This article engages a new collection of articles by Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born phenomenologis... more This article engages a new collection of articles by Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born phenomenologist and philosopher of communication. It reveals fissures in the metaprogram of Western civilization, including the separation between the true, the good, and the beautiful, the productive tension between the Olympian and the Orphic, and the irreducible difference between the Greek heritage and the Jewish one. The article goes on to lay bare the suspenseful mood of our epoch, the paradigmatic significance of Pointillism in the digital age, the loneliness and decadence we face in the age of mass communication, and the anaesthetic effect of the gigantic and the miniaturized alike.
ABSTRACT: Thematically speaking, this theoretical essay draws on Flusser’s work on dialogue, the ... more ABSTRACT: Thematically speaking, this theoretical essay draws on Flusser’s work on dialogue, the apparatus, and functionalism and Deleuze’s work on control societies, cybernetic machines, and lines of flight to problematize creativity. While promoting creativity, auto-creativity, meta-creativity, and ludic creativity, it also cautions against the cooptation of creativity and meta-creativity by apparatuses or cybernetic systems. It argues for the rejuvenation of self and world alike, and calls for a minor sensibility (in a Deleuzean sense), a collective ethical awakening, and a shift toward an eco-civilization. There is an irreducible East Asian and an important interological dimension to the essay. At a formal level, the essay is meant as a textual body without organs (BwO) or a taiji-style text, which privileges the flow of textual energy over structural clarity and classicality. As such, the reader is invited to go with the flow.
ORIGINAL TITLE: "The Promise and Nemesis of Creativity in the Age of Generalized Acceleration."
ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: This exigency-driven essay makes the following main points: 1) Creativity is central to our nature as the entropy-defying animal. 2) The digital age at once enhances and hinders our creativity. 3) In view of the ubiquity of apparatuses of capture, we should first and foremost question and critique creativity. 4) More emphasis should be put on auto-creativity, ludic creativity, meta-creativity, and resistance. 5) An ethical awakening or minorization is in order. The essay draws on the work of Nietzsche, Flusser, Deleuze, Serres, and Virilio, as well as insights from Daoism and Chan Buddhism.
This contemplative piece is an interological, khoralogical reception of and response to Flusser's... more This contemplative piece is an interological, khoralogical reception of and response to Flusser's little known fable on the philosophy of language, which he spells out more systematically in his monographs. Proceeding at a sprightly pace, it ventures beyond Flusser and points to the at once illusion-prone and culturally productive nature of language as a human secretion, a world-making sieve, and a womb-like dwelling.
This article traces the shift in media theory from humanism to anti-humanism, or from extensionis... more This article traces the shift in media theory from humanism to anti-humanism, or from extensionism to assemblage theory and machinism. The suggestion is that the anti-humanistic orientation illuminates the human condition even better, especially in the post-industrial and digital ages when Kafkaesque absurdity characterizes human life. The article also points, if only in passing, to the relevance of interology to media-theoretic inquiry.
After reiterating in a rhapsodic mode some of the core understandings that have crystallized sinc... more After reiterating in a rhapsodic mode some of the core understandings that have crystallized since the inception of interality studies about a decade ago, the article articulates an interological view of media, putting the emphasis on medium as khora or the matrix of becoming. Part of the intention is to enact interology interologically. The reader is invited to encounter the article as if it were a Pointillist painting.
After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the... more After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the ancient Chinese sacred book from diverse perspectives. To maintain a fast tempo, and to stay within the bounds of what counts as a probe, the entries have been explained in a suggestive rather than exhaustive manner. Put otherwise, the piece seeks to say more with less, much like how the I Ching itself communicates. Although arranged alphabetically, the entries can be read in any order. As a matter of fact, the reader may experience the shock of recognition when leaping from entry to entry aleatorily. To pay homage to McLuhan, the piece ends with a tetrad on the I Ching. The reader is encouraged to read the piece in dialogue with 'McLuhan and the I Ching: An interological inquiry', 'Flusser and the I Ching' and 'Focal knowledge, medium bias, and metamedium'.
