Re: Serres: Parasites and noise

Paul Bains wrote:
> 
> >Serres writes about the
> >senses in a book called _les cinq senses_ and is best approached through
> >the French tradition of sensibility. Sorry, not sure if its in English.
> >
> >Fumario de la Mark (...)
> 
> could you say a little bit more about the French tradition of sensibility?
> What is this critter for you.
> pb.


	Well, lately I have been reading Serres with more than a little
interest, he is captivating and even more so the more you read him and
see how 'expressions' mix back and forth from one book to another
creating a sort of turbulance in the possible interpretations that one
can bring to his text. His very manner of turning a phrase is also the
content of his stirring 'discourse' -- a sort of whirlwind is created
where the blind spots as far as cognitive understanding is concerned are
brought into play; the rigor of a void in knowledge(savoir plus que
sagesse) suspends the proliferation of symbolic exchange (which
constitutes the basis of consensus making or expressive appropriation
through the expression of cultural products that would then make up the
cultural heritage that would give identity to a people and distinguish
that which is outside such identification which is to say the foreigner,
savage -- for more on this one could read Bergson. I have been reading
_L'energie spirituelle_ He writes that this mobile movement of
expression is dependent on an accumulation of energy, a conservation of
matter which then would be its potential(puissance). More particularly
in an essay called "La consience et la vie" following a method where he
says he is tracing "lignes de faits" or "lines of facts"; he notices
that a living organism strives to move by looking for "substances qu'on
pourrait appeler explosives et qui, sembable a la poudre a canon,
n'attendent q'une etincelle pour detoner" (substances that one can call
explosive and which; like canon powder, require but a spark to set them
off.). I am not sure if he wrote this during the war but it might be
something to keep in mind... So, there is here a sort of dialectic
between the conservation and accumulation of energy and its explosive,
blitzing thrust forward which bergson earlier in this essay likens to
the conquest of territory and which again is the *expression* of
cultural work and heritage. George Bataille in his own 'works'
emphasizes expenditure of energy rather than its accumulation thinking
of the native festivals of potlatch where prestige is an 'expression'
where one's wealth is destroyed without profit or return, without usury,
or interest. It is the notion of interest as much as the more well know
notion of the interiorisation of exteriority driving the Hegelian
dialetic making up a memory and stabilising it in memory as cultural
production which is how one could perhaps approach what imperialism is
all about. Well, I am not sure how I ended up here en train d'ecrire --
let me add that I think Bataille places too much emphasis on expenditure
and not enough on conservation.  So looking at Bergson and Bataille
together is of interest to me because it brings thinking(my own of
course) into the rigor of paradox whose tension releases a sort of
vibration, murmur, noise which then make up the traversal, or crossing
of the screen in an enigmatic manner, stirring far from any mystery and
its symbols and any domesticating culture that one could be expressed
with them in order to pacify unruly savagery and uncultivated forests.
To balance a certain scale this way would be to expose, to risk dying of
exposure in a holding out into a savage "clearing" in a rception of
transmitting impressions, tatooing of skin, piercing of the screen in a
continuing flow of pointilic periods endlessly in flux, constantly
becoming other in their plasticity which would be the very "matter" of
painting as Lyotard shows in so many essays, or attempts at cave
painting -- non-symbolic, Klee-like childishness...

this is a "new materialism"

A sublime critter,
Fumario de la Mark  ...


Long live the plasticity of phrasitic scholars!!