“[The map] is itself apart of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
This is the Ariadne aspect of the erotic consciousness—the thread held at its two ends by consciousnesses that look for each other, escape each other, capture each other, and rescue each other; and now they are again separated from each other by that thread which, indissociably, links them together. All these Ariadne objects play with the stratagems of truth at the threshold of light and illusion…Escape is inconceivable; the only way out is in the direction of that dark point which indicates the center, the infernal fire, the law of the figure. No longer threads that one ties and unties but corridors in which one is swallowed up, they are ‘configuration objects’, of the type underground, cage and machine—the labyrinth’s inward path. There, error and truth are no longer in question: one may miss Ariadne, one cannot miss the Minotaur.
Jean Baudrillard: Hyperreality and Implosion
All is not well in the world of the capitalist code. In the latest
essay of his series on Jean Baudrillard, Andrew Robinson explores the
French thinker’s account of the crisis of contemporary capitalism,
through three related concepts: hyperreality, fascination and implosion.
Robinson shows how, in this theory, too much effectiveness can be
counterproductive.
Sexistences: Modes of Being in Sex, Emily Apter ca. 2018
西方文化 > >
Hayden WHITE “Postmodernism and Historiography”
Parerga: Postmodernist historical thought is present-oriented and is
primarily interested in the past only insofar as it can be used to serve
the present.
Thus, Lyotard is only half-right in finding the origin of postmodernism
in the rejection of the great schemata (‘grands recits’) of universal
history which purported to disclose history’s direction, aim, and
meaning.
Professional historians and philosophers of history had dismissed these
great schemata as myth and ideology long before Lyotard reported their
abandonment.
But postmodernism goes further and rejects, not only the “grands recits”
of providence, progress, the dialectic of the World Spirit (Hegel),
Marxism, etc., but also (les petits recits) of professional historians
as well; both kinds of historiography are deemed irrelevant to the
practical needs of our epoch.
Central among these needs is “coming to terms with” a past “that won’t
go away,” especially the past of the Nazi genocide, which belied the
myths of progress, enlightenment, and humanism sustained by professional
historians in the service of the state and bourgeois society since the
time of the French Revolution.
Project MUSE – Configurations-Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2017
Free Issue of this excellent journal:
Articles
Dream of an
Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian
Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary
| pp. 1-27| HTML |
Download PDF
The Measurement of Time: Mann and Einstein’s Thought Experiments
pp. 29-55
HTML
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“Ways of Desiring: Postcolonial Affect in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller
|
pp. 57-88
|
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“I am a Wire Simply”: Morse Code, H. D.’s Asphodel, and Modernist Posthumanism
| pp. 89-108
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Ambivalent Media Histories
| pp. 109-119 | HTML | Download PDF
The Sublime Object of Ideology – Slavoj Zizek
~PDF of the full 2nd Ed.
Slavoj Zizek – A Pervert’s Guide to Family
“Here, then, is where we are five years later: still unable to locate 9/11 into a large narrative, to provide its “cognitive mapping.” Of course, there is the official story according to which, the permanent virtual threat of the invisible Enemy legitimizes preemptive strikes: precisely because the threat is virtual, it is too late to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense. The difference of the War on Terror with previous XXth century world-wide struggles like the Cold War is that while, in the preceding cases, the enemy was clearly identified as the positively-existing Communist empire, the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the characterization of the figure of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: “Most people have a dark side… she had nothing else.” Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side … the terrorist threat has nothing else…”
Call for Publications: Verge 6.2 (Infrastructure)
This special issue [of Verge] will gather new work from the humanities, arts,
and social sciences examining “infrastructure” as concept or material
reality in Asia, Asian America, and Asian diasporic communities around
the world. We welcome scholarship that explores the relationships
between real and conceptual infrastructures, concrete materials and
codes of practice—both in particular parts of Asia and as Asian people,
goods, and ideas circulate globally. We are especially interested in
essays that use the concept of infrastructure to better understand
questions related to development projects, technological changes, and
emergent political and social realities. Our goal is to discover how
infrastructure studies can renew classic approaches to Asian societies
and their national or global histories, provide new insights into Asian
and Asian diasporic literatures or arts, and help focus attention on
current ecological and political concerns—for example, by mobilizing new
concepts such as redundancy, resiliance, and repair. We seek close
examinations of the evolution of the infrastructures that are
fundamental to economic and political relations, and to the daily lives
of billions of people, to reveal the ways in which material
technologies, sociotechnical processes, legal forms, popular culture,
and the natural environment interact to produce the physical and
imagined spaces of city, nation, region, and empire.Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) should be prepared according to
the author-date + bibliography format as outlined in section 2.38 of the
University of Minnesota Press style guide, and submitted electronically
to [email protected].
The key to weird media is that it reveals apophatic visions. Surveillance infrastructure, 404’s and even non-human cameras
are all describable, all real, all translatable within the limitations
of their media. Thacker says that with weird media ‘all objects
inevitably withdraw into things.’ Through weird media, objects are
revealed for their ’thinginess.’
This puts them beyond the realm of subjective understanding and
highlights the impossibility of connection. In this sense, weird media
may be the only truly ‘supernatural’ category of dark media and the only
one I can’t de-analogise.
The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. No matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them it insets its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other’s blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric.
– deadline for submissions: July 31, 2018
Fredric Jameson after the postmodern
Awesome…