Czech-born thinker Vilém Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Martin Buber. Inf... more Czech-born thinker Vilém Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Martin Buber. Infused with communicology, media philosophy, information theory, game theory, and probability theory, etc., his philosophy of dialogue is refreshing and convincing. In his eyes, telematic dialogue is an effective means to the socialization of freedom. At the same time, he views the filtering of redundancy as indispensable for the dialogic life in the information age. Moreover, Flusser demonstrates to us how interlingual dialogue facilitates the emergence of negentropic styles and the poetic transformation of language. This article succinctly delineates the contours of Flusser's philosophy of dialogue against the backdrop of the emerging line of inquiry known as interality studies.
I What was a prophesy back in 1980 is now a quotidian reality. Like Gilles Deleuze, Flusser sees ... more I What was a prophesy back in 1980 is now a quotidian reality. Like Gilles Deleuze, Flusser sees the computer as a cybernetic machine, the popularization of which marks the rise of a new species of power and the advent of a new type of society, namely, the control society. In this sense, "Disguised as a Computer, a New Power Invades Your Home" is of a piece with Deleuze's "Postscript on Control Societies" (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 177-182). The theme discussed in this mini article of Flusser's is spelt out in "Our Program" (Flusser, 2013, pp. 19-26), "To Govern" (Flusser, 2011, pp. 123-130), and elsewhere. Besides Max Weber's traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic authorities, a new species of authority, i.e., cybernetic authority, has come to the scene. If the age of "cybernetic control" (a tautological expression) has turned most people into nomad artists (who employ shortrange vision only and use their eyes as if they were hands), Deleuzean surfers (who get taken up by a movement that is already in place and adjust to shifting waves in the moment), Certeauan tacticians (who do not have the luxury of foresight and have to resort to a patient, tireless alertness instead), metaphorical Eskimo hunters navigating in a snowstorm by relying on all but imperceptible patterns of the terrain, or the Monkey King in Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West who cannot get outside of Tathāgata's palm, if visual detachment has given way to acoustic immersion and tactile exploration once and for all, Flusser finds it all the more crucial for social agents to update their sensibility with formal disciplines such as informatics, cybernetics, decision theory, and game theory (Flusser, 2013, p. 144). To be guinea pigs, or to be masters of our own condition, that's the question. So Flusser indicates. Yet, as things stand now, politics can only be saved through a depoliticized, formalistic attitude. Therein lies the paradoxical nature of our situation. The new species of power Flusser brings into focus has, as he prophesied, given a second breath to Europe, thus foiling the project of provincializing Europe, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty's book title. II
This article furthers interology by foregrounding its practical efficacity and offers a clue as t... more This article furthers interology by foregrounding its practical efficacity and offers a clue as to the pragmatic orientation and ethical calculus of the Chinese mind. It sheds light on the relational, prudential thinking behind the immemorial Yi Jing, the optimal point envisioned in the Great Learning, and the analogical reasoning behind liology and the Five Agent Theory to characterize the persona of the noble person which the cumulative literature of Chinese ethics (especially Confucian ethics) seeks to constitute. The article then shifts toward a stroboscopical view of a few interological moments in the Western tradition, bringing into focus Paul Virilio as an exemplar. In view of the multifold crisis the world is caught in, the article ends by presenting interology as the meta-program of the civilization to come.
This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in th... more This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in the era of new media from the perspectives of media theory and interology. It takes new media as a McLuhanesque formal cause and holds that a conspicuous characteristic of literary works in the era of new media lies in the salience and normalization of interality. This development means art forms like mosaic and Pointillism have acquired a paradigmatic significance as a result. In revealing this new paradigm, the article also points to some current social maladies that have come with new media. It holds that literary writing should go beyond the mere embodiment of symptoms and make an intervention in media-induced maladies. The article affirms the irreplaceability of experimental literature and serious literature in an era of attention deficit, and points out that form should occupy a paramount position in literary theory, literary criticism, and literary praxis.
