but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange... Benjamin, Shakespeare, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs

   

    Come unto these yellow sands, 

              And then take hands: 

    Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd 

              The wild waves whist, 

    Foot it featly here and there; 

    And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear. 

              Hark, hark! 

    Bow-wow. 

              The watch-dogs bark. 

    Bow-wow. 

              Hark, hark! I hear 

              The strain of strutting chanticleer 

              Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

    Full fathom five thy father lies; 

              Of his bones are coral made; 

    Those are pearls that were his eyes: 

              Nothing of him that doth fade, 

    But doth suffer a sea-change 

    Into something rich and strange. 

    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: 

                              Ding-dong. 

    Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the "thought fragments" it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking that delves into the depths of the past - but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things "suffer a sea-change" and survive in new crystallised forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into a world of the living - as "thought fragments," as something "rich and strange," and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

Ariel's Song in Shakespeare's Tempest & Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin

Other sea-changers, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

 

the rabble and its doctors; Žižek & Arendt

Philippe Garrel's mediation on '68 Paris, Les Amants Réguliers

Paris '68

Photoshoplooter parody of the London 'Shoplifting Riots', hither.

Hannah Arendt; On Violence in Crises of the Republic

"Nothing, in my opinion, could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organic thought in political matters by which power and violence are interpreted in biological terms. As these terms are understood today, life and life's alleged creativity are their common denominator, so that violence is justified on the ground of creativity. The organic metaphors with which our entire present discussion of these matters, especially of the riots, is permeated - the notion of a "sick society," of which riots are symptoms, as fever is a symptom of disease - can only promote violence in the end. Thus the debate between those who propose violent means to restore "law and order" and those who propose nonviolent reforms begins to sound ominously like a discussion between two physicians who debate the relative advantages of surgical as opposed to medical treatment of their patient. The sicker the patient is supposed to be, the more likely that the surgeon will have the last word. Moreover, so long as we talk in non-political, biological terms, the glorifiers of violence can appeal to the undeniable fact that in the household of nature destruction and creation are but two sides of the natural process, sot hat collective violent action, quite apart from tis inherent attraction, may appear as natural - a prerequisite for the collective life of mankind as the struggle for survival and violent death for continuing life in the animal kingdom." 

Slavoj Žižek; Shoplifters of the World Unite in LRB

"Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν καὶ ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων... Arendt, Johnson, mass society, & the ancient Greeks

Vita Activa; Hannah Arendt

This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in

society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as

the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different

from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek citystates.

To belong to the few "equals" (homoioi) meant to be permitted

to live among one's peers; but the public realm itself, the

polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody

had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show

through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all

{aim aristeuein). 34 The public realm, in other words, was reserved

for individuality; it was the only place where men could show

who they really and inexchangeably were.

34. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochm emmenai allon ("always to 

be the best and to rise above others") is the central concern of 

Homer's heroes (Iliad vi. 208), and Homer was "the educator of Hellas."

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities,

problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior

of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not

only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it

has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the

two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and

the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a

life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world

of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to

whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of

the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose

beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though

hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar

manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period

prior to the modern age.

This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient

feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself,

was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of

something, and even of the highest and most human of man's

capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the

slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian

had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully

human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we

use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous

enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.

However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is

at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the

ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to

the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is

that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the

intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere

but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically

related.

Serres, Adorno, Arendt

"Our geography invades the planet. This is the second voyage, the re-appropriation through knowledge. Geography is nothing else, its birth is there, at the moment at which knowledge becomes universal, in spatial terms and not by virtue of any right."

"In whose interest is it to lay down a law of history if not in the interest of whoever wishes to stop time? Of course it is in the best interests of whoever pursues power in economics, politics, or philosophy to close of genesis... The law is a theft... Metaphysics is operatory, it is the strategic set without which physics and the exact sciences are nothing but partial and dispersed tactics... The most general knowledge that can be formed, the most exact, the most faithful, and the most effective, can be deciphered by a military model. The discourse on method is a science of war.

"To know is to engage in a practice implicated in the ideology of command and obedience."

Michel Serres; Jouvences, Hermès IV, Hermès III respectively

"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy... 

To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature. Unity is the slogan from Parmenides to Russell. The destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted upon.

Yet the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were its own products. In the scientific calculation of occurrence, the computation is annulled which thought had once transferred from occurrence into myths. Myth intended report, naming, the narration of the Beginning; but also presentation, confirmation, explanation: a tendency that grew stronger with the recording and collection of myths. Narrative became didactic at an early stage. Every ritual includes the idea of activity as a determined process which magic can nevertheless influence...

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things insofar as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends. In the metamorphosis the nature of things, as a substratum of domination, is revealed as always the same. This identity constitutes the unity of nature."

Adorno & Horkheimer; Dialectic of Enlightenment

"It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over

men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the

primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.

Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile

ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its

hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together,

"acting in concert" (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition...

...The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor

the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent

of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose

premise is the self-evident. The elementary rules of cogent evidence, the

truism that two and two equals four cannot be perverted even under the

conditions of absolute loneliness. It is the only reliable "truth" human beings

can fal1 back upon once they have lost the mutual guarantee, the common

sense, men need in order to experience and live and know their way

in a common world. But this "truth" is empty or rather no truth at alI,

because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some

modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth.) Under the conditions

of loneliness, therefore, the self-evident is no longer just a means of

the intel1ect and begins to be productive, to develop its own lines of

"thought." That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality,

from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection

with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phenomena

of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one's and

who once dared to say that "there must be a God because man needs one

being whom he can trust") in a little-known remark on the Bible text "it

is not good that man should be alone": A lonely man, says Luther, "always

deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst." 4

The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything

to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this "thinking everything

to the worst," in this deducing process which always arrives at the

worst possible conclusions."

 Arendt; The Origins of Totalitarianism