June 2013
8 posts
We need more time
“Growth means the constant expansion of capital, of property, of the world of things. But we do not need more things; we need more time. We do not need more property; we need more joy. The collective intelligence, the social organization of collective brain, has created the possibility of creating everything we need without more exploitation.”
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: After the Future: http://vimeo.com/25367464
poetry: the return of infinite hermeneutics
“But the analogy between economy and language should not mislead us: although money and language have something in common, their destinies do not coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange. Poetry is the language of non-exchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language.”
Surrender to Proust →
thesmartset.com
Remembrance of Things Past: Scaffolding for incredible sentences
“The sentences are like great piles of words with all the folds and layers of an unspooled bolt of fabric spilling onto the floor”
“The idea that criticism only happens when you proceed from interpretative propositions to supportive patterns is, at best, a rhetorical dodge: “I had a very grand thought, and lo! I found it in the text!” To say that patterns cannot urge us toward interpretive propositions is to deny the text any serious role in the process of cognition. Has Fish never noticed a pattern and then had a thought about it? Is nothing perplexing in Milton? Is there nothing that reveals itself as a pattern, but without clear resolution or meaning? Interpretations undoubtedly define in advance the regime of our noticings (the elaboration of that idea is one of Fish’s greatest contributions to theoretical discourse), but surely that is not absolute. Otherwise, every interpretation would succeed by force of will (or force of narrow-mindedness). Surely the text’s ability to surprise us with noticed, but unresolved pattern is not only one of the great pleasures of the text, but the source of a great deal of its power.”
—From Stephen Ramsay’s response to Stanley Fish.
Stanley Fish, on the word 'opposite'
“Can it be an accident that a word signifying difference has two ‘p’s’ facing and mirroring each other across the weak divide of a syllable break? Opposite superficially, but internally, where it counts, the same.”
“Summer was like your house: you knew where each thing stood.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours
How Facebook Learned Rape is Bad for Business →
huffingtonpost.ca
“On June 11th, the world’s media will descend on San Francisco for Facebook’s first shareholder meeting. Picture the PR disaster of them being met by a pandemonium of mothers brandishing giant placards of Rethaeh Parsons, Amanda Todd, and rape victims bound and gagged — all displaying Facebook advertising by American Express and Dove. That’s only one possible scenario of many.”
May 2013
15 posts
“Students interested in imaging are steered toward computer vision for weapons; ones interested in robots are directed into military drone research… . Engineering education can be seen as the first in a series of filters within professional engineering that systematically remove individuals interested in challenging societal power, or remove the will to challenge from individuals.”
—
June 1st at 3pm: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mary “Missy” Cummings, and Thomas Keenan will debate the future of drones.
Csikszentmihalyi is an artist working on technologies that rebalance power between citizens, governments, and corporations, and founded and directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT. Cummings is one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots and director of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab. Keenan is director of the Bard Human Rights Project.
The debate is a part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is___”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future in EXPO 1: New York.
View the full Speculations schedule here.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Long Island City
(via triplecanopy)
Zizek Explains the Filioque
(before going on to articulate his own reading of Christianity, based, as it were, on one Hegelian Slip-of-the-Tongue):
“The key doctrinal division between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity (both Catholicism and Protestantism) concerns the procession of the Holy Spirit: for the Latin tradition, the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, while for Orthodox it proceeds from the Father alone. From this perspective of the ‘monarchy of the Father’ as the unique source of the three ‘hypostases’ (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), the Latin notion of double procession introduces an all too rational logic of relations into God: Father and Son are conceived as relating to each other in the mode of opposition, and the Holy Spirit then appears as their reunion, not genuinely as a new, third, Person. We thus do not have a genuine Trinity, but a return of the Dyad to One, a reabsorption of the dyad into One. So, since the principle of the sole ‘monarchy of the Father’ is abandoned, the only way to think the Oneness of the divine triad is to depersonalize it, so that, in the end, we get the impersonal One, the God of philosophers, of their ‘natural theology.’”
Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
Ex Machina: Lectio Digitas →
exmachina-tmr.tumblr.com
Skim what you may, read what you must: <3, The Editors
1. a hermeneutic approach to democracy
2. the un-encyclopedic circumlocution of Samuel Johnson
3. strange encounters on the listserve
“
I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing —-
just as it is.
I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones—
or alone.
I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.
“The book that collects the mind thus collects an extreme capacity for rupture, a limitless anxiety, one that the book cannot contain, one that excludes all content from it, all limited, defined, and complete sense.”
— Maurice Blanchot
Watch out for militant DIYers! →
huffingtonpost.com
Play
April 2013
7 posts
“Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.”