The digital age demands that we retune and update our sensibility. In his rigorous, schematic cor... more The digital age demands that we retune and update our sensibility. In his rigorous, schematic corpus, Flusser shows us how. As we prehend his elaborations and intimations, we find ourselves returning to the worldview behind the immemorial I Ching, which epitomizes programmatic thinking and contains an ethical calculus of the expedient and the optimum. This article creates a space of exploration between Flusser's corpus and the I Ching, reveals the resonance in between, poses Flusserian questions about the I Ching, and brings to the fore aspects of the book that otherwise would remain largely unnoticed. It also points out that the digital revolution was predicated upon a Leibnizian reduction of the vitalistic, inter-transforming yin and yang to the bimodal 0 and 1, and points to the desirability of vitalizing the digital. At a moment of self-reflexivity, the article reveals its own accidentally derived hexagrammic structure. It can be read as a hexagram (the six sections) within the frame of another hexagram (the Introduction and the Closing Remarks). The readers are invited to figure out the second hexagram on their own and see it as the "flip to" hexagram.
As social media, virtual reality, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, mobile computi... more As social media, virtual reality, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, mobile computing, cloud computing, virtual collaboration platforms and other new technologies become an integral part of our life, more and more of us are facing a practical issue: insufficiency of psychic energy. Approaching the cyberneticization of the human condition from the perspective of psychic energy makes for a sorely needed critical intervention. This article reveals the vampiric nature of cyberspacetime, looks into vitalistic philosophy and spiritual praxes for coping strategies, and calls for homo ludens to rise above apparatuses of capture and conserve psychic energy for negentropic endeavours, psychosomatic events and spiritual awakening. It proceeds with the assumption that news about one's autopoiesis and becoming is the most important news. Part of the motive is to demonstrate media theory and time-tested spiritual praxes as equipment for living.
This article fulfills a long-felt desire to create an artifact that allows the reader to get a ho... more This article fulfills a long-felt desire to create an artifact that allows the reader to get a holistic sense of interology at a glance. The idea of interality is to the entries explicated below as oneness is to manyness. As a philosophical undertaking, interology wills nothing short of a worldview shift, and an overcoming of traditional Western ontology. Interology has a vitalistic bent and cures clinging. A thorough-going interology is extricating. Although most entries cast interality in an affirmative light, some of them (e.g., alienation) serve as a counterweight to remind the reader that interality is not to be single-mindedly romanticized, in the same way that not all guanxi is life-enhancing. The article is of a piece with all previous and upcoming articles on interality and interology. A few entries are listed as the keywords to pay homage to the author's home discipline, even though interality studies as a line of inquiry is post-disciplinary.
The concept of khôra, which was elaborated but quickly repressed by Plato in Timaeus, has caught ... more The concept of khôra, which was elaborated but quickly repressed by Plato in Timaeus, has caught the attention of a whole coterie of contemporary philosophers. It is often interpreted as "receptacle" or "uterus." Its presence in Deleuze's corpus is largely covert and easily overlooked. Foregrounding its significance in Deleuze's work allows us to get a firmer grasp of his vitalistic thought. Following the lineage of Plato-Leibniz-Whitehead, Deleuze takes khôra to be a screen, sieve, filter, or membrane that makes something issue from chaos, "even if this something differs only slightly." Khôra is the mother or locus of genesis, becoming, negentropy, and the event. Roughly speaking, the function of khôra is twofold: prehension and negative prehension, or simply selective prehension. Two statements made by Deleuze deserve our particular attention: first, "the brain is the mind itself"; second, "the brain is the screen." For our purposes, the second statement can be productively misinterpreted as, "the brain is the khôra." There is textual evidence in Deleuze's book, Negotiations, to support such an interpretation. After sorting out the rationale of Deleuzean vitalism through the lens of khôra, this article moves on to such notions as the intermind, composite khôra, and the global superbrain to probe into the human condition in the era of mental symbiosis between humanity and its artificially intelligent counterparts, and to negotiate the tension between control and becoming.
