Pia Jacques

Para-fiction : Fiction experienced as truth, achieving the truth-status through a mimicry of history.
Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility, Carriet Lambert-Beatty

Modern style of interpretation excavates, and destroys.
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag

Ailleurs le désir spasmodique du Presque Vrai naît simplement d’une réaction névrotique devant le vide de souvenirs : le Faux Absolu est le fils de la conscience malheureuse d’un présent sans épaisseur.
La Guerre du Faux, Umberto Eco

How do we know the moderns are aware that they have never been modern? Because, far from keeping the facts separate from the fiction and the theory of this separation from the practice of mediation, they endlessly, obsessively fix up, repair, and overcome these broken fragments.
The Slight Surprise of Action, Bruno Latour

Thinking about the container of knowledge – and its source. Rather than of the usual taught discourse of human supremacy over the earth (its overall control and domination) rethinking the human’s position on the planet. As today, what is actually ‘under control’? Is it because that we believe we know the consequences, then why are we still acting to a world heading to its unescapable end?
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin

"War is destructive but abondonness is even more destructive."
Letters to Max, Eric Baudelaire

We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves could be lost-mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance. (p.94)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

'archive' is its verb form, thus, refers not to the process of fixing and determining meaning, of enacting the connection of truth and power in Foucault's sense, but instead the opposite, that is, to the process and the promise if unfixing meaning, of detaching truth from power. (...) To 'archive' in its Enlightenment sense, thus, is inextricably linked to the promise of detaching truth from the exclusive domain power by moving it from the realm of private discretion into the realm of public judgement, where it invites re-examination and re-interpretation. (p.148)
Institutionality as Enlightenment Blake Stimson, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional Attitudes (Amsterdam: Valiz)

"Where are the disappeared?"
Judith Butler

Silverfish in the Minecraft videogames, Minecraft wiki, Gamepedia: The silverfish in Minecraft can be offensive if you are attacked by many of them, but if you create one, it becomes your pet and is then your ally.

The turning operations with which the tradition ends bring the beginning to light in a twofold sense. The very assertion of one side of the opposites – fides against intellectus, practice against theory, sensuous, perishable life against permanent, unchanging, supra-sensuous truth – necessarily brings to light the repudiated opposite and shows that both have meaning and significance only in this opposition. (p.36)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

Si (…) la richesse des sociétés dans lesquelles prédomine le mode de production capitaliste apparait comme un amas de marchandises, les expositions universelles sont le temple dans lequel les marchandises perdent tout contact avec le réel, avec leur valeur d’utilisation, et la plupart des contacts avec leur valeur d’échange, pour devenir de simples signes connotatifs, à leur valeur d’échange, pour devenir de simples signes connotatifs, à haute température émotive. (p.264)
La Guerre du Faux, Umberto Eco

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction (…) loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag

Art accepts its status quo, as a corpse, following its transformation into a mere representation. Obsolete, reducible to a pure form. (…) This, then enhances political action. The present status quo is already abolished : Action to its destruction will ultimately succeed creates an ultimate horizon for revolutionary perspective. (p.60)
In the Flow, Boris Groys

The innovations of the foreseeable future might even become useful in some circumstances but do not promise great gains in employment or GDP growth. (…) This implies that the contribution of the innovation to employment will be small and its impact on GDP growth will likely be modest and overestimated insofar as the accounts fail to account accurately for the negative externalities caused by the destructive forces of creative destruction.
Has creative destruction become more destructive?, Komlos

Our contemporary age seems to be different from all the other historically known ages: Never before has humanity been so interested in its own contemporaneity. The middle ages were interested in eternity, the Renaissance was interested in the past, modernity was interested in the future. Our era is interested primarily in itself. (p.137)
In the Flow, Boris Groys

Production is unforeseeable, you never know what is going to come out. Coordination between destruction and production New unpredictable and unforeseeable practice: the destructive is also the productive character in this new sense. Within production being related to melancholia, the destructive character is the cheerful counterpart : instead of interpreting the world, he changes it. The relation of destruction and production is closer than thought. ‘He has few needs: least of all, to know what will take the place of the destroyed’
The Organization of Destruction, Benjamin Noys

History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies.
The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway

Framing becomes deinstitutionalized and the frame fictionality de-fictionalized. (p.174 )
In the Flow, Boris Groys

