a hundred jars of sky

"The self, the autos of legitimating and legitimated self-foundation, is still to come, not as a..."

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:26:10 +0800

“The self, the autos of legitimating and legitimated self-foundation, is still to come, not as a future reality but as that which will always retain the essential structure of a promise and as that which can only arrive as such, as to come.”

- Jacques Derrida

"The command is issued to change the world, instead of explaining it; or to become an animal, instead..."

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:16:54 +0800

“The command is issued to change the world, instead of explaining it; or to become an animal, instead of continuing to think; or to transform one’s own body into a body without organs, and think rhizomically instead of logically. All these commands are issued in order to abolish philosophy as the ultimate source of the consuming, critical attitude, and in this way to liberate truth from its commodity character. For following a command, or refusing to do so, is something quite other than accepting or rejecting a doctrine of truth as the result of a critical investigation. …truth only shows itself if the command is followed: the world must first be changed, then it will show its true nature; the leap into faith must be made, then the truth of religion manifests itself.”

- Antiphilosophy- Boris Groys

"From Socrates, via Marx, to the critical theory of Frankfurt provenance, it is held that any truth..."

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:13:18 +0800

“From Socrates, via Marx, to the critical theory of Frankfurt provenance, it is held that any truth that appears as a commodity is no truth. And this means in particular that there is not a truth in general, since under the conditions of the market economy no doctrine of truth can escape commodity status.”

- Antiphilosophy- Boris Groys

"For years, Apple liked to feature The New York Times’ website when it showed off a new version of..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:23:57 +0800

“For years, Apple liked to feature The New York Times’ website when it showed off a new version of its browser Safari, and it gave the Times’ pre-release access to the iPad to develop a news app to show off at its unveiling. But last fall, it was CNN that took over Apple’s most-favored-news-org status. This time around, CNN got some quality screen time, but it was The Washington Post that got showed off in Safari. Apple still holds a grudge [the ieconomy series], apparently.”

- Push notifications for news stories, better background downloads, and more of Apple’s new promises to news orgs » Nieman Journalism Lab

"Here is what waiting to be feels like. It feels like that one trilled song of a morning bird, a..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:53:00 +0800

“Here is what waiting to be feels like. It feels like that one trilled song of a morning bird, a single note curled upwards in the stillness, and it should be poignant but you are on the Internet. […] It feels like a ginger ale on the way back from the park, sweaty for the first time in months, the dogs’ tongues lolling out the window, like saying, “Yes, this, this is it, the liminal space of the drive back, that has to mean something,” and then the slow corkscrew of afternoon into twilight blue and it is all the same. […] It feels like awareness of the absurdity of your anxious questing, the lavender-robed luxury of what-does-art-mean-anyway melancholic cigarettes, disgust with it all, just grind away at it or give up. But what would it mean if you didn’t think like this? What would it mean if there were no moments where it all felt futile, a waste of time, self-indulgent, empty? […] It feels like waking up on Sunday morning and drinking your coffee and longing for something concrete even when you know that what you do will always operate in a space of unknowing, unknowing if what seems like success will turn quickly into failure or vice versa, unknowing if what feels right to you is right, unknowing what you are searching for exactly, unknowing your next move, unknowing why you keep doing this when there are so many other things you could do.”

- Sarah Menkedick | Waiting to Be | Vela

"We no longer need to fear “selling out” in the midst of creative expression, since we are already..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:35:16 +0800

“We no longer need to fear “selling out” in the midst of creative expression, since we are already sold out by the terms of service. As online selfhood comes to dominate, we sell out simply by having an identity.”

- The Primitive Accumulation of Cool (via nathanjurgenson)

"Leaving aside questions of intellectual genealogy, however, much of what is most distinctive about..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:20:54 +0800

“Leaving aside questions of intellectual genealogy, however, much of what is most distinctive about Agamben’s style of thought comes from his love of paradox and contradiction. […] For all their sweeping ambition and programmatic claims, the political works fundamentally represent the same fragmentary and improvisational style of intellectual exploration as the more miscellaneous entries in Agamben’s canon; in all his writings, he exemplifies the “study or play” with the Western cultural and political tradition that he advocates. Whatever else Agamben’s works manage to achieve, they may ultimately be most successful when they serve to invite us to join him in the serious pursuit of study as play.”

