Thanks for this, i've never read or heard of this or the author before. i do have some questions/issues - i'm only going with what isn't italisiced in the text because i don't understand a word his interlocutor says;
- "speed is violence... example is my fist"
speed isn't violence surely? i haven't read the book on speed, but how is he claiming that speed is violence? as i understand it, violence can be produced by speed, but what about the violence of the vacuum, where speed is reduced until you die? Or of the black hole, which will supposedly infinitely reduce your speed but still violently tear you apart?
i'm not happy with this equivelance of a natural physical property and a human value judgement - otherwise we can likewise say that communication is violence because it always involves some physical impact on the reciever, such as sound waves on the ear, and like motion can be increased in order to cause harm.
- "we must think about both the substance and the accident"
i agree, since as he says he's not saying anything different from 'classical' aristotle stuff. I'm not sure i agree with his accusation that we're in some different time now where we've changed how we consider technology (this 'inversion' he talks about) maybe i'm wrong.
like when he says "the invention of the plane was the invention of the plane crash", sure, but "the invention of the washing machine was the invention of the ...." what goes there, since we've now 'inverted' our approach to technology - the invention of people putting their back out? and for a historical example "the invention of the hunting bow was the invention of ranged warfare", "the invention of the wheel was the invention of chariots".
- "in technical terms, speed is a transfer of energy"
this annoys me - in mechanical terms, not technical. becuase i think by technical he means his own definitions - jargon, in other words. If he makes this transfer of energy process a technical term, he can then apply it to things it shouldn't apply to like violence. If we say it's a mechanical term only, we can't apply it to violence since it makes no sense to claim a mechanical process is equivelant to something that isn't reducible to one mechanical process. I mean this:
"once you start thinking in terms of energy, the problem of violence is immediately present"
why is this the case - he hasn't explained it, just said that if you use "speed is a transfer of energy" in a technical (his) sense, you can get to a technical sense where speed = violence. but i think not, if it is a mechanical (material), not technical (ideal) term.
- "but I have absolutely no confidence in psychoanalysis"
when i got to the end and he was talking about 'staircase thinking' and intuitive leaps of understanding/presentation, this made me laugh :D
- "Death is an interruption of knowledge"
sure, but one that was conquered without any need for technology - biology solved this interrupt long ago, so that we may say it is not the case that death is an interruption of knowledge, it never has been for humans.
a lot of what follows, talking about stopping/interruption, is a meandering way i think of concluding that a thing is defined by what it isn't as much as what it is. ok, that's true.
- "what is living, present, conscious, here, is only so because there's an infinity of little deaths, little accidents, little breaks... in the sound [and visual] track of what's lived"
this is poetry not philosophy :D
by which i mean it's an obvious and trivial point expressed in flowery language
it's annoying, because he makes some good points about the organisation of time, and the weaponsiation of it, but for example i've read much better analysis of this by historians talking about Augustus (octavian) and his reorganisation of the calendar and religious holidays, or by historians/theorists talking about strikes and labour stoppages. Those analysis are better because they're coherent, evidenced, and structured.
- "The cinema shows us what our consciousness is"
ugh. no it doesn't. it shows us what cinema is. Our brains and sensory organs are not cameras and directors, our bodies are not actors.
i'm not going to go to much into this part, but i think his main confusion (consciousness as a cinematic montage) comes from concieving of sleep (unconsciousness) as a lack of consciousness, rather than an altered conscious state.
"disappearance of the great narratives... no one believes in them anymore... I only believe in the collage"
why explain this via a new "transhistorical" mode of conception, when it's already easily explained by institutional education, advertising, and state sponsored propaganda?
- "The great narrative of Total War has crumbled in favour of a fragmented war that doesn't speak its name, an intenstinal war in the biological sense"
This is literally a sentance without meaning, one that only the author can possibly understand because they have their own definition not shared by anybody else of "intestinal war" and "the biological sense". Show me someone capable of understanding this sentance and I will follow them forever.
