Naming things "great great stream"

"Great great stream"

Mi ssissi ppi means "great great stream" in the anishnawbe or ojibway language!!
Says friend Ronald Momogeeshick Peters.

Here is an interactive link to the 7000 streams running through the North American land, all pouring into the Mississippi River, and feeding into the Golf of Mexico. It's interesting how names have things in them.

Click link below for the article + interactive map

Great great stream interactive map

Virginia Woolf --> an animation of words "Words...for it is their nature to change."

BBC* animation of "Words," an expression of Virginia Woolf's idea of what words are, in her own voice! The animated illustrations are inspired by the woodcuts created by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell.

Do take a look at the video. I couldn't find a version of it not embedded in a blog or otherwise. Scroll up to the video (2.21 min) in this blog link below:
Virginia Woolf --> an animation of words "Words...for it is their nature to change."

In this broadcast, Woolf says that words "don't live in dictionaries," that rather "they live in the mind." Keep in mind the author died 75 years ago. I'm doing a freestyle interpretation of her saying; I am inspired that words live in the body, in the mind and the senses, the soul and our stride.

[Excerpt from the broadcast]
“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.”

"Words...for it is their nature to change."

*This material comes from an archival recording by Virginia Woolf, first broadcast by the BBC on 29 April 1937. 
Christine cricri Bellerose

Eco-Niobium in Oka

Dear colleagues, a proposal:

As we enter a week of talking about the capitalscene and affects, a horrific and stunning series of events is taking place in Oka, Quebec, about 45 minutes by car away from Montreal: a newly formed mining company with extremely dubious history is attempting - while using the language of community consent, ecological mindfulness and intra-community dialogue - to reopen the old St Lawrence Columbium mine. With promises of huge cash payouts, infrastucture and employment, Eco-Niobium is re-opening a debate that the citizens of Oka have TWICE quelled in recent history: In 2002 and 2011. Oka, the site of the 1990 crisis, a land and rights dispute between the municipality and the Kanesetake Mohawks (here the municipality was totally in the wrong), is facing a nefarious campaign of subversive baiting this THIRD time that already has city council and the (potentially) the Mohawk Chief on board.

This mine will require massive interference of the water table, in a rich agricultural region. The Agropur factory (Oka Cheese) is mere hundreds of meters away; as is the lake of two mountains and the nearby Oka National Park. Many residents are at risk of being forcibly displaced. They are promising new water purification systems, roads and hydraulics. The region already has higher-than-permitted uranium soil contamination from previous mining activities. All of these previously established industries, essential to the character of the village, are put at risk by this proposal, as is the eco-tourism industry.

In sum:
The communities of Oka and Kanesetake have recently been plunged into a battle with a big mining business, Eco-Niobium, which seems to have the support of the town council. This project risks the safety of the residents of Oka, the agricultural industry of the region, and the reliability of our ground water.
Additionally, various sub-groups within the community are being played off each other (farmers, villagers, Mohawks), the last thing a community with a long history of colonialism and racial violence needs.

A proposal:
Affect and the Anthropocene is caught up with, and implicated by, questions of what constitutes environmentalism, indigenous land rights, water safety, community an commerce; we should be interested in this conflict. The town of Oka is holding a town hall meeting on April 4, 19:00 at the Oka church. In conversation with Erin, I have proposed that we rent a bus, departing at 5:30 pm from Concordia, and observe this town hall meeting in the historic town centre of Oka. After, we can walk up the street (two blocks) to my partner's country house where we can discuss the affective poilitics at play, this week's reading in the Capitalscene. I will have some snacks prepared and invite you all to bring food to share while we meet. I can share what I know of the region's phenomenal history of not only conflict, but cooperation (at times) and its colonial legacy. The bus will depart for Montreal at 10:00 pm with a drop off at Concordia.

While there are more images in the articles linked below, I have embedded one from the mining site, which I 'trespassed' on earlier this week.
 

