Empiricism | Humean inversion

Arguing against Empiricism's main epistemological claim that "everything finds its origin in the sensible and in the operations of the mind upon the sensible" Deleuze finds in Hume "a model of the genesis of subjectivity" (Delanda, 2006). Deleuze in his text on Hume (1972) writes about Hume's great inversion that places empiricism in a higher power: "if ideas contain nothing other and nothing more than what is contained in the sensory impressions, it is precisely because relations are external and heterogeneous to their terms. ...The real empiricist world is thereby laid out for the first time to the fullest: it is a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction 'and' dethrones the interiority  of the verb 'is'" (Deleuze, Hume p.38)

Connect, Conjugate, Continue

"You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying... If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata with out taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small pot of new land at all times. it is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram', as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs"

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, London p.160-161

lost-in-space workshop

A one and a half day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held on 2nd and 3rd December 2010,

in which participants will debate and cross-fertilise ideas and notions of space. The purpose is to provide a platform from which typically disparate disciplines considering spatial issues may ‘find’ one another in order to discuss, debate and develop ideas on space.

The event is aimed towards research and PhD students studying in the UK, focusing on how they think about space, how space influences their work and on what properties of space they draw to shape their work.

It is organised by a PhD student group spanning departments in UCL from the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and the University of East London.

Participants will be PhD candidates from across the UK and a panel of invited guests.

for more details please visit:

http://www.lostinspaceworkshop.co.uk/

acting pragmatically

"As an intelligent species we spent millennia successfully coping with the environmental changes using accumulated knowledge about cause and effects relations. Hume himself argues that the ability to match means to ends (i.e. the capacity for causal reasoning), is not an exclusively human ability but may be observed in other animals which use it 'for their own preservation and the propagation of species'... The subject or person emerging from the assembly of sub-personal components (impressions, ideas, propositional attitudes, habits, skills) has the right capacities to act pragmatically (i.e. it match means and ends) as well socially, to select ends for a variety of habitual or customary reasons that need not involve any conscious decision."

DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, London p.51-52