Business is Circus/ Circus is Business

Circus is business
It really is

Circus is business
I insist

Still don´t believe me?
Okay

Business is circus
?

Fine, I am glad we agree

Business is circus
Business is circus
Business is circus
Circus is business

Business is circus
I said

Got it?

Tea wisdom

On my teabag I can read the following message:

To learn, read.

To know, write.

To master, teach.

I read, write and teach therefore I am ... a teabag?

The wise words sounds nice, but I guess it all depend what you read, write and teach, and how you read, write and teach.

Noise

Michel Serres present a useful understanding of communication is his book The Parasite. He writes: “At the feast everyone is talking. At the door of the room there is a ringing noise, the telephone. Communication cuts communication, the noise interrupting the message. As soon as I start to talk with this new interlocutor, the sounds of the banquet become noise for the new ‘us’. The system has shifted.”

Noise! In the beginning of time - Serres points out in Genesis – there was not a word (like the Bible claims), but noise. The undefined and multiple noises are gradually formed into words through a creative process actualizing parts of the world´s potential. In other words, noise is the joker, the virtual or the potential; noise is – as he reminds us through the French etymology of the word – a parasite. He distinguishes three kinds of parasites:

- Parasite as a biological organism that feeds of a host, e.g. worms.
- Parasite as a social pariah that is a person, who lives off unearned income, or the labour of others (e.g. aristocrats, freeloaders, lazy students, Paris Hilton)
- Parasite as noise, static or interference in communication

This leads him to say: “The system works because it does not work.” It moves, it actualizes, it speaks. Something affects the system whereby communication can evolve. Noise is this unpredictable thing that can affect us, if we are open. However, if we are closed and only staying with our predefined agenda, then there is no progress, no communication, but just confirmations of already established order.

...

No one becomes a person without relations to other people.

Communication from hell

In a world packed with communication the man without a tongue hears everything.

He is the king of communication, because he knows what is going on.

He knows as if his wisdom was placed in his ears.

And when he writes, he writes like a wind blowing from hell carrying God on its shoulders.

The motivation of sex

Put to the limit, everything – according to Sigmund Freud – is motivated by sex. Even his own theory of motivation. Does this mean that his work should be evaluated according to the number of women in his bed, not on the coach?

It might tell us why many are productive in their younger years, but does it tell us why many writers and artist produce their best work late in life? Maybe. Maybe they are even more motivated by sex in that phase of their life. Or, maybe after many hours of writing or painting you become quite good at what you are doing, and when you are good you might attract attention, which might generate sexual offers. So maybe sex is not the factor of motivation, but the result of hard work. But, then again, some might say that they will only work hard, because they know the possible outcome …

One way or the other something motivates people to do something. Often ideals, norms and trends are playing a far more controlling role in motivating, than the fun Freud was thinking about. But once again these ideals, norms and trends might discipline much behavior, because they make people belief that living by these ideals wills the lead to …

Mr. Nobody

The movie Mr. Nobody raises the question, whether the possibilities remain open, if you do not choose. They do. They do. Do. Get it?

However, the art of telling a good story deals with choosing what to happen next. For this reason Deleuze used the distinction between potential and actual instead of reality and possibility, because sometimes the possibilities carry more reality than what is possible. And also, of course, he used this distinction, because he wanted to become more than a philosopher.

So Mr. Nobody can become ... yes anybody.

Philosophy of the saucepan

A philosophy of the saucepan, how come? Well, because we still have not tasted the full richness of life. In Une Saison en Enfer, Arthur Rimbaud writes: “La morale est la faiblesse de la cervelle.” The moral is the weakness of the brain. The weakness of the brain shows itself when we try to label the potential of this world before even tasting a little bit of it.

A philosophy of the saucepan is a drop to the bottom of the pan where everything flows through everything, but everything – due to this weakness – does not flow through everything. Or, as I believe, we have not only lost the taste of life, but also the taste for life because we let our lives be dominated by ideals, norms and values defined by others. We cling to these ideals due to a growing aguish of being dropped from the ‘good’ company, or being confronted with the unclassified others. The result is a moralistic life wrapped in good or bad tastes, a life without thinking. Tasteless.

