Farewell, 2009

2009 (嚴格來講是從08年底開始)，可以說是我目前為止的人生中變化最大的一年吧！

Knowing / Ethics

Knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation... Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities - even the smallest cuts matter.

-- Karen Barad, Meet the Universe Halfway

otaku culture

Today's subculture (otaku culture in Japan) chooses videogame wars over street-riot opposition, deviance over activism, solipsistic erotic fantasy over sexual freedom, and hollow identity over existential angst. This subculture has long abandoned the ideals of modern humanism, embracing instead what Yumiko Iida calls a postmodern "nihilistic nationalism" linked to a "highly media-permeated and technologically driven socio-cultural environment," which is "devoid of meaning, historical depth, and empirically grounded subjectivity." (Takashi Murakami 村上隆, Little Boy: p256-7)

Reason

"Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift." 
    -- Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 262.

The truth of nonlinguistic embodied communication

An embodied communication is more like a dance than a word. The flow
of entangled meaningful bodies in time - whether jerky and nervous or
flaming and flowing, whether both partners move in harmony or
painfully out of synch or something else altogether - is communication
about relationship, the relationship itself, and the means of
reshaping relationship and so its enacters. ... As Smuts puts it,
"Changes in greetings are a change in the relationship... With
language, it is possible to lie and say we like someone when we don't.
However, ... closely interacting bodies tend to tell the truth".
-- Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, p.26

become with

"To be one is always to become with many."
---- Donna Haraway (When Species Meet, 2008)

thinking being

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic...

-- Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

the signal of noise (Mechademia 3)

"Consciousness is just a property of matter at a certain stage of organization."
-- Hilary Putnam

"Digital media is the end, the end of indexicality. But it is also a potential beginning of great things, if we allow ourselves to reinvent what we consider real, and to let identity reveal itself in aspects other than the physical."
-- Adèle-Elise Prévost

Cyborg Affect (Mechademia 3)

"If it is true that our gods and our hopes are no longer anything but scientific, is there any reason why our love should not also be so?"
-- Villiers de I'Isle-Adam

"If humans have no memory and no body, in what sense are they still human?"
"おもい"... "thought" or "feeling/emotion" (=affect)
"Even if we are already resigned to the loss of [the body and memory], I believe that affect remains. It may be some kind of feeling toward a particular woman, or toward the dog who lives with you, or toward the body you have lost."
-- 押井守, director of the "Ghost in the Shell"

"The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room's atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and the neurology of the subject. The "atmosphere" or the environment literally gets into the individual. Physically and biologically, something is there that was not there before, but it did not originate sui generis: it was not generated solely or sometimes even in part by the individual organism or its genes."
-- Teresa Brennan

Affective production

-- Affective production... the type of production that raises questions about how images, information, and value are being calibrated in postindustrial settings. Producing networks for affective flow, and points of contact for modulating that flow is a networked form of production which has become very valuable in what some scholars have identified as an affective economy, in which flows of affect are amplified, redirected, and modulated, increasingly invested in by capital as potential sources of value. (Wissinger 2004:10)