Driftwork

Return to declination. To the text finally translated into its differential elements. The minimal angle to laminar flow initiates turbulence. From which comes, here and there, indefinite in time and place, a world among many others, things and men.

Without declination, there are only the laws of destiny that is to say the chains of order. The new is born of the old, the new is just the repetition of the old. The angle interrupts the Stoic chain, it breaks the foedera fati, the infinite sequence of reasons and causes. It precisely disrupts the laws of nature. Therefrom arises the appearance of living, of everything which breathes, and the horses rush forward. (serres)

In an hour a person may have 10,000 to 100,000 genetic mutations and be completely unaware of them…

Genetics could not work without diversity, without mutation there would be no difference, without mutation there would be no evolution. Genetics is the science of difference. Without genetics there would be no evolution.

Hannah Arendt writing of the principle of equal rights writes: “ That all men are created equal is neither evident nor demonstrable…” (Truth and Politics in the crisis of culture - check this) Equality for Arendt is not a truth in the classical sense; it is a principle of which we have mutually convinced ourselves and that we have decided to establish as the foundation of the constitution…

And yet equally and with more accuracy we could argue that inequality is a mere social construction that should be regarded with greater care than is commonly ascribed to the use of the term. On what basis is superiority assigned to A over B, eye color, gender, money, a category such as race ?

Yesterday Jan said ‘Polish Race…’ I said to him that it was simply ridiculous to say that as he knew very well (he’s a biologist) that we are all descended from a few women from 50,000 years ago. In his dark racist soul he desperately wants it to be possible to argue that ‘x’ is superior to ‘y’….

(Sagan) can argue: “At the heart of pseudo-science is the idea that wishing makes it so”. Where empirical based science requires testable hypotheses, pseudo-science offers untestable hypotheses and produces untestable evidence… myths over evidence. But this argument for falsification does collapse before the matheme, Godal and rationalism combined present a model of science that is haunted by difference.

[[where is this from…]]
We asked Jean-Francois to construct us some monsters. He said that this unimaginable. We asked him why. He said that the monsters he had been reading about in our history books were so much worse than any he had written about or even imagined that he felt incapable of thinking about them yet.

We left him alone with the thought for a few days and then noticed that he was trying to think about a piece called death’s image. It was a short piece not about the death of humanity, as we expected, but the petrification of a person reduced to its bare life. Behind the skin was a pure vacuum. Their humanity was a decayed absence in the center of a ruined life, a no longer known or understood species. Heavily marked by the scarcely known horrors of the intervening years, awash with images, words and virtual sensations the written piece was not menacing but more quotidian. Bad memories that I have missed, it said. “Yes, you too have missed them, you just imagine that these adequately represent the intervening years….” To read it, to hold the text and then to live the experience of him thinking it was to gently, even painfully learn to despair.

“The Psychological team will be so happy with this.” Carl said when she received the bundle. “ I wouldn’t have missed this for anything…”

As Nietzsche knew well, opposition incorporates only limited forms of difference according to two general models. The first expressed most prominently in Platonism and Christianity elevates one term in an opposition to a positive and pure identity and defines the other as lack or absence so that beauty, for example, is the beautiful in itself and can exist independent of ugliness, which is nothing but the falling away from the beautiful. The result is a crude idealism. The second model found Hegelian dialectics insists that each term of a binary opposition invokes and passes into its other, creating an identity of opposites that relates and reconciles them. Nietzsche takes a different route when he declares “The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values” (1966a) an declares opposing values to be merely “foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives as it were…” Opposition in short is a crude tool dealing with a phenomenon – difference – that requires more subtle instruments….(3) Genealogies of difference.

Not then to fall into Lyotard’s nihilistic trap, but rather to require a deeper ontological speculation which is to move away from our normative reliance on categories of identification.

A differend is an actual or unsolvable dispute which is in a sense generated by unbridgeable cultural difference. The impossibility of legislation in the event of a differend is the result of there being no share values on which the conflict might be resolved, so that the differend is exactly the name of the unsolvability of a dispute across cultural difference.

Lyotard is a philosophical thinker who produces the roots of philosophical difference articulated not in Saussure, but in Kant and Hegel, where Kant and Hegel represents the possibility of truth and justice for the outcome of philosophical enquiry, Lyotard turns to Wittgenstein for his understanding of a multiplicity of language games for a less teleological account of the dynamics of difference.

Christopher Norris “a melange of Wittengenstein, post-structuralist and kindred ideas presented in an oracular style that raises bafflement to a high principle…” (1995)

…When cultural critics from different theoretical standpoints talk of alterity it usually means more or less the same thing: the general property of otherness as the secondary identity in relation to which a dominant identity is structured. But there is another important aspect of alterity and otherness, which is important to identify for the discussion of cultural difference. Alterity often refers to a kind of other-worldliness, to an ungraspable or ineffable quality of the Other. This is particularly evident in postcolonial studies where racial otherness is often understood as exactly this incomprehensibility and hence unrepresentability of the native by the western colonizer, tourist or writer…. The notion of the ineffability of the Other can also be found in the work of Levinas and his many disciples who have taken the idea of alterity not as an issue concerned with the structuring of identity but as a site of exchange or encounter with another person and therefore as the basis of ethical action. (95)

and

The concept of the other has three important characteristics, which find expression in these very different contexts: the sense of quasi-oppositionality, the sense of implicit inferiority or secondariness and the the senses of unknowability or ineffability…(95)