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1 | Name | Author | Date (Initial) | Link | Type | Referrer | Themes | Citations | ||||||||||||||||||||||
2 | Worked | 11/1/2023 | http://www.paulgraham.com/worked.html | Essay | self | Work | It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren't prestigious doesn't guarantee you're on the right track, it at least guarantees you're not on the most common type of wrong one. | I realize that sounds rather wimpy. But attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
3 | Great Work | 11/1/2023 | http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html | Essay | Self | Work | People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. | Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you're stuck, just so you start to get something done. | One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than your contemporaries', but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good. | What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. | ||||||||||||||||||||
4 | Sad Boys in Harpy Land | 12/1/2023 | https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/playwrights-perspective-alexandra-tatarsky | Play | Bianca Giaever | Death | What would it look like to refuse to compose, and instead insist on decomposing? Let the play, like the world, like the word, like the body, be eaten by worms, pecked to bits by birds, nibbled by fishes. Infinite rehearsal for the world to come. | This is a play about wanting to die and wanting to write a play about wanting to die and being unable to write a play about wanting to die — and that makes you want to die all the more! Oy vey. A spiral. No lines, just a series of circles down into hell. Or, as we say, “material.” The world was going to hell, and all you did was nothing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
5 | Jung at Heart | 12/1/2023 | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gbQ4APdwolSj_A3ejdiY9eUFj9Y0_Xot/view?usp=drive_link | Article | Piet Aukeman | Work, Identity, Politics, Judaism, Zionism | n "Depth Psychology," Neumann developed a revolutionary idea in reaction to the Holocaust. He argued that Judeo-Christian morality represses evil, leading to horrific phenomena such as Nazism. Micha Neumann: "He said that every person has to accept the evil within him, not to cast it away and not to repress but to live with it, sometimes even to manifest it, and to pay the price of sorrow and guilt feelings. He send the book to Jung after communication was restored and Jung said it was extremely interesting. | "He felt the malaise of Western society very strongly," Maoz explains, "and the need to find a balm for it. The sickness is a rational focusing on the conscious world and a denial of the unconscious and the psyche; it is the repression of whatever is not comfortable from consciousness. Neumann said we must dive into the sea of the unconscious and bring to the surface all the gold and treasures, including the collective ones, because they are the driving force of creativity. The emphasis is on not repressing, but on connecting to the forces latent in the unconscious, to hold a dialogue with them. He was talking in the late 1930s about processes that we started to talk about in the late 1990s." | ||||||||||||||||||||||
6 | In Praise of Shadows | Junichiro Tanazaki | 12/1/2023 | Book | Nao Mizuno | Aesthetics | One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that too obvious a structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to "follow the brush." Indeed it would not be far wrong to say that the narrative technique we call "stream of conscious-ness' has an ancient history in Japanese letters. It is not that Japanese writers have been ignorant of the powers of concision and articulation. Rather they have felt that certain subjects-the vicissitudes of the emo-tions, the fleeting perceptions of the mind are best couched in a style that conveys something of the uncertainty of the mental process and not just its neatly packaged conclusions. | Anyone with a taste for traditional architecture must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
7 | Depth Psychology and a New Ethic | Erich Neumann | 12/1/2023 | Book | Piet Aukeman | Psychology, Mind Posture | The contrast between "conscience" and the "inner voice" (which we shall be considering in detail later on) is evidence in support of our contention about the relationship between ethics and persona-formation. This contrast is most clearly exemplified in the founders of new religious or ethical movements; these were invariably "criminals", and it was inevitable that they should be treated as such. Abraham (who broke his father's idols into pieces), the prophets, Jesus and Luther (who in turn superseded the narrow religious nationalism of the Jewish people, the old Law, and Catholicism) - all these were regarded as criminals in exactly the same way as Socrates, who introduced "new gods", or Marx and Lenin, who set out to destroy the established order of society. The revolutionary (whatever his type) always takes his stand on the side of the inner voice and against the conscience of his time, which is always an expression of the old dominant values; and the execution of these revolutionaries is always carried out for good and "ethical" reasons. Often enough - though by no means always, as the history of the heresies may teach us - the course of history eventually recognises these "criminals" of the inner voice as the forerunners of a new ethic. But this in no way alters the fact that the conscience of the new age- though itself partly shaped by the impact of many revolutionaries of the inner voice - invariably re-establishes a canon of dominant values and requires the individual to adapt to this canon in its turn by the formation of a façade personality. | In contrast to suppression, repression may be regarded as the instrument most frequently used by the old ethic to secure the imposition of its values. In repression, the excluded contents and components of the personality which run counter to the dominant ethical value lose their connection with the conscious system and become unconscious or forgotten - that is to say, the ego is entirely unaware of their existence. Repressed contents, unlike those suppressed, are withdrawn from the control of consciousness and function independently of it; in fact, as depth psychology has shown, they lead an active underground life of their own with disastrous results for both the individual and the collective. What the study of neuroses has demonstrated in the case of the individual, we shall now show is also true of the collective: the complexes of the unconscious which have been shut away from daylight by repression undermine and destroy the world of consciousness. | Suppression is a conscious achievement of the ego, and it is usually practised and cultivated in a systematic way. It is important to notice that in suppression a sacrifice is made which leads to suffering. This suffering is accepted, and for that reason the rejected contents and components of the personality still retain their connection with the ego. | |||||||||||||||||||||
8 | Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power | Byung Chul Han | 12/1/2023 | Book | Self via Honey Moon | Psychology, Neoliberalism | Consumer capitalism operates through the selling and consumption of meanings and emotions. | ... the neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization - as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self - represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation. As an 'entrepreneur of himself, the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly - and even passionately. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely. Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not lay hold of individuals directty. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized - and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one. Such engineering of freedom and exploitation, which occurs in order to effect self-exploitation, is what escaped Foucault. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