As a miniscule philosophical event, this essay proceeds in the liminal space between Deleuze stud... more As a miniscule philosophical event, this essay proceeds in the liminal space between Deleuze studies and interality studies. Meant as just another "Go" move improvised in relation to previous moves and countermoves in a horizonless game of intellectual nomadism known as interality studies, it sketches out the contours of Deleuzean interology in the process of falsifying Platonist ontology. I nterology, which derives from the neologism, "interality, " is the counterpart of ontology. A robust, thoroughgoing interology holds the promise of incorporating or encompassing, if not subsuming, ontology, our ideological attachment to the latter notwithstanding. In the final analysis, so-called "entities" are nothing but transient permutations, metastable nodes, or Deleuzean events arising and perishing in a rhizomatic relational field. They are registered by the flux-averse, stability-craving intellect as "the ten thousand things. " If we scrutinize ontology closely enough, we see interology instead, just as "Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome" upon closer examination. 1 Ontol-ogy is to interology as the tree is to the rhizome, and, some might suggest, as Christianity is to Buddhism. Mediumistically speaking, the reign of ontology in the West is attributable to a fateful event that occurred during the span of human existence: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, the psychic and social impact of which took a very long time to penetrate the social fabric, got intensified and democratized by the printing press, and eventually was eroded, if not dissolved, by electric, electronic, and digital media. During this reasonably long interlude theoretically known as history, the civilized West witnessed a gradual ascendance of ontological thinking and a corresponding displacement, repression , and submergence of interological thinking.
This article engages a new collection of articles by Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born phenomenologis... more This article engages a new collection of articles by Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born phenomenologist and philosopher of communication. It reveals fissures in the metaprogram of Western civilization, including the separation between the true, the good, and the beautiful, the productive tension between the Olympian and the Orphic, and the irreducible difference between the Greek heritage and the Jewish one. The article goes on to lay bare the suspenseful mood of our epoch, the paradigmatic significance of Pointillism in the digital age, the loneliness and decadence we face in the age of mass communication, and the anaesthetic effect of the gigantic and the miniaturized alike.
ABSTRACT: Thematically speaking, this theoretical essay draws on Flusser’s work on dialogue, the ... more ABSTRACT: Thematically speaking, this theoretical essay draws on Flusser’s work on dialogue, the apparatus, and functionalism and Deleuze’s work on control societies, cybernetic machines, and lines of flight to problematize creativity. While promoting creativity, auto-creativity, meta-creativity, and ludic creativity, it also cautions against the cooptation of creativity and meta-creativity by apparatuses or cybernetic systems. It argues for the rejuvenation of self and world alike, and calls for a minor sensibility (in a Deleuzean sense), a collective ethical awakening, and a shift toward an eco-civilization. There is an irreducible East Asian and an important interological dimension to the essay. At a formal level, the essay is meant as a textual body without organs (BwO) or a taiji-style text, which privileges the flow of textual energy over structural clarity and classicality. As such, the reader is invited to go with the flow.
ORIGINAL TITLE: "The Promise and Nemesis of Creativity in the Age of Generalized Acceleration."
ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: This exigency-driven essay makes the following main points: 1) Creativity is central to our nature as the entropy-defying animal. 2) The digital age at once enhances and hinders our creativity. 3) In view of the ubiquity of apparatuses of capture, we should first and foremost question and critique creativity. 4) More emphasis should be put on auto-creativity, ludic creativity, meta-creativity, and resistance. 5) An ethical awakening or minorization is in order. The essay draws on the work of Nietzsche, Flusser, Deleuze, Serres, and Virilio, as well as insights from Daoism and Chan Buddhism.
This contemplative piece is an interological, khoralogical reception of and response to Flusser's... more This contemplative piece is an interological, khoralogical reception of and response to Flusser's little known fable on the philosophy of language, which he spells out more systematically in his monographs. Proceeding at a sprightly pace, it ventures beyond Flusser and points to the at once illusion-prone and culturally productive nature of language as a human secretion, a world-making sieve, and a womb-like dwelling.
This article traces the shift in media theory from humanism to anti-humanism, or from extensionis... more This article traces the shift in media theory from humanism to anti-humanism, or from extensionism to assemblage theory and machinism. The suggestion is that the anti-humanistic orientation illuminates the human condition even better, especially in the post-industrial and digital ages when Kafkaesque absurdity characterizes human life. The article also points, if only in passing, to the relevance of interology to media-theoretic inquiry.
After reiterating in a rhapsodic mode some of the core understandings that have crystallized sinc... more After reiterating in a rhapsodic mode some of the core understandings that have crystallized since the inception of interality studies about a decade ago, the article articulates an interological view of media, putting the emphasis on medium as khora or the matrix of becoming. Part of the intention is to enact interology interologically. The reader is invited to encounter the article as if it were a Pointillist painting.
