not

lepsia verzia v .txt: http://burundi.sk/dusan/carrythatweight/images/5/51/Pzi.esej.research.txt

premise: what if whitehead, not heidegger would set the agenda for postmodern thought?

INTRO

whitehead 861 aq 7 akbal IX – process and reality, 29
heidegger 889 li 11 cimi XI – being and time, 27
> both books = antiessentialist, antipositivist

1 q of beginnings
H’s first question of Being: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”
W begins with “How is it that there is always something new?”
How can our culture’s incessant repetition and recycling nonetheless issue forth in something genuinely new and different?

2 q of history of phil
H: where did phil got wrong path?
W: “It is really not sufficient to direct attention to the best that has been said and done in the an-
cient world. The result is static, repressive, and promotes a decadent habit of
mind.” Instead of trying to pin down the history of philosophy, Whitehead
twists this history in wonderfully ungainly ways. He mines it for unexpected
creative sparks, excerpting those moments where, for instance, Plato affirms
Becoming against the static world of Ideas, or Descartes refutes mind–body
dualism.
^ nedebugovat linearnu historiu filozofie, ale nachadzat unexpected threads (ako 3hoursold v jpg ekologii)

3 W doesn’t talk about metaphysics

5 q of style
H: Heidegger’s contorted writing combines a height-
ened Romantic poeticism with the self-referential interrogation of linguistic
roots and meanings. It’s a style as portentous and exasperating as the myster-
ies it claims to disclose.
W’s language, to the contrary, is dry, gray,
and abstract. But in this academic, fussy, almost pedantic prose, he is contin-
ually saying the most astonishing things, reigniting the philosophic sense of
wonder at every step.

7 q of technology
H warns us against the danger of technological “enframing,” with its reduction of nature to the status of a “standing reserve.”
Heidegger ought to treat science and technology in the same way that he treats language: for language it-
self is a technology, and the essence of what is human involves technology in
just the same way as it does language
W: scientific and technical rationality is one kind of “abstraction.” This, in itself, is not anything bad.

8 q of subjectivity
Whitehead does not see the subject as an effect of
language. Rather, he sees subjectivity as embedded in the world. The subject
is an irreducible part of the universe, of the way things happen. There is noth-
ing outside of experience; and experience always happens to some subject or
other. This subject may be human, but it also may be a dog, a tree, a mush-
room, or a grain of sand. (Strictly speaking, any such entities are what White-
head calls “societies,” each composed of multitudes of “actual occasions,”
which themselves are the subjects in question.)
^ !! societies = objects composed of events(?) ??is he flat?? (flat ontology like early latour, and delanda)
+
In any case, the subject consti-
tutes itself in and through its experience; and thereupon it perishes, entering
into the “objective immortality” of being a “datum” for other experiences of
other subjects. In this way, Whitehead abolishes the ontological privileging of
human beings over all other subjectivities. This doesn’t mean, of course, that
the differences between human beings and other sorts of beings are irrelevant;
such differences remain pragmatically important in all kinds of situations, and
for all sorts of reasons. But in undoing the ontological privilege of being hu-
man, Whitehead suggests that the critique of the subject need not be so com-
pulsive a focus of philosophical inquiry.

Whitehead’s metaphysics stands outside the dualities—the subject or not, meaning
or not, humanism or not—with which recent theoretical thought has so often
burdened us.

Whitehead both exemplifies, and encourages, the virtues of speculation, fabulation, and invention.

Deleuze’s affinity with Whitehead lies, above all, in his focus on affect
and singularity, as a way of working toward a nondialectical and highly aes-
theticized mode of critique.

aim of S’s book: critical aestheticism.

W: “Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth,” and even
“Beauty is . . . the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying.”

Kant: Beauty cannot be judged according to concepts; it is a matter neither of em-
pirical fact, nor of moral obligation. This is why there is no science of the
beautiful. For Kant, aesthetics has no foundation, and it offers us no guaran-
tees. Rather, it throws all norms and values into question, or into crisis.
Beauty, Kant says, is not cognitive, not conceptual. “A judgment of
taste is not based on determinate concepts”; that is to say, the concept behind
such a judgment (if it can be called a “concept” at all) “does not allow us to
cognize and prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically
indeterminable and inadequte for cognition” (Kant 1987, 213). There is no
objective or scientific way to determine whether an object is beautiful, and—
if it is—to explain why.
+
beauty is not objectively there, in the world. It is not in nature; it is rather
something that we attribute to nature. An aesthetic judgment, therefore, is
one “whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective”
..Yet at the same time, beauty isn’t merely subjective.