Politics of production (‘my little writing factory’): the destructive character can be seen as a figuration of the disruption of capitalist production and especially of creative destruction and yet still lies in an epitopal proximity.
The Organization of Destruction, Benjamin Noys

Creative destruction refers to the incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones. This restructuring process permeates major aspects of macroeconomic performance, not only long-run growth but also economic fluctuations, structural adjustment and the functioning of factor markets. Over the long run, the process of creative destruction accounts for over 50 per cent of productivity growth. At business cycle frequency, restructuring typically declines during recessions, and this add a significant cost to downturns. Obstacles to the process of creative destruction can have severe short- and long-run macroeconomic consequences.
Creative destruction, Ricardo J. Caballero

The harmful effects obviously include the loss of income but also “increased uncertainty, anxiety, devaluation of human capital, dislocation, status losses, etc. An innovative economy may be an ‘uncomfortable’ system in which to live (Schubert 2015 , 13).”
Has creative destruction become more destructive?, Komlos

Screenshot 00:30, 25.08.2021, Word Corrector

Of course, it is impossible to do without the word, but when we use it, we should be aware of the difference between true memory, which today subsists only in gestures and habits, unspoken craft traditions, intimate physical knowledge, ingrained reminiscences and spontaneous reflexes, and memory transformed by its passage through history, which is practically the opposite: willful and deliberate, experienced as a duty rather than spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjective, rather than social, collective and all-embracing. How did the transition from the first, immediate form of memory to the second, indirect form, take place?
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

By setting the birth of the Christ as a chronological basis, opens a twofold infinity of past and future eliminates all notions of beginning and end, establishing mankind in a potential earthly immortality. (p.68)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

The stagnating life satisfaction might be a reflection of the fact that as new products come into the market, they devalue the ability of existing products to generate utility and create new needs whose satisfaction requires renewed effort. However, satisfaction is continuously interrupted as new needs are incessantly created. In a short time we adapt to the new products – we get used to them – so that they fail to satisfy and we aspire to more; so in this way satisfaction continues to elude the modern consumer.
Has creative destruction become more destructive?, Komlos

Actually, creative destruction is being taken to a new level: “devastating innovation” with no consideration of how much of it will improve the human condition and how much damage its spillover effects cause. The transition to a post-industrial economy has been far from advantageous to the well-being of a substantial share of the population.
Has creative destruction become more destructive?, Komlos

'Mnemotechnics' (Renaissance ideals related to) the art of memorizing an order of artifactual or natural productions through their spatial disposition.

'The archive' as this corpus mysticum is sometimes referred to generally, is understood to be a mix of social structure and cultural form that organizes knowldege in a manner that governs, delimits and directs the kind of insights we gather and pleasures we enjoy, and all largely below our level of our cognition, or at least, below the level we admit publicly. Regardless of whether we are referring to the economy of art, its bureaucracy, epistemology or cultural value, the foundational metaphor for such horizontalist accounts is Adam Smith's invisible hand. (p.142)
Institutionality as Enlightenment Blake Stimson, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional Attitudes (Amsterdam: Valiz)

‘I thus try at one and the same to historicize the transcendental and to de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility. Statements or forms of expression undoubtedly depend on historically constituted systems of possibilities.’ (p.50)
The Politics of Aesthetics,Rancière

umpire
noun(in some sports) an official who watches a game or match closely to enforce the rules and arbitrate on matters arising from the play. • a person chosen to arbitrate between contending parties. verb [no object] act as an umpire in a game or match. A position from which to judge the forces fighting with each other with an impartial eye.

The less memory is experienced from within, the greater its need for external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory – hence the obsession with the archive that marks an age and in which we attempt to preserve not only all the disappearing, coupled with the anxiety about the precise significance of the present and uncertainty about the future, invests even the humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially memorable.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

The destructive distortions of the tradition were all caused by men who had experienced something new which they tried almost instantaneously to overcome and resolve into something old. (p.29)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

We tend to speak about the flow of things, information and economic events as if this flow were neutral, as if nobody in particular was responsible for it. (…) It us actually what makes art political — that artists take individual or collective responsibility for what they are offering to us. (p.120)
In the Flow, Boris Groys

Everything has become perishable, except perhaps human heart; immortality is no longer the medium in which mortals move, but has taken its homeless refuge in the very heart of mortality; immortal things, works and deeds, events and even words, though men might still be able to externalize, reify as it were, the remembrance of their hearts, have lost their home in the world; since the world, since nature is perishable and since man-made things once they have come into being, share the fate of all being – they begin to perish the moment they have come into existence. (p.44)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

