autonomystic - Tumblr blog

[autonomystic]

"A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

[autonomystic]

“The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be institutionalized and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confined from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be re-introduced in extended form, with whole nations as the sub-jectless subjects. If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.”

Adorno, ‘Out of the firing-line’ (1944) from Minima Moralia

[autonomystic]

Apparently both "feudalism" and "capitalism" are etymologically related to cattle.

[autonomystic]

“After men persuaded themselves, that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions praise and blame, sin and merit.”

— Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, Part I: “Concerning God,“ Appendix, translated by R.H.M. Elwes (1883)

[autonomystic]

Ulrike Meinhof, b. October 7, 1934

“That is where we come from: from the isolation of the suburban home, the desolate concreted public housing, the cellprisons, asylums and special prison sections. We come to the guerrilla organization brain-washed through the media, consumerism, physical punishment and the ideology of non-violence; from depression, sickness, declassification, insult and humiliation of the individual, of all exploited people under imperialism. Eventually we perceive the misery of each of us as constituting the necessity of liberation from imperialism, the necessity of anti-imperialist struggle. We understand there is nothing to lose by destroying this system through armed struggle, but everything to win: our collective liberation, life, humanity, identity.”

~ Excerpted in Semiotext(e), Hatred of Capitalism (2001)

[autonomystic]

Gilles Deleuze

[autonomystic]

"Man is the only animal that kills its kind obstinately and furiously[...] But man is also the only one troubled to the point of absolute laceration by the death of his kind."

—Georges Bataille, "Notes for a Film" (1952-1953), The Cradle of Humanity

"HORKHEIMER: I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance. ADORNO: That is connected with rationality. Human beings do things in a far more terrible way than animals, but the idea that things might be otherwise is one that has occurred only to humans."

—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Idea of Humanity" (13 March 1956), Towards a New Manifesto

[autonomystic]

Metaphysicians are frequently only more far-sighted or less timid positivists. Is Spengler really the metaphysician he and his enemies consider him? If one remains on a formalistic level and considers the predominance of conceptualization over empirical content, the difficulty or impossibility of verification, and the crudely irrational supporting concepts of his epistemology, he is. If, however, one examines the substance of these concepts, one is always led to the desiderata of positivism, in particular, to the cult of the ‘fact’. Spengler never misses an opportunity to defame the truth, whatever it may be, and to glorify that which simply is what it is and nothing else, that which needs only to be registered and accepted. "...But in historical reality there are no ideals; there are only facts. There is no causation, no justice, no equity, no goal; there are only facts. Anyone who does not understand this may write books about politics, but he should not meddle in politics itself."

Spengler turns an essentially critical insight – that truth has been impotent in all previous history, that the merely existent has tyrannized all attempts by consciousness to break out of its sphere of power – unobtrusively into a justification of the merely existent. The idea that something which exists, which has power, and which perpetuates itself could nevertheless be wrong never occurs to him; or, rather, he convulsively forbids himself and others to think such thoughts. He is overcome with rage when he hears the voice of impotence, and yet all he can say against it is that it is powerless now and forever. Hegel’s theory that what is real is rational degenerates to a caricature.

[...]

Spengler identifies with power, but the soothsaying aspect of his theory reveals the impotence of identification. He is as sure of his case as is the hangman after the verdict has been pronounced. His historical-philosophical world-formula immortalizes his own impotence no less than that of the others.

Perhaps this characterization of Spengler’s mode of thought allows some more fundamental critical considerations.

His metaphysics is positivist in its resignation to what is so and not otherwise, in its elimination of the category of potentiality, and in its hatred of all thought that takes the possible seriously in its opposition to the actual.

Adorno, Spengler After the Decline

[autonomystic]

“Self-awareness does not mean closing the door on communication. Philosophy teaches us on the contrary that it is its guarantee.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[autonomystic]

if there is a game of some kind that you cannot avoid participating in & which you are guaranteed to lose, then your goal (if you're spiteful) is to lose in a way that maximizes the cost of your opponent's victory. the broader goal is to disincentivize participation in the game, or end it.

[autonomystic]

this is a small thing but i love when churches replace 'father, son, and holy spirit' with 'creator, redeemer, and sustainer' in their liturgies. not only do u take patriarchal language out but u also give god an aura of mysticism.

[autonomystic]

Theses on Monsters, China Mieville

1.

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors.

2.

To insist that an element of the impossible and fantastic is a sine qua non of monstrousness is not mere nerd hankering (though it is that too). Monsters must be creature forms and corpuscles of the unknowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime, delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is godhead.

3.

There is a countervailing tendency in the monstrous corpus. It is evident in Pokémon’s injunction to “catch ’em all,” in the Monster Manual’s exhaustive taxonomies, in Hollywood’s fetishized “Monster Shot.” A thing so evasive of categories provokes—and surrenders to—ravenous desire for specificity, for an itemization of its impossible body, for a genealogy, for an illustration. The telos of monstrous quiddity is specimen.

4.

Ghosts are not monsters.

5.

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word “monster” shares roots with “monstrum,” “monstrare,” “monere“—”that which teaches,” “to show,” “to warn.” This is true but no longer of any help at all, if it ever was.

6.

Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing modernity, of Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s made things and a variably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything, of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All our moments are monstrous moments.

7.

Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own monstrosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are themselves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled, fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysemic, fecund, rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to signify one thing.

Any bugbear that can be completely parsed was never a monster, but some rubber-mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villain, a semiotic banality in fatuous disguise. It is a solution without a problem.

8.

Our sympathy for the monster is notorious. We weep for King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, no matter what they’ve done. We root for Lucifer and ache for Grendel.

It is a trace of skepticism that the given order is a desideratum that lies behind our tears for its antagonists, our troubled empathy with the invader of Hrothgar’s hall.

9.

Such sympathy for the monster is a known factor, a small problem, a minor complication for those who, in drab reaction, deploy an accusation of monstrousness against designated social enemies.

10.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reaction embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this investment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandizements notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal and more evil.

11.

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of humanity.

[autonomystic]

[autonomystic]

“Elysium…The world needs a term of endearment.”

My favourite words from Disco Elysium.

(Bonus:)

[autonomystic]

This is a cool essay abt how the moralization of balance in complex dynamic systems emerged from the logic of the market (where being either a debtor or a creditor, the most obvious forms of imbalance, was stigmatize and or sinful). I was psyched to see it bc without having thought about it that much ive always hated appeals to balance as intrinsically virtuous, and see balance rhetoric as obviously in bed w dualist and complementarian ways of thinking. And this article is also just talking about how balance is underexplored as a historical phenomenon or site for ideology.

[autonomystic]

[autonomystic]

Subramania Bharati