‘You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second—what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because listen—we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge—so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions—even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking—that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these? Your history?’ -David Foster Wallace; Good Old Neon

‘[A] new medium establishes and is established by a series. Each instance of the medium is an absolute realization of it; each totally eclipses the others. For all our claims of "inevitability" in the working out of old masterpieces, we know that, say, a given fugue might have worked out differently, not merely in the sense that other fugues might have been written on the subject, but that this one might be more or less otherwise than it is, that there might be alternate versions. Then to call one version "inevitable" would be to praise it. But with a Pollock all-over line painting, or a Louis stripe, or a Noland chevron, or a Stella Z-form, any change (of an angle, a shift of color or a color's width, or its distance from another color) would simply create a new instance, an absolutely new painting. If one speaks of a given instance as inevitable, that is no longer a term of praise, but a statement of its existence. These are works every one of whose properties is essential to them. This is the definition of a Leibnizian monad. Like a monad, like the world there is, the only fact about these paintings that does not follow analytically from a complete idea of them is that they exist in space and time. Existence in this world, like the existence of the world itself, is the only contingent fact about them. They are themselves, I feel like saying, contingencies, realizations. Nothing but our acceptance of an instance determines whether its series is worth realizing, or how far it is worth going on generating its instances; when we find that a series is exhausted, it is absolutely past, over. As instances, they declare the evanescence of existence in space and time. (Literal or material objects do not declare evanescence, however transitory they or their arrangement may be. Metaphysically a pyramid is as evanescent as wrappings are, or as a flash of neon.) I think it is sometimes felt, by those angered or suspicious of such paintings, that no object the actual making of which is so unimportant could conceivably bear the major importance we have attached to works of art. It is true that their existence as instances is carried on their face; labor is not in them; they look as if they might as well have been made instantaneously, and that their use should take no longer. But the fact about an instance, when it happens, is that it poses a permanent beauty, if we are capable of it. That this simultaneity should proffer beauty is a declaration about beauty: that it is no more temporary than the world is; that there is no physical assurance of its permanence; that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim autonomy, to become free. Acceptance of such objects achieves the absolute acceptance of the moment, by defeating the sway of the momentous. It is an ambition worthy of the highest art. Nothing is of greater moment than the knowledge that the choice of one moment excludes another, that no moment makes up for another, that the significance of one moment is the cost of what it forgoes. That is refinement. Beauty and significance, except in youth, are born of loss. But otherwise everything is lost. The last knowledge will be to allow even that knowledge of loss to vanish, to see whether the world regains. The idea of infinite possibility is the pain, and the balm, of adolescence. The only return on becoming adult, the only justice in forgoing that world of possibility, is the reception of actuality—the pain and balm in the truth of the only world: that it exists, and I in it. […] Because these abstractions retain the power of art, after the failure of representations to depict our conviction and connectedness with the world, they have overcome the representativeness which came between our reality and our art; overcame it by abstraction, abstracting us from the recognitions and engagements and complicities and privileged appeals and protests which distracted us from one another and from the world we have constructed. Attracted from distraction by abstraction. Not catching our attention yet again, but forming it again. Giving us again the capacity for appeal and for protest, for contemplation and for knowledge and praise, by drawing us back from private and empty assertion. These works exist as abstracts of intimacy—declaring our common capacity and need for presentness, for clear separateness and singleness and connection, for horizons and uprightness and frontedness, for the simultaneity of a world, for openness and resolution. They represent existence without assertion; authority without authorization; truth without claim, which you can walk in. It is out of such a vision that Thoreau in Walden ("The Pond in Winter") speaks of nature as silent.’ -Stanley Cavell; The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

“When you no longer occupy” your self, says the Zhuangzi, “in your self, forms and things appear by themselves”. Obviously, “occupy” circumscribes and attributes a territory to the self, separates “what” you occupy from “what” you do not occupy, establishing, however little, permanence and rigidity. The Zhuangzi teaches us to de-occupy ourselves, but not because the “self” is detestable and we must flee it or ascetically deny it, but because we need to recover from the consistency of the subject and to rid ourselves of it and “forget” it, in the terms of the Zhuangzi––that is the Zhuangzi’s principal, systematically conducted philosophical operation––in such a way that we no longer have to posit the world as an object opposite us, to be known and manipulated. Or, to repeat terms already introduced, by undoing the possibility of a nature (as object), it thrusts us back into (reconnects us to) the natural (as process). Once we no longer assail the world with our investigations, the Zhuangzi continually tells us, once we no longer impede it by carving it up and codifying it, once we no longer set it in opposition to itself as a function of our disjunctions, once we no longer contract it with the clenching of our desires, once we stop invading it with our fears and aspirations, [something of the world] comes “to light” on its own. We no longer know “it,” but the world “illuminates” [itself].” Let us not only emancipate ourselves from all the toolkits of the knowing mind; let us rid ourselves of the desire to know as well. It is this voluntarism that, on its own, encumbers and obscures; it is this desire for truth that, on its own, forms a screen. When you renounce any position as an “occupier” (there is no longer “self” and “other” facing off), no longer orienting yourself or digging in as a result (in one direction or the other), [you are] able to embrace [the world] in every direction––without “direction” or “horizon” (wu fang)––and solely in accord with the initiative of the transformation under way. “Your movement is like water,” continues the Zhuangzi, “your motionlessness like a mirror”; “you respond like an echo, evanescent as if not being there and calm as if being pure.” -François Jullien; The Great Image Has No Form, or, On the Nonobject Through Painting