A good meal can make one forget all about time. Actually, it seems like it is only the taste, which has this time-forgetting quality, as if it was out of time. This time-forgetting quality, in which the taste appears, can of course appear in many other settings as well, such as reading literature, watching an interesting movie or listening to a piece of music. In the process of these activities, we might loose ourselves in the sense that we forget ourselves and time; because we rather – willingly or unwillingly – drift away through all the possible lines of escape creating new ideas, thoughts and feelings, new structures of taste.

What does this say about taste? That, if something arouses my taste, awakens me; I might see new possibilities because I allow myself to be carried away. This has nothing to do of course with my taste being special – for instance it is not a matter of my good taste (always specified within certain ideals), just daring to taste. Taste is connected to a creative way of being. Developing a taste has something to do with being open; to act or live without any ideals, norms or values to put down on the meal like a kind of preservative. I have to dare expose or uncover myself in order to receive the meal, the book, and the film as it is. I have to use or take time in order to forget time. Then I might change direction, I might transform, I might … In other words, I should not relate the experience to anything else, such as the review of the restaurant, only what the experience itself opens up for. If we return to the question of taste it means that taste remains being just a habit, the habit of liking this and not that, unless we dare experience a meal, a book or a piece of music that might take us away. Literally takes our individuality away so that we can become a neutral whoever, because, in that moment, when we are open for anyone, anything and any taste.

What does the chef’s say? “Knowledge is not seeing, it is entering into contact, directly, with things; and besides, they come to us… Sensation is a generalized sense of touch”, writes Michel Serres in The Birth of Physics. “I say that one must be a seer, make himself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses”, wrote Arthur Rimbaud in a letter. The taste of taste comes to us when we dare open ourselves, expose ourselves; it is then our senses develop, because we allow ourselves to be imprinted by the forces of the world. Or in other words we cannot judge anything beforehand, but only after as if all the good recipes are a track drawn as answer to our open and curious approach to life. Do we ever eat anything else than the taste of this world? No, of course not, but why do we keep wrapping the world in moralistic values, are we afraid of tasting life, loosing ourselves?

Perhaps we need to look elsewhere to understand this poetic approach to life that I propose in order to grasp the intimacy of taste and sociality. Or, we might put it differently: The chef’s poetic relations to the ingredients, the guest’s poetic relation to the meal and the host’s poetic connection to the guest, etc. is an aesthetical empathy. An esthetic empathy is an ethical gesture, because one takes or carries the burden for the other; one allows oneself to become a seer, to have direct contact with life without any pre-given assumptions. How? Being radical open, exposed, becoming an impersonal whoever or neuter, who melts with the flow of life through an aesthetical empathy. The empathy is not guided by norms or assumption, because it is linked with the nakedness of the senses. As Rimbaud might have said, we have to dare think to witness the beauty of life, make it tastier. He did not want to stop the flow of life with moralistic value or norms, but rather he wanted to suck it down to the bone.

The chef of taste becomes impersonal; he becomes that force which produces a form of life. It is not a matter of asking the curry or the cinnamon whether its taste is good or bad. Each human being, each spice, each flavor is already a particular tissue presenting its own original dish that, qua being a potential, is open for invitations. The chef tries to create a spacious space for the singularity by being open to the complexity and concreteness of the forces of each spice. It is through imperceptible departures from any idealistic path or recipe that the formation of the more tasty form of life emerges. The taste is nothing but the tracks or lines that follow in the slip of our direct involvement with life. The taste always appears afterwards, as a new possibility of life.

So the bottom-line is: Do the human being have the courage to live its own taste, to live a form of life that is tasty, producing more taste; or would it rater prefer to let its own taste be guided by moralistic ideals, ideals that often reflect the norms, values and stature of the business society of today? A good taste without taste, is that acceptable?

