Appeals to nature are almost always an invocation of essence or timelessness, but this is completely wrong. The essence of this supposedly essence-bestowing signifier is in fact pure mutability itself, "nature" is the site from which all difference emanates

Will to power is exactly like the theory of natural selection in its apprehension of productive force as the instantiator-instance of the world, that is therefore specifically not bound by a binary transcendental morality or located within an "individual" and "its" being (because to think these things as coming-to-world or as relation-to-world is always an impoverishment). There is no relation-to-world because the world is relation, and therefore a-transcendental difference, itself. This is exactly the state of affairs in the way Bergson describes relation. A Nietzschian or Spinazoian cast of being is just where to locate and depart from a truly anti-anthropocentric ground for critique of the standard model of 'power' and relation to world ([ecology?] a model much more like the straw arguments bad readings of Nietzsche end up producing), where one can see the schemata in which umwelt/umgebung actually function, and where their telos of salvation falls away like antlers in winter.



[philosophy = will to sadness?, where sadness = immanent coming-to-being as opposed to the nihilism of happiness (understood not as joy or ecstasy but as the harvest and end of stasis or equilibrium or stupidity, and therefore a kind of death worship, or worship unassimilating of and threatened by death; death that is also the center around which it organizes itself but constantly ignores. It is the un-affirmation of its own object of worship, and maybe the genesis of neuroses?)]. So, philosophy as a kind of jouissance?


A god is a sort of gag, a substantiation of the incomprehensible or ineffable. God is precisely the externalized embodiment of an inability, and is therefore a sort of beacon or endless presence of unaccepted (or unacceptable?) failure. Religion, then, is a sort of twice baked systematized failure-worship, it is the worst kind of mysticism because it fails to even understand itself on those grounds... in this instance, actual mystics are much more honest, they don't require this second order that characterizes non-mystic religious traditions.

Thanks, Wikipedia. Thedia.

The only truly private things are those we truly can not talk about (much like the most genuine letter is the one never sent). If we can talk about them, we will talk about them; if we will talk about them, they are not private.

Privacy in the contemporary sense appears to be not void, but presence. Privacy is the invocation of a space of delimited exposure, rather than the un-uttered non-presence of the truly private. Privacy is today the sub rosa; it seems never to be, politically speaking, the passage in silence that Wittgenstein implores.

Therefore, what does it mean to appeal to a "right to privacy?" What does it mean to protest Facebook privacy policies? It seems that in its commonest articulation, what is apparently most invoked by a right to privacy is not, in the end, a right FROM intrusion, but is rather a right to freedom from self-incrimination. A right to privacy in the contemporary sense is actually a way of saying "do not use these things that I name private, for despite their non-being-in-a-sate-of-true-privacy (unuttered, unutterable), in so naming them I claim them away from you and from your ability to use them." A right to privacy today seems more an impoundment than a prohibition. "Allow me to disseminate these things without repercussion." This is especially relevant, despite its lack of rigor, in view of a time when biometric technology increasingly forces our bodies to speak for us, to divulge what we would not divulge purposefully, in the form of an actual techno-scientific intrusion. Therefore, in THIS respect a right to privacy does remain an impoundment, but with the caveat that in this instance it is the prohibition of the collection of information about our bodies obtained without uttering them AND without consent (unlike, say, writing something on a social networking site and then wanting it to be unavailable). It is a third category produced by the apprehension of human-being as bare life by the biopolitical machinations of regulatory power.

Privacy vs. secrecy?

The category animal is not simply a corral of the things on the other side of the Man/Animal divide, it is not a name that applies there and not here (but this does not mean the animal-in-man sense that is precisely the OPPOSITE of this sense, none of the hack literary posturing and poetic noodling gesturing like gags at a secret obscure otherness in this, no appealing to the "mysteries" of that fabulous thrusting thick gunted Lady fucking Nature, mysteries only possible to touch through divinations of precious Novelists and other serene-portrait-photograph'd species of New Yorker column writers that are our Mediums of the day)

Animal is a name that is applied to a given species, at a given moment of enunciation, and while it does not NOT function as a name or as a corral of the plenitude of all other non-Homo sapiens life as this is clearly its most common and proprietary function, it doesn't exactly just do that either. All humans are at risk of becoming an animal during the war of discourse. This act has simply gone by other names in the past: Communist, Jew, Heretic/Infidel; now it is called Homo sacer. The goal of militarist/authoritarian/fundamentalist politics is precisely determining the target of this name, after which several well-established and well known political technologies fall into place and begin to operate.