Resources: 
Please start here, at the community's facebook page. Large portions of it are fiercely pushing back, but I suspect that the local governments are receiving kickbacks. The process of community consultation is in NO WAY an indication that this project will not go through!! Some excellent information has been collected here, 
https://www.facebook.com/contrelamine/

http://www.ledevoir.com/environnement/actualites-sur-l-environnement/466768/eco-niobium-une-compagnie-racoleuse
http://ici.radio-canada.ca/regions/montreal/2016/03/22/001-projet-de-mine-de-niobium-a-oka.shtml
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSnMKWlyqkpa+1c0+MKW20160323
https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDtls.html?corpId=9339337

Questions About Politics

I had a great conversation with Becky today that made me realize that I've perhaps not been forthcoming enough about how the course is attempting to raise the question of the political. This lack of clarity on my part may have caused a misunderstanding about the centrality of the political in the approach to reading/viewing we've explored.

In Jacques Rancière's work, there is an important difference (which will be found in most "poststructuralist" French thinkers) between Politics and The Political (la politique/le politique).

Politics usually refers to the organization of political systems - questions of governance, distribution systems etc. In a broad sense, you could say that Politics touches on macropolitical regimes of organization.

The political refers to the more processual, micropolitical fissures. These can and do operate across the macropolitical, so they must not be seen as "smaller" issues. This is a transversal regime. At this more unformed level, there is still potential for change, which is why thinkers of political change tend to speak of the political instead of politics.

It is important to be able to distinguish these two levels when we speak of politics. When we analyse political structures - when we explore the work of film festivals in the context of film distribution, for instance - we are looking at a regime from a macropolitical perspective (we are looking at the film not for itself - not in its singularity - but in terms of its wider effects in a system that makes particular demands on those effects). This is not to say that there is no potential for political change at this stage. Everything makes a difference. But this stage is usually more solidly constituted. Questions that emerge at this level include systemic issues: how is culture distributed? what constitutes culture at the level of state systems? how do larger systemic issues of race and gender play into constituencies produced by the circuits of distribution called forth?

When we speak of the political we are speaking of politics in germ. We are speaking of potential. Art works at this level (there is of course "message" art that is more didactic, but this is very rarely successful at doing the work it tries to do). The political force of art is not its message, but the intricate way in which it creates the conditions for a different mode of existence or encounter with the world.

When we spoke of the films as we tried to do in the 4 weeks of film viewing I was in no way wanting to discount the macropolitical issues that come up in relation to circuits of distribution and global cinema. I was simply hoping to practice a close reading of the work on its own terms in order to begin to understand how it might be doing the work of the political. In my way of seeing things, to speak in complex ways about how art circulates, you need to be able to engage, in detailed and thoroughgoing ways, with what makes it the work it is.

Of course, this approach may not be of interest, and it is not necessary for it to be of interest. But, as an artist, I find it important. It matters to me how decisions are made, and what makes a work the work it is. In the case of cinema, this touches on the relationship between light and colour and sound and voice and duration and rhythm. It also touches on inheritances, techniques, localities, ethnicities. None of these aspects can be singled out, and all must be actively part of any discussion of "content,"I think. From here, from this discussion of what is singular about this particular work, another discussion can ensue that pulls the concern toward macropolitical issues (of which the anthropocene is arguably one). But for me, to make the second discussion - the one about Politics - primary is to ignore the singularity of how art can be political in its activation of modes of experience that may otherwise be backgrounded.

I would love to hear more about your ways of thinking the political.

Deleuze on ~~Windsurfing~~

I  have at long last found the Deleuze chapter I am often thinking about-- it is called Mediators, and it comes from Negotiations. In this chapter, Deleuze basically advances the idea that the correspondences we find in the world, across diverse fields and strata of relationality, are not really accidental or coincidental. He argues, "philosophy, art, and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons," and that, " the way they impinge on one another depends on their own evolution. So in this sense we really have to see philosophy, art, and science as sorts of separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." (125) This is also related to Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony that I brought up in class.


  
Another great quote, "the kind of movement you find in sport and habits are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic concept on of motion, where there 's a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement depended less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding-take the form of entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin 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" (122).


