Jesse Roode > Jesse's Quotes

“The emphasis on empathy accomplishes several significant goals in view of a posthuman theory of subjectivity. Firstly, it reappraises communication as an evolutionary tool. Secondly, it identifies in emotions, rather than in reason, the key to consciousness.”
― Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman

“The crisis of Humanism means that the structural others of the modern humanistic subject re-emerge with a vengeance in postmodernity (Braidotti, 2002). It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of postmodernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent ‘others’: the women’s rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonization movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements are the voices of the structural Others of modernity. They inevitably mark the crisis of the former humanist ‘centre’ or dominant subject-position and are not merely anti-humanist, but move beyond it to an altogether novel, posthuman project.”
― Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman

“In my view, posthuman ethics urges us to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘others’ in a vital web of complex interrelations. This ethical principle breaks up the fantasy of unity, totality and one-ness, but also the master narratives of primordial loss, incommensurable lack and irreparable separation. What I want to emphasize instead, in a more affirmative vein, is the priority of the relation and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.”
― Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman

“Life is desire which essentially aims at expressing itself and consequently runs on entropic energy: it reaches its aim and then dissolves, like salmon swimming upstream to procreate and then die. The wish to die can consequently be seen as the counterpart and as another expression of the desire to live intensely. The corollary is more cheerful: not only is there no dialectical tension between Eros and Thanatos, but these two entities are really just one life-force that aims to reach its own fulfilment. Posthuman vital materialism displaces the boundaries between living and dying.”
― Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman

“Life is a body ripe for viruses. To be flesh and blood is problematic, I thought. To be stuck in your skin, to be merely entrails in a skin and then, having given your skin up to medicine, to no longer have that skin to yourself, to be forever hidden away behind a body, and the functional extremities of the heart, neurons, and immune system in which it begins and ends, like a knot that cannot be undone, binding us to a plot larger than ourselves–a plot where we are bound to our own body as others are bound to their bodies.”
― Brandon W. Teigland, Metapatterning for Disconnection

“A classless society is the direction history has taken. We have the convulsions of the communist horizon always before us. No one can escape from one system without being immediately obliged to adopt another system that is just as closed, or more so. If the East is post-communist and the West is post-capitalist then what is the world?”
― Brandon W. Teigland, Metapatterning for Disconnection

“The whole area was crowded with media-generated representations, holographic advertising inducing consumers to imagine that synthetic drugs would bring them good health, that cellular phones would break down the walls of isolation, and that vacations would restore the land and the ocean to them. They wanted consumers to console themselves with the idea that this paltry forgery, this fraudulent, counterfeit luxury surrounding them was really theirs to wallow in, that it existed, that it was real, atmospherically. In whatever direction I looked, the city appeared more and more deserted, the surroundings more desolate, and I was overcome by an unbearable sense of loneliness.”
― Brandon W. Teigland, Metapatterning for Disconnection

“This exuberant beauty was in the damp spring stars. In the many years of cold rain rippling across the screen of cypresses. In the brambles and the rose bushes. In the rabbit nibbling its way through the garden and the doves murmuring in the vines and shade. In the alpine valleys. In the bays and among the highlands. In the clouds and the eagles, the wind, and the rising sun. In the roots of the chestnut tree, in the ferns and the ghost pipe, in the spores of lion’s mane, in the sterile conk of chaga. In the rocky cliffs that rose sovereign. In the rocks over which mountain goats leaped. In the trenches of seaweed. In the crushed stones and shells from the beach. In the brush-covered resting places of deer. In the hulks and ruins of empty estates, abandoned and alone with lichen on the stucco. In the towns glistening in the heat and in the cheerful, serene sound of cathedral bells. In automobiles and pedestrians. In the children and the old people.”
― Brandon W. Teigland, Metapatterning for Disconnection

“Nature doesn’t appear. It doesn’t appear in the overarching patterns of patterns, not in spheres, sheets, tubes, borders-pores, layers, binaries, centres, calendars-time, arrows, breaks, or cycles, and it does not appear when you consider other metapatterns such as gradients, clusters, voids-space, rigidity, emergence, webs-networks, or triggers. The vague notion of nature as a way of exploring the fundamental connectedness of the phenomenal world is useless. All nature is useless to me except as a science. Nature ends with the word science in the same way that language ends with the word God .”
― Brandon W. Teigland, Metapatterning for Disconnection