Friday, May 26, 2006

Riding the Waves

There is always a network of “unchosen” presuppositions, a greater background to our: everything we do, live and create. We never start from scratch. We are constructed and reconstructed from the start: Heidegger’s “being-in-the-word” Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” etc...All such philosophical moves (in complete opposite to the philosophical virgins of the Cartesian tradition) attest to an in/finite prior: structural, existential, and historical. There is always a context, a network of in/finity that we as subject-activists are always already folded into...

It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle”. (Deleuze)

We know the beginning and the end already, it is set: nothingness to nothingness. Birth and death are two sides of the same life coin, but there is still a dimension between the two surfaces, however infinitesimally small - in between the two sides there is leverage for something to happen, becomings are always possible. It is always the middle that one searches in one’s activities, for the world is perpetually starting and ending at every point.

There is no life, no beauty, no spirit, in the deluded searches for closures and origins....

Like a surfer, it is always a question of inserting oneself into an already existing movement, and like judo, one uses a greater strength, not so much against itself, but for oneself: glide, fall and slip, but never posse/s or control: one’s finite activity is always against an infinite multifarious background of sublime passivity:

There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting‑into‑orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something instead of being the origin of an effort”. (Deleuze)