- Adam Kotsko | Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Agamben

"In a sense, the addiction memoir is the simplest form of self-accounting, a grossly distended..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:40:46 +0800

“In a sense, the addiction memoir is the simplest form of self-accounting, a grossly distended version of the curve of many people’s lives …the book itself is the capstone of redemption, and the fact of the book retroactively justifies the addiction—and not only justifies it but renders it, in retrospect, necessary. …The more skillful the resulting narrative, the better justified the addiction: the reward for having visited derangement—systematic or not—is the bounty of vital language and deep gratitude one has brought back. The takeaway, though, is that the despond has been safely deposited in the past.”

- Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Michael W. Clune’s ‘White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin’ : The New Yorker

"Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence,..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:28:05 +0800

“Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence, caused not by “laziness” or “narcissism” but by a lack of options or social mobility. For millennials much more than for the generations which immediately preceded them, the future is determined by the past. The son is indebted to the debt of the father. When I ask millennial parents about how they see their children’s future, they tell me they do not like to think about it. It is one thing to discover, as an adult, that the rules have been rewritten, that the job market will not recover, that you will scramble to survive. It is another to raise a child knowing that no matter how hard they work, how talented they are, how big they dream, they will not have opportunities - because in the new economy, opportunities are bought, not earned. You know this, but you cannot tell this to a child. The millennial parent is always Santa, always a little bit of a liar.”

- Sarah Kendzior | Al Jazeera English

"Notice as well: in this struggle, the 99% were not acting as a class. But they were acting like a..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 22:24:49 +0800

“Notice as well: in this struggle, the 99% were not acting as a class. But they were acting like a class insofar as they were opposed to another class. Their affirmation of themselves declared the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, entirely circumventing the problem addressed in some ultra left theory in terms of the dilemma of proletarian affirmation… this in no way means that Occupy produced or prefigured communism. Its contribution was more modest: breaking a hole in our setting, making the gap between capitalism and the people (in other words, class struggle) apparent as a gap. And more: Occupy made real and new the challenges of mobilizing, organizing, and enduring. Against the fantasy of an immediate communism (as compelling as it might be for a quick fix generation), it posed the ongoing and unavoidable questions of infrastructure, self-governance, problem-solving, provisioning, and mutual care that are themselves inseparable from communism as a self conscious mode of emancipatory egalitarian production and reproduction.”

- Split consciousness | Jodi Dean

"The problem is not science and technology. For one, science, technology, and the humanities can be..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 22:44:25 +0800

“The problem is not science and technology. For one, science, technology, and the humanities can be blended in very interesting ways. Second, science and technology are not the enemy. …Criticizing capitalism makes people uncomfortable. Criticizing technology is easy.”

- The Core Reason for the Humanities Crisis | Erik Loomis

"I think the focus on consumption, on what goes into the body, is because it is the easiest way to..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 21:55:07 +0800

“I think the focus on consumption, on what goes into the body, is because it is the easiest way to enforce the idea of avoiding causing harm/suffering/exploitation. The rules are easy to understand. It doesn’t require critical thinking, or situational ethics, only the ability to read nutrition facts and ingredient labels. That said, there are a number of people who are trying to formulate a veganism that isn’t based on consumption—I just don’t know if that will catch on.”

- Let Them Eat Meat: Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Royce Drake (aka The Abomination)

Quiet Babylon: The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing...

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:36:52 +0800

Quiet Babylon:

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25 of your comrades. Describe how you would bring down the government.

The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25—including your daughter. Describe how you would get through the days ahead.

…The PM deployed the army to a protest, killing 25. You are one of the soldiers. Describe how you would work through your PTSD, shame, and guilt.

"-Although it was an exceedingly well-reported story that lent itself well to lovely web expression,..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:51:02 +0800

“-Although it was an exceedingly well-reported story that lent itself well to lovely web expression, the story itself was not particularly newsworthy, or recent, or ground-breaking, or exclusive.
-During the story’s construction, it became a situation where it seemed—at least from the outside—like the form began to demand unreasonable length of the content.
[…] It’s a shame that the Snow Fall model eclipsed the Nate Silver model in the imagination of the “future of journalism” crowd. In early 2012, 1% of Times readers were reading Nate Silver; as the election drew near, on a single day, 20% of Times readers came to read Nate. …Nate Silver basically did Snow Fall-level traffic in just a single day.”

