divisions - between

philosophy / science

morals / ethics

self / other

*chart them to visualize internal references. See massumi's last chapter.

A day of death. A long conversation with ___ concerning my own amorality: a life lived in service of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, or rather living defined as a series of processes without function. A cemetery contrasted with a shopping mall: the affluent mercantile "heart" center of the city which has become transformed into a pseudo-futuristic mirrored reflective Jacque Tatti-esque glass walled labyrinth serving up virtual reality goggles and gold/silver too-casual pants, vs the cemetery representing the holy ground of the old world, a terrestrial sponge soaking up tradition and history to sprout life to new trees, a bed of death harboring reminders of life which have become forgotten, turned into a garden, a recreational area for the living, a topiary removed from contemporary time. Both are filled with dates and numbers, clocks and calculators.

How do I want to die? How do I want my body to be handled? A question of style or fashion: what do we adorn ourselves with now and what does it represent? How will we immortalize ourselves later and how will we be remembered? Death as fashion, living-death, zombies: "beautiful grotesque." The relation (or in-relation) of time: goddamn clocks and calculators, what does it mean? Our life units distilled into materialist quanta to be sold back to us in bits/bytes, stored in the cloud:: a relationship to digital photography! *my own personal desire to be removed from this system of perpetual useless exchange, the paradox: to make enough money to remove myself from the system of having to make money. Leads to dreams of paradisical existence, the articulation of the ideal home and studio, privacy in space/time/silence/solitude, and also human relationships. How much human interaction do we need to be fulfilled and how do we expect to change/participate in those that we currently have accumulated (haphazardly)?

The question of nature: what is nature, what is unnatural? Back to language, the divisions between philosophy & science, meaning/truth/real(ity)... Baudrillard's invisible hegemony, Massumi describing nuances of Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin's arcades project... Always this looming threat of photography (in relation to other media of expression): remember Mcluhan's media theory applied to shamanistic-artistic practice, applied to various psychoanalytical theories, even personal idiosyncratic relationships.

The question of the body: the language evoked to refer to the meat, to the mind, to the self. Where is it located? Can it be found? The bodies relation to presence, immersed in a sea of information, swimming in stimulation. A conversation with ___ about "too much" stimulation, sensory data in excess that "drains energy": back to differentiating between energies as such, from food, breath, environment, sacred idealism (chi flow), or scientific quanta of calories and heat expenditure or even quantum molecular interactions. (What is the difference) between the thinking-through and feeling-through of these experience, with these bodies? Is it the question that changes, the potential of the answer, or perhaps the experience itself is definitively unique (subjective)? The affect of the environment on our ability to express it: color's relation to our feeling of openness or inhibition to use language, or how the scale of walls creates an affect correlated to a mental architecture, how ___ describes a change in "mental weight" as the light changes seeming to shift the entire contents of the universe or have some effect upon gravity itself = affect being correlated to effect, back to the divisions between body and environment. Being a woman vs having a female body: being a subject or being subject-to a corpus beyond our influence, control, working autonomously regardless of our will.

The question of language: not to question the utility of language itself, but rather how can a language be used to articulate a more useful line of questions. Philosophy is littered with tricks and traps, don't fall in! Be nimble and quick to leap over the distracting candlesticks in order to only address those concerns that require due attention. Language's relation to attention: conservation of energy = conservation of attention = conservation of words: relationship to magic? Einsteinian physics? [that old theory of conscious restraint, which I can now understand as being an intuited movement towards a practice of Zen, of the Tao, on non-participation, of the world as a vortex which strips the person of the powers]. Language as symbols full of content and empty of meaning = exhausting!

___'s attention: the long phase-gap of intense consideration that occurs between being-asked and becoming-reply. Based in hesitance, a kind of paralysis: a primal fear that the statement will come to define the person, a belief in the poisonous potential of language to infect and contaminate the symbolic world we inhabit. Another aspect concerns control: an internal fight against speaking/acting impulsively, confrontationally, out of anger (by which she means pure emotion or specifically negative emotions? Would it still be undesirable to speak spontaneously out of love?). This behavior is partly due to conscious changes in herself to behave/function in the world differently, a movement towards active awareness of all nuanced details, but also amplified further in relation to me and my line of questions (as well as our intimate relationship I'm sure).