- "Individual death founded all of religious, mystical, and magic thought"
This isn't true (it's false), i'm not going to explain why, he doesn't explain it so.
10."Interruption in space was the ramparts, rules, chastity belts. Now interruption in the body is replaced by interruption in time"
No, what has changed that he can say "now"?! He already admitted religious rules divided (interuppted time) and not just "the body". So rules belong not in mere space interruption, but also time interuption, right, going back for ages, so how can he say "now"? How can he say bodily interpution has been "replaced"? Are the borders all no longer patrolled?
more and more I think he writes/speaks because he likes the sound and not the meaning... "we plug into everyone's intimate duration. Subliminal effects mean just that" for example.
- "I don't believe in explanations. I believe in suggestion, in the obvious quality of the implicit"
yet he rejects psychoanalysis. ok.
anyway, regardless, if you don't believe in explanations you don't believe in education. or in my view philosophy, but i don't know if this author would claim to be a philosopher.
- "Being an urbanist and architect"
ah. rich guy who designs stuff he'll never have to use, build, maintain, repair or demolish, based as we now know not on "explainations" but on suggestions.
So this may be an uncharitable reading, I don't know anything about the author and I haven't read anything else by them, and by the forumulation this looks like an interview so maybe i need to read where he goes into what he means by what he says/writes, but his claim about explanation not being his goal makes me doubt that.
maybe also i've misinterpreted him i dunno.
well i guess i have to follow you forever now :D
thanks for this, actually my immediate response wouldn't be about definitions (i accept trying to pin him down is pointless)
"nation-states openly declare and fight wars, redraw borders" "think proxy wars, Syria, 9/11, cointelpro, Stuxnet, private mercenaries, USAID: wars are no longer declared yet they rage on more than ever"
yes, i assumed this is what he was meaning by those things. however - as far as i understood him, he was saying that this is due to some kind of rearrangement in the way in which we percieve the world, in part due to technology, which he describes as a kind of cinematic collage - we have fragmented the world as he says.
my counter would be can't you explain this with a simple historic narrative - wars were declared illegal, so there are (technically) international legal reprecussions for invading a place. this law obviously is only as strong as those who uphold it like all laws, and like all laws it was immediately overcome with rhetoric that twisted the meanings of words, and subterfuge, and bribery.
in other words, no our reality isn't any different (or percieved differently) than before. other than in scale and scope. Nothing is fragmented, you just have to zoom out.
"we are not aware of what happens to us on a molecular level, what kinds of processes, in this case, are active in our gut (they can be studied of course, but they are not part of our conscious experience of ourselves)–yet they happen; consider, moreover, that you can even read this literally and not as a metaphor or an interesting turn of phrase"
ok so my first thought is surely we are aware of what happens to us on an intestinal level, if not molecular? and also on a cellular level? i think we have a whole bunch of 'interoceptive' senses that do tell us what's going on (with differing degrees of accuracy) in our intestine, for example. Like you know when there's bad bacteria there right cos it hurts?
So I'd argue we are conscious of this - and I'd assume that this is why buddhist monks for example get better at their interoceptive senses via meditation - because they train them & to distinguish them better.
"new research suggests that our intestinal innards might resemble a battlefield more than a conference room. Researchers have found that gut bacteria continually wage war on their neighbors, perhaps as a way to stake out space."
this for me is too much like those nature shows that make up human narratives and turn for example lion prides into a soap opera rivalry with a hyena pack or whatever.
it's a very human thing to call what they're describing war or a battleground. In fact our intestines resemble neither a battlefield or conference room, because bacteria are capable of neither of those things - they're human activities that need human agency.
the concepts of 'battlefield' and 'conference room' have way too many components and associations to call what gut bacteria do anything resembling them.
so it's poetry, and yeah like you say there's no reason poetry can't philosophize, and I wouldn't be so crass to say there's no value in his kind of intuitive approach. But to me it's theological more than strictly philosophical - he writes a complicated cryptic (mystic) sentence and a disciple must translate it for everyone, which because of his breadth of meaning (rather than depth) is easy to do because it just takes a sensible educated disciple.
