How Capitals get Distinct?

[aim of the paper: approach distinction as a positive, or productive result of the process of Balkanization]

[with references to:
-Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans (chapter one Nomen),
-Vesna Goldsvorthy: The Rhetoric of Balkanization (from Balkan as Metaphor, MIT Press)
-Elizabeth Grosz, three essays from The Architecture from the Outside (Lived Spatiality, Futures, Cities, Architecture & The Architecture from the Outside
-Pierre Burdieux, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1979/1984, Routledge,

These are three consecutive theoretical essays by Elizabeth Grosz culminating with the idea of architecture from the outside.

This is an important essay by Vesna Goldsworthy on the Rhetorics of Balkanization.

Here is an informative history of the word: Balkanization from the book by Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans. Please read her mapping of the history of the word.

Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on April 26th 1986, filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square km site known as the “red zone” in order to document the extraordinary efforts at cleanup by Ukrainian workers and volunteers. When Shevchenko’s 35-mm film footage was later developed, he noticed that the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise.

"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. [...] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." This is not some abstract, mystical notion of life but a life, a specific yet impersonal, indefinite life discovered in the real singularity of events and virtuality of moments. A life is subjectless, neutral, and preceding all individuation and stratification, is present in all things, and thus always immanent to itself.

"The ‘possessive spectator’ [Laura Mulvey] describes is a fetishist who ‘wounds the film object in the process of love and fascination’ but also ‘reinvent(s) its relations of desire and discovery’ (p. 178). This is a ‘penetration’ and even an ‘emasculation’ of the film, producing ‘a fragmented, even feminized, aesthetic of cinema’ (pp. 179–80)." (Mary Ann Doane)

"My self and my own" is Etienne Balibar’s exploration of the conceptions of "my self" and "my own" in John Locke’s "Essay on Human Understanding". In a review for "Political Theory" Chris Pierson writes: "In a brilliant essay that ranges effortlessly over the poetry of Robert Browning, the Confessionsof St. Augustine, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Balibar identifies and explores an ambiguity in Locke’s conception of my self and my own."

Balibar begins his text as follows: "I cannot say if the expression “possessive individualism” was invented by MacPherson in his 1962 book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, or if he took it from another source. What is sure, however, is that from that moment onwards it became an extraordinarily successful instrument of historical analysis and ethical judgment which largely escaped the original intentions of the author.

In his presentation at RT3 on January 11, Nicolas Bourriaud has been referring to a series of texts by Louis Althusser that are introducing the concept of "aleatory materialism". Written between 1982 and 1986 and published posthumous these short texts seem widely unkown today - at least outside of the french and italian (post-)marxist circles. Here are a few links to interesting sources:

This paper explores different possibilities for considering the role experience plays in political change. We introduce the concept of continuous experience to gain purchase on modes of everyday existence which are fluid, dispersed and never unified. Continuous experience interrupts and tarries with time; things, people and situations are affected by continuous experience not as it is interpreted or represented but as it materialises.

... that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is likea rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music (although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem, under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block of becoming at the level ofexpression, or a block ofexpression: this block of becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordinates or punctual systems functioning asmusical codes at a given moment. It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of expression.

Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man?