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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Friday, October 27, 2006
I am not keeping my promise of talking about Eisenmann; I deliberately decided not to go for the lecture; was tired and unmotivated.
Nonetheless, today's lecture by Speaks was about Deleuze. I must qualify that I've not read the part of Deleuze and this is solely a regurgitation of his interpretation.
Deleuze, in his book with Felix Guattari called A Thousand Plateaus, tried to define the role of philosophy. What is philosophy for? Premise: there is this background of chaos, an infinite flux where things appear and disappear at an extremely fast rate. So art, science and philosophy all try to establish different planes to deal with this chaos. For philosophy, this is called the PLANE OF IMMINENCE, where the philosopher creates a plane and populates it with concepts. The ambition of philosophy is to give consistence to the infinite flux. Philosophy tries to to travel at the speed of chaos, and it can achieve that, because it is in the realm of the virtual. Science, on the other hand, gives up the possibility of moving at infinite speed. Science creates a PLANE OF REFERENCE. It wants to map things in the hope of gaining a reference point. Art, on the other hand, wants to create a permanance; it wants to create the finite that restores the infinite. It does this through its PLANE OF COMPOSITION through the creation of affects and precepts. A rich tissue of correspondence can happen between one plane and another.
Speaks ends by saying that architects, in a way, operates in all three planes. While architecture wants to create something grounded in reality, managed by the plane of science, there is usually a beautiful ideal running through it that plays in the domain of philosophy, and executed in the realm of art.
So how does this relate to Design Intelligence? The link that Speaks creates is quite tenuous. It is based on the fact that Deleuze denies the illusions of transcendence, the universal, the eternal, and of discursiveness. Therefore, the philosophy that Deleuze is proposed is read a form of invention- philosophy is all about creating new concepts, not uncovering existing ideals. In the same way, Design Intelligence is about creating new solutions, new innovations, and not being fixated with a kind of ideology.
I think the problem with this whole setup is that he has a very narrow definition of ideology. My friend postulates that this is an Oedipus complex. Speaks was educated in all things Marxist (he is a literature student) and is now rebelling against his teacher. So the uncompromising ideology that he so hates is actually specific- Marxisim.
In the questions that were raised during the discussion, it is clear that students find his premise of intelligence problematic- it does not address ethics or vision. I said the design intelligence that he proposed was rudderless, but he disagreed with my reading of it.
Ah well, at least I started of a whole slew of question from the students. :P

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