Ultimately what I love about Deleuze (and Guattari) and process philosophy more genuinely is that they don't dismiss intuition, they don't get too bogged down in the typical stratifications of experience and allow for a much more holistic interpretation of experience, which I think really comes through in this piece beautifully.  


The  chapter starts on page 121 of the PDF download link I will attach.

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwijx5rHw-jLAhXrmoMKHdAoCAAQFggbMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdesignstudiesdiscourses.files.wordpress.com%2F2013%2F09%2Fdeleuze-negotiations.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGLE7CHT56RAPm76vsngm92O1moXA&sig2=qShsYJC1Byhs0IvR-OARUg

Food for April 4th!

Hi everyone,

I am going to bring some food for our next class, April 4th, but I won't be able to bring enough to feed everyone substantially, so I'm hoping someone else may volunteer to bring some stuff in too that day?

I will be bringing some roasted vegetables (vegan), and probably a fruit salad (also vegan). Maybe someone could bring something that would go well with that or not at all!

Let me know if you want to coordinate further:)

Fungi:

Paul Stamets mentions amazing things; heat resistance via fungi, fungi that metabolize radiation, and his own biography, a logger turned biologist... it is worth hearing the whole interview to catch these and other points.
His point of fungi-virus-plants interrelation points to other unknown connections upon which our food provision and other things may be dependent... 

 

Did some thinking about the transnational & music in relation to borders...

I found this article that I've included here:
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199735921.001.0001/acprof-9780199735921-chapter-2


Territorialization and deterritorialization are concepts that seem to be taken up here in a different manner. Perhaps we can discuss how they differ? Or how they are similar to Deleuze & Guattari's? Reading this has got me thinking about how musicology (or media studies for that matter) engages these philosophical concepts.

In Reggae on the Border, Alvarez argues:

"that border reggae helps its participants claim dignity in the face of the dehumanizing effects of global economic and political patterns. There is often an intricate relationship between border reggae and social movements, lending support to cultural critic George Yúdice's contention that some cultural practices and venues have the potential to be turned into resources that might “be (p.21) mobilized in the pursuit of social justice under certain circumstances.”² Border reggae is thus one example of how globalization operates in the form of everyday cultural and political expression as much as it does in the activity of transnational corporations and nation-states. Rather than assume border identities and communities are liminal, deterritorialized, and displaced from concrete movements for social change, border reggae shows us they are deeply rooted, deeply territorialized, and deeply placed in local relationships, cultural politics, and efforts for social transformation along the extended U.S.-Mexico border.^3" 

Reggae on the Border The Possibilities of a Frontera Soundscape

Luis Alvarez

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199735921.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter investigates the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multi-ethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.

Rhythms and Refrains

I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s The Years. Throughout a narrative structuring device is the rhythms of the seasons and of nature and weather. I relate this to what we have been talking about in class recently in relation to Guattari’s notion of rhythms and refrains and how we might connect our own existences to these rhythms. These two excerpts occur in sequence in the novel and I think demonstrate this thinking beautifully.

"It was raining. A fine rain, a gentle shower, was peppering the pavements and making them greasy. Was it worth while opening an umbrella, was it necessary to hail a hansom, people coming out from the theatres asked themselves, looking up at the mild, milky sky in which the stars were blunted. Where it fell on earth, on fields and gardens, it drew up the smell of earth. Here a drop poised on a grass-blade; there filled the cup of a wild flower, till the breeze stirred and the rain was spilt. Was it worth while to shelter under the hawthorn, under the hedge, the sheep seemed to question; and the cows, already turned out in the grey fields, under the dim hedges, munched on, sleepily chewing with raindrops on their hides. Down on the roofs it fell--here in Westminster, there in the Ladbroke Grove; on the wide sea a million points pricked the blue monster like an innumerable shower bath. Over the vast domes, the soaring spires of slumbering University cities, over the leaded libraries, and the museums, now shrouded in brown holland, the gentle rain slid down, till, reaching the mouths of those fantastic laughers, the many-clawed gargoyles, it splayed out in a thousand odd indentations. A drunken man slipping in a narrow passage outside the public house, cursed it. Women in childbirth heard the doctor say to the midwife, "It's raining." And the walloping Oxford bells, turning over and over like slow porpoises in a sea of oil, contemplatively intoned their musical incantation. The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.