‘More and more, we are grasping that the perfect crime of capitalism is built right into the system itself and scarcely needs to be hidden or disguised within false rhetoric. But then why are so few interested in any type of systemic critique? Part of the problem is that an older form of capitalist ideology is getting in the way. Even if we try, many of us cannot help but take the system’s pharmaceuticals, wear its sweatshop-made clothes, and use its products and services (of course, this primarily refers to the minority of the world’s population who actually have access to these goods and services). We can cognitively map the system and learn where our coffee comes from, how are shirts are made. In the end, however, we cannot avoid transgression. In an earlier Fordist moment of capitalist production, workers were bought off on the level of desire (tempted more by what type of upholstery to outfit their new cars with than by organizing revolution on the factory floor). Today, it is more about being bought off on the level of conscience, since it is impossible within commodity culture to be clean. Perhaps we no longer experience the old Fordist desire, with its accompanying moment of forgetting (“I would really like to have that commodity, no matter how it’s made and how the workers are treated, and therefore I will let myself forget how the system works so that I can enjoy my new purchase”). Instead, we increasingly experience its opposite: we don’t want to have that commodity, because we know (and don’t want to forget) how it’s made and how the workers are treated. Nevertheless, we cannot conceive of how to get by without purchasing it (because we see no alternative option) and we cannot prevent feelings of guilt over our participation in a loathsome system. Therefore, we let ourselves forget the vulnerability of the system precisely so that we can enjoy our purchase knowing that we could not have done otherwise. While the Fordist statement was, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is actually rotten,” today’s statement is, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is capable of being terminated.” In both cases, something like amnesia or “memory washing” has occurred. But the causes and effects are qualitatively different. And again, in the new chronic moment, what we cannot make ourselves bring to consciousness is cognizance of, let alone desire for, the system’s final end. However, the radical action available to us today is not a “waking up” to our duplicity and hypocrisy, in which we let ourselves experience all the attending guilt we are currently managing by various amnesic strategies. Rather, the challenge is to mobilize our hypocrisy in a way that relies less on moral categories and more on an objective critique of the total system that has left us––via false choices––with “hypocritical” lifestyles.' -Eric Cazdyn; The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness

‘Something is changing, but this can only be understood when we understand crisis and disaster as nonspectacular and in everyday terms. This is the present challenge for counterglobalization movements: to bracket the more spectacular political scandals, corruptions, and disasters and turn to everyday economic activities (and the crises inherent in them) in order to understand larger formal problems. Instead of treating the political spectacles as chronic (as problems to manage), the economic minutiae should be treated as acute (as something to be radically changed).' -Eric Cazdyn; The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness

‘At his death Gasan Jōseki left behind him these lines: It is ninety-one years Since my skin and bones were put together; This midnight, as always, I lay myself down in the Yellow Springs.' […] ‘From the standpoint of absolute selfhood, life and death of themselves both belong to the self, each at its own time and each in its own Form. At each of their moments, life and death are constituted completely from within “time.” Inside and out, through and through, they are temporal. But at the same time, from one moment to the next and in their very temporal mode of being, life and death are ecstatic. The are ecstatically. Viewed from the standpoint of absolute selfhood, there is no change in life at death. That is the sense of the words in the death verse just quoted: “This midnight, as always.”’ -Keiji Nishitani; Religion and Nothingness 

‘The method to be practiced is as follows: you are to doubt regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead men would also hear sounds…. You must doubt deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be. Pay no attention to the various illusory thoughts and ideas that may occur to you. Only doubt more and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything in advance, without intending to be enlightened and without even intending not to intend to be enlightened; become like a child within your own breast… But however you go on doubting, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. Doubt deeply in a state of single-mindedness, looking neither ahead nor behind, neither right nor left, becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. When this method is practiced more and more deeply, you will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Doubt, “What is the subject that hears?” and doubt still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Doubt but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of doubt, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment, as if you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived.' -From the Sermons of Takusui; quoted in Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness