For School

Cyclonopedia & Deleuze

For me Cyclonopedia has been a slow read to say the least, and I’ve had to read many passages multiple times before I think I’ve begun to understand. That being said that parts I do understand have been very insightful and I can see how this book offers a lot of interesting ideas. (Perhaps if a had two months instead of two weeks I would feel more confident in understanding this book :) 

One part I did like was towards the beginning on pg. 50-52.

“The half-man-halfscorpion of the Gilgamesh epic is such an avatar, guarding the gate to the Outside. Scorpions are burrowers, not architects: They do not build upon the compositions of solid and void, they devour volumes and snatch spaces; for them the holey space is not merely a dwelling place, a place to reside. More than that, it is the Abode of War, the holey space of unselective hunting.” (pg. 50) 

“If archeologists, cultists, worms and crawling entities almost always undertake an act of echumation, it is because exhumation is equal to ungrounding, incapacitating surfaces ability to operate according to topologies of the whole, or on a mereotopological level. In exhumation, the distribution of surfaces is thoroughly undermined and the movements associated with them are derailed; the edge no longer belongs o the periphery, anterior surfaces come after all other surfaces, layers of strata are displaced and perforated, peripheries and the last protecting surface become the very conductors of invasion.” (pg. 51-52)

“exhumation proliferates surfaces through each other.” (pg. 52)

The last line especially to me made the past few pages all the more clear, and it made me think so much of Deleuze when he talks about the how “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.” (pg. 7) That the coils create more coils, and greater and greater complexity is created. I would try to sum it up more but for a rare instance I think Negarestani has actually said it best. 

Thinghood

I really enjoyed the Bennett reading and was intrigued by one of the passages on pg. 4:

“The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story will enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us, will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies, and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.”

I felt like this was a great summation of a lot of what she talks about throughout the rest of the reading. The first few lines got me thinking about the extent of “thinghood” and how it relates to us humans, especially when she says “we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world.” This reminded me of Varnelis and how he talks about MMORPGs; how “Even though they are still rather early in their development, MMORPGs seem to have the capacity to feed back into real culture.” The avatar of a MMORPG is an extension of the person or the player behind it, but couldn’t the avatar be considered just a thing as well? Would Bennett say that the avatar is a thing that makes us nonhuman, a thing that plays a role in the world as well but is still just a thing? Maybe somebody could help me understand this better?

Project Idea

In thinking about our next paper I keep coming back to Shaviro and his writing style. I think I would like to try and imitate this somehow with Rainbows End, connecting different passages and showing common threads throughout both the class readings and the novel.

J.D. Salinger & Girl Talk

I found the documentary we watched in class to be very thought provoking especially when looking at the subject of authorship and piracy and the networks. I was reminded of a controversy I remember hearing about from my dad. Fredrik Colting is a Swedish author who wrote a book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which was viewed as an unofficial sequel to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s estate sued Colting over this. In talking with my dad he brought up the idea of whether Holden Claufield as a character should be controlled under the idea of copyright. Obviously Holden Claufield is a character of Salinger’s creation but Colting never uses the name anywhere his book, instead calling his character Mr.C, an old man who acts similar to the young teenager. So the question becomes whether Holden Claufield belongs to Salinger not just as a name, but as a character. It reminds me of what Shaviro says:

“What does it mean to own a sound or an image anyway? What are the implications of reproducing one? For that matter, how do we even delineate a single image or a sound? Where does one end and the next begin? Given a pre-existing visual or sonic source, how radically must it be changed before it is turned into something new?”

A character is no different from a sound, what if someone were to write a novel about a young wizard boy with a noticeable scar, where is the line between copying J.K. Rowling and creating a new piece of work? How much would a new author have to change is wizard character to be considered a new and different? The questions are the same with the Salinger and Colting.

Overall I think this is a really interesting topic.

Here are some of the links I used in looking at the Salinger/Colting issue:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/60-years-later/?scp=3&sq=coming%20through%20the%20rye%20J.D.%20Salinger&st=cse

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090615/books-salinger/

Connectedbyus: Stuck

MMORPGs & Real Life