Profound Jargon

How come did you name your page Profound Jargon? he he

But what gives power its force, what makes it so hard to get around and master, is that power is positive in its effects. Power invents, power creates, power produces. It produces more than a law that forbids desire--it produces desire itself, power induces and produces desire, power gives desire its objects, power, indeed, is desirable. Power not only produces desire; to an equal degree, and this goes much farther, beyond the law that is imposed on the subject, power produces the very form of the subject, it produces what makes up the subject. The form the subject takes is, precisely, determined by power. Power produces desire and the subject.

Spivak hints toward this possibility in her conceptualization of a “unifying moment”: "People are similar not by virtue of being similar, but by virtue of producing a differential, or by virtue of thinking of themselves as other than a self- identical example of the species." (Spivak 1990, 136)

Spivak (1999b) also outlines an imperative to reimagine the planet, where the “planet overwrites the globe” (44) so that planetarization controls globalization by deflecting the rational imperative of capitalist globalization toward “the indefinite radical alterity of the other space of a planet” (82). She explains: "Globalization is achieved by the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere . . . It is not fanciful to say that, in the grid work of electronic capital, we achieve something that resembles that abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines—once the equator and the tropics, now drawn increasingly by other requirements— “imperatives”— of Geographical Information Systems. The globe is on our computers. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a near contrast with the globe. (44)"

Forty years ago, [the critical system] was supposed to denounce the machinery of social domination in order to equip those challenging it with new weapons. Today, it has become exactly the opposite: a disenchanted knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence between everything and everything else and between everything and its own image. This post-Marxist and post-Structuralist wisdom is not content to furnish a phantasmagorical depiction of humanity completely buried beneath the rubbish of its frenzied consumption. It also depicts the law of domination as a force seizing on anything that claims to challenge it. It makes any protest a spectacle and any spectacle a commodity. It makes it an expression of futility, but also a demonstration of culpability.

The slave quilt code is the idea that African American slaves used quilts to communicate information about how to escape to freedom. The idea was introduced and popularized throughout the 1990s. Most quilt scholars and historians consider the "code" to be completely lacking any basis in fact.

Computer: Monitor, display this document, O.K.?

A writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he's writing at the moment. It's possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one's writing. Which doesn't mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing incredibly well, and not even that, because anyone can write incredibly well. So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it's always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger.

We are living in the greatest revolution in history - a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid. This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved! All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions.

"How did the world respond to the destruction of Hiroshima?"

This technique of asking patients to imagine certain motor acts has proved to be of great value in allowing conscious patients physically unable to communicate – such as patients with locked-in syndrome – to manipulate their own fMRI to describe their interior mental states. In essence, the fMRI becomes a high-tech typewriter. But when patients cannot voluntarily respond to complex questions about their mental states, we have no direct way of knowing what, if anything, they are experiencing. And that’s what we should be telling the family, rather than saying that the fMRI indicates a specific level of consciousness.