Lastly;
"I don’t know if I’d ever learn anything new if my approach to texts was “does it conform to my current set of opinions?”"
Yeah I know this could easily seem counter-productively confrontational or dismissive. as an apology;
it's always easier to attack than to defend, especially from a position of ignorance.
my usual approach to encountering new philosophers/philosophy (it's pathological on my part) is to treat it as a God to tear down and destroy.
given this, I habitually attack, but make it clear my position of ignorance (i mean when i say i hadn't read him properly, just what was provided), and also provide my own position - in the expectation that someone better informed/wiser will come along and tear it down.
so i think that's where it looks like I'm saying "this must conform to my view" - i don't mean it like that to be clear, I just don't want to be cowardly and only attack, i want to give someone my own position so they can counter properly.
i do appreciate you bringing this to the community (educating me) I wouldn't have read it otherwise, and i'll end up reading more to cure my ignorant position.
also I don't consider seperating the author and work i think both are fair game so it probably looks too personal an attack because of that :D
edit:
the implication of the attempt to tear down these gods being that the ones you can't must be true gods, or at least demi gods, so worthy of following, in a poetic/religious sense.
i missed your previous convo on this, thanks for the link it was a good defence of the french academic cocaine scene :D
I do think there is a fundamental role for what i call religious thought there - in Virillio what he calls an interest not in the gaps between steps but the steps.
i don't know a good way to put what i mean, but roughly that kind of intuitive thinking i relate closely with the subconscious (i don't mean just in sleep) and with theology/poetry, and i can only assume it's a useful strategy for life & understanding things - or else we wouldn't do it, alongside developing stricter more structured methodologies of thought/philosophies.
i tend to also relate it more to society than the individual tho, it works best i think collaberatively with as much experience input as possible, so if it becomes too exclusive/technical in language & academic in practice it can lose it's advantage over other modes like analytics, which are better for an individual or small group arriving at truth.
"but i don’t think i’ve found the balance yet..."
nothing you've written seems at all unbalanced, i prefer an emotional response alongside the theory - its why i write 'this annoys me' etc about bits of the text to try to convey my own 'felt' reactions. like face-to-face we have expressions and vocal tone to tell us this stuff, the internet cuts out that emotional content which is to the detriment of thinking, especially as a social/shared activity.
"his interest in some sort of return to Christianity"
oh shit we killed god too soon, people are fucking insane :D
what is the best order to read the french theorists in btw, i've only read extracts of them - who should I start with and who can i skip, and who's the best current standard-bearer?
thanks so much for this! (tho tbh i really didn't want to ever return to spinoza i know he's like the philosophers philosopher but it was torture sometimes)
on replacing gods - what's your feeling/thoughts on what that'd look like (esp. in a leftist sense)? do you agree with N about christianity/greek gods generally? And about other religious systems, I assume you'd say there's worthy qualities/values discernable in them all (or not?); which are the big concepts/ideas that you prefer in various faiths or mythologies?
also have you ever read (i dunno if you read this genre) Lord of Light by R.Zelazney? It's sci fi but he studied religions it's a fun book.
i'll read that stuff through & probably bother you with questions at some point :D
" What I’m more interested in is religion from the sociological standpoint."
yeah this is what I was asking mainly, and by other religious systems I meant just common knowledge about their espoused values.
but your answer is excellent thanks.
It's a really interesting topic these religious aspects in the US, it is a unique and in some ways historically unprecedented situation or maybe 'religious ecosystem'
Though it (religious evolution/development in the US) has i think enough similarities with polytheistic systems to assume some things about it's evolution - I think we can probably look to India, or the horn of Africa, or some other regions where we've had this mixing of religious thought in (relatively) newly formed states.