9 | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism | Max Weber | 1/1/2024 | Book | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10 | A Life of One's Own | Marion Milner c/o Marginalian | 1/1/2024 | Book | On Giving Up | Although I could not have told about it at the time, I can now remember the feeling of being cut off from other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living. I was so dependent on other people’s opinion of me that I lived in a constant dread of offending, and if it occurred to me that something I had done was not approved of I was full of uneasiness until I had put it right. I always seemed to be looking for something, always a little distracted because there was something more important to be attended to just ahead of the moment. | I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden. | If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of their own. | I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose, whether it would not burst its way out, or if the purpose were too strong, perhaps grow distorted like an oak whose trunk has been encircled with an iron band. I began to guess that my self’s need was for an equilibrium, for sun, but not too much, for rain, but not always… So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.” | I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it. | Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes. | By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most widely aware. So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension…. Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs. And, by finding that in order to be more and more aware I had to be more and more still, I had not only come to see through my own eyes instead of at second hand, but I had also finally come to discover what was the way of escape from the imprisoning island of my own self-consciousness. | ||||||||||||||||||
11 | Zone One | Colston Whitehead | 2/1/2024 | Book | Mark Leckey / Roddy Parker | Loss, Broken Glass | Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
12 | Man and His Symbols | Carl Jung | 3/1/2024 | Book | Lent by Nao | Psychology | This is the concept of the "shadow," which plays such a vital role in analytical psychology. Dr. Jung has pointed out that the shadow cast by the conscious mind of the individual contains the hidden, repressed, and unfavorable (or nefarious) aspects of the personality. But this darkness is not just the simple converse of the conscious ego, Just as the ego contains unfavorable and destructive attitudes so the shadow has good qualities- normal instincts and creative impulses. Ego and shadow, indeed, althoug separate, are inextricably linked together in much the same way that thought and feeling are related to each other. The ego, nevertheless, is in conflict with the shadow, In what Dr. Jung once called "the battle for deliverance. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
13 | Wretched of the Earth | Frantz Fanon | 3/1/2024 | Book | leaves on Nassau Av | Psychology, Colonialism, Politics | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
14 | Ghosts of My Life | Mark Fisher | 4/1/2024 | Book | Topos | Marxism, Work, Politics, Culture | His sound is a work of mourning rather than of melancholia, beause he still longs for the lost object, still refuses to abandon the hope that it will return. 'A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and I hear omething in the tune that makes me feel sad, he says. A few ar my favourite producers and Dis are dead now too - and I hear this hope in all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK. But they couldn't, because the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn't as artificial, self-aware or created by the Internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those Ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren't running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away trom them. In club culture, it all became like superclubs, magazines, Trance, commercialised. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone. Now there's less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can't hide, the media clocks everything: He irks his pessimism: But (dubstep nights DMZ and FWD have hit eamosphere and real feeling. The true underground is srong, I hear good new tunes all the time. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
15 | Postcapitalist Desire | Mark Fisher | 5/1/2024 | Book | Kevin Moore | Marxism, Work, Politics, Culture | as far as there is civilisation, there is discontent because, as we looked at with Marcuse, desire will never be commensurate with the organisation of life that requires work? Work involves this kind of subduing of desire. All other repression follows from that. | Capital is always going on about the "revolutionary". The word "revolution" is a key commodity identifier now... You're sort of looking at me blank... Don't you see this quite a lot? The word "revolution" used as a commodity? Names of restaurants, that kind of thing? This appeal to dynamic flux, shift, creativity, all of that, is a key feature of advertising. This is kind of the well, argument of Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. I say that — you may not have read it. It was an important text for a lot of these discussions. It was inst very big — way too big for what was necessary — but a lot of their argument is really about how the counterculture became subdued, transformed, turned into... It wasn't simply defeated, it was incorporated into the core structure of capitalism now, which then has to be about creativity, self-reinvention, etc. etc. So the counterculture becomes mirrored in the current form of capitalism. So it doesn't simply defeat this stuff, it metabolises it, it absorbs it, it transforms it for its own ends. And that's what we can start to look at next week with Lyotard. There is a tension — a potentially productive tension — between desire and Marxism. | I think libido is different from desire. Libido is not only what we want but why we want it. The object causes it, in that sense. And what is raised by this? These struggles are articulated through the counterculture as the production of new forms of desire. We talked about this when we started off [in the first lecture]. I talked about the co-option of those forms of desire, via Apple, etc., which precisely individualises, which transforms all desire into a desire to be a more successful individual, etc. What is also raised here, then, is the spectre of a different kind of desire, a different kind of libido, a desire for a transformed world. You could say that the cultural expressions, in some sense, although they fed into the political struggles, were in many ways stronger than l the actual political struggles were capable of being. That's precisely why, in some ways, they were able to survive the political struggles and were able to be retrospectively commodified after the event. | capital is the driver! Capital is purposiveness without purposes. Endless driving... There's no final to it. There's no end point to it, in itself, which I think brings us very close to the core theme of this module, in a way. Because you could say that makes it flat with the structure of desire in itself. | You've got to distinguish between empirical power and knowledge] Their very empirical power means that they lack the capacity to develop knowledge. Subordination of the subordinated group gives that group] the potential to develop knowledge. Knowledge can become the basis for agency; agency can really change things. So only the subordinated have the potential to really change things. The dominated are dominated themselves by their own ideology. They're inside a dream from which they cannot awake. | once a group recognises its common interests, then it can act together. Once workers realise the problem is capital, not them — once they stop competing against one another and realise they have a common enemy — capital — this is when they're going to have agency. Similarly, when women realise the problem is patriarchy, not them as individuals, then their consciousness has immediately shifted. You feel better! That's the first thing. You'll feel relief from the guilt and misery of having to take responsibility for your own life, which you shouldn't have to - despite everything neoliberal propaganda tells us. It is not you! It's a direct inversion of Thatcher! "There's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and their families". It's the other way round! There's no such thing as the individual. But the individual is immediately given. And that's part of the problem of immediacy. | Almost everyone is subject to an artificial scarcity of time: the sense that there is no time to do anything. So, technology, rather than liberating time, particularly communicative technology, has exacerbated and intensified the sense that there is no time in its production of artificial scarcity. We can see, from Marcuse's perspective, that this isn't an accident. It's not that we're just failing; we could live a life with far less work, but things haven't worked out that way. It's a deliberate strategy at the level of capital and human consciousness, to keep inhibiting and obstructing that possibility: of working less and determining your own needs. It's not a material problem. It's a political problem. Even though the material problem is still very severe. | I have a lot of problems with the term "community", largely because of the way it's been easily appropriated by the right. But also, because it implies an in and an