After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the... more After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the ancient Chinese sacred book from diverse perspectives. To maintain a fast tempo, and to stay within the bounds of what counts as a probe, the entries have been explained in a suggestive rather than exhaustive manner. Put otherwise, the piece seeks to say more with less, much like how the I Ching itself communicates. Although arranged alphabetically, the entries can be read in any order. As a matter of fact, the reader may experience the shock of recognition when leaping from entry to entry aleatorily. To pay homage to McLuhan, the piece ends with a tetrad on the I Ching. The reader is encouraged to read the piece in dialogue with 'McLuhan and the I Ching: An interological inquiry', 'Flusser and the I Ching' and 'Focal knowledge, medium bias, and metamedium'.
Czech-born thinker Vilém Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Martin Buber. Inf... more Czech-born thinker Vilém Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Martin Buber. Infused with communicology, media philosophy, information theory, game theory, and probability theory, etc., his philosophy of dialogue is refreshing and convincing. In his eyes, telematic dialogue is an effective means to the socialization of freedom. At the same time, he views the filtering of redundancy as indispensable for the dialogic life in the information age. Moreover, Flusser demonstrates to us how interlingual dialogue facilitates the emergence of negentropic styles and the poetic transformation of language. This article succinctly delineates the contours of Flusser's philosophy of dialogue against the backdrop of the emerging line of inquiry known as interality studies.
I What was a prophesy back in 1980 is now a quotidian reality. Like Gilles Deleuze, Flusser sees ... more I What was a prophesy back in 1980 is now a quotidian reality. Like Gilles Deleuze, Flusser sees the computer as a cybernetic machine, the popularization of which marks the rise of a new species of power and the advent of a new type of society, namely, the control society. In this sense, "Disguised as a Computer, a New Power Invades Your Home" is of a piece with Deleuze's "Postscript on Control Societies" (Deleuze, 1995, pp. 177-182). The theme discussed in this mini article of Flusser's is spelt out in "Our Program" (Flusser, 2013, pp. 19-26), "To Govern" (Flusser, 2011, pp. 123-130), and elsewhere. Besides Max Weber's traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic authorities, a new species of authority, i.e., cybernetic authority, has come to the scene. If the age of "cybernetic control" (a tautological expression) has turned most people into nomad artists (who employ shortrange vision only and use their eyes as if they were hands), Deleuzean surfers (who get taken up by a movement that is already in place and adjust to shifting waves in the moment), Certeauan tacticians (who do not have the luxury of foresight and have to resort to a patient, tireless alertness instead), metaphorical Eskimo hunters navigating in a snowstorm by relying on all but imperceptible patterns of the terrain, or the Monkey King in Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West who cannot get outside of Tathāgata's palm, if visual detachment has given way to acoustic immersion and tactile exploration once and for all, Flusser finds it all the more crucial for social agents to update their sensibility with formal disciplines such as informatics, cybernetics, decision theory, and game theory (Flusser, 2013, p. 144). To be guinea pigs, or to be masters of our own condition, that's the question. So Flusser indicates. Yet, as things stand now, politics can only be saved through a depoliticized, formalistic attitude. Therein lies the paradoxical nature of our situation. The new species of power Flusser brings into focus has, as he prophesied, given a second breath to Europe, thus foiling the project of provincializing Europe, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty's book title. II
This article furthers interology by foregrounding its practical efficacity and offers a clue as t... more This article furthers interology by foregrounding its practical efficacity and offers a clue as to the pragmatic orientation and ethical calculus of the Chinese mind. It sheds light on the relational, prudential thinking behind the immemorial Yi Jing, the optimal point envisioned in the Great Learning, and the analogical reasoning behind liology and the Five Agent Theory to characterize the persona of the noble person which the cumulative literature of Chinese ethics (especially Confucian ethics) seeks to constitute. The article then shifts toward a stroboscopical view of a few interological moments in the Western tradition, bringing into focus Paul Virilio as an exemplar. In view of the multifold crisis the world is caught in, the article ends by presenting interology as the meta-program of the civilization to come.