I guess what I mean is that you say worship of economy, I can say grain-god. You say worship of science, I can say wisdom-god. In this way of considering it, the god of christ has been forced back to it's pre-monotheist days, it's split into a couple of different expressions - evangelical mega churches are bacchus again for example. The civil god even would be the lawgiver/justice god - which the empire usually associates with the state (in modern times the nation state).
all these 'fragmented' aspects of religious thought and practice we can see manifested in the US are present also in any place that is nominally strictly and rigidly monotheistic or doctrinal, they are just repressed or redirected, i guess you could say forced into grand narratives. And still throughout much of the world, grand religious narratives hold sway (though I appreciate that on a global scale this can be described as increasingly/already fragmented by globalism/modernity as much as anything else).
So:
" in my opinion gods cannot be replaced with facts and logic, they have to be replaced by better gods which will look nothing like the anthropomorphized God of Abrahamic religions, but what this might look like is anyone’s guess."
I totally agree, except with the last as above I think we can make some good guesses at least - for example there will be an agriculture deity, that might be similar or different to the economy deity that will also exist, depending on conditions. there will be ancestor worship in some form (hopefully not faces on mountains) - probably the ppl who fought in the revolution or similar. Whatever the sex/love deity ends up like it won't be binary in manifestation, we know.
I wonder tho about anthropomorphism - look at US competing pantheons as expressed by the 'literati' and propagandised by the state, I mean superheroes. Yeah they're for kids (sort of), no they're not representative of religion or religious thought in the US, but at the same time they are I think (the marvel films for example) a good look at what the US would like thier pantheon to look like.
I agree it won't look like Abrahamic anthromorphism, but I wouldn't discount some amount or manifestation of it - it's a key method of religious thought, to make ourselves or parts of ourselves gods so we can see what we look like in extreme, which is a useful thing of course.
Also as a minor thought - while gods/religion cannot be replaced with facts and logic, for sure there is a facts and logic god - atheistic groups/cults have always sprung up through history alongside theistic ones, and there are usually gods of language and mathematics in polytheistic places. I think these things have probably already merged in scientism, the hard atheism & the math god.
"Practice shows that if one sits down with an express purpose of “creating a religion” that quickly fails or turns into a scam."
Yeah. A while back, I looked into UFOlogy briefly. I guess you could call this a religion (regardless of the truth of UFOs/aliens), in the same sense of your other US religions, but when I was looking at it in some iterations it has this idea that the US deep state is hiding tech progress from the people, progress that would end capitalism, eradicate poverty etc.
So in this theology/cosmology (or at least one common expression of it), there are gods (aliens), the state are corrupt and evil (there's a devil), the promised utopia is one that lines up fairly well with socialist ideals. The prophets are whistleblowers (prometheus i guess). And the gods, the aliens are peaceful and also prevent global war in a distant, indirect way.
Anyway, it was interesting to me because at least one common expression of this particular 'religion' is completely untroubled by a shift to a socialist economy/state, in fact that is it's goal (though the method involves a mysterious technological artifact to solve material problems). It's also heavily co-opted/influenced by the CIA (who understand in some way i assume religion - it's not like they can't read) which is interesting.
Are there any fragments of US religious thought (the economy, wicca, luck worship in casinos, whatever) that you think can be compatable with a socialist future, or aren't contradictory with it? Obv not the q cult...
"Not sure what you are referring to re Greek gods"
sorry it was badly phrased, i mean the morality systems not actual gods - if I remember rightly he prefers a more empowering one to the xtian version, when he's talking about slaves/nobles.
to rephrase better: do you agree with his analysis of xtian morality, generally speaking, as being undesirable/less desirable? especially with comparison to a more 'honest with the real world/empowering' morality, which i got the impression he thought the greek religious virtues were (not accusing him of supporting/following ancient greek religion)?