out. Some are in the community and some are out of it. I had a slogan once: "Care without community". Isn't that what we want? Where you can give people the care regardless of whether they belong to the community. We haven't spoken about the events of last week yet.2 But isn't that exactly what this new form of right-wing reaction is about - the exact opposite of that. It's restricting care only to a defined community. So, you're literally putting up walls... It's a fantasy. | So, what if we reframe what was happening in the 1960s not as some Golden Era where everything was great and then all went wrong? Willis's analysis gives us some of the resources to think of this as a stalled project. If impatience was a problem, then patience is needed. So how do we develop patience? How do we develop patience sufficient to overcome these very deep and very long-lasting structures? How do we spread out the accessibility of these kinds of experiments of alternative living from particular groups: from youth and from the relatively privileged? And to return to Marcuse: isn't it the case that there's more real scarcity now than there was in the 1960s? "Real" is a problematic term... What are the actual limits? That's a big question. What are the actual necessities now that put limits on human freedom? You won't get a bigger question than that today. Promise. | To have one's consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one's whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject — a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for. | ||||||||||||||
16 | The Principle of Return — Parapraxis Magazine | Adam Hajyahia | 5/1/2024 | https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-principle-of-return | Essay | Woodbine NYC | Psychology, Colonialism, Politics | How can a people whose modern life is defined by dispossession, dehumanization, death, destruction, starvation, besiegement, mass incarceration, mutilation, and maiming, whose oppression is supported by the world's cruelest military powers, imagine a material beyond? How can the same people who have been besieged for seventeen years by one of the world's most technologically advanced and sophisticated necropolitical apparatuses actively break free using low-tech machinery made out of garbage? Dig a hole out of prison with a spoon? Through a sustained practice of resistance, how can a zealous commitment to liberation refuse to become but rhetorical anaphora? | Fanon had a close understanding of how, unconsciously, the colonized repeated imagines the moment of their freedom. Such psychic returns are not coincidental, nor do they burst out of nothing. They are the stimulus of the labor of dreaming. These dreams and desires are stored in our muscles like hidden building blocks — a stenography of sorts that formulates itself through the very conditions of the repressive reality. "The dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping [above the walll, swimming [near the shores of Akkal, running [in the streets of Jaffal, and climbing [the trees of Birzeit]. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning." [12] This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured. | The people of Gaza's knowledge of the land behind the fence comes not from their memories but from the repetition of their labor. They know these lands because, after waiting for months and sometimes years to obtain work permits, they are allowed to cross the besieging walls to work these lands. Again, Palestinian time and labor are paid as a debt: we wait for permits to work the lands from which we are exiled; we wait on checkpoints to cross from one reserve to another. Our extracted and exploited time becomes the infrastructure of material labor with which the colonial enterprise is structured. [19] Those laborers move through militarized Israeli checkpoints to become the farmers of Israeli agricultural plantations, and the workers who build the settlements atop the ruins of their ancestral villages. They know these lands because they work them; they are alienated from these lands because they work them. | ||||||||||||||||||||
17 | The Shoah After Gaza — London Review of Books | Pankaj Mishra | 5/1/2024 | https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza | Essay | Woodbine NYC | Colonialism, Zionism, Politics | Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children. | Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’ | |||||||||||||||||||||
18 | Die Rede der Zukunftspreisträgerin | Meredith Whittaker | 6/1/2024 | https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin | Lecture | Self | AI, Politics, Data, Zionism | In addition to the current technologies that are being called “AI,” we also need to look at the AI narrative itself. The story that’s animating marketing and hype today – how is this marketing term being deployed? By wielding quasi-religious tales about conscious computers, artificial general intelligence, small elves that sit in our pocket and, servant-like, cater to our every desire, massive companies have paved the way for unprecedented dominance. By narrating their products and services as the apex of “human progress” and “scientific advancement,” these companies and their boosters are extending their reach and control into nearly all sectors of life, across nearly every region on earth. Providing the infrastructure for governments, corporations, media, and militaries. They are selling the derivatives of the toxic surveillance business model as the product of scientific innovation. And they are working to convince us that probabilistic systems that recognize statistical patterns in massive amounts of data are objective, intelligent, and sophisticated tools capable of nearly any function imaginable. Certainly more capable than we, mere mortals. And thus we should step aside and trust our business to them. This is incredibly dangerous. The metastatic shareholder capitalism-driven pursuit of endless growth and revenue that ultimately propels these massive corporations frequently diverges from the path toward a liveable future. | This is why, based on what we know about the scope and application of the Lavender AI system, we can conclude that it is almost certainly reliant on infrastructure provided by large US cloud companies for surveillance, data processing, and possibly AI model tuning and creation. Because collecting, creating, storing, and processing this kind and quantity of data all but requires Big Tech cloud infrastructures – they’re “how it's done” these days. This subtle but important detail also points to a dynamic in which the whims of Big Tech companies, alongside those of a given US regime, determines who can and cannot access such weaponry. | |||||||||||||||||||||
19 | Homo Zion — How Pinkwashing Erases Colonial History | Hussein Omar | 6/1/2024 | https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/homo-zion | Essay | Parapraxis | Colonialism, Zionism, Politics, Gender | As such, efforts to refute Zionism’s claims about itself as a queer haven have only been very marginally successful. By regarding pinkwashing as cynical PR stunt, these efforts persistently ignore the psychic identification that queers both in and out of Israel feel with its model of securitization. To be clear, such failures to overturn pinkwashing’s claims persist regardless of whether they undertake the proctological task of disputing the basic historical “truths” of Israeli attitudes to homosexuality or whether they engage in logical disputation. This latter mode, typically articulated in the subjunctive mood, holds that even if Palestinians don’t have the same gay rights we do, we still shouldn’t endorse their genocide. This approach is especially troubling. It keeps Palestine shrouded in mystery, appearing to conceal some secret of which anti-Zionists are ashamed: that it is indeed a brutish place, but we shouldn’t bomb it regardless. | “The establishment of a canonical narrative about the story of gay liberation in [the USA]—with an attendant fetishization of ‘gay havens’ like post-Stonewall New York and San Francisco—cemented in the global imaginary an essential association between gay liberatory politics and American history as exceptional. With time “gay rights” would come to be seen as a uniquely American civilizational attainment—reiterated by the fact that Pride is celebrated in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, for exampl”—and by the 2000s, adopted into American imperial politics. A particular story of American (white and bourgeois) gay liberation would be exported as a universal yardstick by which all other histories, and particularly Third World histories, were to be compared and mostly found deficient, and therefore judged “backward.” No longer would the Muslim woman be the only subject worth saving; now, too, the Muslim homosexual would emerge as a new imaginary subject upon which imperial fantasies of transformation would be inscribed." | Even as Zionism may contain within it the kernel of an unconscious desire for its own dismantling, it is incumbent upon queer people who dream of Palestine’s liberation to excavate not just their own histories and the choices they made but have now forgotten, and thereby critique their own psychic investments in that project. We must redirect our efforts from attempting to counter pinkwashing at the level of fielding alternative facts, and instead ask: what are the questions to which “pinkwashing” seems to provide an answer? It is also incumbent upon us to remember the many who stood against the pact that we made in exchange for militarized state protection. | ||||||||||||||||||||