The problem of scientific objectivity, as the nineteenth century posed it, owed so much to historical self-misunderstanding and philosophical confusion that the real issue at stake, the issue of impartiality, which is indeed decisive not only for the “science” of history but for all historiography from poetry and storytelling onward, has become difficult to recognize. (p.51)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

It is as though I had the right to call the heel of my shoe a hammer because I, like most women, use it to drive nails into the wall. p;102
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

Lieux de mémoire arise out of a sense that there is no such thing as spontaneous memory, hence that we must create archives, mark anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies and authenticate documents, because such things no longer happen as a matter of course. When certain minorities create protected enclaves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is true of all lieux de mémoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history will soon be swept away.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

Controversially, if history did not seize upon memories in order to distort and transform them, to mould them and turn them to stone, they would not turn into lieux de mémoire which emerge in two stages: moments of history are plucked out of the flow of history, then returned to it – no longer quite alive but not entirely dead, like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded. (…)
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

The growing meaninglessness of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end. p.78
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

As traditional memory has vanished, we have felt called upon to accumulate fragments, reports, documents, images and speeches – any tangible sign of what was – as if this expanding dossier might some day be subject to subpoena (Subpoena: to order someone to go to a law court to answer questions) as evidence before who knows what tribunal of history.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

Modernism is a history of infections. Malevich: Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity; Marcel Broodthaers declared he wanted to be an artist to become insincere; (…) (p.72)
In the Flow, Boris Groys

The trace negates the sacred but retains its aura. We cannot know in advance what should be remembered, hence we refrain from destroying anything and put everything in archives instead. The realm of the memorable has expanded without reason: we suffer from hypertrophy of memory, which is inextricably intertwined with our sense of memory’s loss and concomitant industrialization.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

Solastologie: Le sentiment d'avoir perdu le réconfort d'un monde familier, et qui nous rend attentifs à la perte et à ce que nous perdons.
Ce mal du pays sans exil, Basile Morizot

There is the fact of the basic incompatibility between the traditional concepts making labor itself the very symbol of man’s subjection to necessity, and the modern age which saw labor elevated to express man’s positive freedom, the freedom of productivity. (…) Values are social commodities that have no significance of their own but, like other commodities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and commerce. (p.32)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

The prophylactic warding off of the implicitly anticipated problem of dryness, the problem of thinking in boxes, the problem of power realized through the statis of epistemes, was this given in the enlightenment ideal of progress, in the idea that the method of compartilization - that is knowledge itself or fixing fixing and determining meaning in order to master it - would change or open out to be ever more refined, more nuanced and generative of understanding. In the future, it was assumed, we will be able to understand the past and so holding on to raw data - archiving it - serves an investment in this promise, as an investeent in the idea that the meaning of any given archival object can, in principle, forever be contested, revised, expanded upon and better understood. (p.148)
Institutionality as Enlightenment Blake Stimson, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional Attitudes (Amsterdam: Valiz)

’L’universalisme n’est pas rejeté mais particularisé, ce qui manque est une nouvelle forme d’articulation entre l’universel et le particulier’
The Return of the political, Chantal Mouffe

Massa maakt de kassa.
Bezoek vernietiging centra, Hoorn, 19.05.2021

Occasionally, however, the same life which needs forgetfulness demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness. (p.22)
On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life, Frederich Nietzsche

(to) SAND
verb [with object]
1 smooth or polish with sandpaper or a mechanical sander: mask off the area to be painted and sand it down | (as noun sanding) : some recommend a light sanding between the second and third coats.
2 sprinkle or overlay with sand, to give better purchase on a surface.
PHRASES
the sands (of time) are running out
the allotted time is nearly at an end. [with reference to the sand of an hourglass.]
« Sous les paves, la plage »

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away.
The Destructive Character, Walter Benjamin

Universality of ideas is replaced by universality of access. (p.157)
In the Flow, Boris Groys

To our modern way of thinking nothing is meaningful in and by itself, not even history or nature taken each as a whole, and certainly not particular occurrences in the physical order or specific historical events. There is a fateful enormity in this state of affairs. Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every individual entity that is visible to us, degrading them into functions of an over-all process. The enormity of this change is likely to escape us if we allow ourselves to be misled by such generalities as the disenchantment of the world or the alienation of man, generalities that often involve a romanticized notion of the past. (p.64)
Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

The destructive character does his work, the only work he avoids is being creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
The Destructive Character, Walter Benjamin

Quintessence
noun The pure, highly concentrated essence of a thing; The purest or most typical instance.

