentions on his blog this emerging novel called The Empty City by the Norwegian speculative fiction writer, Berit Ellingsen. Essentially an existentialist story of a man who opens to an already opened world, The Empty City is, according to Ellingsen “a story of non-dualities.”

Recent chapters start at 39 but you can back up a bit if you still find yourself linear…

Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects

 

 

 

I am very excited for Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects which is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press. Here, Bryant discusses his motivations in Democracy and how it is different from Difference and Givenness, his previous book. For Bryant, Difference is a “graduate student” text, a book in where he tried to “police” the world of Deleuzians and correct misinterpretations. Kindly, Bryant claims for The Democracy of Objects a “workbook” status, something filled with arrows from which others can work from. A thousand directions, a thousand suns.

I can’t wait!

The Adjacent Possible(s)

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.. Yet it is not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number, and it excludes most of the forms that now populate the biosphere. What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.

Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson locates an impetus to creativity in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From,  in the lacunal spacebetween thinking, between the concrete. His premise is that good ideas never come in discrete packages “shipped direct from the factory” but rather are cobbled together from a history of detritus and the forgotten. Johnson writes that we “take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.” This is the “adjacent possible,” that space of no space which acts as a shadow to new thought, and which shelters, or incubates, ideas whose time has not quite yet come.

While Johnson is describing a scientific process (which he uses as a metaphor for the social) Heidegger also summons forth a form of the “adjacent possible” (though in not so clear language) when he describes, in What Is Called Thinking?being caught in the “draft” of a thinking which withdraws, and that it is in this moment of surrender that thinking is able to begin thinking. Heidegger writes that “what withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all.” It is by being pulled forward that the being of language actually engages, and that “‘this being in the draft of’ is in itself an essential and therefore constant pointing towards what withdraws.”

DeBeauvoir, in her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity, again calls attention to the liberating necessity of “unhinged” thought, of the creative absolute (which is never an absolute.) Science, she writes, “condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to posses it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, bot at the fusion with the thing, but at the possibilities of new discoveries.”

These three thinkers, separated by half centuries and radically different positions in life, all echo a similar thought; that there is a necessity for thought to remain open, to be constantly torn loose from what is know. It is only in this way that we can begin to think. It is a plea for the irresponsible, for the reckless. In an age of certainty and absolutes, of Fukuyamaian non-history,  of known truths and unknown truths (which are even then known) it is the thinking of the non-concrete, of the fluid and flux-filled that points, through a non-pointing withdrawal, a way forward.

 

The Difficulty of Naming: On Martin Heidegger

I will be speaking at the University of Maine on Thursday, 2 December in the Maples building as part of their Philosopher’s Colloquim series. This is open to the public.

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government” (via zunguzungu)

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thin … Read More

via zunguzungu

Heidegger and no thing.

We venture the paraphrase; No thing is where the word is lacking. “Thing” is here understood in the traditional sense , as meaning anything that in any way is. In this sense, even a god is a thing. Only where the word for the thing has been found is a thing a thing. Only thus is it. Accordingly, we must stress as follows: no thing is where the word, that is the name, lacking.^⁠

—M. Heidegger, The Nature of Language

No thing is lacking. Heidegger has placed the emphasis on is, making it the affirmative, making it the positive. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove then) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing blossoms, enriches, belongs, becomes. What is no thing? Heidegger writes just before this that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this selection he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? What happens if there is no naming of the thing?

We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness. But what happens if we remove the name for this brick, if we no longer know what to call it, in fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is, un-reliant, un-needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the objectifying—of it.

Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed anything, per se. The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (according to Heidegger) and in this, there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. By removing the name, I allow ( or rather one allows, or no one allows) the brick to be all things, to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its being. It becomes, quite literally, everything. Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything.; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe.

A Must Read For a Take On Obama Now.

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In? – NYTimes.com.

Heidegger and the echo of language.

“Most often, and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past.”

—M. Heidegger

A name, in and with Heidegger, is too often a residue, a sound echoed. When we say “plate” or “dog” or “cider” it is always to a thing already named, already categorized timelessly ahead of time. A name has become already a thing and thereby when we say a thing we are carrying on, carrying forward, a tradition which is not necessarily ours. How then to name, to truly own something, not in the sense that we own as in to posses but own as in to appropriate—in the pure Heideggerian sense. We appropriate by making something our own, we seek to embody it with our own-ness.

Heidegger writes that everyday language, that is mortal speech, is a “forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” What does the “cup” call to any longer, besides a base utility, a base, all too common form of  naming? Is this naming of “tree” any more dynamic, is it any more a call, or is it simply a quality, an averaging out of all its constituent elements.

In Georg Trakl’s poem, “A Winter’s Night” which Heidegger draws on in his essay “Language,” Heidegger points to base objects listed in the poem—table, bread, wine, window, snow—and defends them as pure calls, as having been rescued from the world of prosaic speech and returned, in a sense, to the original dynamic purity of the name. Heidegger writes that Trakl, having re-invested the words into the poem, has rescued them from the prosaic and returned them to the their dif-ference (and in this we must read dif-ference as the holding apart of two things, the separating powers.) He claims them to have been bidden by the pure language of the poem, and in bidding to have been brought into a “nearness,” a “presence” which is always absent in the mere mortal speaking of language.

LePage Backs Away from Human Rights Act Remarks

LePage Backs Away from Human Rights Act Remarks.

via LePage Backs Away from Human Rights Act Remarks.