“I feel that people don’t really do what they want to do. And I think it’s much more important that you do what you want to even if it’s wrong. We all get so chicken that we’re afraid of our jobs, we’re afraid of our wives, we’re afraid of our children, we’re afraid to go out in the street. I really think it’s because we’re too worried about the way we would appear. Fear is the basis for everything terrible. Fear is what causes all the horror in the world. No man achieves anything through fear. Fear isn’t constructive. So the only thing that can save people in a spiritual or religious or in any way is to say I’m not afraid anymore. The minute they say they are not afraid they cannot commit a wrong act. There will be no such thing as a wrong act.”

"…social labour is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kind. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and matchinnumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of info-commodity, semiocapital."

Are You Working Too Much?  Sternberg Press, 2011

Thinking about philosophy early this morning as unable to sleep, and I was reminded of this from Werner Herzog which seems as good a philosophy to me as any other I’ve come across. Courtesy of Paul Cronin’s book, Herzog on Herzog 

last night I went to see Žižek talk about media at the ICA. He is truly energetic, not only in his philosophy but also with his body where his gestural movements seem to lift and fall with the intensities of his feelings for things. I love him. 

There were two things in particular he spoke of that made perfect sense to me. That of thinking being painful, like an attack on the subject and attempting to find truth and meaning is an agonising process – I can relate to on having just written a big paper and my mind being worn out and sore, but sore like legs that have run to far, where you have felt the full use of them. He also spoke of jokes as being a great portal into serious thought. He told us a great joke: a Montenegro man who was so lazy he took two glasses to his bedside at night, one full with water and one empty, so if he was thirsty or not in the night all bases were covered. (Žižek explained how this was also a great example of dialectical Hegelian double negation – or something – I’m afraid I know nothing about Hegel) But what this ludicrous tale did was exemplify the power of jokes to make you laugh and make you think. I’ve been thinking about jokes and the way they access a freedom to thought, so I loved this.

‘Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of land at all times.” Deleuze & Guattari, A 1000 Plateaus

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées #72

Deleuze on his idea of what love might be: “…compositions of relations with one another … And this type of flexibility or of rythm which occurs when you present your body, and from that time your soul also, you present your soul or your body, under the relation that is composed directly with the relation of the other. You truly feel that this is a strange happiness.” I guess one could say the same for an encounter with an artwork that matters to you.