where is the ball. please pass the ball. let’s make a ball.   
 

“A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it. Over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function, and no value. Ball isn’t played alone. Those who do, those who hog the ball, are bad players and are soon excluded from the game. They are said to be selfish [personnels]. The collective game doesn’t need persons, people out for themselves. Let us consider the one who holds it. If he makes it move around him, he is awkward, a bad player. The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it. It is the subject of the body, subject of bodies, and like a subject of subjects. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves.

[..]

this quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructer of intersubjectivity. we know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. “we”: what does that mean? we are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of “i”. the “i” in the game is a token exchanged. and this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection. i am i now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for “i” and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. the “we” is made by the bursts and occultations of the “i”. the “we” is made by passing the “i”. by exchanging the “i”. and by substitution and vicariance of the “i”.

That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his “I,” and the “we” is built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No. Everything happens as if, in a given group, the “I,” like the “we,” were not divisible. He has the ball, and we don’t have it any more. What must be thought about, in order to calculate the “we,” is, in fact, the passing of the ball. But it is the abandon of the “I.” Can one’s own “I” be given? There are objects to do so, quasi-objects, quasi-subjects; we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings or end of relations. By them, the principle of individuation can be transmitted or canget stuck. There is something there, some movement, that resembles the abandon of sovereignty. The “we” is not a sum of “I”‘s, but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawals, resignations, of the “I.” The “we” is less a set of “I”‘s than the set of the sets of its transmissions. It appears brutally in drunkenness and ecstasy, both annihilations of the principle of individuation. This ecstasy is easily produced by the quasi-object whose body is slave or object. We remember how it turns around the quasi-object, how the body follows the ball and orients it. We remember the Ptolemaic revolution. It shows that we are capable of ecstasy, of difference from our equilibrium, that we can put our center outside ourselves. The quasi-object is found to have this decentering. From then on, he who holds the quasi-object has the center and governs ecstasy. The speed of passing accelerates him and causes him to exist. Participation is just that and has nothing to do with sharing, at least when it is thought of as a division of parts. Participation is the passing of the “I” by passing. It is the abandon of my individuality or my being in a quasi-object that is there only to be circulated. It is rigorously the transsubstantiation of being into relation. Being is abolished for the relation. Collective ecstasy is the abandon of the “I”‘s on the tissue of relations. This moment is an extremely dangerous one. Everyone is on the edge of his or her inexistence. But the “I” as such is not suppressed. It still circulates, in and by the quasi-object.”

from michel serres, the parasite, “theory of the quasi-object”

(many thanks to sean dockray who brought up this text during his very interesting talk on quasi-architecture last week at program, and for making it available here. michalis also mentioned serres last week in the text he wrote for ap’strophe’s new release ‘objects sense objectes‘. this is also meant to be a response to this. and i’m getting very interested in parasites now.)