…because power has left the nation-state; politics has been overcome by financial flows. -Zygmunt Bauman
Month: January 2013
Reblogged: The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos
This from Virgilio A. Rivas
The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos.
My comment to Rivas:
Fascinating post. I’ve given some thought to the effects of the Internet, especially blogging/vlogging, on neuro-cognitive evolution. The Global Network of Capitalized Information is fast at work relieving us of our own private subjectivity. Our very selves are being gobbled up through our MacBooks onto the corporate-owned harddrives of Twitter, FaceBook, WordPress, and Google (Google is even gobbling up our apartment buildings, the continents and the oceans, even the stars and the sky by way of their satellization of the elements into a virtual Google Earth!). This de-subjectivization is not at all a depersonalization. The person is becoming planetary, which is what personality was always already in reference to (the earth and the sky are masks, the visible products of an underlying invisible cosmogenic (or chaosmatic) process, which itself is reducible neither to a Self, a God, or a World. Cosmogenesis remains always open-ended, wild, free, nomadic; not as something alone, or even All-One, but rather as something always becoming-other, repetitively different/ciating: multiplying, dividing, perplicating.
…
You write:
“The middle ground is the anesthetization of Chaos which will entail the dispersion of Chaos from its concentration as realizable creative assemblages in selected spaces and geographies of the world into open spaces and plateaus. This will mean sacrificing profits and reshifting of knowledge culture from centers to peripheries; from continents to islands, from oceans to river tributaries; from galaxies to planets, from Milky Way to the solar system (which will have tremendous consequences for science). This is perhaps the clue to the hermetic turn.”
I wonder if science’s return to the planets after paying so much attention to the galaxies will look anything like this?: https://footnotes2plato.com/2011/10/14/the-post-copernican-odyssey-from-the-kantian-psyche-to-the-tarnasian-cosmos/
Is the Universe Alive?
In this episode of the “Through the Wormhole” series put together by Discovery Channel, Morgan Freeman asks, “Is the Universe Alive?” He builds on the ideas of a motley crew of scientists in order to learn to see life at multiple scales, including the computer scientists Juergen Schmidhuber (machines are alive) and Seth Lloyd (atoms think), the theoretical physicists Stephon Alexander (the universe has a heart beat) and Lee Smolin (black holes allow for cosmological natural selection), the particle physicist at the Sante Fe Institute Geoffrey West (cities are alive), and the physician Robert Lanza (the universe is imaginary).
An interesting set of ideas. I only had trouble with Lanza’s strangely titled (“biocentrism”?) idealistic solipsism.
American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, ed. By Robert McDermott
I mentioned this text, American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, edited by my advisor Robert McDermott, a few months back. It has since been published.
The Gossip Gospel – An Informal Talk on the Role of Gossip in Community
I gave this talk on New Year’s Eve to a group of my friends.
