No Borders Metaphysics

This is the action we're putting up to figure out how to use the word "human" these days. Can it ever had any meaning apart "those we have chosen"?

I'm working on my chapter about rhythms in Aharon's house and I'm doing a rhythmic piece with him about rhythmic transduction. It is about how knowledge can be understood in terms of entrainement, of the kind that makes the heater in his room produce patterned marks in the wall. More about all this soon. Meanwhile, two links from Aharon. The first is his piece on search art with Phil Jones: Search Art The second is his reflections on rhythms and gravity that illustrate beautifully his ideas about search: Gravity In

In his beautiful and inspiring "Che cos'è il commando?" Agamben deals with archeological excavation as the source of all discovery: it is a Foucauldian thought, but he puts it in a way that makes me think that it can be extended to what has no starting point, no ground but layers of floors. In this sense, the excavation his on about is present both in archeological and in anarcheological endeavours. Agamben investigates these starting points - the question of ground. He starts out with archés , that are both commencement and commandment (commencer, commander, in French); the original element and the commanding force. He conjectures that to command is to start something out. Western philosophy, he says, never considered power in terms of command. Obedience has attracted more attention and indeed it is crucial, but authority really disappears only when commands are no longer given - there is likely always someone to obey any command provided that it is actually issued. He t...

I've been writing Being Up for Grabs, the book, steadily since February. My plan is to have it ready by the end of July. I've finished chapter 4 today and this makes me feel that my plan is still feasible. Last Saturday, walking in Buttes Chaumont, Paris, I restructured the book quite dramatically and got rid of two chapter. Its structure now looks like this: 1. Being up for grabs - the preliminaries 2. Anarcheologies 3. Fragments 4. Doubts 5. Rhythms 6. Contingencies and their galaxies The idea is to develop another sense of priority, closer to Aristotle's "proton to onton" than to Schaffer's. In this renewed sense, accident is prior. It is widespread and crucial for what is sensible, but it is not its ultimate component, nor what comes first ever. Such other priority can be seen in several different ways, as accident presents itself in different ways too. It is part of its widespread character to present itself with diff...

Been reading the very exciting Society of Tiredness of Byung Chul-Han. He diagnoses that the immunological time has been replaced by a neuronal time - a time of otherness and negativity was replaced by a time of excessive positivity, with open potentialities with scarce limitations. The contrast between the two eras - that of a disciplinary society and that of a society of achievement (or of performance) - is expressed in the prototypical diseases of the two times: in a society of discipline, borders are to be preserved - as is otherness, negativity, duties - and people go down with immunological diseases, infections of all sorts while in a society of achievement, borders spell defeat - people are rather guided by potentiality than duty, by what they can do than by what they should do - and illnesses are depression, deficit of attention, burn-out syndrome. A society of achievement - in a name that he considers fitter than Deleuze's "society of control" which is still too ...

Been reading Jordana Rosenberg's essay on recent waves of molecularization of politics that deploys Marxism and queer theory against the ontological turn. It seems to me that the problems Jordana sees in turning ontological lie on the insistence that social mediation ought to be more pervasive than anything ontological. I rather think that it is ontology itself that needs to be queerized (as I defended in my recent Bodies in Clinamina ). As I was writing in facebook, Jordana's is a beautiful essay. But I think that there is a blind spot towards heavily politicized non-human elements of environment (that makes mediation be indifferent to ecological constrictions, pictures society as the ultimately withdrawing agent that is ultimately detached from the non-human, presents history as being imposed on a planet rather than negotiated with its layers). Queer is not only aleatory, but this ought to be an invitation to queerize the elements that have served to quench capitalist dete...

Been to Mendieta's retrospective in the Der Moderne in Salzburg. The exhibition presents most of her phases and is successful in making her stuff dialogue with a collection of Viennese actionism in another floor. The contrast is interesting because while most of the actionist work (including the amazing stuff of Valie Export and Peter Weibel, and the inspiring stuff of Herman Nitsch) has a ring of body art that attempts to flee from bodily constraints, Mendieta's stuff seems to be always negotiating with the hidden territorial demands of the body. It is as if she is looking for a territory in the most veiled chambers of the body and the earth. It is a reterritorializing attempt, even if the underground of the territory has to be captured by excavating layers and layers of imaginals. Anarcheology, ananatomy, the hurry for origins, for the quale of groundedness. She is constantly looking down, and making up a territory that was not and could not be given. I think the contrast bet...