ENDOF INTRO

cau palo! by ma zaujimalo co si myslis o tomto, mozno ta to zaujme – suvisi s temou individuacie – na druhej strane sa to da tiez citat ako ezotericka literatura -)

najprv hovori o ‘flexibilnej subjektivite’, ktoru datuje od protestnych hnuti v 60s, a ktoru dnes povazuje za vsadepritomnu:

We all now have available a flexible and processual subjectivity as instituted by the counter-cultural movements; In the present, the most common destiny of flexible subjectivity and of the freedom of creation that accompanies it is not the invention of forms of expression motivated by an attention to sensations that signal the effects of the other’s existence within our resonant body. What guides us in this creation of territories for our post-Fordist flexibility is an almost hypnotic identification with the images of the world broadcast by advertising and mass culture.

[..] By offering ready-made territories to subjectivities rendered fragile by deterritorialization, these images tend to soothe their unrest, thus contributing to the deafness of their resonant body, and therefore to its invulnerability to the affects of the time that are presented within it. But that may not be the most deadly aspect of this politics of subjectivation, which instead is the very message that such images invariably convey, independently of their style or their target-public. At stake here is the idea that there exist paradises, that these are now in this world and not beyond it, and above all, that certain people have the privilege of inhabiting them. What is more, such images transmit the illusion that we could be one of these VIPs, if we simply invested all our vital energy – our desire, affect, knowledge, intellect, eroticism, imagination, action, etc. – in order to actualize these virtual worlds of signs in our own existence, through the consumption of the objects and services they propose to us.

[..] In other words, what the Western idea of a promised paradise amounts to is a refusal of life in its immanent nature as an impulse to continuous processes of creation and differentiation. In its terrestrial version, capital has replaced God in his function as keeper of the promise, and the virtue that makes us worthy of it now becomes consumption: this is what constitutes the fundamental myth of advanced capitalism.

…a potom cast co ma zaujima, kde hovori o subjektivite v post-totalitnych krajinach:

If we approach the totalitarian regimes (Latin America, Eastern Europe) not by their visible or macropolitical side, but instead by their invisible or micropolitical side, we can see that what characterizes such regimes is the pathological rigidity of the identity principle. [..] Destructively conservative, the totalitarian states go much further than a simple scorn or censorship of the expressions of the resonant body: they obstinately seek to disqualify and humiliate them, to the point where the force of creation, of which such expressions are the product, is so marked by the trauma of this vital terrorism that it finally blocks itself off, and is thereby reduced to silence.

It is not hard to imagine that the meeting of these two regimes makes up a scenario even more vulnerable to the abuses of pimping: in its penetration to totalitarian contexts, cultural capitalism took advantage of the experimental past which was exceptionally audacious and singular in many of those countries; but above all, it took advantage of the wounds inflicted on the forces of creation by the blows they had suffered. The new regime presented itself not only as the system that could welcome and institutionalize the principle of the production of subjectivity and culture by the movements of the 1960s and 70s, as had been the case in the United States and in the countries of Western Europe. In the countries under dictatorships it gained an extra power of seduction: its apparent condition as a savior come to liberate the energy of creation from its bonds, to cure it of its debilitated state, allowing it to reactivate and manifest itself again.

..cize tuzba po identifikacii s medializovanymi rajmi je v posttotalitnych krajinach este silnejsia ako na zapade ‘vdaka’ silne konzervativnej politike identity pocas diktatury..

ide len o esej, nema to tam nicim moc podlozene, ale aj tak mi to pride zaujimave.. hm… treba to brat tak ze Rolnik je (brazilska) psychoanalyticka…. (btw s Guattarim napisala knihu o mikropolitike)

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en

– till early 60s: disciplinary Fordist regime; politics of identity reigned in subjectivity; rejection of a resonant body;
– then crisis – cultural movements called for “l’imagination au pouvoir”
– new: * flexible subjectivity; “counter-culture”; radical experimentation with modes of existence and cultural creation which shattered the “bourgeois” lifestyle at its politics of desire, with its logic of identity, its relation to otherness and its culture;
– today: we all now have available a flexible and processual subjectivity as instituted by the counter-cultural movements; In the present, the most common destiny of flexible subjectivity and of the freedom of creation that accompanies it is not the invention of forms of expression motivated by an attention to sensations that signal the effects of the other’s existence within our resonant body. What guides us in this creation of territories for our post-Fordist flexibility is an almost hypnotic identification with the images of the world broadcast by advertising and mass culture.
+
By offering ready-made territories to subjectivities rendered fragile by deterritorialization, these images tend to soothe their unrest, thus contributing to the deafness of their resonant body, and therefore to its invulnerability to the affects of the time that are presented within it. But that may not be the most deadly aspect of this politics of subjectivation, which instead is the very message that such images invariably convey, independently of their style or their target-public. At stake here is the idea that there exist paradises, that these are now in this world and not beyond it, and above all, that certain people have the privilege of inhabiting them. What is more, such images transmit the illusion that we could be one of these VIPs, if we simply invested all our vital energy – our desire, affect, knowledge, intellect, eroticism, imagination, action, etc. – in order to actualize these virtual worlds of signs in our own existence, through the consumption of the objects and services they propose to us.

What we are faced with here is a new élan for the idea of paradise developed by Judeo-Christian religions: the mirage of a smoothed-over, stable life under perfect control. This kind of hallucination has its origin in the refusal of one’s vulnerability to the other and to the deterritorrializing turbulence that he or she provokes; and also in the disdain for fragility that necessarily derives from such an experience. This fragility is nonetheless essential because it indicates the crisis of a certain diagram of sensibility, its modes of expression, its cartographies of meaning. By disdaining fragility, it does not call up the desire for creation anymore; instead it provokes a sentiment of humiliation and shame whose result is the blockage of the vital process. In other words, what the Western idea of a promised paradise amounts to is a refusal of life in its immanent nature as an impulse to continuous processes of creation and differentiation. In its terrestrial version, capital has replaced God in his function as keeper of the promise, and the virtue that makes us worthy of it now becomes consumption: this is what constitutes the fundamental myth of advanced capitalism. In such a context, it is at the very least mistaken to consider that we lack myths today: it is precisely through our belief in this religious myth of neoliberalism, that the image-worlds produced by this regime turn into concrete reality in our own existence.

This kind of pimping of the creative force is what has been transforming the planet into a gigantic marketplace, expanding at an exponential rate, either by including its inhabitants as hyperactive zombies or by excluding them as human trash.

The seducer conjures up a spellbinding idealization that leads the seduced to identify with the seducer and submit to him: that is to say, to identify with and submit to the aggressor, impelled by an inner desire, in hopes of being recognized and admitted into the seducer’s world.

even greater in the countries of Latin America and Eastern Europe which, like Brazil, were under totalitarian regimes at the moment when financial capitalism took hold. Let us not forget that the “democratic opening” of these countries, which took place during the 1980s, was partially due to the advent of the post-Fordist regime, whose flexibility could only encounter the rigidity of the totalitarian systems as an obstacle.

If we approach the totalitarian regimes not by their visible or macropolitical side, but instead by their invisible or micropolitical side, we can see that what characterizes such regimes is the pathological rigidity of the identity principle. This holds for totalitarianisms of the Right and the Left, since from the viewpoint of the politics of subjectivation such regimes are not so different.

For them, such a threshold does not summon up an urgency to create, but on the contrary, to preserve the established order at any price. Destructively conservative, the totalitarian states go much further than a simple scorn or censorship of the expressions of the resonant body: they obstinately seek to disqualify and humiliate them, to the point where the force of creation, of which such expressions are the product, is so marked by the trauma of this vital terrorism that it finally blocks itself off, and is thereby reduced to silence

It is not hard to imagine that the meeting of these two regimes makes up a scenario even more vulnerable to the abuses of pimping: in its penetration to totalitarian contexts, cultural capitalism took advantage of the experimental past which was exceptionally audacious and singular in many of those countries; but above all, it took advantage of the wounds inflicted on the forces of creation by the blows they had suffered. The new regime presented itself not only as the system that could welcome and institutionalize the principle of the production of subjectivity and culture by the movements of the 1960s and 70s, as had been the case in the United States and in the countries of Western Europe. In the countries under dictatorships it gained an extra power of seduction: its apparent condition as a savior come to liberate the energy of creation from its bonds, to cure it of its debilitated state, allowing it to reactivate and manifest itself again.