20 | Donald Judd Selected Writings | Donald Judd | 7/1/2024 | Essays | Nao Mizuno | Art | Partial knowledge is no reason to make art that is fragmentary or hestitant. After all, anyone now who knows some simple science knows more than anyone earlier praising deities. As for oneself, one can know as has always been known by the attentive. The only reality that can be known at once and more or less completely is oneself. This reality can sometimes be known as it becomes art — thus the work of art is a reality. The work of the four artists is not abstracted from anything. It is something itself. ... The color and value is somewhat atmospheric. The problem for any artist is to find the concatenation that will grow. The first work that an artist feels is theirs is not a solution limiting the possibilities but is work that opens to limitless possibilities. Rothko panted hundreds of paintings, none bad, none repetitive. It's a great achievement for him to have created an interest from himself that was interesting for a lifetime. | Newman wrote in 1948:"...we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history." In 1965 he said: "The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting." "One thing that I am involved in about painting is that the painting should give man a sense of place, that he knows that he's there, so he's aware of himself. In that senge he relates to me when I made the paintings because in that sense I was there.... That the onlooker in front of my painting knows that he's there. To me, the sense of place has not only a mystery, but has that sense of metaphysical fact. I have come to distrust the episodic, and I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate. And also: "What matters to a true artist is that he distinguishes between a place and no place at all, and the greater the work of art the greater will be this feeling. And this feeling is the fundamental spiritual dimension. If this doesn't happen, nothing else can happen." | ||||||||||||||||||||||
21 | Conversations with Zizek | Slavoj Zizek & Glyn Daly | 7/1/2024 | Book | Leaves on Nassau Av | Philosophy, Psychoanalysis | There is a further potential danger. This concerns especially orthodox trends in politically correct multiculturalism and their distortion of a certain type of alliance politics that seeks to establish chains of equivalence between a widening set of differential struggles around gender, culture, lifestyles and so on. While there is nothing wrong in principle with establishing such forms of solidarity, the problem arises where this type of politics begins to assume, in a common-sense way, a basic levelling of the political terrain where all groups are taken to suffer equally ('we are all victims of the state/global capitalism/repressive forces. ). In other words, there is a danger that equivalential politics becomes so distorted that it becomes a way of disguising the position of those who are truly abject: those who suffer endemic poverty, destitution and repressive violence in our world system. In this way, the abject can become doubly victim-ized: first by a global capitalist order that actively excludes them; and, second, by an aseptic politically correct 'inclu-sivism' that renders them invisible inside its postmodern forest; its tyranny of differences. For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gord-ian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette - Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions' and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality. | ... the point of philosophy is not 'What is the structure of all?' but What are the concepts the scientist already has to presuppose in order to formulate the question?' It is simply asking about what is already there: what conceptual, and other, presuppositions already have to be there so that you can say what you are saying, so that you understand what you under-stand, so that you know that you are doing what you are doing. In this sense Kant was always a model philosopher. For example, even in his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's problem is not speculation about mortality of the soul. He asks a simple question: What is it that we have to presuppose is true by the mere fact that we are active as ethical agents?' Kant's answer is quite consequent - and at a different level affirmed even by Derrida. His answer is that, at least in the common understanding of ethics, people effectively presuppose the immortality of the soul and the existence of God; they silently presuppose this. That is what philosophy is about, not I philosopher believe in a certain structure of the universe etc.', but an exploration of what is presupposed even in daily activity. | ... if I were to locate a specific insight I would say that - and this is something that stays with me even now - retroactively, at least, I only understood what philosophy was at a certain elementary level when I arrived at the Kantian transcendental dimension. That is to say, when I understood the central point that philosophy is not simply a kind of megalomaniac enterprise - you know, 'let's understand the basic structure of the world' - that philosophy is not that. Or, to put it in more Heideggerian terms: while there is a basic question of understanding the structure of the world, the notion of the world is not simply the universe or everything that exists. Rather, the 'world' is a certain historical category, and understanding what the world is means, in transcendental terms, understanding some pre-existing, at least historically, a priori structure which determines how we understand how the world is disclosed to us. This for me is the crucial turn. | You know, when I was young I read about a verger - the one who assists the priest. It's a nice story about a guy who had been doing his job for twenty years when all of a sudden there was an order from the church hierarchy that everyone employed by the church had to be literate. The priest discovers that the verger is illiterate and says 'I am very sorry but I have to expel you; you can no longer be employed here'. So the guy is furious, goes home and wants to buy a cigarette, but he notices that on the long way home there is no tobacco shop. So he puts the little money he has into opening a tobacco shop, is able later to open another one, and then more and more, until, after a few years, he is rich. He then has so much money that at a certain point he goes to the bank to open an account, whereupon he is taken to see the director of the bank. When the director discovers that he doesn't know how to fill out the forms or sign his name, he exclaims, My God, even though you are illiterate you have earned so much money; imagine what you could have been if you were literate! And the guy replies: 'I know exactly what I would have been: a poor underpaid helper in a church.' | Since The Sublime Object, you have averaged something like a book a year with numerous supplementary publications. Is this an expression of psychoanalytic drive? Yes, and do you know in what sense? My reference here would be Stephen King's Shining. What people tend to forget is that this novel is basically about writer's block. In the film version the Jack Nicholson character always types the same sentence, cannot start his text, and then the situation explodes into axe killings. But I think the true horror is actually the opposite one: that you have the compulsion to write on and on. That's much more horrifying than writer's block I think. In the same way as when Kierkegaard refers to the human being as an animal that is sick until death, the true horror is immortality; that it will never end. That is my horror - I simply cannot stop. And I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing - I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project - it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based upon an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing. I never begin with the idea that I am going to write something. I always have to begin with one or two observations that lead on to other points - and so on. | |||||||||||||||||||