Acephale, Sade, "evil," Bataille, banality - the secret way of tricking the left into finding fascism sexy is called BDSM, an obscurantist sexual gesture towards fascism if there ever was one, something I think Pasolini did, but "Pauline Reage" did not get; Alsdair Grey did, but Richared Kern has not. Couldn't the same arguments about sub/dom relationships be applied to actual slaves? If so, the claims people make about these things are unforgivable to the extreme, obscene in a way they cannot at all claim intentionally, and at the same time completely ridiculous and laughable - if not, they are like children play-acting a game whose only product is a sort of repulsive naive erudition and cowardly hypocrisy in the face of their own arguments and proclimations

SANDINISTA, or how I learned to be bored by what's 'good'

Once someone told me when I was about 15 that Sandanista was the worst Clash album, that even the band said it was mostly filler, and I should've bought something else. I got it because it was the record with the most songs on it, because I had no way to tell between any of the records, and I remember feeling basically embarrassed listening to it the first time even though I was alone in my room..

It was one of the weirdest things I'd ever heard, with no songs like I thought punk rock was supposed to sound, nothing like Dead Kennedys which was the only other 'punk' record I had (Bedtime For Democracy also bc it had the most songs). I was nervous that I had screwed up, but since I bought it I kept listening, I sat up so many nights playing 'rebel waltz' on my guitar... it felt like whole record was either some kind of trick or some kind of secret, and I gradually was ok with both. I heard 'magnificent 7' for the first time in so long recently, and I found my record, and it is still the only Clash record worth listening to.



PS If you combine that with the fact that the other stuff I was listening to at 15 and 16 were tapes from (terrible) local punk bands, it makes so much sense to me now why the Shaggs & Ariel Pink & Stevie...... et al made so much sense to me when I first heard them and why I still can't stand what I do... it's the difference between liking "london calling" and "sandanista" the most. I will never be the latter

vellum and emulsion

Writing personal blogs takes a degree of exhibitive self absorption I haven't had since I was 20, and writing aesthetically critical blogs of say, records, or films, is and has always been dull to me.

It is, I guess, a way to make a buck. Or a way to make the possibility of a buck: a figurative buck in view of a buck to come. Visions of frames, certificates, watermarked paper.


I agree with David Lynch that gasoline and lake water is beautiful and the smell is very good. I want to smell that now, I want to do some boating, power boating

Notes from thoughts from today

"It Follows"


Locke and who speaks

Settling/settled
"It's settled"
Settle the matter / bloody fields and dead kings

What the fuck is the point of this piece on channel 9? Of course there are more fire trucks outside of the city, hardly anyone (and esp. nobody wealthy) LIVES IN THE CITY ANYMORE. Until people decide they're willing to flee BACK to the city, until people decide they don't want to live in the suburbs - which is to say, RE-INVEST IN THE CITY - OF COURSE investment in infrastructure will be proportionally higher outside of it. So should there be fewer fire trucks in the county? Is that the conclusion? Syracuse was abandoned by the overwhelmingly white middle and upper classes forty years ago, how is this meant to be 'shocking'? What a stupid piece of journalism. Should be happy about the crumbs of a story on the city proper at all though, I guess.

Thursday

Snow, yard, pictures

How is it that as far as I have seen, no one appears to realize that Glenn Beck's success is almost entirely due to the way he has adopted the semiotics, syntax, rhetoric, style, etc. of traditionally anitcapitalist, antiracist, feminist, and related discourses, and uses "their" (if I can even provisionally claim this unity) kind of an analytical strategy in a brilliantly perverse way? Listen to any given show and see how this is borne out.

In a country where you can't be overtly racist, he often takes the tack of appearing to support 'minorities' by promoting legislation or action that most not of his spectacularly [bizarre? expedient?] political position DO consider racist, and then calls people opposing him the "actual" racists. I guess his tricks resemble Slavoj Zizek's in that respect.

