Value is Chaos

"Chaos is the name for a peculiar preliminary projection of the world as a whole and for the governance of that world... beings as a whole projected relative to the body and its bodying."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 3)

"If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract."

"Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

The Challenge of the Next Great Philosophy

"...it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. It is indeed never at rest, but carried along the stream of progress ever onward. But it is here as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn – there is a break in the process, a qualitative change and the child is born. In like manner the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world."
"But this new world is perfectly realised just as little as the new-born child; and it is essential to bear this in mind. It comes on the stage to begin with in its immediacy, in its bare generality. A building is not finished when its foundation is laid; and just as little, is the attainment of a general notion of a whole the whole itself. When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. In the same way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages. The beginning of the new spirit is the outcome of a widespread revolution in manifold forms of spiritual culture; it is the reward which comes after a chequered and devious course of development, and after much struggle and effort. It is a whole which, after running its course and laying bare all its content, returns again to itself; it is the resultant abstract notion of the whole. But the actual realisation of this abstract whole is only found when those previous shapes and forms, which are now reduced to ideal moments of the whole, are developed anew again, but developed and shaped within this new medium, and with the meaning they have thereby acquired."

(Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit)

"[Philosophical] greatness [lies is in confronting] the image of life as a whole in order to interpret it as a whole, while the subtlest minds cannot be freed from the error that one can come closer to such an interpretation if one examines painstakingly the colours with which this image has been painted and the material underneath. . . . The whole future of all the sciences is staked on an attempt to understand this canvas and these colours, but not the image. It could be said that only a man who has a firm grasp of the over-all picture of life and existence can use the individual science without harming himself; for without such a regulative total image they are strings that reach no end anywhere and merely make our lives still more confused and labyrinthine."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy)

"It is especially difficult for modern man to find his way into the essential, because in another respect he is familiar with too much and indeed believes he is familiar with everything. For him everything earlier is something past by means of which he can illuminate what comes later and what pertains to him according to his needs. Here earlier has no power of decision because it no longer is experience as incipient in history. The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly the future. We must think about the inception this way...Remembrance of the inception is therefore not a flight into the past but a readiness for what is to come."

(Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts)

"The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of the modern world, in that the former consisted in the cultivation and perfecting of the natural mind. Testing life carefully at all points, philosophizing about everything it came across, the former created an experience permeated through and through by universals. In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. In straining to grasp it and make it his own, he rather strives to bring forward the inner meaning alone, without any process of mediation; the production of the universal is abridged, instead of the universal arising out of the manifold detail of concrete existence. Hence nowadays the task before us consists not so much in getting the individual clear of the stage of sensuous immediacy, and making him a substance that thinks and is grasped in terms of thought, but rather the very opposite: it consists in actualising the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts. But it is much more difficult to make fixed and definite thoughts fuse with one another and form a continuous whole than to bring sensuous existence into this state. The reason lies in what was said before. Thought determinations get their substance and the element of their existence from the ego, the power of the negative, or pure reality; while determinations of sense find this in impotent abstract immediacy, in mere being as such. Thoughts become fluent and interfuse, when thinking pure and simple, this inner immediacy, knows itself as a moment, when pure certainty of self abstracts from itself. It does not “abstract” in the sense of getting away from itself and setting itself on one side, but of surrendering the fixed quality of its self-affirmation, and giving up both the fixity of the purely concrete – which is the ego as contrasted with the variety of its content – and the fixity of all those distinctions [the various thought-functions, principles, etc.] which are present in the element of pure thought and share that absoluteness of the ego. In virtue of this process pure thoughts become notions, concepts, and are then what they are in truth, self-moving functions, circles, are what their substance consists in, are spiritual entities."

"Let the other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy – without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor Truth."

(Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit)

"If 'the 19th century,' to use Nietzsche's wicked phrasing, was a 'victory of the scientific method over science,' then [the 20th] century will be the one that saw the victory of scientific technology over science."

(Friedrich A. Kittler, On the Implemetation of Knowledge: Toward a Theory of Hardware)

From Antonioni

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

"Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer."

"We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean."

"I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks laid down by panic in the face of nature."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

Post-Ideological Politics?

"What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological'. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."

(Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

Read "Pop Culture" as Folk Religion

The spirit of a nation is reflected in its history, its religion, and the degree of its political freedom. The improvement of individual morality is a matter involving one’s private religion, one’s parents, one’s personal efforts, and one’s individual situation. The cultivation of the spirit of the people as a whole requires in addition the respective contributions of folk religion and political institutions.