It was raining in Oxford. The rain fell gently, persistently, making a little chuckling and burbling noise in the gutters. Edward, leaning out of the window, could still see the trees in the college garden, whitened by the falling rain. Save for the rustle of the trees and the rain falling, it was perfectly quiet. A damp, earthy smell came up from the wet ground. Lamps were being lit here and there in the dark mass of the college; and there was a pale-yellowish mound in one corner where lamplight fell upon a flowering tree. The grass was becoming invisible, fluid, grey, like water. "

Infinity Kisses

Infinity Kisses


About a year ago I met someone who changed my life. His name is Carlos, and he is a Siamese cat. Originally it was just supposed to be a temporary, house sitting arrangement, but the universe had other plans, and the temporary became permanent. Carlos has taught me a lot in a short period of time, and the one thing that never ceases to amaze and amuse (and sometimes bemuse) me is his concept of bodily sovereignty.

Erin often says that when we think of a body, how it is constituted in space-time, we tend to separate our bodies from entities we see as external to ourselves. Abstracting ourselves from the chair in which we sit at the moment we are asked what constitutes a body, forgetting we wear clothes, neglecting that we walk on surfaces, we think of our bodies as strictly human, as able to exist even temporarily in a conceptual vacuum, independently of the non-human. This is similar to the way in which many theories of the anthropocene seem to abstract the human from the environment/nature..

This is not so simple when you have a very affectionate cat. While I write this, my laptop is precariously perched on my crossed legs, far from secure, because sitting in its ideal location is a warm, cozy cat. My current couch-laptop-cat-pajama ecology is shifting and temporary. But having a cat as determined to cuddle as I do, I am constantly aware of the configurations of my body, the negotiations involved on the molecular and molar scale that are always already ongoing, whether or not we are aware of them.

For my final project, I considered doing a photography series that would explore the limits of the concept of bodily sovereignty as it relates to human-cat ecologies. For various reasons I chose not to, but I wanted to share the work that I continue to be deeply inspired by, Infinity Kisses by Carolee Schneeman.

The series was originally photos, but it has been rendered into a film, I believe by Schneeman herself, below. Enjoy!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4wuJH4M8I

Urban Light Pollution

Another way we are really damaging ourselves with some of modern life's comforts-- inability to see the beautiful sky above us at night! Also, this light pollution can mess with our bio-rhythms and is bad for other animals as well.




And the source for the image, as well as interesting information.
https://www.jmu.edu/planetarium/light-pollution.shtml

牛粪 (Yak Dung) - 2012

Wanted to share this interesting film some of us saw a few weeks ago in another class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfpTHOhExGI

It's interesting to me how the people in the film have established a way of working with an abundant natural resource to construct so many useful items for their homes. While it might be tempting to say that this is a kind of push-back against damaging anthropocene-related activites, the burning of yak dung to heat houses during the cold Tibetan winters is actually pretty damaging to the environment.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/12/yak_dung_is_making_climate_change_worse_and_new_cookstoves_don_t_help.html

God is most definitely a lobster

Just saying

Hello ALL;

Jose pointed out that Apichatpong Weerasetakhul's most recent film, Cemetery of Splendour. It will be playing again at Cinema du Parc from Friday March 18th to Tuesday March 22nd, and Thursday March 24th: 2:00, 9:05, and Wednesday March 23rd: 9:05.

If this doesn't make sense here's a link to the Cinema du Parc's page for the event:

 http://www.cinemaduparc.com/english/prochainemente.php?id=cemeteryofsplendour

Salud,

Class

Hi everyone!

Becky pointed out that my dates are wrong in the syllabus (thanks for that!) - we have a class next Monday (21) but no class the following Monday (28). The reading is 3 Ecologies by Guattari.

Group Post: Tropical Malady

The group: Anthony, Jennifer, Ellie, Kyla, Braden, Maude and Melanie

For Tropical Malady, we asked the class to doodle or draw while watching the film.  First, with their dominant hand, and then with their non-dominant hand.  The thought was to gain access to the film using other means than the usual optical mode.