22 | All that is Air Melts Into Air | Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain | 7/1/2024 | Essay | Self | Colonialism, Data, Politics, Capitalism | And yet, the intoxicating allure of net zero remains irresistible for corporations and governments alike. In promising to reduce carbon emissions without systemic or economic change, net zero means emissions can continue forever, that burning can continue as long as someone else is paid to draw the carbon back out of the atmosphere. | Offsetting is ultimately a data-driven scheme. The centrality of data in how this process operates, and the fact that data itself becomes the commodity, means that the accuracy and methodology of how data is collected tends to be the focus of critique, often at the expense of analyzing other aspects or risks of a given project. For example, the LifeStraw scheme attracted criticism for improperly measuring how much Kenyans actually boil drinking water (the baseline scenario), but less so for the brittle, colonial structure of the scheme whereby a population is made dependent on a single European company’s product. What happens if the LifeStraw device breaks? Who pays for a replacement? What if the LifeStraw company ceases to exist? These fundamental questions are overshadowed by critiques pertaining to the accuracy of the project’s math. Incidentally, Kenya is one of the least polluting countries per-capita in the world, making the impact of carbon savings from LifeStraw negligible. | Offsets are fundamentally performative, creative endeavors: they demand ingenuity in data collection, quantification, and modeling. Through these acts of creative measurement, they conjure novel commodities out of thin air. Viewing the world through the lens of net zero not only spectacularly reduces everything to a single dimension—that of carbon fluxes and flows—but also more generally presupposes that these metabolisms can be measured, standardized, and ultimately made fungible. This view frames the cohort of other lifeforms with whom we share the planet as systems that provide ecosystem services. Trees serve as carbon pumps and wetlands as carbon stores. Environments are quantified and financialized based on their capacity to uptake the CO2 molecule. Offsetting renders kin as infrastructure. | As the political economist Bram Büscher points out, rather than attributing any intrinsic value to environments, seeing them primarily as providers of measurable services is a way of extracting value from their conservation and providing a new means of accumulation. Offsets therefore transform environmental conservation into a business model for attempting to solve one of capitalism’s most intractable and intrinsic problems: how to achieve ongoing capital accumulation on a finite planet. Amidst arguments that offsetting is a vital way to bring investment to the conservation of biodiverse places around the world, it is worth recalling that the banner of conservation has long been used to mask violence, dispossession, and the control of indigenous communities who have long stewarded areas of rich biodiversity. Known as “conservation-via-dispossession,” the added financial incentive of carbon offsetting risks exacerbating these abuses, and there are already a raft of cases of Indigenous groups being coerced into offsetting agreements that commit them to change how they manage or inhabit their lands. | At their heart, offsetting structures provide ways for wealthy corporations from the Global North to continue their operations, dodge emissions reductions, and push the burden of change and transformation onto the already-marginalized communities least responsible for the crisis. | To return to the words of Max Curmi, sabotage reveals a system functioning exactly as it is meant to: [The system] is actually not broken. It’s performing exactly the way it was set up … For the climate movement to actually start to engage with this in an effective way we have to acknowledge the situation that we are currently facing. It’s not a couple of bad politicians or a couple of bad corporations, it’s an entire economic and legal framework that prevents change from happening and that locks in an extraction-based economy that is fundamentally about exploiting people and the environment for as much profit as possible for the rich. | ||||||||||||||||||
23 | Sound and Depression | Nick Klein | 7/1/2024 | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EIKbFSDe8pcyjuoCfw5gdHwTPrms3V5R/view?usp=sharing | Thesis | Self | Capitalism, Sound, Depression, Art | The Noise from Japan is distinct in two characteristics that are indicative to the (anti)”genre” : scale of production and output, and diversity of style. The undisputed champion of these characteristics and most well known producer of the form is Akita Masami, predominantly known as Merzbow. Akita’s vast discography speaks to the role of production en masse as an almost formal or compositional construct in the act of creation itself. In conversation with David Novak, Akita explains his relationship to production and capitalism: “Noise was an idea about capitalism: the overload of capitalism, that kind of consumer overload. For me, it’s a consumer sound. . . . If capitalism goes into catastrophe, it freezes the consumer. In fact, in the late ’80s, Japan was frozen with consuming economically—the “bubble,” you know? So when I made Noise in that same period—well, I’m not a salaryman, and I’m not consuming with money, but it’s the same idea. . . . It’s very difficult to escape from our system. We’re already in- volved in the system. So if I can put something into the system, I want to change its direction to one kind of way, a private way." — Akita (Merzbow ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||
24 | Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life | Theodor Adorno | 10/1/2024 | Book | Self | Capitalism, Theory, Frankfurt School | The relation of knowledge to power is one not only of servility but of truth. Much knowledge, if out of proportion to the disposition of forces, is invalid, however formally correct it may be. If an émigré doctor says: For me, Adolf Hitler is a pathological case,' his pronouncement may ultimately be confirmed by clinical find-ings, but its incongruity with the objective calamity visited on the world in the name of that paranoiac renders the diagnosis ridiculous, mere professional preening. Perhaps Hitler is 'in-himself' a pathological case, but certainly not 'for-him'. The vanity and poverty of many of the declarations against Fascism by émigrés is connected with this. People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us | |||||||||||||||||||||||
25 | The Academisation of Rave: Is Everyone Talking About Dancing, Rather Than Doing It? | Chal Ravens | 10/1/2024 | https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/clubbing-dancefloor-utopia-raving-academia/ | Article | Rave | Looking on from this side of the Atlantic, I wonder if I sometimes detect a note of puritanical moralism in the American academisation of rave? There seems to be a need to justity all this hedonism and excess pleasure as, in fact, an important technique of self-actualisation or community building or other meaning-making activity, in a way that doesn't occur so readily to Brits, for whom alcohol is the problematic cornerstone of social lite. That's not to deny the possibility that raves can be zones of personal and political transformation, but I'm reminded of the wellness lingo that's attached itself to the "psychedelic renaissance" in clinical and therapeutic settings. People are now paying thousands of dollars to have a life-changing epiphany at the ketamine clinic, even though they could roll the dice on the same experience - or a totally different, much weirder and more entertaining one - for a hundredth of the price at Sam in the club. | It’s not that there’s suddenly more room to dance, or that our moves are any more interesting – it’s more that the focus of clubbing has shifted away from records, labels and genres; away from ranking, cataloguing and classifying; away from the content of dance music and towards its context. | This tendency towards academisation has turned the dancefloor into a kind of ideological zone of contestation rather than just a receptacle for weekend hedonism. It has also coincided with an increasing politicisation of club culture over the last decade, from the 2010s rejection of #allmalelineups through to the current mobilisation around the genocide in Gaza. In music magazines, artist profiles and scene reports are often framed around a political or identitarian aspect of club culture, from the reclamation of Black and queer histories within a white-washed mainstream, to lesser-heard narratives around mental health, neurodivergence and disability. | |||||||||||||||||||||