Maybe the creation of a tastier world for the next generation begins, if not around the saucepan in the kitchen, then around the table. Never before does everything depend so much on each human’s acceptance that it does not depend on him or her alone. Each one is just one taste among others trying to become tastier together.

Utopia

Once in awhile people like to talk about utopia, that is the good place that does not exist. There is an intellectual pleasure linked with the utopian project (because it is a good project), but no intellectual seems to deal with it, because there is nothing they can do (or imagine to do). After all it is utopia! In that spirit the intellectuals themselves are the illness. Instead of producing new ideas that might open up actualizing a utopian potential right here and now they reproduce ideas by references and footnotes ad libitum.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had in Harlem with a girl, who said that here is a reason for all the churches in Harlem, people need to believe in something place, a better future.

Just like most academics need the references, because they cannot create the better future themselves, therefore, they need to believe that someone else might do it, for instance Marx, Deleuze, Heidegger…

Perhaps the next big idea will come from somewhere else than the academy.

Last Dance

Denmarks finest at the moment: The Raveonettes

Childlike

We need a lively, childlike, happy art if we are not to lose the freedom we value above everything.

- Francis Picabia

Go...

To become what one is, writes Nietzsche, is the task in life. The philosopher then emphasize that no one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but yourself alone. This can be seen as the scary part of existential freedom that each one of us will have to create our own path in life. Decisions, decisions not between already existing paths, but how to create one. If you do not create yourself, the price will be yourself, he says.There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you.

Where does it lead? Do not ask, he says. Go along. Go...

Adding value

Today many people talk about adding value to their life or career, but are they aware of Nietzsche, who once said: Valuing is creating? Or are they aware of Serres, who once said: The real goal is to end all goals, so we can begin to create?

I guess not.

Valuation is itself the main reason why we value things. So, if one wants to add value to her life, then she better begin to create or invent her own path, and not just grasp the best and most comfortable ideal from the nearest guide-book in good living.

Everything is connected

Complexity theory has told us that everything is connected to everything else...  just like a life is a set of various pictures put together. A life is not like one straight story (formed in one ideal), but a set of pictures. How these pictures are put together seems less important than what is on each one of them. 

How they are put together can vary as when your imagination changes the order of pictures in your past. In other words, what you experience cannot change only how you add meaning to it.

The more possible relations between the various pictures or elements of life, the stronger the life-story seems.

A quote from the beachreading

"Stil I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living." 

- Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

 

Revolutionary words

Michel Serres says in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: ”It’s better to do than to judge, to produce than to evaluate. Or, rather, it’s in mining coal that one learns if it is grey or black. It’s better to create than to criticize, to invent than to classify copies.”  

Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.”  

Michel Serres says in the same conversation: “One word on that word author, which comes to us from Roman law and means ’the guarantor of authencity, of loyalty, of an affirmation, of a testimony or an oath,’ but primitively it means ’he who augments’ – not he who borrows, summarizes, or condenses, but only he who makes grow. Author, augmentor... everything else is a cheat. A work evolves by growing, like a tree or an animal.”

The author is the guarantor of loyalty. He makes the world grow; he augments. Writing begins with the ability of reading that is being able to read the signs of the world. The signs are objects for an encounter opening up for new relations. To think is to unfold or decrypt the signs in the process of constructing words. 

The writer reads; he affirms that which is becoming. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze writes: “To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values, which are those of life, which make life light and active. There is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do.”

Writing is intimately linked to reading and learning, so in many ways the creation of knowledge is intimately linked to writing. However, all writers know that they know more than they can put into words.

Serres writes in The Birth of Physics: “Knowledge is not seeing, it is entering into contact, directly, with things; and beside they come to us… Objects, in the distance, change their skins, they send one another kisses. In the distance the square tower, angular, stiff, coarse; it comes to me, round, sleek and smooth. A phenomenology of the caress, voluptuous knowledge.”

