anti-irrationalism

To embrace the irrational is merely to embrace the obverse of instrumental rationality. In its own way bataillean surrealism is also instrumental, though it reverses the polarity of determination from human action on nature to natural action on humans. Bataille was wrong about cruelty and sexuality: they are not repressed. Torture, inquisitions, rape and genocide are integral to modernity from Torquemada to Abu Ghraib. Simondon's thesis opf the 'pre-individual' drawn into individuation through socio-technical assemblages, and Adorno's inclusion of 'bodily impulse' in any act of spontaneity capable of rupturing the administration of the world to produce action: these are not bataillean binaries but dialectical syntheses.

Now that the boundaries of the private have been driven back, this process appears as the dialectic of public and intimate. Conviviality in communication and the cosmopolitan ethic of care will depend on this dialectic. This may yet be the role of the wireless assemblage of isolated individuals imagining community. Or the immersive spectacle's communities united in their isolation.

Boiling point

Points of appearance and disappearance are congruent with moments of virtuality such as the bloiling point, the statistically likely moment at which water boils but which does not determine that all the molecules vapourise simultaneously. The virtual image is likewise turbulent, the lynchpin of any image in which it may become other than it is in any direction. Contra Bazin: not the actual image but its becoming.

(This may be the source of the misunderstanding that all moving pictures are narrative)

Wallace Stevens

"A fortunate powem or a fortunate painting is a synthesis of exceptional concentration (that degree of concentration that has a lucidity of its own, in which we see clearly what we want to do and do it instantly and perfectly)"

A perfect experience.

Aphorism

Not biology: architecture is destiny

A Coin that is not a coin

Despair and the sublime: two views on a single incommunication

The Departed

The immanent otherworld now presents itself via callphone. The other world is dis-place-ment, a place always other, always elsewhere, not necessarily better but different and synchronous.

royksopp - remind me

Michael Dieter turned us on to this as exemplary data visualisation from You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvaHZIrt0o