A big thank you to Michelle Filippi for this picture!
The tines of the fork*, or the various voices of the anthropic, under the sign of a forked imple(mentation) of techne, of technology-direction (the tines of a fork point in the same direction); are accelerated by those caffeine drivers of modernity, Tea and Coffee.
The plate in the distance, carries an uncertain food, the nutrition of the future; the future as nutrition.
The nearest plate, present at hand, is empty. This is a Platonic plate, a Platonised plate; empty, absent, of actual nutritional presence, but a space ‘full’ of ideas, ready to fill itself with the future, with the food of the future.
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*Interesting resonance, cf. “Cranthimus Jaxley Terence is right.
Or, more simply, it’s what I would call the instrumental positivist’s revenge, on those theoretical tendencies that tend to suspend, and radically question, traditional substantial commitments. It’s the corollary, of what’s going on in current sociopolitical scenarios.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:37
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Cranthimus Jaxley
Cranthimus Jaxley It’s a kind of imperialism of stupidity, wherein the stupid are finding it increasingly difficult to hide the essentially militarised mechanisms of their exploitations. The gap between the ‘people themselves’, and their alienated forms of governance, has collapsed. The distance enabling disingenuousness, hypocrisy, and denial, has disappeared. The two tines of the Occidental ‘forked tongue’, have fused, and do not know what to say.
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· Reply · 27 August at 12:55″
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This breakfast scenography, suggested the above conceptual geometry to me. From here, it is possible to go in many directions of connective interpretation, proliferating further conceptual geometries, perhaps ‘topologies’ is a better word.
Is this merely a consideration of consumption? One based on the question of consumption; on the model of consumption; on consumption as a metaphysical principle of configuration? Yes, it can be all of those things. It can even be used reductively and/or radically; in all kinds of inflationary ways. But let us not neglect deflationary possibilities; those options, where the model and its various mirages of explication, interpretation, insight, and intuition; in short, its modellings; withdraw and absent themselves, not only from the positive chatter of their inflationary insights, but from their usual and habitual conventions and uses, too; leaving metaphysical ground and space, not merely for another festival of extrapolatory combinatorics based on yet another well worn positive convention, but thinking something, everything, and nothing, all at once, simultaneously and systematically, and yet always free to go in any ‘metaphysical’ direction, whatsoever. Here, of course, even the notion of ‘system’, comes into radical question. However, instead of following the traditional discursive and economic circuitry, of placing one positive insularity after another; in what can only ever be misguided attempts at positive domestication, a facile and reductive conversion of insights communicating very little or nothing; the relation of subsequence, here, might be better used as a means of maintaining that alleged ‘nothingness’, as a ‘fulcrum’, as it were, granting unlimited insight(s) into all possible conceptual geometries, the full range of theoro-topological possibility. So, with another resonance of the ‘fork’ and ‘tines’ metaphoric, an apt quote from Derrida.
“As such, philosophical discourse is always presented as a self-effacement before the thing said, before truth, before essence, before content, before meaning, etc. Philosophical discourse in fact strives for this wherever it is at work, and this effort has certain determinate effects in its partial successes and its necessary failures. What I advance here, therefore, is not a projected philosophical discourse. That is why I started by saying to the French Philosophical Society that I was not offering it a philosophical type of discourse. Consequently, if it is the mark of philosophy that it efface itself, insofar as it is a signifying text, before the signified truth, the content, the presence of the meaning of being, etc., then what I proposed was a questioning of that mark. And I can only do that by inscribing it (in every sense of the word), that is, by exceeding philosophical discourse somewhere and thus writing a text which, I am afraid, cannot efface itself totally before what is to be said. It requires, solicits, and sometimes even obtains—as I am grateful to you for having proved by your intervention-—a “divided” attention—-to use your word. In broaching your question, you also noted that I meant something [vouloir dire] and that, even if you did not understand it completely, you were convinced of my wanting-to-say-something. I am less sure of this than you. I have posed the question of intention [vouloir dire], of its affiliation to the essence of logocentrism and metaphysics, elsewhere. At the point at which this question is posed, intention is no longer involved. Perhaps not even a questioning intention.
Finally, I freely acknowledge that the different stages of the path I proposed were very unequally illuminated. I will not appeal to time, which I have moreover amply overrun, to justify the fact that I have not been able to clarify equally all the words which I have used. As you have noted in an admirable word, they are nests of language, full or empty—who knows and it matters little, only the simulacrum matters here—the weaving [tissage] of which obscures its structure beneath all its folds, equally and simultaneously. It does not openly expose itself. [ll ne s’exp0se a plate couture] This is not the result of animal cunning but of the structure of a fabric or tissue [tissu], of the organization of the text. From the text which you wanted to pass unperceived, we leave ourselves free to concern ourselves with the content of this nestlike object. I have tried to justify theoretically the impossibility of illuminating, of giving an equal thematic weight to all parts of the text, which is made of differences and of differences of differences, and is therefore, in principle, irreducibly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity connects up again with what I have said about strategy: I privilege one or other chain of concepts in the light of a given context which, moreover, I can only analyze and master in part. I leave the other concepts in a shadow, be it provisional or definitive. I also try to formalize this shadow and draw its spectral and schematic figure.
As much as possible. Through forks and nests.’
Wood, D.C., and R. Bernasconi. Derrida and Différance. Coventry/Evanston, Ill.: Parousia Press/Northwestern Univ Pr, 1985. (pp. 87-9)”