Serres says in the conversation: “So, it no longer depends on us that everything depends on us.” In other words: reading is more important than writing. It is a more creative act, because this process already anticipates writing.

The signs are already out-there to be read (it no longer depend on us), but everything there is depend on us, on our awareness. This has nothing to do with knowledge and putting things in predefined boxes and systems, but awareness of what is, what happens and what takes place.

In that sense writing might be seen as a continuos reminder of what takes place, although this reminder is a never ending process.

Writing new lines ... revolutionary words.

Michel Serres

A comment on the philosophy of Michel Serres:

Michel Serres has worked intensively to bring philosophy back to life. This task is among others done by expressing himself and his thought in the language of the people. He does not operate with a meta-language.

The task of philosophy is to put things together, showing that nothing exists outside the various relations that create life. In this sense he shows us that communication is relation, like a tracing of the paths between elements, the mixture of things.

Unlike other French philosophers he does not deal with the unspeakable as the other side of the speakable, but shows that life with all its senses consist of more than what can reside in language. Wisdom is more than words.

This opens up for an inventive or creative element in his philosophy.  

We invent

A painter's studio should be their laboratory. 

Our profession does not consist in imitating; 

we invent. painting is a riddle.

- Pablo Picasso

Not yet

What do we do about the fact that we do not yet think? he asked.

Let's think about that, she said.

Now?

No, not yet, she said.

Not yet! The motto of humanity, he said.

Yes, I think a lot about what I should think about, she said.

Not yet?

Yes, not yet.

Freedom-to?

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace writes: "But what of the freedom-to? Not just freedom-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"

Plato once said that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece (or the Oracle said so), because he was willing to expose beliefs and ideas to a critical investigation. He did not claim to know what he did not know, but he was always willing to learn. In other words: He was willing to question the mainstream opinion and ideas, so that he could decide based on wisdom, not political agendas that are just seducing people to believe that freedom to choose, not already is defined as freedom-to.

The solutions are to become creative in order to create new roads, that is, creating a choice as we make it possible by choosing it. 

Freedom

Freedom? How? Just when we dare to deal with those things we do not really know, or know badly, then it appears. 

It is never freedom from, always freedom to. It is precisely there we begin to imagine; we begin to create; we begin to live. 

Freedom always takes form on the border of our knowledge, transforming our ignorance to wisdom - and vice versa.

Get what you want

There is always another breath in my own, another voice or thought, which kind of persists me.

Once The Rolling Stones sang, "You can't always get what you want... But if you try sometime, you might get what you need." 

I have been thinking a lot about this sentence, because in some way it sounds reasonable, but then you realise that the reasonable is already formed and controlled by some norms for what is reasonable and not. And is that really reasonable? 

So, if The Rolling Stones should do a cover-version of their hit, I will propose: "You can get what you want, if you try real hard, you might get more than you need."

One way to get there - getting what you want - happens, when you listen to what happens, and realise that it is not YOU that is important, it always the other or another, because he or she brings life to your life.

The codes of today

In communication you talk about restricted versus elaborated codes. Codes, which need to be decoded.

The restricted codes are simpler; they tend to be redundant and orientated towards social relations. For instance in the world of economy, you either have money or not, a simple +/- dichotomy.

Elaborated codes are more unpredictable you often find them in art and literature. 

Restricted codes depend on cultural experience; elaborated on formal training, they need to be learnt. Here you do not know the plusses and minusses beforehand.

So, one question: Is the business culture of today a part of our culture or do we need to learn it?

I believe it is part of our culture that we reduce everything, every relation to a matter of economical value. Or put differently, the business logic is so simple that there is nothing to learn, only something to rebel about.

Still here

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't 

mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank - 

but that's not the same thing. - Joseph Conrad

Happy new year

In the book The White Tiger the narrator mentions a beautiful poem that goes as follows: 

You were looking for the keys for years

But the door was already open

The poem unfolds a classical paradox in the human history. Many seem to be looking for something that they already are a part of, but too afraid to grap, too afraid to live. Constantly producing past they wish were different, even though all it requires is the courage to do something right here and now. If the present is actualised in a nice way, then the past will look pretty and the future become brighter and brighter.

