groundless

Seen as originary, disorientation is always constituted by identifiable, characteristic orientation-markers (cardinalité( designating its borders, in- dicating North and South, Orient and Occident. In disorientation, how- ever, Orient and Occident are not simply geographic givens; Orient and Occident designate particular experiences of disorientation. Such cardi- nal directional markers, insofar as they open (to) the horizon of meaning and configure the motif for all motivation, can be reified only through experience of and in the world. Observed over significant lengths of time, establishment of such cardinal points is what “adjusts” both techno-gen- esis and socio-genesis. Through this positing of directions and their ad- justments, disorientation opens a space of difference, between here and there, public and private, profane and sacred, strange and familiar, and so on. Adjustments (re-)orient, and originary disorientation is converted, if not occluded. If such adjustments are the engine of all motivation, and if they must be oriented, it is because the orient (the other) is missing. From this missing other, cardinal designation produces a figure (a motive that is a goal) in which what is being oriented is reflected—the Orient is this mirage.3
This cardinal orientation is not successfully occurring today; thus we are suffering from disorientation as such.

stiegler / t&t 2 / Intro

Althusser had warned (citing Bergson), “One has ‘to wait until the sugar dissolves’”:

On Thursday the 29^th and fifth day of his sicknesse, hopes began a little to diminish; howbeit that morning his headache was somewhat lessened, his breath also, which before was short, being longer, which moved him to put on his cloathes, endeavouring to rise as he had done before; but his head being so giddy that he was not able to stand alone, he was forced to betake him to his bed againe; from henceforth ever keeping to his bed. This evening there appeared a fatall signe, about two hours or more within the night, bearing the colours and shew of a rainbow*, which hung directly crosse and over Saint James’s House. It was first perceived about seven a clocke at night, which I my selfe did see, which divers others looking thereupon with admiration, continuing until past bed-time, being no more seene. This night was unquiet and he rested ill.

* A lunar rainbow, as presaging the death of Princes and the desolation of Kingdoms.

Desert in the desert (the one signaling toward the other), desert of a messianicity without messianism and therefore without doctrine and religious dogma, this arid and horizon-deprived expectation retains nothing of the great messianisms of the Book except the relation to the arrivant who may come—or never come—but of whom, by definition, I must know nothing in advance. Nothing, except that justice, in the most enigmatic sense of the word, is at stake. And, for the same reason, revolution, in that the event and justice are tied to this absolute rip in the foreseeable concatenation of historical time. The rip of eschatology in teleology, from which it must be dissociated here, which is always difficult. It is possible to renounce a certain revolutionary imagery or all revolutionary rhetoric, even to renounce a certain politics of revolution, so to speak, perhaps even renounce every politics of revolution, but it is not possible to renounce revolution without also renouncing the event and justice.
—Jacques Derrida

A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible.
—Jacques Rancière

From Philip Armstrong / Recticulations

bird

portolano

Fredric Jameson (1991)

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.
Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.
Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite – correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

scapegoat

hans baldung grien / fighting horses /woodcut /1545

silver the cannibal horse

quince

Banksia serrata

plate and print

Joseph Banks' Floriegium
Sydney Parkinson travelled to the Pacific with Banks on board Cook's ship, the Endeavour. He made nearly 1000 drawings... but died on the voyage. Banks employed 18 engravers to produce 753 copper plates for his anthology of flowers. He sent proofs to Linnaeus who gave Banks' name to a new genus of plant.

swing

Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony - October 18, 2011 in Berlin)

http://excerpter.wordpress.com/2006/10/02/friedrich-kittler-the-city-is-a-medium/

no tomb without a culture, no culture without a tomb

Anthony Viscount Montague's "A Book of Orders and Rules", by Sir Sibbald David Scott, in Sussex Archaeological Collections, vol. vii, London (1854) at Google Books

pirates

pages

the love of horses

back and forth

glue