A sample list of qualifiers…
Images of my favourite rhizome…. “orchid and the wasp” … “ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” … “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
…the logic of categories ill fits the endemic variegation and messiness of human interactions.„ Bauman 2003
….Why, though, didn’t the Greeks invent mathematical physics ? [preamble about slavery and the minor gods waging battles in space (edited out)]… but above all, the Greeks did not invent physics because of the human sciences, for the human sciences preceded physical science. Anterior both in time and the conditions of the physical sciences, the human sciences prevented the former from emerging. This conflict, haunts our early knowledge. We were concerned with our own relations before we worried about te world. Humanity, a sociologist first, needed all its history before becoming a physicist. Conversely, history is this slow catching up of the world… We have interpreted religions and mythologies in terms of the natural sciences for so long, a misinterpretation imposed by our modernity, that we still believe firmly that our ancestor were primarily afraid of lightening, meteors and the dark…. No, they feared others and the group, their enemies. All mythologies and religions are human sciences in an exquisite way, infinitely more precise… To reach the world and then physics, we had to cross that particuar barrier, erected by groups themselves…
Michel Serres - Gnomon
Reading Derrida at Moorfields…. My eyes cannot focus now as a result of the eyedrops…. Still here I am thinking about Peeters text Derrida and its implicit representation of the (masculine) philosophical imaginary in the 1960s and 1970s, i’m struck by how unlike the world of Moorfields Eye Hospital this strange philosophical universe is. Woman and children are marginal in Derrida, though occasionally they rise to the surface and become noticed within the the the fields of men, for in the text relationships are between men. But of course we know that the philosophical imaginary hasn’t changed as much as it should have in the intervening years …. (witness the ’New accelerationist’ conference next week…) …. and then it is clear that its Moorfields which by any everyday standard is the future and past as both culture and philosophical moment. In this sense then the reverse is true to what the book presents, the imaginary of Moorfields is as multicultural as one could imagine. That the structure is as problematic as everything else in the rest of Western Europe goes without saying, yet the gender and cultural differences are clearly more interesting and representative of everyday life than the Derrida allows for or even misrepresents… so here we are, having left the utopian moment of the hospital, wondering whether philosophy will ever be able to move beyond its reactionary imaginary…
there at the beginning of both the consumer society that Marcuse showed us and the spectacle that Debord illuminated is The Great Gatsby. the novel works on the world and the people (subjects) that the new regime of Fordo-Bernaysism was producing but also tidies up the ruins of previous…
…nudged from the behind by the horror of expiry, life in a liquid modern society no longer needs to be pulled forward by the imagined wonders at the far end of modernising labours…. Bauman (2005)
— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (via anthropologeist)
(via hollmanlozano)
