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Deleuze: for him le pli, or fold, describes the way we swallow the exterior world, invert it and then flip it back outwards again, and, in so doing, form our own identity.
all the various files would one day turn out to have been related all along, their sudden merging leading me to crack the case. What was “the case”? I didn’t know—but that was the whole point: the answer to that would become clear once all the dossiers hove into alignment.
Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe. My use of the word tribe here isn’t fanciful; it’s modern that’s the dubious term. The logic underlying the corporation is completely primitive. The corporation has its gods, its fetishes, its high priests and its outcasts
It has its rituals, beliefs and superstitions, its pools of homespun expertise and craft and, conversely, its Unknowns or Unspokens.
This ruinous edifice (he’d say), which serves as a glaring reminder that its would-be occupants are scattered about the earth, spread horizontally rather than vertically, babbling away in all these different tongues—this tower becomes of interest only once it has flunked its allotted task. Its ruination is the precondition for all subsequent exchange, all cultural activity.
The first move for any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness. I read this for the first time, long before I worked for him, in Creative Review; then later, with slight variations, in Design Monthly, Contemporary Business Journal and Icon.
It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them.
Forget universities! he snorted, interrupting me again. These are irrelevant; they’ve become businesses—and not even good ones.
Buckles are finicky; once you remove hands from the equation, mastery of them becomes well-nigh impossible.
Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string.
This upset me, much more than the fact of Petr’s illness did. For crying out loud, I felt like shouting to the nurse, ward manager, whoever: if you can’t save these people, at least clean the windows.
Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact—the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies—for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture—the one that’s turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being
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I was thinking of that other guy, who went mad. What other guy? I asked. The famous philosopher, she answered. Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer or someone; the one who said that God was dead. Oh, I told her: you mean Nietzsche. Maybe, she said. I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche, I said. Whoever, she replied; it doesn’t matter: the point is—I found this out later—he saw a horse being beaten in a square in Turin, and he lost it. Can you imagine? After all the questions that he must have grappled with, the complex, universal stuff he’d thought and written about, it was a horse that did his mind in: a
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