26 | The Origin of Capitalism | Ellen Meiksins Wood | 10/1/2024 | Book | Verso | But what was even more distinctive about this for of imperial domination - or rather, what this distinctive for of appropriation implied - was a system with coercions of is own, economic imperatives, reinforcing, and eventually capable of replacing, the extra-economic coercion of military conquest and direct political domination. These economic coercions are unique to capitalism. The ideological implications go even further. The argument for colonial expropriation was not just that improving settlers had the right to expropriate and displace people who were not suitably productive. Nor was it even just that colonizers could, indeed should, expropriate those who might be productive but not producing for commercial profit. The point was that, just as Locke's 'improvers' and enclosers were giving added value to the people they displaced, effectively creating value and therefore giving something to the community rather than taking it away, the colonizer, in expropriating local populations, was not robbing subject peoples but adding to the common good. These colonizers now found their justification in economic rather than extra-economic moral or religious principles, or, more precisely, economic principles took on a moral and religious meaning. Just as human beings engaged in improvement had assumed God's role as creators of value, their project had become the new religion. | This is not the only way in which Locke's theory of property supported the interests of landlords like Shaftesbury. Against the background of his emphatic pronouncement that all men were free and equal in the state of nature, he nevertheless, like others before him, justified slavery. More particularly... his views on improvement could easily be mobilized to justify colonial expansion and the expropriation of indigenous peoples, as his remark on the American Indian makes painfully obvious. If the unimproved lands of the Americas represented nothing but 'waste', it was a divinely ordained duty for Europeans to enclose and improve them, just as 'industrious' and 'rational' men had done in the original state of nature. 'In the beginning all the World was America' (Il.49), with no money, no commerce, no improvement. If the world - or some of it - had been removed from that natural state at the behest of God, anything that remained in such a primitive condition must surely go the same way. | Locke's point, which not coincidentally drips with colonialist contempt, is that unimproved land is waste, so that any man who takes it out of common ownership and appropriates it to himself - he who removes land from the common and encloses it - in order to improve it has given something to humanity, not taken it away. There is, of course, something attractive about Locke's idea that labour is the source of value and the basis of property, but it soon becomes clear that there is something odd about it too. For one thing, it turns out that there is no direct correspondence between labour and property, because one man can appropriate the labour of another. He can acquire a right of property in something by 'mixing' with it not his own labour but the labour of someone else whom he employs. It appears that the issue for Locke has less to do with the activity of labour as such than with its profitable use. In calculating the value of the acre in America, for instance, he talks not about the Indian's expenditure of effort, labour, but about the Indian's failure to realize a profit. The issue, in other words, is not the labour of a human being but the productivity of property, its exchange value and its application to commercial profit. This emphasis on the creation of exchange value as the basis of property is a critical move in the theorization of capitalist property. | It is worth dwelling for a moment on this concept of improve-ment, because it tells us a great deal about English agriculture and the development of capitalism. The word 'improve' itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just 'make better' in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit (based on the old French for into, en, and profit, pros - or its oblique case, preu). By the seventeenth century, the word 'improver' was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste. Agricultural improvement was by then a well-established practice, and in the eighteenth century, in the golden age of agrarian capitalism, "improvement' in word and deed came truly into its own. | |||||||||||||||||||||
27 | The Cultural Turn | Frederic Jameson | 12/1/2024 | Book | Verso | Postmodernism, Capitalism, Theory | That is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of the eighteenth century. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
28 | We do this 'til we free us | Mariame Kabe | 12/1/2024 | Book | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
29 | No Longer Human | Osamu Dazai | 12/1/2024 | Book | Nao | I fail to see, however, that a distrust for human beings should necessarily lead directly to religion. Is it not true, rather, that human beings, including those who may now be deriding me, are living in mutual distrust, giving not a thought to God or anything else? | It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar “What a messy business it is to be fallen for” by the more literary “What uneasiness lies in being loved.” | a bitterness akin to shame | People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness. | “I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.” | The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. | It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself. | (The clash between rich and poor is a hackneyed enough subject, but I am now convinced that it really is one of the eternal themes of drama.) | It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it. | That’s because I deceived them. I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody. | Society won’t stand for it. It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right? If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it. It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it? Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you? | Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent. | God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin? | Everything passes. | |||||||||||
30 | On Giving Up | Adam Phillips | 12/1/2024 | Book | Topos | Loss, Grief, Freud | This, Freud suggests, is what we do; this is even how culture works for us, what culture is for - to master loss. Whether or not the child is mastering loss - whatever that could mean - he has certainly redescribed his experience of his mother's inevitable intermittent absences. He hasn't taken her temporary loss literally, even though, of course, no one can ever know whether a temporary absence will be a permanent one. But is it now a loss or a game? Is loss just the very thing we need to find ways of transforming, to prompt our inventiveness? Could loss be redescribed, without being unduly upbeat - without being in a so-called 'state of denial' — as also a form of inspiration? If loss is the point and not the problem - and this doesn't stop us caring for and about each other - we may be less terrorized by it, and so less obsessed and impressed by it. We may then be able to understand and use Picasso's wonderful boast, "I don't seek, I find? Finding would be the point, and not losing. Loss would no longer be, as it were, an end in itself. When loss is not catastrophic loss, it is a form of stage fright. | He has never been able to see the benefits of censorship, as Freud urges us to do. What feels like sabotage can be, as it were, opportunity in disguise. So Freud wants us to ask - as does Kafka in a different way - what does whatever you want to prevent, and the ways in which you prevent it, make possible? There are always going to be leopards entering the temple. The question is, what service, if any, can they become part of? And who decides? | The censorship is deemed to be self-protective and self-starving - self-protective by being self-starving; self-serving in the fullest and most restrictive sense. It is the assumption of the censorship that we prefer safety to danger, closedness to openness, the familiar to the strange. So Freud says, think of the censor as your most important conversational partner rather than the tyrant you are always managing. Where there was sovereignty, there can be mutual exchange; where there is tyranny an experiment in living is being kept at bay. In psychoanalytic treatment the patient suspends self-censorship with a view to better self-censorship in the future. And this entails making conscious the censor's criteria for censorship with a view to working out your own, more desired criteria - working out what you should not say when, and what you want to be able to say and when. And as an afterthought, it is not odd that as ambivalently assimilating Jews, both Kafka and Freud were working out how you can make the censor work for your desire. And this, of course, is how we have come to read writers under communism and other totalitarian regimes. | It would, of course, make sense that the most effective censorship is to all intents and purposes invisible, or silent; it doesn't in any way present itself as censorship, it presents itself as upbringing, or nurture (I might say I love you when I mean I want to censor you). We may or may not need to be paranoid about this - paranoia is acute censorship anxiety - but it may be instructive to acknowledge that censorship is our medium and our project. No description of ourselves and our lives, Freud suggests, is either intelligible or useful without censorship having, as it were, pride of place. Psy-choanalysis, or getting to know your censors. | ... for a culture to exclude a possibility, and to have to change if that possibility is to be admitted, implies that it has depended on that exclusion in order to sustain its existence. Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature Clearly there can be no politics or religion - no form of social organization - without a category of the unacceptable, and so without censorship. So when we are saying that Freud's psychoanalysis depends upon censorship we may not be saying very much. We may be saying no more than that what Freud called 'psychic life' is selective and punitive; that what we can let ourselves know about ourselves is always under surveillance, and tends to be, as it were, heavily policed. If the modern question, as Michel Serres has said, informed partly by Freud, is, 'What is it I don't want to know about myself?', then we need to acknowledge how much work, how much discipline and diligence and obedience is required to sustain this project of not-knowing, of informed ignorance. | Perhaps we should ask of the censors what Iris Murdoch suggested we should ask of philosophers: not merely what do they fear, but what do they love? This is the question that Freud -for whom the whole idea of censorship was the precondition for psychoanalysis; indeed, without the idea of censorship, psychoanalysis would be unintelligible - didn't quite realize he was asking. If we are, right from the beginning, censored and self censoring creatures, what do our formative and apparently informed censors want for us? If censorship is a form of love-and sometimes a perverse form of love, even though our first censors are ostensibly our parents - what is it that our censors love, in censoring us? What does their world look like uncensored by them? | ... curiosity may be the most sustaining form our desire takes. | A psychoanalyst is someone who is, above all, curious ad curious about curiosity; and psychoanalysis itself may be more of a curiosity profession than a helping profession, while keen to work out the connections between the two. A psychoanalyst is not someone who needs to know, not someone who needs to be right, or needs to be believed. He is someone who, among much else, analyses resistances, even though it sounds oddly old fashioned now to say such things. And it is the resistances to curiosity that are to be analysed. Resistance is (always and only) resistance to curiosity. We suffer, Freud suggests, from being insufficiently curious about our suffering (and one of the aims of a psychoanalysis should be to get the so-called patient curious about his suffering and indeed about his pleasure). We are not curious enough about what we believe and don't believe about ourselves and other people. And so, to pick up on the title of this essay, not believing should provoke as much curiosity as believing. This is what Freud is drawing our attention to. He wants us to be curious about belief and disbelief, and indeed about the inability to believe. A curiosity about the malaise of his time. And of ours. And for Freud, this begins with the child curiosity about sex, and what a curiosity about sex is assumed to be a curiosity about. And why it might matter. | in what sense does self-knowledge now get us the life we want? In what sense is the traditional, the conventional, project of knowing ourselves a good way to spend our time? What can't self-knowledge do for us? And what, to ask the psychoanalytic question, can so-called seli-knowledge be a defence against? What might we be using even psychoanalysis itself to resist about ourselves? Freud, that is to say, who counsels us that we are always ambivalent about everything we value - that is how we know we value something, because we love it and hate it - makes us wonder, through psychoanalysis, about our ambivalence about the time-honoured project of knowing ourselves. | What this shows is how difficult it is to tell the difference between what we think we are left out of and our projected imagining of it. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want. It may be that being left out of the so-called primal scene is what inspires curiosity, what prompts the wish to know, and what inspires fantasy. The primal scene violates and stimulates the child's omni-science, since only in fantasy can he know what isn't there. But with this first predicament the child also experiences his powerlessness: | Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay 'Art as Technique" of 1917: Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war ... And art [through its defamiliarizing practices) exists that one may recover the sensation of life... The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater's remark that 'habit is a form of failure', when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us — and clearly we need reminding — that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalysic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it. | For a culture faced with this kind of devastation, he suggests, there are three choices: 1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for. 2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative. 3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance. The Crow in fact gave up their Sun Dance around 1875, about a decade before they were moved into their reservation. One needs to recognize the destruction, Lear writes, if one is to move beyond it. In the abstract, there is no answer to the question: is the Sun Dance the maintenance of a sacred tradition or is it a nostalgic evasion?' We should consider, as Lear begins to do, what not giv-ng up would have entailed. | And why, by the same token, might someone need to feel that suicide was not in their repertoire? And yet, of course, before any suicide there is a history of more or less serious refusals, and avoidances, and supposed failures. Before suicide come the other, minor forms of giving up. In the ordinary course of events, when we give up, or give up on something or someone, we are not ostensibly asking whether life is or is not worth living: we are asking either whether what we had wanted to do is worth doing, or whether we have the ability to do it. When I give up I am admitting failure, or acknowledging loss of desire, or seeking the pleasures of sabotage. But giving up, for whatever reason, has become in this situation what I want, what I want to do | No one else could gain admission here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. Now I am going to shut it? The man doesn't give up until he is given up on by the sadistic doorkeeper. We should notice that no thought is given to what the aftermath to giving up would be like, to the way giving up would look. In the background of a Kafka story there is often the promise of something, but of something that never happens, as though Kafka's theme is not what was once called existential dread, but tantalization. The lure of foreclosed possibilities. The very real freedom of being able to turn back, or to give up, seems to be a freedom Kafka fears: he wants to reach the point from which there is no turning back, no turning back from wanting whatever is wanted. And wanted at whatever cost. As though wanting, for Kafka (and not only for Kafka), is like an addiction. The self-cure for having been tantalized is either to turn the tables and become the tantalizer, or to give up on wanting: two forms of revenge, two forms of cruelty to oneself. Kafka, who gave up all the women he thought of marrying, could not give up on the theme of giving up. So even when he writes about the perennial theme of finding a way of giving up on suffering — one's own and the suffering of others — he finds a way round it that seems at once ingenious and true: 'You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world - that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature - but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.' We might ask, in a pragmatic way, as Kafka would not have: for what