Of problems, solutions, and filing cabinets

We are wrong to believe that the true and the false can only be brought to bear on solutions, that they only begin with solutions. This prejudice is social, for society, and the language that transmits its order-words, ‘set up’ ready-made problems, as if they were drawn out of ‘the city’s administrative filing cabinets,’ and force us to ‘solve’ them, leaving only a thin margin of freedom. Moreover, this prejudice goes back to childhood, to the classroom: It is the school teacher who ‘poses’ the problems; the pupil’s task is to discover the solutions. In this way we are kept in a kind of slavery. True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. — Deleuze, Bergsonism

Filed under: Bookshelf, Kids

The Man in the High Castle

The “hook” of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is the alternative rendering of the pre- and posthistory of World War II, with Germany and Japan winning the war and occupying nearly the entire world. But what’s striking about this imagining is how little it differs from the postwar actuality.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Control, Lines of Flight, Subjectivity, Value

Against the Day

I’m more than halfway through Pynchon’s Against the Day, and so far, like most of his books, it is by turns enthralling, excruciating, beautiful, and boring. I’ll wait until I finish the book to talk about the story and thematic elements, but I just wanted to put in a quick note about something that I keep thinking about it as I read it.

Filed under: Badiou, Bookshelf, Subjectivity

Tuesday Faulkner: The value of women

It is a well-known fact that the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjuncture.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Control, Economy, Faulkner, Work

123

Mike has forced me to participate in the page-123 meme that’s been going around.

Filed under: Bookshelf

Entrepreneurship/exodus

Paolo Virno’s latest book, Jokes and Innovative Action, has been translated and will be released by trailblazing indie label Semiotext(e) next month. Gerald Raunig has a review.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Lines of Flight

Escape

…But just because they are avenues of escape and not fantasies doesn’t mean they are all the same, or that they are all desirable. It seems to me there are two kinds of escape, at least, and here again, D.H. Lawrence’s stories in The Woman Who Rode Away outline the contours of each of them.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Lines of Flight, Minor, Opposition

I don’t get you

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Control, Lines of Flight

Not literature

Today is William Faulkner’s 110th birthday. From The New York Times:

In April of 1962, less than three months before his death on July 6, William Faulkner made a trip many thought he wouldn’t. As a favor to a relative, the reclusive and taciturn writer spent two days visiting at West Point.

The Times covered Faulkner’s visit in a dispatch by George Barrett, which ran under this 4-column headline: “Faulkner Inspects West Point, Gives a Reading and Stays for a Chat: Faulkner Finds Cadets Knowing: Corps Studied Works for Nobel Laureate’s Visit.”

[...]

He showed surprise when almost all the cadets broke into extended applause for his reply to a question concerning the “spirit of nationalism” in which he said that “if the spirit of nationalism gets into literature it stops being literature.”

Filed under: Bookshelf

Corruption

The final Lemony Snicket book is, so far (we’re on chapter 10), kind of a disappointment, mostly because of its not-so-veiled personification of the Bushits and their political failings.

Filed under: Bookshelf, Opposition