As the same book very beautiful says: The moment you realize what is beautiful in life, you stop being a slave.

So take out your sunglasses, 2009 will become brighter and brighter.

Educator

Being a good teacher, a good professor, I believe, is all about liberating the students. A teacher cannot find the path for his or her students, he cannot set goals, but he can help them to be simple and honest.

Honesty, how difficult it seems for many today.

It suits you !?

Haruki Murakami writes in his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running that he has been able to run for more than twenty years for the simple reason: It suits him.

Now running would not suit me, but that is not the issue here. Instead it is having the courage to do something as weird as running for more than twenty years, because it suits you.

How many people knows what suits them in life? And how many people have the courage to do what suits them, even though it might not be part of the mainstream norms of suitable living?

In search of the autonomous

More than words the pop songs say. Sure. However, acting alone does not seem to move anything, if not wrapped-up in words. Why? Perhaps people only can read CAPITAL letters and not various forms of language such as body, emotional, social or political. Perhaps everything has to be translated into a given agenda, a given method, a given system, which seems to determine all of our goals when we try to speak and think. Perhaps we should start all over. From scratch, liberated from all the images that imprison us such as norms and ideals.

In search of the autonomous, I search. 

Thought-provoking

Today I received this Heidegger quote from a friend: "Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking - not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought provoking."

What does it take to make us think about all the stuff that we take for granted? 

When do we start asking questions to the simplicities in life? 

Press play

Will you play with my mind?

Such a question is an open invitation. 

An invitation to a thought that affirms life 

instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life. 

Anyone can press play.

Spacious

We have stopped living in the countryside, even stopped living in the cities. Today we all live in the same world. Everything is connected. Still, however, some people continue to think that the place is important, as if the place were not connected to all other places in one open network, which is still being created (i.e. without a materplan, of course). 

The only place worth mentioning is the only one that exists, which is the place right here and now. And if that place is not spacious enough to consist of all forms of life, then we all have an ethical problem, which in a way is a spacious, topological or even a geographical problem.

Get it

There is a funny thing, if not scary, about the understanding of life today. The funny thing is shown in the two phrases "get it" or "have it". Like you either "get" the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze or not; or you either "have" the self or life that you want or not. Both assumptions are very naive.

One thing is that learning is not about getting IT, but about becoming wiser. It points towards the future. Another thing is that no one has a self - like an essence in a box. A self is continuosly becoming, that is becoming along the struggles of reading Deleuze, or the many other encounters in life. A self is a potential waiting to be actualised in different ways. 

So, to become wise is an endless journey. Just like becoming, who you are now and now and now...

"Get it" or "have it" are two examples of the logic of today's business society where everything is seen, measured and judged in the light of a specific goal - such as money, titles or a life formed after specific ideals or norms, et cetera. Right or wrong, get it or not!

The funny thing about this getting or having IT is that what most people want and desire are right in front of them, but they do not see it, because they focus on the specific IT. The result is that many postpone their life while they try to get it, that is forming the potential into something specific. Get it, so I can have it!

One day we all get it. That is the tragic part about it all; because that day we realize that the happiness, love and beauty was not waiting at the end of the long hall. It was right here all the time. We just did not see it, because we were looking for IT.

The formula is simple: If you are not happy now, then you will never be. Get it, before you end wasting your time getting it.

Small world or...

The world is getting smaller, some say. This, some also say, might have something to do with the Internet and stuff. It might. Because it seems that within the last ten or twenty years more people have been sitting in front of the screen getting fatter and fatter. So in total: The world is getting smaller, so it seems, because of all the fat people, who take up more space.

It is an interesting relationship between technology and life.

The poetic heartbeat

Philosophy is poetic in its form; its a poetic form of being. Poetry is a way of being open towards the unexpected, to be prepared to create new links between places and things, between the immanent forces of what happens.  