This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in th... more This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in the era of new media from the perspectives of media theory and interology. It takes new media as a McLuhanesque formal cause and holds that a conspicuous characteristic of literary works in the era of new media lies in the salience and normalization of interality. This development means art forms like mosaic and Pointillism have acquired a paradigmatic significance as a result. In revealing this new paradigm, the article also points to some current social maladies that have come with new media. It holds that literary writing should go beyond the mere embodiment of symptoms and make an intervention in media-induced maladies. The article affirms the irreplaceability of experimental literature and serious literature in an era of attention deficit, and points out that form should occupy a paramount position in literary theory, literary criticism, and literary praxis.
The digital age demands that we retune and update our sensibility. In his rigorous, schematic cor... more The digital age demands that we retune and update our sensibility. In his rigorous, schematic corpus, Flusser shows us how. As we prehend his elaborations and intimations, we find ourselves returning to the worldview behind the immemorial I Ching, which epitomizes programmatic thinking and contains an ethical calculus of the expedient and the optimum. This article creates a space of exploration between Flusser's corpus and the I Ching, reveals the resonance in between, poses Flusserian questions about the I Ching, and brings to the fore aspects of the book that otherwise would remain largely unnoticed. It also points out that the digital revolution was predicated upon a Leibnizian reduction of the vitalistic, inter-transforming yin and yang to the bimodal 0 and 1, and points to the desirability of vitalizing the digital. At a moment of self-reflexivity, the article reveals its own accidentally derived hexagrammic structure. It can be read as a hexagram (the six sections) within the frame of another hexagram (the Introduction and the Closing Remarks). The readers are invited to figure out the second hexagram on their own and see it as the "flip to" hexagram.
As social media, virtual reality, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, mobile computi... more As social media, virtual reality, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, mobile computing, cloud computing, virtual collaboration platforms and other new technologies become an integral part of our life, more and more of us are facing a practical issue: insufficiency of psychic energy. Approaching the cyberneticization of the human condition from the perspective of psychic energy makes for a sorely needed critical intervention. This article reveals the vampiric nature of cyberspacetime, looks into vitalistic philosophy and spiritual praxes for coping strategies, and calls for homo ludens to rise above apparatuses of capture and conserve psychic energy for negentropic endeavours, psychosomatic events and spiritual awakening. It proceeds with the assumption that news about one's autopoiesis and becoming is the most important news. Part of the motive is to demonstrate media theory and time-tested spiritual praxes as equipment for living.
This article fulfills a long-felt desire to create an artifact that allows the reader to get a ho... more This article fulfills a long-felt desire to create an artifact that allows the reader to get a holistic sense of interology at a glance. The idea of interality is to the entries explicated below as oneness is to manyness. As a philosophical undertaking, interology wills nothing short of a worldview shift, and an overcoming of traditional Western ontology. Interology has a vitalistic bent and cures clinging. A thorough-going interology is extricating. Although most entries cast interality in an affirmative light, some of them (e.g., alienation) serve as a counterweight to remind the reader that interality is not to be single-mindedly romanticized, in the same way that not all guanxi is life-enhancing. The article is of a piece with all previous and upcoming articles on interality and interology. A few entries are listed as the keywords to pay homage to the author's home discipline, even though interality studies as a line of inquiry is post-disciplinary.
The concept of khôra, which was elaborated but quickly repressed by Plato in Timaeus, has caught ... more The concept of khôra, which was elaborated but quickly repressed by Plato in Timaeus, has caught the attention of a whole coterie of contemporary philosophers. It is often interpreted as "receptacle" or "uterus." Its presence in Deleuze's corpus is largely covert and easily overlooked. Foregrounding its significance in Deleuze's work allows us to get a firmer grasp of his vitalistic thought. Following the lineage of Plato-Leibniz-Whitehead, Deleuze takes khôra to be a screen, sieve, filter, or membrane that makes something issue from chaos, "even if this something differs only slightly." Khôra is the mother or locus of genesis, becoming, negentropy, and the event. Roughly speaking, the function of khôra is twofold: prehension and negative prehension, or simply selective prehension. Two statements made by Deleuze deserve our particular attention: first, "the brain is the mind itself"; second, "the brain is the screen." For our purposes, the second statement can be productively misinterpreted as, "the brain is the khôra." There is textual evidence in Deleuze's book, Negotiations, to support such an interpretation. After sorting out the rationale of Deleuzean vitalism through the lens of khôra, this article moves on to such notions as the intermind, composite khôra, and the global superbrain to probe into the human condition in the era of mental symbiosis between humanity and its artificially intelligent counterparts, and to negotiate the tension between control and becoming.
As a miniscule philosophical event, this essay proceeds in the liminal space between Deleuze stud... more As a miniscule philosophical event, this essay proceeds in the liminal space between Deleuze studies and interality studies. Meant as just another "Go" move improvised in relation to previous moves and countermoves in a horizonless game of intellectual nomadism known as interality studies, it sketches out the contours of Deleuzean interology in the process of falsifying Platonist ontology. I nterology, which derives from the neologism, "interality, " is the counterpart of ontology. A robust, thoroughgoing interology holds the promise of incorporating or encompassing, if not subsuming, ontology, our ideological attachment to the latter notwithstanding. In the final analysis, so-called "entities" are nothing but transient permutations, metastable nodes, or Deleuzean events arising and perishing in a rhizomatic relational field. They are registered by the flux-averse, stability-craving intellect as "the ten thousand things. " If we scrutinize ontology closely enough, we see interology instead, just as "Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome" upon closer examination. 1 Ontol-ogy is to interology as the tree is to the rhizome, and, some might suggest, as Christianity is to Buddhism. Mediumistically speaking, the reign of ontology in the West is attributable to a fateful event that occurred during the span of human existence: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, the psychic and social impact of which took a very long time to penetrate the social fabric, got intensified and democratized by the printing press, and eventually was eroded, if not dissolved, by electric, electronic, and digital media. During this reasonably long interlude theoretically known as history, the civilized West witnessed a gradual ascendance of ontological thinking and a corresponding displacement, repression , and submergence of interological thinking.
To say that interology is a way of life is to say that it is a practical philosophy, an ethics. T... more To say that interology is a way of life is to say that it is a practical philosophy, an ethics. This way of life is characterized by dialogue, communitas, life-enhancing relationality, productive tension, mode switching at opportune intervals, the primacy of leisure, frontiersmanship, liminality, readiness for rapture, playfulness, creativity, the sensation of freedom, and, if one is truly awakened, the capacity for unconditional bliss. The last phrase is a big claim reserved for buddhas, immortals, sages, yogis, and the like. In the final analysis, this understanding of interology is vitalistic in nature. It is preoccupied with autopoiesis, sees life itself as an artistic medium, and treats every instance of doing and non-doing as an opportunity for self-fashioning. Life starts to give off a different aura when one lives this way. Eventually, happiness becomes endogenous, and a species of inalienable spiritual triumphalism (not the vulgar stripe displayed by philistines, nor the type held in contempt by LU Xun 鲁迅) takes over, so much so that one becomes "unswayable by the eight winds," as the Zen expression has it. The Stoic-minded Kenneth Burke would use "heads I win, tails you lose" to characterize this attitude toward life. Spiritual self-sufficiency by no means implies isolationism, since one is always already thrown into relations. It is rather a matter of managing to get vital nourishment wherever one is thrown, and involves an intuitive, prudential praxis of selection and deselection, prehension and negative prehension, affectability and imperturbability, engagement and disengagement.
When we speak of "universal languages" without at least roughly defining the intended concept, we... more When we speak of "universal languages" without at least roughly defining the intended concept, we find ourselves on various slanted planes, sliding from one error into another. The plane, for example, on which music exists as a "universal language," is slanted in relation to the planes where the universal languages "Esperanto" and "symbolic logic" are to be found, where these two planes intersect each other. However, if one tries to avoid this slide into errors by roughly outlining the concept of "universal language" (for example, asking what is meant by the word "language," and for which society a language is "universal"), then one runs the risk of losing grasp of the concrete problem that was originally meant by the word "universal language." This is an unpleasant situation. The situation is uncomfortable because the concrete problem is about to push previously invisible aspects to the foreground, becoming urgent (not to say flammable). Before our eyes, a whole series of codes is about to become universal languages (traffic codes, codes of fashion, gestures, nutrition, etc.), and it is beginning to show that universal languages not only serve to facilitate understanding between different language groups but also contribute to the dissolution of these groups. Therefore, it is more important than ever not to lose grasp of the concrete problem hidden behind the words "language" and "universality," which becomes the problem of massification when these two words are combined. As soon as one steps back from the question of universal languages to see them in the current, concrete context, it becomes apparent that, in this respect (as in so many others), we are in an end time in the apocalyptic sense of the word. The confusion of languages imposed on us in Babel is about to be overcome, and nothing stands in the way of the
Czech-born thinker Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Buber. Infused with com... more Czech-born thinker Flusser is another advocate of the dialogic life after Buber. Infused with communicology, media philosophy, information theory, game theory, and probability theory, etc., his philosophy of dialogue is refreshing and convincing. In his eyes, telematic dialogue is an effective means to the socialization of freedom. At the same time, he views the filtering of redundancy as indispensable for the dialogic life in the information age. Moreover, Flusser demonstrates to us how interlingual dialogue facilitates the emergence of negentropic styles and the poetic modification of language. This article succinctly delineates the contours of Flusser s philosophy of dialogue against the backdrop of the emerging line of inquiry known as interality studies.
This article is the first explicit encounter between interality studies and urban studies. It is ... more This article is the first explicit encounter between interality studies and urban studies. It is meant as a theoretical exploration and a cultural intervention. The concreteness of the city renders the concept of interality relatively tangible, whereas the potency of the concept as a heuristic helps reveal the aesthetic thrust and ethical valence of the city as a spatiotemporal configuration and a constitutive ground mutating and becoming in a milieu or a relational field beyond itself. In this sense, the article implicitly imagines the city as a khora (literally, uterus, receptacle) enveloped within a larger khora. The example of Xi’an at once grounds and furthers the discussion. The article puts forward the notion of a comprehensive interality index but cautions against its hypostatization. The project has been called forth by the collective angst toward the overdevelopment and wholesale makeover of urban China during the past two or three decades. The tacit agenda is to poeticize theoretical discourse.
This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in th... more This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in the era of new media from the perspectives of media theory and interology. It takes new media as a McLuhanesque formal cause, and holds that a conspicuous characteristic of literary works in the era of new media lies in the salience and normalization of interality. This development means art forms like mosaic and Pointillism have acquired a paradigmatic significance as a result. In revealing this new paradigm, the article also points to some current social maladies that have come with new media. It holds that literary creation should go beyond the mere embodiment of symptoms and make an intervention in current social maladies. The article affirms the irreplaceability of experimental literature and serious literature in an era of attention deficit, and points out that form should occupy a paramount position in literary theory, literary criticism, and literary praxis.
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Papers by Peter Zhang
ORIGINAL TITLE: "The Promise and Nemesis of Creativity in the Age of Generalized Acceleration."
ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: This exigency-driven essay makes the following main points: 1) Creativity is central to our nature as the entropy-defying animal. 2) The digital age at once enhances and hinders our creativity. 3) In view of the ubiquity of apparatuses of capture, we should first and foremost question and critique creativity. 4) More emphasis should be put on auto-creativity, ludic creativity, meta-creativity, and resistance. 5) An ethical awakening or minorization is in order. The essay draws on the work of Nietzsche, Flusser, Deleuze, Serres, and Virilio, as well as insights from Daoism and Chan Buddhism.
ORIGINAL TITLE: "The Promise and Nemesis of Creativity in the Age of Generalized Acceleration."
ORIGINAL ABSTRACT: This exigency-driven essay makes the following main points: 1) Creativity is central to our nature as the entropy-defying animal. 2) The digital age at once enhances and hinders our creativity. 3) In view of the ubiquity of apparatuses of capture, we should first and foremost question and critique creativity. 4) More emphasis should be put on auto-creativity, ludic creativity, meta-creativity, and resistance. 5) An ethical awakening or minorization is in order. The essay draws on the work of Nietzsche, Flusser, Deleuze, Serres, and Virilio, as well as insights from Daoism and Chan Buddhism.