v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Logic of Repetition

Vallejo Nocturno 2013-Niftee

From Interview:

Jacques Derrida: I am not an “Ornette Coleman expert,” but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus there is a repetition, in the work, that is intrinsic to the initial creation—that which compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in improvisation: thus when people want to trap you between improvisation and the pre-written, they are wrong.

Ornette Coleman: Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.

Simondon

From The Pinochio Theory blog:

Gilbert Simondon (1926-1987) is another obscure French philosopher championed by Gilles Deleuze. . .

Simondon asks the question, What is an individual? That is to say, what is it that distinguishes one part of being from everything else, that allows something to be identified, or to have a distinct identity? His basic answer is that an “individual” is not an entity, but an ongoing process; that an individual is never given once and for all, but that it must become, and that in a certain sense it never stops becoming; that, therefore, we should speak of individuation, rather than of individuals as things existing once and for all. I was a fertilized egg, then an embryo, then a baby, then a child of various ages, before I became an adult; my individuality had to emerge out of something “preindividual”, and even as an adult I have not attained a final form of individuality, because I continue to change, and will so continue to change until I am dead, at which point I will no longer be an individual at all.
The consequences of such a view of individuation are numerous and profound. Obviously, it disqualifies all those classical philosophies, from Plato to Descartes to contemporary “common sense,” which assume the existence of fixed essences and substances. More subtly, Simondon’s arguments are directed against the belief (pervasive in Western culture) in hylomorphism, or the dualism of form and matter: the idea that matter is passive and inert, and that it gets shaped by a form that is imposed upon it, from above. This was Aristotle’s doctrine, of course; it is still arguably present in our contemporary ideas that software is totally distinct from hardware, and that the genes provide a blueprint which is simply imprinted upon our bodies and minds. But Simondon argues that this distinction is never total. Matter is not completely inert, for it always contains incipient structures, potentials for being formed in particular directions or ways. And form is never absolute, and never simply imposed from the outside, since it can only work by translating or “transducing” itself into a material, that is to say by a series of transformations that transmit energy, and thereby “inform” matter (using “inform” in the strong sense of “information” as not just a signal or message or series of bits, but as a process by which something is affected or modulated by something else through a process of interchange and communication).
In addition, if the individual must be understood as an ongoing process of individuation, then the “individual” cannot be isolated from its surroundings, or from all other individuals. An individual can only be defined in relational terms, in contrast and connection to its “milieu,” or to what it is not, but from which it has emerged. That which allows us to distinguish an individual, to see it as separate from everything else, also forces us to link it to everything else. I cannot be an individual at all, without the presence of that which is not me, not my individuality. As a living being I need oxygen, water, and food, for instance; it is only my ability to continue to procure these things, to incorporate them from my environment, and to eject my waste products back into that environment, that allows me to develop the degree of individuality by which I am separate from (or not entirely confounded with) that environment. In this way, Simondon rejects both atomistic individualism, on the one hand, and the excessive holism which would not concede me any existence at all apart from the totality, on the other.

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Objective Reality

Vallejo Nocturno 2013

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

Thomas Pynchon, V

Sebald's Forms of Organization

From MC Journal, an essay by  Tom McInnes Lee:

The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature.

The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events.

The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash.

The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually  uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.

As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent.

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Incorruptible distorting-mirrors

From Cabinet,In Defense of Friendship:

But perhaps the truth about friendship comes across most startlingly in the experience of its demystification. Running into an old friend is like coming face to face with the embarrassing identifications of our past, like finding the love notes to Kurt Cobain that you once scribbled in the back of your chemistry notebook. Musil describes the experience of seeing an old friend: “Each of us would like to free himself from the painful feeling that he once mistook the other for himself, and so we serve each other as incorruptible distorting-mirrors.”⁷ There are few things more repulsive than an infatuation one has grown out of. Further, if friends are like yardsticks according to which we measure the current states of our lives, running into old friends is bound to remind at least one party of their failed ambitions and disappointments. 


Among other things, modern social-networking technologies have largely robbed us of the shock of the reluctant recognition of a friend on the street. It is impossible to ever truly lose track of anyone anymore, for no friendship is so fleeting that it could not be revived with a late-night Google search. Facebook, for instance, has banalized the experience of reuniting with lost companions. Instead of the healthy wake-up call of encountering an ex-friend face-to-face, Facebook pages overflow with former friends and lovers, resembling so many cemeteries for the ghosts of failed relationships past.


To run into an old friend is to be struck by the realization that a person who once seemed so important and necessary to the quotidian rhythm of your life now seems insignificant and even strange. You wonder, in turn, what other seemingly integral things are equally illusory and circumstantial. Some authors find the changed appearance of old friends so unsettling that they describe it almost as a kind of demonic possession. In the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example, the narrator attends a ball where all of his old acquaintances appear as “bad portraits of themselves.”⁸ Upon being introduced to his oldest friend, the narrator is struck by the way his friend’s “voice seemed to be emitted by an advanced phonograph, for while it was that of my friend, it emanated from a stout, grey-haired old fellow whom I did not know, and after that it seemed to me that it could only be artificially, by a mechanical trick, that my friend’s voice could have been placed inside this stout old man who might have been anybody.”⁹

Robert Musil describes in similar terms encountering the old friend upon whom The Man Without Qualities is based: “He stood inside himself, confined within the larger fleshy revision of the old self. His gaze was stuck inside the gaze of that other, his speech inside his speech. … It was clear to me, if I may say so, that he would have liked to be himself again; but something held him back.”¹⁰ Both writers imagine that the souls of their youthful friends have somehow been swallowed by the aged bodies before them; their old friends appearing as pantomimes of the eternal battle between spirit and time. In truth, though, when we see old friends it is not really they whom we no longer recognize. What we are disturbed by in such encounters is the revelation of our own contingency. But isn’t friendship supposed to buttress us from precisely these kinds of morbid thoughts? Isn’t it true that the pleasures of life are always on the side of transiency and illusion? As Hazlitt has it: “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”¹¹

A Power of Illumination

From the NYT blog philospher Paul Horwich writes about Wittgenstein's contributions:

The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.

Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”

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In Mental Life. . .

From Dylan Trigg's blog, on a lecture regarding "ruins":

Freud’s usage of ruinous and archaeological metaphors shifts through his psychoanalytical thinking, beginning with something broadly equivalent to ruinlust and ending on a note of anxiety and melancholy. At the earliest stages of this relation, he assumes the role of an intrepid adventurer, keen to excavate the buried secrets lurking in the psychic and earthly unconscious. A passage from the 1896 essay “The Aetiology of Hysteria” reads thus:

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions... He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built (Freud 2001a, 192).

With this account, Freud indirectly gives us the foundations of analytic theory. In assuming the role of classical explorer, Freud elevates psychoanalysis to a mode of both retrieval and restoration. The dotted fragments and sketchy remains of a former civilization require careful work in order to bring them back the light of consciousness. Too abrasive, the explorer risks effacing the traces through driving them deeper into the buried earth. But with cautious probing, these same traces point to a past that is accessible through the work of reanimation and reconstruction.

Still in this early phase of his thinking on ruins, Freud expands upon his archaeological analysis, remarking that “This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city” (Freud 2001b, 139). In each account, the ruin is presented as material, which if disorderly, is also lodged in time and thus receptive to the work of excavation, interpretation, before subsequent reconstruction.

From the outset, then, Freud’s relation to ruins is laden with tremendous psychic value. Far from inert matter, devoid of substance, at all times, the materiality of the past assumes a latent meaning. Freud recognises here the value of the ruin as being imbued with a future life, making it clear that the appearance of inactivity is deceptive. In this way, the past in question is one that has an afterlife attached to it, its buried meaning waiting the emergence of a future psychoanalysis to restore it.

