Category Archives: theory

自由 [Freedom] has a relatively stronger Western connotation, related to the idea
of democracy. 自在 [spontaneous, or self existing] is more associated with the image of
a Taoist who wanders across worlds— “[flying] like Kun-Peng thousands of miles up in the air… carefree like little birds easing down to the field,” “being perfectly one with heaven and earth,” and “being heaven and earth” (Shang 131). These two images of Kun and Peng come from a story told by one of the earliest Taoist thinkers Zhuangzi in 逍遥
游 [Wondering Beyond]:

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun. The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand miles he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand miles across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.

One has to cultivate one’s ability to transmute in order to be free, to be 逍遥 [wondering beyond].

…

Deleuze and Guattari write that creating art is “always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat”

…

the late 1980s and early 1990s, people like Wang Fan, Yan Jun, Yangyang, and Li Zenghui were called Bei Piao. Bei means north, specifically referring to Beijing; Piao means floating or drifting. Bei Piao is an identity used to describe people who work or live in Beijing without a permanent residential permit or registered residence. These Bei Piao artists and musicians constitute lines of drift, improvising with the city and the world.

…

“music is only a means, freedom is the purpose.”

…

Utopia is a state of being.
State of being just exists. It is simple.
If the state of utopia has existed for one minute, does it still exist?
Its existence is eternal. If it was once there, it exists.
Many people deny its existence, because they didn’t catch this one-minute. We do not expect it to exist forever. One minute is enough.
We are quite satisfied with that.

…

A: What is music to you, especially to your 真我 (a true/authentic self)?
Y: Many bands treat music as a profession, but it is a part of my life. People often ask me “What do you want to express?” I do not want to express anything. I present myself. You hear it. That’s enough.

…

One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

…

Listen. Transform. Exist.

excerpts (from ://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=ohiou1336097506&disposition=attachment)

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

‘I‘ve written about love before. I’m not going to write about love again. Maybe this is selfish, maybe it is foolish. But I hope it will lead to nuance.

I’ll write about not-love-yet, maybe, about into-love. I want to write through it, to remain porous.

Or: “I’ll write about the process of becoming other: vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi). Maybe then I can return to love.

…

“Possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form”

…

“But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. ‘Love is not consolation,’ she wrote. ‘It is light.’”

…

“like planting a flag on the moon after forty countries have landed there before you, or on a moon whose sole purpose is to host flags” (Maggie Nelson, 2011).

…

“I call power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.”

…

“Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late.”

Excerpts (from https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/lips-in-the-streetlights-pop-future-pop-bops)

‘Marker, who continually challenges his viewer, has provoked me to search the origin of “ornate” and I find that it comes from the Latin verb “to equip.”  It means, originally, well equipped; then later, adorned and elaborately embellished.  I remember that when I played the partitas of J. S. Bach, there came a point when the embellishments were so thoroughly learned and accomplished that they became, in themselves, only music:  that is, the notes being embellished and the embellishments upon those notes ceased belonging to separate categories, and there were no longer any embellishments at all.  To see adornment is always to presume the true “unadorned” nature of a thing.  Schivelbusch, for instance, notes “the typical nineteenth-century desire to disguise the industrial aspect of things by means of ornamentation.”’

‘Now I know “new” is just an illusion. “New” is not my logic, it’s capitalism’s logic. “New” is a lie, actually. It’s not about possibility, it’s just killing the possibility. Capitalism’s culture is always the same: we are creating a new thing, we are discovering the possibilities of the world, of everything. But this discovery is actually to manage it, to name it, to fix it. After this, no more possibilities. Real possibility means you have to keep something in the unknown, in the mystery, in the chaos.’

“The Birth of Tragedy is driven by the famous contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, “the two art deities of the Greeks,” and by the “tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” (BT 1). Nietzsche aims to show that Attic tragedy represents the truce between, and the union of, Dionysus and Apollo, and that it also resolves an assortment of other oppositions in Greek theology, art, culture, psychology, and metaphysics that can be keyed to the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition: the Titans/the Olympians, lyric poetry/ epic poetry, the Asiatic-barbarian/the Hellenic, music/sculpture, intoxication/dreams, excess/measure, unity/individuation, pain/pleasure, etc.

The Apollonian affirms the principium individuationis, “the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense” (BT 4). The Dionysian, by contrast, affirms “the mysterious primordial unity” (BT 1 and passim), “the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being” (BT 8). The Apollonian is associated with “moderation” and “restraint,” the Dionysian with “excess” (BT 4, 21). The Apollonian is concerned with pleasure and the production of beautiful semblance, while the Dionysian is fraught with “terror,” “blissful ecstasy,” “pain and contradiction” (BT 1, 5 and passim). The Apollonian celebrates the human artist and hero, while the Dionysian celebrates the individual artist’s dissolution into nature, which Nietzsche calls the “primordial artist of the world” (BT 5; cf. 1, 8).

The Apollonian is a gallery of “appearances,” “images,” and “illusions,” while the Dionysian consists in the perpetual creation and destruction of appearances. “In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism,” Nietzsche writes, “nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: ‘Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of appearances, I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of appearances!’” (BT 16, cf. 8; WP 1050).

Nietzsche insists on the reality of “alteration,” “change,” and “becoming,” noting that only a “prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity,6 identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood [and] being” (TI,“ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” 5; cf. GS 110, 112, 121). A few pages earlier, Nietzsche calls unity, thinghood, substance, and permanence “lies,” praising Heraclitus “for his assertion that being is an empty fiction,” and praising the senses for telling the truth by showing “becoming, passing away, and change.”

“what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?

…

In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”.

…

the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)

…

I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94).

…

as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative […] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)

…

Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham).

…

homelooseness

…

excerpts (from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1581 and elsewhere)

Throughout his writing on drugs Benjamin circled around the German term Rausch, usually rendered in English as “intoxication” but with deeper resonances: its underlying literal meaning of rush, roar, or thunder and, prominent for Benjamin, Nietzsche’s use of it to denote Dionysian ecstasy, the rending of the veil of appearances to reveal the primal life force. In its grip, as Benjamin wrote in his wanderings around Marseille on hashish, “images and chains of images, long-submerged memories appear”; the borders between subject and object weaken, imagination bleeds into reality, the world comes to life in new ways.

It is not purely a dream or a fantasy but “a continual alternation of dreaming and waking states, a constant and finally exhausting oscillation between totally different worlds of consciousness.” “Intoxication” suggests a transient state of impairment, but Rausch describes an “ecstasy of trance” that holds out the possibility of reenchanting the world without demanding a romantic or religious leap of faith. It is not an effect of the drug per se but “a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”

In Rausch, as he wrote at the end of his evening on hashish in Marseille, “our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like gold coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so they can thus purchase new birth.”

Excerpts (from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/21/sartres-bad-trip/?fbclid=IwAR0QoM6Qrneq_nLvVMNKi5whUxyU8IAx2e6yIDhukJUt2E3zfGVGCiTmMNg)