Glenn Beck uses a gently retuned "leftist" discourse to mute, cauterize, castrate the "left." It's in this way that we can finally understand what is otherwise a mindfuck of a book cover:



We can understand it because that was exactly and literally Benito Mussolini's strategy and greatest political strength, and whatever intent Beck might've had with this cover aside, it literalizes this fact more perfectly than could any lettered image (yes, I know, digital images are lingual, so to speak). His shocked, indignant guilelessness is exactly his guile; the only thing left for me to determine in that respect is whether it's in service to sincere political principles or fiscal expedience.

Glenn Beck's discourse is:
-Pro-capitalist

-Classist in the way that follows from the first principle, but also simultaneously

-Populist. And overwhelmingly so, not only rhetorically, but also in light of Beck's organizations (9/12 project, association with/de facto spiritual leader of the Tea Party), and in this way is reminiscent of

-Intensely nationalist (and I would argue this strategy both makes class resentment abate [we're on the same team!] and allows for the imaginary classlessness provided by that kind of identification as identity)

-Simultaneously traditional and revolutionary (in every significant sense of that word "American" or otherwise)

-Alarmist; adopts a tone of immanent threat and of necessary response. Glenn Beck, I would imagine, is a big fan of the state of exception

-Militarist; despite his 'peaceful protest' rhetoric, his tears (if nothing else) speak to a 'my home is being attacked/destroyed' sort of pathos, and a threatened home or family is excuse enough for anyone to behave violently


To say this is not therefore to call the other side of mass politics non-suspect, or to suggest that this sort of new fascism (one that in fact probably should not be named this way for a few reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Beck would certainly not identify as such and identification DOES MATTER) is not ultimately a biopolitical Janus, but I do think it accounts for something about Beck that has otherwise frustrated and confused a lot of people.

"Outsider" as an aesthetic term is meaningless. [At least once someone is known to someone other than themselves(?)]

"It's a crime to be white anymore" - first in an infinite series

"It must've been a little black boy because the name was, you know, some strange name"
-my Aunt

***

"You're probably going to say this sounds racist, but those people, they can't even take care of one kid and they keep having more! They don't work, and they just have more and more kids and try to live off welfare. And why can't they stop killing eachother?"

"What's wrong with 'Redskins?' Nobody actually has red skin! Everyone's so sensitive, it doesn't even make sense!"
-middle aged Mom from my school district

***

"So, the blacks have made it this far"
-step grandfather remarks made while driving down the Geddes hill towards the city after the reservoir & middle school. Sort of a 'high water mark' reference

***

"You can't say anything anymore. They're always stopping you or complaining, you get that Sharpton with the media on his side anytime anyone says anything"

"I've got a black friend, and even he calls 'em niggers!"

"Rush Limbaugh isn't racist"
-friend's father

***

"I went into Wegmans on Valentines day and saw all these things, they were decorations and they looked like I don't know, like little chocolate monkeys, and they were all over the place, and then I noticed that the blacks were going crazy for them and buying them. They were there for the blacks!"
-this one hurts... my Grandma :(

***

"Going to the Western Lights P&C is like taking a trip to Mexico"
-Can't remember the source exactly, reasonably sure it was a specific friend

***


-all of these, with the exception of my grandpa, were said in the past week. I should've started doing this last year when I moved home....

What is called SINKING?

BEYOND THE BLEASURE PRINCIPLE

These are our demands:

1.) These are not our demands. We demand that we not speak of “our demands.” There is only the I, here, speaking these – my – demands. There is only the “we,” as in “you and I;” a spectral you addressed in spirit by Me. A spectral you, a spectral youth, and the spectre of a disembodied, dispossessed, derealized youth-as-“youth,” haunted by its own past, to whom I am speaking. So to speak.

2.)

Fucking like Victorians

You can only abstain from abstaining (which is not to say, therefore, to participate or to Do) and still lay claim to the word. Talking about abstaining from whatever Thing is to not, in a sense.

Fort / Da

social technology as a pressure valve. Being able to talk to people you otherwise wouldn't changing how we relate to the idea of this person - how we relate to absence. What is absence? What does it produce? What happens when you fundamentally alter the experience? If you don't lack - or don't in the way that the word once connoted... what happens to want? Does "social technology" psychologically atomize the World?