“Goodbye ‘erogenous zones’: everything becomes a hole to offer itself up to the discharge
refex. […] Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through
each other. Carnal abstraction and design.”

The obscene is defned by opposition to “the scene” which, Baudrillard says, belongs to a certain theatrics proper to what he thinks of as a superseded psychoanalytic paradigm: here, mimesis, representation, projection and mirroring all still made sense. Distance, a certain staging, was still possible. But these representational dramaturgies have now been displaced into media “circuits and networks” that are “cold and communicational, contactual and motivational” (EC 130); here, there is no refection, only interminable circulation. “The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image.” (EC 130) It is the closer-than-close33, so close that the subject is no longer able to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Pornography provides the model for obscene culture, but its ultra closeup techniques quickly extend beyond the mediatization of sexual

owever, if Ideas are to be thought primarily as problems (according to Deleuze's literal reading), this implies that they must already have their own consistency and form as problems that stand structurally outside achieved empirical knowledge, 'feeding' and conditioning knowledge. Any empirical knowledge is only 'determined by the conditions of the problem, engendered in and by the problem along with the real solutions. Without this reversal, the famous Copernican revolution amounts to nothing'.

So one dreams of saying it so simply, so simply . . . so simply that it would not be repeatable. One dreams of words that burn to ashes as we use them. But it will never work. There will always be ashes, or I will never have said anything.

The anomalous will be coarse and rough, because it is not a perfect instance of any type. It is this very coarseness, and unpredictability that gives the anomalous the power to spirit us out of ourselves. The anomalous is not merely pretty, but attractive like beauty with some kind of edge . . . the surprising sexual energy of the apparently shy and quiet, the surprising intellectual power of the guy or the girl in leather . . . something that places the anomalous on the edge, the borderline. Something that draws us out, disorganizing our thoughts, lives. Something with which we can form undulating lines of becoming. Racing beyond speed, because beyond the mile markers that we left behind when desire became pointless