This rather uneven relationship between Freud and the ruin gives voice to the latter only by dint of a psychoanalytic intervention. The ruin, to put it in phenomenological terms, speaks less for itself and more through the method of analysis. The ruin does not decipher itself. As a fragment rather than a complete work of materiality, it requires analysis for the ruin to reach a state of reconstructed completion, begging the question of where the ruin ends and the psychoanalysis begins. I leave this important question unanswered for the moment.

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Computer Brain Not

Daniel Dennett writes at Edge:

We're beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it's much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it's always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well, but still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I'm just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

What we're seeing right now in cognitive science is something that I've been anticipating for years, and now it's happening, and it's happening so fast I can't keep up with it. We're now drowning in data, and we're also happily drowning in bright young people who have grown up with this stuff and for whom it's just second nature to think in these quite abstract computational terms, and it simply wasn't possible even for experts to get their heads around all these different topics 30 years ago. Now a suitably motivated kid can arrive at college already primed to go on these issues. It's very exciting, and they're just going to run away from us, and it's going to be fun to watch.

The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer that you're used to. It's not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it's not like your iPhone except in some ways. It's a much more interesting phenomenon. What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn't do any of this) is a way of thinking in a disciplined way about phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts. Until late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a machine with a trillion moving parts. It's just mind-boggling. 

You couldn't do it, but computer science gives us the ideas, the concepts of levels, virtual machines implemented in virtual machines implemented in virtual machines and so forth. We have these nice ideas of recursive reorganization of which your iPhone is just one example and a very structured and very rigid one at that.

We're getting away from the rigidity of that model, which was worth trying for all it was worth. You go for the low-hanging fruit first. First, you try to make minds as simple as possible. You make them as much like digital computers, as much like von Neumann machines, as possible. It doesn't work. Now, we know why it doesn't work pretty well. So you're going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel.

It's going to be a connectionist network. Although we know many of the talents of connectionist networks, how do you knit them together into one big fabric that can do all the things minds do? Who's in charge? What kind of control system? Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.   

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Ruins return

Dylan Trigg writes at 3am magazine:

How does a ruin — be it the remains of an industrial factory or the relic of an ancient civilization — fit into the landscape of a city? Beyond its warped mass of broken materiality, a ruin is also a disordering of time. It maligns time, dissolving boundaries between past and present. The question is not where the ruin is located, but when? Not in the present, but neither in the past. Time out of joint, to invoke the spectre of Hamlet.

More than this, the ruin undercuts our attachment to places. If there is sometimes a tendency to become overly attached to our little corner in the world, then where that corner is a ruin, such attachment is overrun by constant change. Becoming overly attached to one’s favourite ruin is likely to result in heartbreak. Impossible, after all, to become nostalgic about something that resists a fixed identity. No matter how much we want the ruin to testify to a past of our own — to be one’s own ruin — in the glance of an eye, it assumes a different past, and wholly disconnected to the one we may have incorporated as our own.

Ruins return. This is one of the great surprises that the ruin presents to us: its persistence in time alongside its disordering of time. Far from the waste matter of culture, the ruin always resists repression, finding ways to fend off the very decay that constitutes the ruin in the first instance.

No wonder, then, given this complex structure that Freud elected the ruin to the principle metaphor not only for the practice of psychoanalysis but also for the mind itself. In the archaeological excavation of the ruin, Freud found the means to articulate a set of themes central to his thinking as a whole, not least the very preservation of the past in the mind.

Why the image of the ruin? What can it tell us about psychoanalysis — and equally, what can psychoanalysis tell us about ruins? And moreover, if Freud’s concern is with the ruins of classical Rome and Athens, then how can psychoanalysis contend with the contemporary ruins of Detroit and Chernobyl?

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Pessoa

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of out notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it’s because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

Fernando Pessoa from Tumblr, Fernando Pessoa Is Not for You