- Everyone Secretly Hates “Snow Fall” | The Awl

"[I]t is necessary to consider a decisive fact: at the time when capital needed to suck in physical..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:00:14 +0800

“[I]t is necessary to consider a decisive fact: at the time when capital needed to suck in physical energy from its exploited slaves, psychopathology could be relatively marginalized. Your psychic suffering didn’t matter much to capital when you only had to insert screws and handle a lathe. You could be as sad as a solitary fly in a bottle, but your productivity was hardly affected because your muscles could still function. Today capital needs mental energies, psychic energies. And these are exactly the capacities that are fucking up. It is because of this that psychopathology is exploding in the center of the social scene.”

- Exhaustion/ Depression | Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

"It is not possible to say: You are exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:59:42 +0800

“It is not possible to say: You are exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make a cure, get the hell away from it all, recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill yourself. It is no longer possible, for the simple reason that it is no longer a matter of a small minority of crazies or a marginal amount of depressive persons. It concerns a growing mass of existential misery that is tending more and more to explode in the center of the social system itself.”

- Exhaustion/ Depression | Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

"The day after the bombings, Latifi showed his three detainees photos of some of the dead women and..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:47:08 +0800

“The day after the bombings, Latifi showed his three detainees photos of some of the dead women and children from the bazaar. One of the young men turned away, then collapsed in convulsive sobs. Another, who was maybe 16, stared at the pictures, stone-faced. Eventually, he looked up and asked Latifi to kill him.”

- Luke Mogelson | The Corner Where Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan Meet - NYTimes

"There are so many words to learn, and to learn how to use correctly, depending on whom you’re..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:42:58 +0800

“There are so many words to learn, and to learn how to use correctly, depending on whom you’re talking to. I’ve been saying “West Bank,” for instance, but Israel’s prime minister refers to the same territory in biblical terms: “Judea and Samaria.” What other words are landmines? Is there a “security fence” or a “separation wall,” or a “segregation wall” or an “apartheid wall”? The towering concrete barriers and the settlements and the Israeli “Defense” Forces’ checkpoints are “facts on the ground.” When Palestinians can’t stand to name the country that took their land, they call it “’48,” after the year of the taking. This is a practice in “steadfastness,” in “popular resistance,” in preventing one’s own “normalization” to the presence of the colonizer. The greatest feat of redefinition, though, is the ubiquitous umbrella word for all this intransigence, “conflict.” “The conflict.” But ask the land. What is taking place there right now is not so much a conflict as it is the process of expansion for which “the conflict” lends cover.”

- Nathan Schneider | The Hourglass < Killing the Buddha

"Choosing fascism as the “pathology” that is supposedly revelatory of the real content of the..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:55:51 +0800

“Choosing fascism as the “pathology” that is supposedly revelatory of the real content of the “normal” can fall much too easily into familiar patterns of liberal political analysis: moralism, progressivism (i.e., fascism shows that pre-modern national loyalties “still” hold great power), and the easy dichotomy between Enlightenment reason and its irrational other. The privileging of Stalinism gets around that, because one can position it specifically as a failure within the Enlightenment tradition, rather than a failure of the Enlightenment to overcome the forces opposed to it. Adorno (and Horkheimer) are much more sophisticated than your normal moralizing critique of “totalitarianism,” yet I do think their work can very easily be appropriated by such discourses — whereas Zizek’s valorization of Stalinism, at least so far, apparently cannot. …It’s much too “easy” to prove that supposedly “pre-modern” forms of power (patriarchalism, tribalism) are on the loose — and then we get to feel a nice buzz of liberal righteousness denouncing these people for failing to get with the program. It’s a lot more interesting and surprising to hear Zizek say, as he did once in a public lecture I attended (but has unfortunately not followed up on yet to my knowledge), that Stalinism has finally come into its own in contemporary corporate culture.”

- Adam Kotsko | Stalinism and the Psychoanalysis of Politics | An und für sich

"What’s curious is that of all the ethical commitments that liberal-leaning consumers with..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:24:52 +0800

“What’s curious is that of all the ethical commitments that liberal-leaning consumers with discretionary income try to maintain today (dolphin-safe tuna! locally-sourced food! environmentally-safe detergents!) the circumstances of workers rarely if ever figure into the imagination, and yet, it’s not been so long since the treatment of workers did have a place at that somewhat trendy table. Now? You can see the banners at Whole Foods that mark off the company’s ethical commitments and not expect to see anything about its laborers or even about the labor conditions at the point of supply. That’s not just that the owner of the company is something of an infamous asshole about labor and regulation, it’s par for the course. Apple moved to deal with rumbles about labor conditions among its Chinese suppliers before they became a major issue, but it’s hard to imagine consumers making this a major part of their brand preferences or even foregoing certain products entirely.”

- Tim Burke via ayjay