This is a brilliant post from Brian Holmes on Guattari and our struggle for sensible self-determination within and among the contemporary regimes of dominance. How are we to navigate such layered complexities which both afford our mode of existence as well as limit our possibilities? How are we to even begin to think this?
“How can we escape from the subtler encoding machines that would scan our neuronal mesh at the molecular level, and synchronize it with the algorithms of computers? The flexible economy confronts us with the paradoxical trap of our own freedoms. What I’d like to do with the help of Guattari’s later works is to spark off some conversations about the models of existence that we bring into play, in hopes of leaving behind the dominant patterns that shape our destinies. The question is how you rearrange the stars above your head, to open up unexpected paths on the ground beneath your feet.” – Brian Holmes
* See Also: How does Schizoanalysis Work? or, “how do you make a class operate like a work of art” – via deterritorial investigations unit
or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics
[This text was developed through a large number of improvised presentations. Thanks to all who listened and responded. The very first, in Chicago at the invitation of Jon Cates, is archived here. – BH]
.
A desiring mind seeks infinity, and finds it today in a proliferation of signals: electromagnetic waves beaming down from the skies, fiber-optic cables emerging from the seas, copper wires woven across the continents. The earthly envelope of land, air and ocean – the realm of organic life, or biosphere – is doubled by a second skin of electronically mediated thought: the noosphere. It’s a vast, pulsating machine: a coded universe grown complex beyond our grasp, yet connected at every pulse to the microscopic mesh of nerve cells in our flesh.
Such is the contemporary circuit of communication. Its existence raises two basic questions. What…
View original post 12,773 more words
synthetic zerØ 