Through the mighty influence it exerts on the imagination and the heart, folk religion imbues the soul with power and enthusiasm, with a spirit indispensable for the noble exercise of virtue.

(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Prospects for a Folk Religion)

The future of the future is the present.

'There is a wholly unique experience of dialectic. The compelling--the drastic--experience, which refutes everything "gradual" about becoming and shows all seeming "development" to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from a dream. ... The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass though and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!--Therefore:remembering and awakening are the most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance.'

(Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Dream City and Dream House, Drams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung", The Arcades Project)

'Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will becomes plain that mankind does not bring about any new work, but consciously brings about the completion of its old work.'

(Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge)

Derrida: The medium is the message.

"...it is difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techné, of orientation in general. In fact, it is not difficult, it is essentially impossible. And this is true of all discourse. From one discourse to another, the difference lies only in the mode of inhabiting the interior of a conceptually destined, or already submitted, to decay. Within that conceptuality, or already without it, we must attempt to recapture the unity of gesture and speech, of body and language, of tool and thought, before the originality of the one and the other is articulated and without letting this profound unity give rise to confusionism."

(Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)

Reading the Suprime Crisis

'This, then, is where we stand today: the antagonism imposed on us by the space of dominant ideology is the secondary antagonism between (what Badiou calls) "reactive" and "obscure" subjects, leading their struggle against the background of the obliterated Event.

In his reading of Badiou, Adrian Johnston discerned the ideologico-critical potential of the Badiouian topic of evental breaks: when the balance of an ideological situation is disturbed by arising "symptomal knots," elements which, while formally part of the situation, do not fit into it, the ideological defense can adopt two main strategies, the false "eventalization" of the dynamics which is thoroughly part of the existing situation, and the disavowal of the signs which delineate true evental possibilities, their reading as minor accidents or external disturbances:

one, making mere modifications appear to promise evental newness (a tactic that comes to the fore in the ideology of late-capitalism, whose noisily marketed "perpetual revolution" is really just an instance of the cliché "the more things change, the more they stay the same"-or, as Badiou puts it, "capitalism itself is the obsession of novelty and the perpetual renovation of forms"); two, making the sites sheltering potentially explosive evental upheavals appear to be, at a minimum, unremarkable features of the banal, everyday landscape, and, at most, nothing more than temporary, correctable glitches in the functioning of the established system.

Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification: Johnston writes that "the ideology of the worldly state, through a sort of bluff or masquerade, disguises its non-integrated weakest points, its Achilles' heels, as fully integrated cogs and components of its allegedly harmonious functioning-rather than as loci containing the potential to throw monkey wrenches in its gears and thereby generate evental dysfunctions of this regime, a regime that is never so deeply entrenched as it would like to appear to be in the eyes of its subjects." Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the threatening character of a disfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the necessary result of the system's inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder - Jews - disturbing the organic totality of the social edifice.

Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are "temporary, correctable glitches" in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth, the "exception" which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of the psychic apparatus).'

(Slavoj Žižek, "On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes")

all space-time in a knotshell

"Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well."

Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad."

(Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History)

"The knot is the only support conceivable for a relation between something and something else. If on the one hand the knot is abstract, it must at the same time be conceived as concrete."

(Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome)

Slavoj Žižek - The Reality of the Virtual

Deleuze: On Concepts

First, every concept relates back to other concepts.

Secondly, what is distinctive about the concept is that it renders components inseparable within itself.

Third, each concept will therefore be considered as the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own components.

In the concept there are only ordinate relationships, not relationships of comprehension or extension, and the concept's components are neither constants nor variables, but pure and simple variants ordered according to their neighborhood.

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Slavoj Žižek: Materialism and Theology

'It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.'

(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

"...the relationship between historical and dialectical materialism is that of parallax; they are substantially the same, the shift from one to the other is purely a shift of perspective."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

Indeed, is not dialectical materialism essentially materialist theology, that aspect of Marx that, despite its necessity, is "small and ugly and which must be kept out of sight."

From Franz Kafka

"I can understand the hesitation of my generation, indeed it is no longer mere hesitation; it is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn us merely for forgetting for the thousandth time?"

–From “Investigations of a Dog”

"Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached."

–From “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way”

"The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last."

–From "Blue Octavo Notebooks"

The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein