Tom Stoppard , Arcadia - PowerPoint Presentation

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Tom

Stoppard, Arcadia

Thomasina: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

Septimus

: No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination. (He picks up the tortoise and moves it a few inches as though it had strayed, on top of some loose papers, and admonishes it.) Sit!

Thomasina:

Septimus

, do you think God is a Newtonian

?

Walter Benjamin,

Theses on the

Philosophy

of History

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where 

we 

see the appearance of a chain of events, 

he

 sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [

verweilen

: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is 

this 

storm.

Mark

Fisher,

Captialist

Realism

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action

Gilles

Deleuze,

Bergsonism

[I]f the real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because

the real was expected to come about by its own means, to “project

backwards” a fictitious image of it, and to claim that it was possible at

any time, before it happened? In fact, it is not the real that resembles

the possible, but the possible that resembles the real, because it has

been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from

the real like a sterile double.

Fredric

Jameson

it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Paolo

Virno, on Deja

vu

For

Virno

, potential is located in the past because ‘potential is that which is not

yet

actual (but can become so) whereas the actual is that which is

no longer

potential (but once was). This pair express the articulation of earlier and later, the preceding and the subsequent, the past and present’ (63).

Yet for

Virno

there is not just one

past

but

two; every present has a double past, meaning both an

old actuality

and

potentiality, or not-now

(113). The

old actuality

is what was, but the

not-now

of the past is actually potentiality. In this sense, for potentiality, ‘its positive character appears

in retrospect

’ (116), meaning that potentiality is always ‘

something that was

’ (117).