Gathatoulie

And of these shall I speak to those eager, That quality of wisdom that all the wise wish And call creative qualities And good creation of the mind The all-powerful truth Truly and that more & better ways are discovered Towards perfection --Zarathustra.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

ok

"We're sorry things didn't work out.
But don't give up hope…" --Staff Robot, OKCupid

"Eighty percent of new products fail - as is appropriate,
considering the general ineptitude governing their conception and
marketing." --http://www.suck.com/daily/96/02/14/

"The tragedy of OK Soda, though, wasn't that it didn't resonate,
but that it resonated too well. It was too perfect. " -- ibid.

neitzschian time

"And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality
befell--from the first day of Christianity!--Why not rather from its
last?--From today?--The transvaluation of all values! ..."
--Nietzsche, "The Antichrist" (end), http://www.fns.org.uk/ac.htm

yet another effort

"If, for the vainglory of establishing your principles outside your
country, you neglect to care for your own felicity at home, despotism,
which is no more than asleep, will awake, you will be rent by
intestine disorder, you will have exhausted your monies and your
soldiers, and all that, all that to return to kiss the manacles, that
the tyrants, who will have subjugated you during your absence, will
impose upon you; all you desire may be wrought without leaving your
home: let other people observe you happy, and they will rush to
happiness by the same road you have traced for them." -- de Sade

Friday, September 10, 2010

reduced to vandalism

Video games and web pages such as Chatroulette.com, Facebook.com, and
Youtube.com all provide the end user a different experience in their
attempt to cure boredom.[22] *The unfortunate irony is that many of
these sites are themselves fairly boring.*
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boredom

(My thoughtful comment was reverted seconds after I made it. Damn them!)

Thursday, September 9, 2010

annie hall moment

So the thing that these people don't seem to
understand about my work is that we can
*exactly* understand "motivation" by looking
at attention, i.e., by looking at what people do
over a period of time and in aggregate. OK,
we can't necessarily understand their deepest
reasons for it (e.g. maybe they fight crime because
their parents were gunned down in the street -- or
maybe they do it because it's the best cure for
ennui)... but we can definitely begin to see patterns,
like,

A, B, C <quit>
A, B, D, E <quit>
A, B, D, E, F, G <quit>
A, B, C <quit>

etc.

Maybe I'm using the word "motivation" in a nonstandard
way? In any case, I think my work is about understanding
and responding to motivation... I don't know what else
there is to say about it, really.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

on being left awake at my desk all night

no worries, I finished reading my suspense novel and massively updated
my OKCupid profile, had beans and toast at berrill, and several teas, and
am feeling as fresh as eggs and am generally entirely ready to look at my
probation report from a new angle today, which is actually necessary, because,
despite the magnificent proportions that this particular sentence has already
grown to and indeed will grow beyond ere long (as I'm sure you can see quite
plainly in the first instance and moreover, intuit in the second or
possibly greater
instances, whether with a sense of foreboding or incipient pleasure I know not)
and despite, also, the semi-analogous prolixity with which I have hithertofore
enunciated my somewhat, shall we say, scientistic strategems and made known
to those concerned in the matter my various scholarly ambitions (always with
some slight reservations as to just how scholarly they really are -- perhaps too
scholarly in some respects and not enough in others), what's really needed now
is a rather different (although not, if you think about it, an
altogether unrelated)
writerly manoeuver which will, I hope, ensure the general cogency and
dare I say,
fluidity, of my rhetorical argument in the other, aforementioned, semi-formal
research-related document, as it coalesces into its final form, by infusing it
throughout with the radiant energies of a certain
mystico-philosophical principle,
namely, that of pure creativity as the sensation associated with engagement
within a libidinal economy; which, in short, is exactly what I feel
prepared to deliver
in my present frame of mind, if only I can find the words with which
to express it --
perhaps simply put it would be something along the lines of "it feels
good to do stuff",
which sentiment one might readily adduce to what is called either wakefulness or
fatigue, as two now predictably different names for activity within an
inhomogeneous
field seeking to further differentiate itself within itself.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

falsely attributed...

It's quite interesting that the quote

"Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism
itself. [...]"

at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8858&ttype=2
*appears* to be a quote from Guattari, but it actually isn't. In fact, unless
it has been re-translated, the quote itself appears to be mis-quoted. In
my copy of the book it goes like this:

"Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism
itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it,
study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely
delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is
always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been
adequately discussed about Marx's Capital is the extent to which
he is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms, precisely because the
system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So
what is rational in a society? It is -- the interests being defined in the
framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests,
their realization. But down below, there are desires, investments
of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest,
and on which interests depend in their determination and
distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious
flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history
is the history of desire." -- Gilles Deleuze, in interview with Felix
Guattari (presumably the interview was conducted by
one of Michel-Antoine Burnier, Patrick Rambaud, Jean-François Bizot, Graine Philippe,  Anne Berger and/or Michel Moret, but I'm not sure who) in "Chaosophy", p. 36, originally in  "C'Est Demain La Veille".

There is another translation of the entire interview here:
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm
Anyway, I "irrationally" attributed the quote to Guattari in a preprint,
I hope they will let me fix it later...

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words cut, pasted, and otherwise munged by joe corneli otherwise known as arided.