The poetic heartbeat of philosophy is what keeps it open. It is through this heartbeat that philosphy passes on the new, the unexpected and - at times - the miraculous impulses that other area of life, then suck down to the bone.

HUMOR

"Are you listening on the intercom, Foamwhistle? 

If you're listening make no sign that you're doing so. 

I thought so."

Taken from David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System.

 

Which one is it?

Since the retired soldier Socrates began asking questions, philosophy has moved away from what takes place. Socrates asks: "What is it?" That is, what is beautiful, just and good; but the beautiful does not refer to an unchangeable idea or example. On the contrary, beauty refers to the concrete phenomenon taken in its becoming, in its becoming beautiful. "Which one is it?" asks Nietzsche, whereby he adresses the forces, which takes hold of a given phenomenon, what is the will that possesses it.

Socrates' problem "what is it?" is that it is a way of establishing sense or meaning from a specific point of view. Nietzsche's "which one is it?" is about establishing a sense from all point of views.

The philosopher is always on the lookout, a voyager travelling between, what seems solid while he is inventing, connecting, communicating or translating. He creates. 

Rationalism = moralism

Michel Serres says it very clear in The Parasite: "Even the world itself does not work quite perfectly...: it works because it does not work. That must shock the old-school rationalism, but the rationalist of the generation before my own had the same relation to the rational as old bigots have to virtue. It was more morality than research, more a social strategy than an intellectual one. I think it was a certain relation with cleanliness; but where do we put the dirt?

So where does this leave the philosopher? Open towards everything. Also that which cannot be put into nice and tidy boxes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, Fantasmi da scacciare, in Foundazione Memmo in Rome is minor, but interesting. 

The work is powerful in an existential way, where each line and word carries significance. His pictures are out of time, because they constantly tries to draw a transversal line through history. However, the picture that really caught my attention is his self-portratit, which also is used to promote the exhibition. I always find it interesting to see how an artist chooses to portrait himself. Furthermore - like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - I believe that an artist in some respect is "a seer". Therefore, I focus on the eyes. In his self-portrait the eyes is the only white. Basquiat was black, so this seems very obvious. However, I believe that the white eyes, the white look or vision signify a white world burning his eye lenses out. It is not the artist looking out. On the contrary, he tries to be open and sensible or impressionable to what comes towards him, which is a white world.

In some respect the work of Basquiat is the work of a rebel with a simple cause: It is a work of a black life trying to become alive in a white world.

some day

you said 

you would like to die of love 

some day

Bill Viola

Recently I saw the Bill Viola exhibition in Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome. A pioneer in the field of video art. However, despite the sterile elegancy of the many shown vidoes, I find his approach a bit forced, too transcendental. His spiritual art is goal-orientated, which  makes it boring. It does not affect me.

After the show I spoke with G about, whether the Americans (i.e. here USA) are more idealistic than Europeans, or it is the other way around. Many theorists have claimed that America is more pragmatic than the idealistic Europenas - qua the long history of the latter. But, maybe it is the other way around; maybe the Americans are more idealistic in a more straight forwarded and predictable way. Of course, this is a lot to say based on Viola's show alone. Nevertheless, he seems very idealistic in a way you also find in classical Hollywood movies. The only difference is that Viola (apparently) is more spiritual, more correct, more authentic, more good; although he just replaces one goal with another, which does not open up for new thoughts and feelings. The answer is already given.

In this claim, Viola's greatest achievement is technical, which might still be art; but not for me. Idealism or transcendentalism, no matter how pretty, is a bore.

The ABC of Philosophy

A: In doing philosophy you have to be ready to constantly change the direction in which you are moving. 

B: In doing philosophy you cannot treat any ideas or norms differently than others. 

C: Doing philosophy is an affirmative practice ending all goals and norms in order to become creative.

In conclusion: Thinking is a creative act that requires: Belief, courage and fantasy.