Levy’s Becoming Virtual

Pierre Levy

Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age

Area: Digital Media

Introduction

·        Virtuality is the process of humanity’s ‘becoming other’—it is heterogenesis

à      Analyze the process of transformation from one more of being to another

Chapter One: The Nature of Virtualization

·        Reality: “I’ve got it”

·        Virtuality: “You’ll get it”

·        Possible v. Virtual

à      Possible: Already fully constituted, but exists in limbo

·        Virtualization is the movement of actualization in reverse

28: “However, the fact of not being associated with any ‘there,’ of clinging to an unassignable space (the one in which telephone conversations take place?), of occurring only between things that are clearly situated, or of not being only ‘there’ (like any thinking being)—none of this prevents us from existing.”

Chapter Three: The Virtualization of the Text

·        Relationship between writing (intellectual technology) and memory (cognitive function)

à      Memory—virtualization: the partial detachment of a living body, sharing, heterogenesis

·        Writing desynchronizes and delocalizes

·        When reading on a screen, the extensive presence that precedes the act of reading has disappeared

à      Digital media doesn’t contain text that can be read by a human being

·        Digital Storage = potentialization

·        Display =  realization

·        The computer is a means for potentializing information

50: “Yet, having enabled us to conceive of memory as a kind of record, it has transformed the face of Mnemosyne.  The semi-objectivation of memory in the text has helped promote the development of a critical tradition.  In effect, writing creates distance between knowledge and its subject.  It is most likely because I am no longer that which I know that I am able to question my knowledge.”

Chapter Four: The Virtualization of the Economy

·        Knowledge has an increasingly shorter lifespan

·        Why is the consumption of information not destructive, and why is the possession of information not exclusive?

75: “Actualization is not an act of destruction but, on the contrary, an inventive act of production, and act of creation. When I use information, when I interpret it, connect it with other information to create meaning or help make a decision, I actualize it.  In doing so I accomplish a creative act, a productive act.  Knowledge is the product of apprenticeship, the result of a virtualization of immediate experience.”

78: “There are two possible methods of increasing the efficiency of labor: (1) reification of labor power through automation; or (2) virtualization of skills using means that augment collective intelligence.”

Wark’s Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark
A Hacker Manifesto
Area: Digital Media
•    The hacker class—produce new concepts, perceptions, sensations, hacked out of raw data
•    To hack is to differ
•    To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds, beyond necessity
•    Information is the detachment of a resource from capital already detached from land.  It is the double of a double.
•    Time itself becomes a commodified experience
•    The hacker class is caught between a politics of the masses from below and a politics of the rulers from above
•    Education is slavery
o    050: “When capital discovers that many tasks can be performed by causal employees with little training, education splits into a minimal system meant to teach servility to the poorest workers and a competitive system offering the brighter workers a way up the slippery slope to security and consumerism.”
o    Education is the organization of knowledge under the sign of property
•    Whose property is knowledge?
•    A hack touches the virtual—and transforms the actual
•    While everyone isn’t a hacker, everyone hacks
•    Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains
•    Every hacker is at the same time producer and a product of the hack
•    Forms of property:
o    Land: primary
o    Capital: secondary
o    Information: developing
•    Hackers need some means of extracting an income from the hack
o    Maintain autonomy; limited protection of rights
•    The vector is viral—vectors of transport move objects and subjects
•    By extension, a vector may be any means by which anything moves
004: “Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world.  Not always great things, or even good things, but new things.  In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While we create these new worlds, we do not possess them.  That which we create is mortgage to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolize the means for making worlds we alone discover.  We do not own what we produce—it owns us.”
021: “The vectoralist class struggles to monopolize abstraction.  For the vectoral class, ‘politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means of warlike strategies of communication, control, and command.”
022: “Hackers come as a class to recognize their class interest is best expressed through the struggle to free the production of abstraction, not just from the particular fetters of this or that form of property, but to abstract the form of property itself.”
030: “But when information in turn becomes a form of private property, workers are dispossessed of it, and must buy their own culture back from its owners, the vectoralist class.”
130: “Information exceeds communication.  Deleuze: ‘We do not lack communication.  On the contrary, we have too much of it.  We lack creation.  We lack resistance to the present.’  Information is at once this resistance, and what it resists—its own dead form, communication.”
139: “The sign of a free world is not the liberty to consume information, or to produce it, not even to implement its potential in private worlds of one’s choosing.  The sign of a free world is the liberty for the collective transformation of the world through abstractions freely chosen and freely actualized.”
170: “Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumerism, even though it is actually its producer.  Under vectoralist rule, society becomes a ‘social factory’ which makes subjects as much as objects out of the transformation of nature into second nature.”
222: “To hack is to refuse representation, to make matters express themselves otherwise.  To hack is always to produce the odd difference in the production of information.  To hack is to trouble the object or the subject, by transforming in some way the very process of production by which objects and subjects come into being and recognizing each other by their representations.  The hack troubles the unrepresentable, the real.”
322: “Once information can move faster than people or things, it becomes the means by which people and things are to be meshed together in the interest of productive activity in ever expanding envelopes.”
344: “The great challenge to the hacker class is not just to create the abstractions by which the vector may develop, but the forms of collective expression that may overcome the limits not just of commodification, but of objectification in general, of which commodification is just the most pernicious and one-sided development.”

Shaviro’s Connected

Steve Shaviro
Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Networked Society
Area: Digital Media
•    Warhol: “Once your see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again”
o    Aesthetic Disinterest
•    Semiotic AIDS: Ambient Information Distress Syndrome: fugue states and catonia
•    You can’t get rid of old information fast/efficiently enough to accommodate for the new
•    Rorty: the “idea” idea—Cartesian notion that the mind is like a theater in which consciousness is a detached spectator that contemplates and manipulates special objects of inner sense
o    83: “But the representationalist approach remains alive and well in other fields, most notable in AI research and in cognitive science.  Cognitive scientists start from the assumption, not that computers should be understood by comparison to human minds, but rather that human minds themselves can already be understood in terms of computers.”
•    Brain like a computer isn’t just some rough analogy—actually is some device
•    Information or intellectual property has no aura; it’s fully subjected to the rules of commerce and realized exclusively in the form of exchange value
•    Baudrillard: the market no longer has exchange value—no relation to reality whatsoever
•    112: “On the one hand, the world seems phone, or unreal, precisely because so much of it is virtual.  On the other hand, and at the same time, virtuality is the one saving grace that makes up for the world’s otherwise chronic unreality.”
•    29: “I do not find myself in the network, having fallen or been thrown.  Rather, I exist for the network.  I am predestined to it.  From the moment I get connected, I am irreversibly bound to its protocols and its finality.”
•    Lyotard: in a postmodern world, there’s no Grand Narrative, but a multitude of competing ones
•    Massumi: the digital is always sandwiched between an analog disappearance into a code and an analog appearance out of code”
•    130: “The material form of the culture of real virtuality, says Castells, is a new articulation of our experience of space and time.  A ‘space of flows’ displaces the familiar ‘space of places,’ while a ‘timeless time’ annihilates traditional cyclical time and industrial clock time alike.”
•    Castells: blackholes of informational capitalism
•    Derrida: determination of a noncenter rather than a loss of center
•    Feedback loops induce effects of interference, amplification, and resonance
•    D & G: cyperspace is haptic, not an optical space—close connection
•    Cyborg—“a human being whose body has been taken over in while or in part by electromechanical devices”
•    “Leaky distinctions”: Haraway
•    “Each spectacle is a monad—entirely self-contained yet connected”
•    Deleuze: moving away from disciplinary societies of Foucault→ control societies
o    Operate through continuous control and instant communication
•    Formal subsumption of labor under capital via Empire
o    167: “This also means that the Count is captured by what Marx calls the formal subsumption of labor under capital: one of the ‘processes whereby capital incorporates under its own relations of production laboring practices that originated outside its domain.”
•    The virtual illuminates the actual, but it’s nothing without the actual’s support
•    Kurzweil: “copying” the brain is ridiculous—the downloaded brain needs a new body
•    145-6: “All this is consonant with Fredric Jameson’s sense of the postmodern era as one in which historical time ‘remains forever out of reach,’ evoked only through the nostalgia of ‘pop images and simulacra’ and in which there has been a ‘prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.”
•    Zizek: simultaneously connected and alone
•    250: ‘[Science fiction] does not actually represent the future.  Rather, it involves both the present and the future, while being reducible to neither.  For science fiction is about the shadow that the future casts upon the present.  It shows us how profoundly we are haunted by the ghosts of what has not yet happened.”

Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulation
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
The Precession of Simulacra
•    “Simulation is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”
•    The real can be reproduced an infinite number of times
•    Dissimulating = pretending ≠ simulating
o    Masked and reality is intact
•    Cartesian hesitation between true and false (he’s acting crazy because he really is)
•    Successive phases of an image:
o    It is the reflection of a profound reality: good
o    It masks and denatures a profound reality: evil
o    It masks the absence of a profound reality: being an appearance
o    It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum: simulation
•    Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country
•    Not a question of concealing the real, but concealing the fact that the real is no longer real
•    Simulation is characterized by the procession of models
•    The proof of something through its opposite (proof of theater through antitheater)
o    “Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form.”
•    “It is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real”
•    Hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself
•    Power only produces signs of its resemblance
•    Loud’s filming experiment: they lived as if we/you weren’t there
o    You no longer watch TV, it’s TV that’s watching you
•    Simulation begins where there’s an implosion of meaning
•    “One enters into simulation and this absolute manipulation—not into passivity, but into the indifferentation of the active and the passive”
2: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody.  It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.  Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance.”
20: “Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation.”
29: “Truth that is no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror, nor the perspectival truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of the test that sounds out and interrogates, of the laser that touches and pierces, of computer cards that retain your preferred sequences, of the genetic code that controls your combinations, of cells that inform your sensory universe.”
History: A Retro Scenario
•    Terrorism is always that of the real
•    Relation between cinema and real is an inverse, negative relation: loss of specificity
45: “Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal.  Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation.  It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly.”
Holocaust
•    Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it’s achieved in retro, finally elevated to a mass level
49-50: “And one would like to have us believe that TV will life the weight of Auschwitz by making a collective awareness radiate, whereas television is its perpetuation in another guise, this time no longer under the auspices of a site of annihilation, but of a medium of deterrence.”
The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence
•    People have the desire to take everything, to pillage.  The only massive effect is manipulation
Hypermarket and Hypercommodity
•    People themselves come in response to the functional and directed question that the objects constitute
•    The hypermarket preexists the metropolitan area
The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
•    More and more information, less and less meaning
•    Where we think information produces meaning, the opposite occurs
•    More real than real, that is how the real is abolished
•    Electronic mass media: end of the message
o    No more mediating power between one reality and another
82: “If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such.  That is—and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit—there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.”
84: “There is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed or informed masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them?”
Clone Story
•    The double is the subject itself and never resembles itself again
•    The body being nothing but the infinite series of prostheses
•    What is lost in serial reproducibility is the aura
96-7: “The Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in service of a matrix called code.  No more mother, no more father: a matrix.  And it is the matrix, that of the genetic code, that now infinitely ‘gives birth’ based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality.”
Holograms
•    When an object is exactly like another, it’s not exactly like it, but a bit more exact
o    There is never similitude, any more that there is exactitude
105-6: “In the hologram, it is the imaginary aura of the double that is mercilessly tracked, just as it is in the history of clones.  Similitude is a dream and must remain one, in order for a modicum of illusion and a stage of the imaginary to exist.  One must never pass over to the side of the real, the side of the exact resemblance of the world to itself, of the subject to itself.  Because then the image disappears.”
Simulacra and Science Fiction
•    3 orders of simulacra:
o    Natural: founded on the image: utopia: operatic
o    Productive: founded on energy: science fiction: operative
o    Simulation: founded on information: end of science fiction: operational
The Remainder
•    Is there an opposite of “the remainder”?
•    All of the real is residual and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself indefinitely in phantasms
146: “All accumulation is nothing but a remainder, and the accumulation of remainders, in the sense that tit is a rupture of alliance, and in the linear infinity of accumulation and calculation, in the linear infinity of production, compensates for the energy and value that used to be accomplished in the cycle of alliance.”
Value’s Last Tango
•    Panic of university administrators: diplomas awarded without “real” work
o    Without equivalence in knowledge

Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies

Slavoj Zizek
The Plague of Fantasies
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
Notes from class
•    Implicitly talks about persuasion
•    What about rhetoric in Zizek?
•    Nealon: “Zizek’s Paradox”
•    How are desires created?
•    Beyond symbolic
•    What about desiring?
o    Same as Deleuze
•    Althusserian read
•    Empty gesture at face value
o    Affirm it?
•    Claim the choice
o    Retroactive
o    Sacrificial characters
•    Privitization
•    Real is not the truth
•    Three truths:
o    Symbolic Real: Context; only notice when failed
o    Real Real: Unassimable real—horror film
•    Close enough where it gets disjunctive
o    Imaginative Real: Full Monty—nude in two ways—sublime; prize but always looking awry
•    Still plays value of the true
o    Badiou: True
•    Through Plato: a truth we’re going to get used to
•    What’s the real, truth, authentic in Zizek?
•    Continuously tells us how we can get purchase on something behind: cynic
•    Something escapes—that’s why it works
o    Foucualt’s disciplinary methods
•    Openness of interpretation—thing Zizek hates?
•    Actions linked to subjectivity
•    Active resistance built in?
o    Minima Moralia
•    What you still really are (i.e. Bill Gates)
•    Symptom → Fetish => Freud can’t treat
•    Depoliticized economics
o    Bill Gates as humanitarian, but really still himself
•    Idea of fetish is the transposition
o    Then no contradiction
•    Layers
•    Reality TV: only believable if people don’t recognize it
•    One can never experience real but still want to critique it
Critical Moments in the Text
•    7: “Fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem it, rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.  This role of fantasy hinges on the fact that ‘there is no sexual relationship,’ no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one’s partner: because of the lack of this universal formula, every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a private formula for the sexual relationship—for a man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula.”
•    8: “Motifs of the struggle for recognition, of the dialectical connection between recognition of desire and desire for recognition.”
•    30: “And traversing the fantasy involves precisely the acceptance of the traumatic fact of radical closure: there is no opening, contingency as such is necessary…Bearing in mind that our capacity to desire involves the paradoxical structure of the forced choice, […] one can fully appreciate the radical character of traversing the fantasy: by means of this traversing, the gap is closed, the structure of the forced choice is suspended, the closure of being is fully accepted, the hysterical game of I offer you X, on condition that you reject it, which structures our belonging to a community, is over.”
•    31: “According to doxa, fantasy stands for the moment of closure: fantasy is the screen by means of which the subject avoids the radical opening of the enigma of the Other’s desire.”
•    49: “Jouissance is thus the ontological aberration, the disturbed balance which accounts for the passage from Nothing to Something.  […] Jouissance is thus the ‘place’ of the subject.”
•    53: “Historicity is not the zero-level state of things secondarily obfuscated by ideological fixations and naturalizing misrecognitions; historicity itself, the space of contingent discursive constructions, must be sistained through an effort, assumed, regained again and again.”
•    88: “So we have, on the one side, the ‘machine in the ghost’ (a ship whieh sails by itself, with no crew; an animal or a human being which is revealed to be a comples mechanism of joints and wheels), and, on the other, the ‘ghost in the machine’ (wsome sign of plus-de-jouir in the machine giving rise to the effect of ‘It’s alive!’).
•    93; “Hegalian totality is not an organic Whole within which each element sticks to its limited place, but a ‘crazy’ totality in which a position reverts to its Other in the very movement of its excessive exaggeration – the dialectical ‘link’ of partial elements emerges only through their ‘exaggeration.’”
•    98: “The Real as ‘impossible is precisely the excess of ‘immediacy’ which cannot be ‘reified’ in a fetish”
•    Summary of “Cyberspace, or, the Unbearable Closure of Being”
o    In this chapter, Zizek discusses Internet sexual partners and the division of mind and body reaction to these encounters.  Even though a screen separates the partners, both have the possibility to experience real, individual pleasure.  By using technological interfaces to foster sexual activity, intimacy becomes complicated.  Zizek notes that cybersex is not isolated and masturbatory, but rather something that adds to sexual arousal: “people use pornography (or other technical sex devices) not only when they lack ‘flesh-and-blood’ partners but also to ‘spice up’ their ‘real’ sex life” (138).
From Untimely Mediations
“Because of its absolute immanence to the symbolic, the Real cannot be positively signified; it can only be shown, in a negative gesture, as the inherent failure of symbolization: ‘if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot themselves be signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification. […] the real as impossible can be shown (rendered) only as the failure of the process which, precisely, aims at signifying it…” (217).
So, this is where we end up this semester—that the Real is actually not really real.  I guess we were bound to get here, and it seems like the perfect circle back to the Sophists. At a basic level, Sophists are tricksters—they can fool their paying audiences into believing that something that is neither Real nor real. Even though Zizek never makes the connection to Sophistry, (probably because he doesn’t have the balls to…) we do see him make the turn to ethics, rather than the truth.  (Question: is Real the same as truth?)  If Zizek says that the Real can only be shown negatively (within, for example, physical, representational after-effects of loss), then is the ethical the positive gesture (the immediate experience)?
Zizek is concerned with representational effects: what happens to me can be caused by something not actually there, but I can actually feel its a/effects here.  I would go to Zizek’s example of online pornography and orgasm, but since I talk about that in my paper, I’d like to talk about belief instead.  When he defines belief as “the shadowy domain between outright falsity and positive truth,” I immediately think of Stengers’ distinction between “cause and reason” (108, 45).  As a researcher, I find myself wanting to know cause and reason, as well as the truth and the false.  But according to Zizek, if truth and reason occur in a delayed realization, then is the opposite of the Foucaudian notion of parrhesiates in which the truth/Real lies in the immediacy of the telling.
Okay, so I realize that I am making interchanging the words truth and Real, and I’m not sure if that’s the right move to make.  Zizek distinguishes between “objective reality” and “subjective reality” in the following:
The true point of idealism is not the solipsistic one (‘there is not objective reality, merely our subjective representations of it’); idealism claims, on the contrary that the In-itself of ‘objective reality’ is definitely to be distinguished from mere subjective representations – its point is only that it is the synthetic act of the transcendental subject which transforms the multitude of representations into ‘objective reality.’ In short, idealism’s point is not there is no In-itself, but that the ‘objective’ In-itself, in its very opposition to subjective representations, is posited by the subject” (215).
I’m not sure that the above passage explains this distinction, but maybe it helps to think about the divide between the two types of reality if we’re looking to define the Real and truth.  What I think Zizek is saying is that ‘objective reality’ is more (R?)real—its experience is in itself, and that’s where the truth lies.  (This could be where we could employ Foucault’s parrhesiates since the truth lies in the telling, In-itself.)  Comparatively, ‘subjectively reality’ might be the telling that happens after an event—one’s vain survival so that s/he can “tell” her/his story.  The subjective reality of this last situation R/real, but is instead a subjective truth (?).
Hmph.  The more I try to differentiate between truth and real, the more confused I become.  Maybe there isn’t much difference between them.  Or, maybe I’m missing it completely.  Anyway, I would like to talk about how, or if, the truth and R/real are different.

Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
•    The reversal of Platonism
•    Virtual is primary over identity
o    Real contains Actual and Virtual
•    Baudrillard: simulacra; Deleuze: copy
•    Desire and pleasure
•    Disinterested in truth
•    Stimulations /simulations produce effects
•    What do the Sophists offer now?
o    Why the move to psychoanalysis?
•    Couldn’t be French and not do psychoanalysis
•    Move to Anti-Oedipus
•    Capitalism has made us neurotic
•    A-O: desiring products
•    More involved in shadows and surface
•    Some overlap with the Stoics
•    One is allowed to make the virtual more actual
o    Virtual is the spillover
•    Power of the false: Nietzsche, Deleuze
o    Enjoy your symptoms: Zizek
•    Aristocratic?
o    Leisure time?
o    Over-man?
•    Competitive version of subjectivity
o    Badiou: relative subjectivity available to all
Critical moments in the text
2: “It is a subterranean dualism between that which receives the action of the Idea and that which eludes the action.  It is not the distinction between the Model and the copy, but rather between copies and simulacra.  Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy at once.”
7: “[Affairs, quantities, qualities] are contrasted with an extra-Being which constitutes the incorporeal as a nonexisting entity.  The highest term therefore is not Being, but Something, insofar as it subsumes being and non-being, existence and inherence.”
20-ish: Noema: the perceived as such
40: “It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series.  It is the mirror.  Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc.”
49: “The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; by the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution.  This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.”
53: “Events are ideal. […]  The distinction however is not between two sorts of events; rather, it is between the event, which is ideal by nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs.  The distinction is between event and accident.  Events are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event.  They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist.  Rather, it is the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which they subsist and insist.
61: Thus the time of the present is always a limited but infinite time; infinite because cyclical, animating a physical eternal return as the return of the Same.”
63: “What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.”
110: “To be actualized is also to be expressed.”
144: “Cicero put it very well when he said that the passage of time is similar to the unraveling of a thread.  But events, to be precise, do not exist on the straight line of the unraveled thread (Aion), just as causes do not exist in the circumference of the wound-up thread (Chronos).
147: “Representation and its usage therefore intervene at this point.  Corporeal causes act and suffer through a cosmic mixture and a universal present which produces the incorporeal event.  But the quasi-cause operates by doubling this physical causality—it embodies the event in the most limited possible present which is the most precise and the most instantaneous, the pure instant grasped at the point at which it divides itself in to future and past, and no longer the present of the world which would gather into itself the past and the future.  The actor occupies the instant, while the character portrayed hopes or fears in the future and remembers or repents in the past: it is in this sense that the actor ‘represents.’”
Fave passage
88: “In this passion, a pure language-affect is substituted for the effect of language: “All writing is PIG SHIT” (that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noisy, alimentary, and excremental bits).”