frances kafka

Thanks to Streetli for comments on an early draft The account of science given in Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's What is Philosophy intriguingly enough begins with chaos. We should be careful not to identify "chaos" too directly with what the scientists talk about when it comes to chaos theory, chaos science (and we must be careful not to over-excitedly over-extrapolate from the popular literature on chaos, as its often done), and yet there are certain resonances between the two. Deleuz...

[This is a series of preliminary notes, a beginning toward a somewhat larger project of mine. How big it is, as of yet, I'm not sure yet. Enjoy the ride.] the ideas men Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." What is...

This is a brief series of notes on what I am going to briefly refer to as the formal systems of interpretation of people. Formal systems for short. Here I'm mostly going to look at those pseudo-scientific systems of people classification, taken as formal systems used to interpret human personality and behaviour, and refer to as examples the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (and C. G. Jung's earlier work in this matter), the Enneagram, astrology, socionics, and even the Big 5 personality system (while...

reach out to five different people for help and write about your experiences @valor_zhang Opposites come together like that, just like that. Don't you see? It's easy to deal with many things, in others and in yourself, but ambivalence is not one of them, that mixture of love and hate, approval and disapproval, a tendency toward X and a tendency toward not-X. Nancy McWilliams, in her magisterial tome Psychoanalytic Diagnoses, quotes this rather interesting passage by P. E. Slater, which I thi...

Walter Kaufmann, in his translation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra has an interesting aside in his Editor's Note to the first part, in his description of Part 4, "On the Despisers of the Body". "The psychological analysis begun in the previous chapter ['On The Afterworldly'] is here carried further. The use of the term 'ego' influenced Freud, via Georg Groddeck." [1] The relation between Freud and Nietzsche is ambiguous, but it does seem to be the consensus that there are some rather def...

A genre is a conversation that moves in fits and starts, breaks and discontinuities. There isn’t an isolated set of criteria or even a status family resemblance that we can recognise as a genre. There are two canons, personal and public, and how books are written and how they are read depends precisely on this interplay of canons. The public canon of science fiction contains Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, Aldiss, Dick, Moorcock, Gibson and so on, stabilized over the years by word of mouth, ...

There is a sense in which thinking is about breaking through the cliches of your general mental activity. You have a particular set of cached thoughts—a specific pattern of ideas that goes from A to B to C and so on, not necessarily because you are right, but rather because that is what you are used to. There are two ways to make yourself think. The first way is to open yourself up to something that is of sufficient complexity that is difficult to easily integrate into your mental schema. The ...

Immanence is less a state you are in, but more of a continuous operation, a process you inhabit, a steady dismantling and production. Spinoza produces modes and relations between propositions that reach out and grow out of themselves in the five books of the Ethics, [a production that touches the infinite, in the movement from substance to infinite substance, from a finite mode to the infinity of God]. Each operation of immanence is an experiment, a moment of risk, a throw of the dice. This ri...