The platter of problems and theories, thesis and worldviews are a fiction. Hercoinner is a emblem and symbol of poverty, impoverishment and simplification. Destructibility allows it become simplified.
TERRIBLE SIMPLIFICATEUR that is what the destructive character is.
The Destructive Character, Walter Benjamin

The corruption of democracy has created a strange, de-politized figure represented. Within the movements of rebellion have to act, have the ability to refuse subjectivity. Destroy within the presence? Must bigger force than all human kind together; it is happening anyway. One’s own destruction? (Jewish tradition?) Destruction not for the stake of destruction but as a mean: who has the character to destroy the presence? Effacing the traces… Reconstructing to the other events of time… The spectral presence: can you grab the presence? Is capitalism about not being able to grasp the presence.
Comments on The Destructive Character by Walter Benjamin, Irving Wohlfarth

Destruction enables new construction: the attempt to grasp production (and reproduction) from its capitalist framing, and to correlate with ‘creative’ destruction. The thought image of the destructive character promises to embody this asymmetrical negation. This embodiment of destruction is a complex and difficult matter: the organization of destruction is a process without guarantees and unstable. The new can only come about the seizure of a ruin, novelty will only take place on the basis of a fully accomplished destruction. A decomposition (Bourdieu)
The Organization of Destruction, Benjamin Noys

To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to ‘land’ somewhere. (p.2) (...) The very notion of soil is changing (p.4)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

The question of landing somewhere did not occur earlier to the peoples who have decided to “modernize” the planet. It arose – ever so painfully – only for those who for four centuries had been subjected the impact of the “great discoveries” of empires, modernization, development and finally globalization. (p.7)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

Public action must be oriented toward a recognizable goal. However open to dispute the word ‘progressive’ may be, it is highly unlikely that anyone can be mobilized by a call to ‘regress.’ With the ‘end of progress’, the prospect of living less well than one’s parents, the project of learning to shrivel up slowly is hardly going to electrify the crowds. (p.49)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

Hence the classic division between knowledge seen from afar but assured, and imagination, which saw things up close but without grounding in reality: at worst, simple fairy tales; at best, ancient myths, respectable but without verifiable content. (p.69)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

The perversity of the modernization front was that, by ridiculing the notion of tradition as archaic, it preluded any form of transmission, inheritance, or revival, and thus of transformation – in short, of engendering. (p.88)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

Memory-history seized on this treasure trove and used it as the basis of its work, disseminating the fruits of its labours through myriad social institutions tailored to the purpose. Now historians have abandoned the cult of the document, society as a whole has acquired the religion of preservation and archivization. What we call memory is in fact a gigantic and breathtaking effort to store the material vestiges of what we cannot possibly remember, thereby amassing an unfathomable collection of things that we might someday need to recall.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

The liquidation of memory has led to a general frenzy of recording. Within a single generation the imaginary museum of memory has expanded beyond all belief.
Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora

Je m’explique : un mince vernis de réalité immédiate recouvre la matière, naturelle ou fabriquée, et quiconque désire demeurer dans le présent, avec le présent, sur le présent, doit prendre garde de n’en pas briser la tension superficielle. Sinon, le faiseur de miracles inexpérimenté cesse de marcher sur les eaux pour descendre debout parmi les poissons ébahis. La suite dans un instant. (p.12)
La transparence des choses, Vladimir Nabokov

First of all, generate alternative descriptions. How could we act politically without having inventoried, surveyed, measured, centimeter by centimeter, being by being, person by person, the stuff that makes up the Earth for us? (p.94)
Down to Earth, Bruno Latour

Living in a constant state of emergency, as disasters are being set out of the way of the constant acceleration. In Benjamin’s critique of the development of the productive forces as a sign of progress, the question remains on the level of a pragmatic proposal as Benjamin’s doesn’t go into more deeply: true on the concept of history but not as we read retroactively. The organization of destruction: for far too long the accent was placed on creativity, people are only creative to the extent that they avoid tasks and supervision. What we have here is not creative destruction but destructive production, or a constructive destruction. The difficulty of a transform material that remains variable and non-positing is that variability.
The Organization of Destruction, Benjamin Noys

References