We then kicked off a discussion using the following words as a starting point - 'gesture', 'structure', 'gaze' and 'carnal'.

Thanks to everyone for thinking with us!

Just a very interesting thought from the poet Robert Duncan:

"In a time when only one vision--the vision of an atomic disaster and the end of the species--haunts the world, in religion as well as in science, men labor to exorcise  all the old stories." 

---1968, The Truth and Life of Myth

How very similar and different is the rationale he describes for the crisis of his own time and ours.

Excerpts for Monday March 14

Hi everyone,
on top of the Sloterdijk and the Latour, I'd like us to return to these 2 passages, one from Whitehead, the other from Deleuze and Guattari. I will bring some copies of the text, but if you like you could also read them in advance and have them with you.
See you tomorrow!
Erin

From Geology of Morals

p. 41

It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not

between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed

matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as

formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and

deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality;

therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is

that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multiplicity:

one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is

more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not

lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in particular

that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenomena

of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization,

and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between

their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation

and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far

more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the

sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that

structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted

that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the

molecular and the molar.

p. 44-45

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals,

orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers,

every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content,

the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not

between forms and substances but between content and expression,

expression having just as much substance as content and content just as

much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides

with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because content

and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and sometimes

along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity

between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition.

The distinction between content and expression is always

real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double

articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them according

to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real

distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction between form

and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are

nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable,

although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless

forms.)

Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and

expression are relative terms ("first" and "second" articulation should also

be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of

invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and

expression are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only

vary from one stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same

stratum multiply and divide ad infinitum. Since every articulation is double,

there is not an articulation of content and an articulation of

expression—the articulation of content is double in its own right and constitutes

a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression

is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For this

reason, there exist intermediate states between content and expression,

expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through

which a stratified system passes. In short, we find forms and substances of

content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and substances,

and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not,

therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances

within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is

already, or still, double. This can be seen on the organic stratum: proteins

of content have two forms, one of which (the infolded fiber) plays the role

of functional expression in relation to the other. The same goes for the

nucleic acids of expression: double articulations cause certain formal and

substantial elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not

only does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the

reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the "messenger."

There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all

directions there are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double

articulations affecting both expression and content.

p. 69-70

There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the

strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evolution

from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended

degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content

and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but

everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the

strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than

another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no

fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another

without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint

of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as

an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order

can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile

soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even

particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects ... It's even worse

nowadays: you can't even tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate

with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser,

no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of the

stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs, and not

an increase in organization.31 Furthermore, if we consider the plane of consistency

we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a

semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron

crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization

produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter... There

is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like an interaction,"

etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists

is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual

organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted

from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what

makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency

possible. A silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences

in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the difference

between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the

distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and

formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the

strata.

From Nature Alive

p. 205-206

Now as a first approximation the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment. This must mean a certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature. Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation. I have, in my recent writings, used the word 'prehension' to express this process of appropriation. Also I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an 'occasion of experience'. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into the creative advance.

p. 206-207

This concept of self-enjoyment does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed 'life'. Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealized potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of the potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment.

p. 207-208

But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of nature. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. 'That way of enjoyment' is selected from the boundless wealth of alternatives. It has been aimed at for actualization in that process.

p. 229


In the first place, we must distinguish life from mentality. Mentality involves conceptual experience, and is only one variable ingredient in life. The sort of functioning here termed 'conceptual experience' is the entertainment of possibilities for ideal realization in abstraction from any sheer physical realization. The most obvious example of conceptual experience is the entertainment of alternatives. Life lies below this grade of mentality. Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then. This vector character is of the essence of such entertainment.

p. 232

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. 

Jean-Pierre Sudre

I think that this artist really reflects a great deal of what we’ve been talking about in class in terms of the interdependence of the world and the relationship that we have not solely on physical level but also on a molecular one. Here is an amazing little feature on Jean-Pierre Sudre from Juxtapoz.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/jean-pierre-sudre-gitterman-