Weight of Numbers

There is a hidden subtitle to Vol. 1 of Fernand Braudel's epic Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life. Found only on the inset page that subtitle is: The Limits of the Possible. Its a seminal work for the relatively fresh "new materialist" camp, and is an obvious wellspring for much of Deleuze and Guattari's work in A Thousand Plateaus (and consequently Manuel DeLanda), although what begin with Braudel as relatively pragmatic material concepts get abstracted rather quickly in their hands.

Speaking of the dense agriculturalization of rice paddy-fields: "What is striking at first glance is the extraordinarily intensive utilization of these precious lands." [pg. 148, my italics]

"[Nomads of the desert] represented speed and surprise at a period when everything moved slowly. [pg.95]

Material limitations (resources, geographical constraints, sufficient time) drive the specificity of cultural advancement; such is one of Braudel's theses. Such limitations locate the possible. Should we suppose that this notion doesn't make the cover because they ran out of space?

Umwelt

"As for the radial threads, they are smooth and dry because the spider uses them as a shortcut from which to drop onto its prey and wind it finally into an invisible prison. Indeed, the most surprising fact is that the threads of the web are exactly proportioned to the visual capacity of the eye of the fly, who cannot see them and therefore flies toward death unawares. The two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on the that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves is "fly-like." Though the spider can in no way see the Umwelt of the fly the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness."

Giorgio Agamben, The Open

A sort of modern fable (or warning?) of evolving apperceptions. Benjamin parasites Uexkull on this point. But also a confirmation of the possibility of communication. And further, an elucidation of the hidden ethos of architecture: to produce a significatory snare. Thankfully, we know, something always gets through.

Anthropological Sleep

"To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one."

Michel Foucalt, The Order of Things

Uninflection

"As time and passion dwindle to a pinpoint, the audience has come to understand that it no longer need subject itself to the actual experience of art but can subsume and synthesize faster and more efficiently art that is already processed by critical interpretation. Even better or more efficient when, as the second critic responds to the first, the art is twice removed; even better as the third critic responds to the second, three times removed. When it became clear to me that that reviewers, commentators and professional observers of all stripe were the true wise men of the new epoch, I could also see that with each new exponential twist of the ongoing cultural logarithm, the artist was approaching that ideal utopian moment when he or she would vanish altogether."

Amnesiascope, Steve Erickson

"Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to 'be' once again, as it did on that first morning that ever was. All wisdom seeks to collect and manifest itself at that blind sweet point."

Thomas Merton, quoted by Roger Connah in 10x10

Eros / Thanatos

"Even the habitués of the cthonic forces of terror will not learn one-tenth of what nature promises its less idly curious but more sober children, who possess in technology not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness."

-Walter Benjamin

"The laws of Venus-Mother Nature cannot be deciphered by the children of Mars - these children who die and will continue to die at the stake before they ever understand that locally, within the walls of Athens for example, but also globally, at some indefinite time and place, the aforementioned decomposition brings back a large teeming, atomic populace sliding down some thalweg, and thereby, by this declination, reconstitutes a world."

-Michel Serres

The Trans-Siberian '58

"Man is not created for such measurelessness."


A portion of Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium, which is a poetic/journalistic attempt to describe a series of encounters with the force of Soviet Russia while it was a superpower, is dedicated to a journey by rail from Peking to Moscow. Kapuscinski's descriptions are very little marked by wonder (which a more romantic demeanor might attempt), and much more by the claustrophobia of the impossibly vast. Few authors have confronted this border-zone at the edge of experience with such candor, and it may be a response born out of the variety of means by which Kapuscinski came to such a meeting. Again in Shadows of the Sun as he narrowly escapes death in the deserts and cities of Africa sometimes by war, but more often by the indifference of the terrain; again in The Emperor as he depicts Ethiopia's mass starvation and the nearly impenetrable silence that disguised it.

It is this measurelessness that Kapuscinski meets again and again. He seems to chase it, wondering what it is to live in that kind of space and time. Or rather, since measurelessness is the impossibility of life, how it is that we continually push at that border to expand the realm of our imperium, and what it looks like at the cusp, from a train, through the dark glass of its aged windows.

Lintel

"To suggest rather than to state, to make a crossroads of each word in the street of sentences. Something new will always come to light if texts are dissected ad infinitum, and in this all written works - and not just those of genius, as some have claimed in error - resemble the works of nature."

Alfred Jarry - Adventures in Pataphysics