—Patti Smith, Just Kids
@zunguzungu @thenewinquiry
thanks for the Sunday Reading nod (“Fact and Fetish”)!
sincerely,
TMR
Ex Machina: "Fear of the Collective": Liz McArthur for The Media Res →
exmachina-tmr.tumblr.com
These icons of capitalism stood in stark contrast to the reality for many Hondurans. Who can afford to eat at fast food outlets in Honduras? The majority of the population is too poor. We visited homes that were clean, but almost devoid of material possessions. We were met with warm hospitality,…
March 2013
27 posts
“To be content (to be content) is to be contained. Content literally means containment. Content as content comes from the belief that what is contained is satisfied.”
—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
“Open content importantly is not public domain. Open content is not something that we all hold in common. The physical analog to open content isn’t the commons, but rather something like the English Right of Way. What English Right of Way does is give people access to land that is privately held so that they have a right of trespass. Rights of passages evolved in terms of an enclosure of the commons within England as well.”
—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
“
… [Francis Bacon] never even considers evaluating individual technical projects on their merit, but simply argues for an all-out affirmation of technology in general. It is right to pursue technological action, never mind the consequences. Intuitions of uncertainty are jettisoned in the name of revelation.
…
The contemporary theological notion of the human as using technology to prolong creation or cocreate with God depends precisely on the reinterpretation of Genesis adumbrated by Bacon.
” —Philosopher Carl Mitcham discussing Bacon’s role in shaping the Renaissance/Enlightenment mode of being-with technology. One interesting aspect of Mitcham’s discussion is his observation that Bacon’s certainty and zeal derives in part from his theological justification for the technological project — “the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences [is] not much other than … the kingdom of heaven” — and that this move in turn reconfigures subsequent theological discourse. (via frailestthing)
Steubenville--rape culture's Abu Ghraib moment →
newstatesman.com
A must-read from Laurie Penny
“There’s a word for what happens when one group of people sees another as less than human and insists on its right to hurt and humiliate them for fun. It’s an everyday word that is often misused to refer to something outside of ourselves. The word is ‘evil’.”
“The pictures from Steubenville don’t just show a girl being raped. They show that rape being condoned, encouraged, celebrated. What type of culture could possibly produce such pictures? Only one in which women’s autonomy and right to safety counts for so little that these rapists, and those who held the cameras, felt themselves ‘perfectly justified’. Only one in which rape and sexual humiliation of women and girls is so normalised that it does not register as a crime in the minds of the assailants. Only one in which victims are powerless, silenced, dismissed. It is impossible to imagine that in such a culture, assault and humiliation of this kind would not be routine - and indeed, the most conservative estimates suggest that ninety thousand women and ten thousand men are raped in the United States alone every year. ”
“Our judgements judge us”
—Valery
Play
Skin as Abjection; Tattoo as Uncanny
One more from Juliet Fleming:
“But the uncanniness of the profound surface whose primary figure is the skin is not new in modernism: indeed, one might consider it to be one result of the replacement of the ‘flat’ plane of medieval representation with the perspectival space of the Renaissance. So Michelangelo’s famous portrait of the artist as a flayed skin on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, and Juan de Calverde’s drawing of an anatomized figure carrying his own pelt seem, today, to be freighted with surplus violence, one that resides in the revelation of two specific facts. The first, revealed by the successive removal of surfaces that comprises the art of anatomy, is that the body is nothing but surface. The second is that while death happens in three dimensions, the skin, in two, can survive. Within this new, Euclidean space, the two-dimensional skin functions as a material remainder that haunts the ‘objective’ spatial depth within which the Cartesian subject is driven to locate itself.
The uncanny aspect of the skin as something that is always both dead and alive - the dead but sensate surface from which all psychic experience is finally derived - may be confronted in the comparatively recent story of Alfred Corder, sentenced to be hanged and dissected for his notorious murder of Maria Matern in 1828. After death Corder’s body was skinned, tanned and used to bind a presentation copy of the printed account of his life and crime. So treated, the skin becomes the material embodiment of abjection. When, in tattoo, the skin gives its own strange half-life over to a newly ‘living’ image, it similarly asks and complicates the question of what becomes of our mortal envelope, either at the Resurrection or at the morgue.”
Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
“At the frontier of what is ‘assimilable, thinkable,’ functioning to collapse the boundary between subject and object, tattooing is (to those who have no fear of names) an act of catharsis par excellence.”
—Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of early Modern England
“writing on the wall still figures for us, as it did for Belshazzar, as the sinister and strangely collapsable hiatus between a sentence and its execution.”
—Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