purposes would it be useful to write that? One purpose would be to try to work out where, in what situations, giving up doesn't work, or can't work. You can turn away, turn your back on the sufferings of others, but it might be the case that this turning away is the only suffering you can genuinely avoid. | In her remarkable and orientating book A Life of One's Own - a book really about how we might sustain our aliveness: the alive-ness, the being enlivened, that is the true antidote to giving up - the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes her attempt to 'decide what [her] aim in life was': ...I found that I had no idea about this. I decided to keep a diary and write down what I thought was the best thing that had happened during the day, in the hope that I might find out what it was that I really wanted. I had also been stimulated by reading Montaigne's Essays and his insistence that what he calls the soul is totally different from all one expects it to be, often being the very opposite. She begins, as a modern person, by trying to work out what she mants and then, by way of qualification, she refers to Montaigne, for whom 'what he calls the soul is totally different from all one opects it to be, often being the very opposite. She thought that when made he happy a sumed that she must have an aim in lie te f the did a yet know what it was. But then Montaigne reminds her that there is a part of herself - perhaps the most important part - that is totally different and may even want the very opposite of what she assumes she wants (that every essence suggests another one). | |||||||||
31 | Mindy Seu for Passerby Magazine | http://passerbymagazine.com/profiles/mindy-seu | Interview | Self | Practice, Research, Identity, Lifestyle | When I’m reading something, I will speed read, get the big bullet points of each paragraph and understand if it’s helpful for me. If it is, I’ll do a second read that’s more thorough, a close reading to highlight key quotes, annotate, etc. Then if it’s extremely relevant, I’ll transpose those annotations and highlights into Google Docs based on themes: digital gifts, AI, archives. I have a huge repository of quotes and comments that I can pull from when I’m writing an essay using keyword search — you basically note a full citation, like author and title, as well as metadata like who recommended it to you, alongside your quotes and annotations, added into the same doc. I’ll even add quotes from friends, excerpts from films or lectures, anything that seems relevant. Later on, when I’m writing something on that theme, I can draw from this repository and adapt as needed. It’s all about developing a citational practice for everyday life | One strategy I use is to create a rough outline or structure of what you want to talk about, take a walk, no pen and paper, and record yourself talking about this topic, and then transcribe that. Then you will have the language that feels informative, yet digestible, structured, yet naturally flowing. Perhaps it also reduces posturing, or playing the role of an intellectual by parrotting jargon | I’m sure my current interest in bodily autonomy and sexualized systems emerged because I had none of that when I was young. I was taught that sex was purely for conception, a duty rather than a pleasure. This puritanical indoctrination filled me with a lot of sexual shame throughout my 20s. Even if you’re intellectually aware of this, having your body recondition itself into a new physical state is so difficult. In my 20s, I was seeing a psychotherapist and sex therapist, which is typically confused with bodywork, but it’s actually talk therapy with a focus on sexual discourse. Working on this mind-body split will be a lifelong practice. Feeling present is difficult when you’ve only been taught to focus on the future and external validation | ||||||||||||||||||||||
32 | Byung-Chul Han w/ El-Pais Mag | https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-10-08/byung-chul-han-the-philosopher-who-lives-life-backwards-we-believe-were-free-but-were-the-sexual-organs-of-capital.html | Interview | Matias Benedetto | Practice, Lifestyle | He says that he writes little. “I’m extremely lazy. I work in the garden most of the time and play the piano. And then, maybe I sit at my desk for an hour. Maybe I write three sentences a day, which then becomes a book. But I don’t try to write, no. I receive thoughts.” Han waits for the words to come to him. “The ones in the books aren’t mine. I receive the ones that visit me and I copy them. I don’t claim authorship of my books: that’s why the words in them are wiser than I am. Therefore, they have to interview my books, not me. I’m an idiot." | Han thinks that it’s a mistake to obsess about the freedom of the individual. “Marx already said it: individual freedom is the cunning of capital. We believe that we’re free, but deep down, we just produce, we increase capital. That is, capital uses individual freedom to reproduce. That means that we — with our individual freedom — are the sexual organs of capital.” He brings up one of his flagship ideas: “Under the compulsion of performance and production, there’s no possible freedom. [If] I force myself to produce more, to perform more [and] I optimize myself to the point of death… that’s not freedom." | |||||||||||||||||||||||
33 | Gerald Donald w/ Electronic Beats | https://www.electronicbeats.net/gerald-donald-interview/ | Interview | Self | Afrofuturism, Techno, Music, Mind Posture | Well, I will not directly indicate my involvement in any project. I will leave this question open to observer interpretation. The most important thing has always been the music and concept itself. I adhere to this philosophy. People spend way too much time engaging personalities rather than the music that’s accompanying that personality. Thus, a proportionally inverse relationship is established and in most cases the personality acquires the larger value. | How can instrumental music be political? Mainly in the structure of the data, it’s level of aggression and so forth. Usually we associate a particular set of tones, rhythmic patterns and timbres with certain emotions, conditions, ideas or environments. For example, a very rigid pattern and rapid percussion sequence can give the aura of a totalitarian state, as can industrial music. All music structure is reflective of its surroundings. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
34 | On Keeping a Notebook — Joan Didion | https://www.are.na/block/14580562 | Essay | Self | Lifestyle, Practice | I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably “The EightyYard Run.” Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
35 | Roger Ebert on Fandom (A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length Quotes) | Book | Roddy Parker | Identity, Lifestyle | A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies. Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
36 | Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard | Book | Yael Mizrahi | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
37 | What’s Up With Everyone’s Small Wooden Stools? | https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/whats-up-with-everyones-small-wooden-stools | Essay | Self | Lifestyle | But there is also something sinister, latently colonial even, in mashing distinct folk arts divorced from their cultural contexts into Instagram-calibrated vignettes. “Found objects” necessitates the question, “Found by whom?” Who are these for? Everyone their own private studio apartment Christopher Columbus, endlessly curating small corners with vaguely African wenge wood stools. It's the same misplaced virtue that animated Airbnb’s promise of a more intimate or profound engagement with one's world (the persistent lie of the “global citizen”), while the real effect was the propagation of simultaneous housing crises. Tiwa Select is run by Alex Tieghi-Walker, who has worked as a creative lead for Airbnb, an overlap that doesn't exactly feel like a coincidence. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
38 | Artist Profile: Rosalie Yu | https://rhizome.org/editorial/2023/nov/01/artist-profile-rosalie-yu/ | Interview | Self | Identity | I think of Taiwan as an error. If I connect back to errors and images, errors and tools, there are some images that don't render because of the codec or of the available technology. Sometimes there are scans that just never come out because you are not supposed to use the technology that way. So I'm guessing when we talk about purposely glitching something, to break the tools in order to see how the system works, I'm trying to use or misuse image-making tools as a way to explore the errors of intimacy, or how I feel the errors of my own feelings. | ... on the opposite side of Asians not having feelings, Black Americans are racialized to have excessive feelings. Sianne Ngai who wrote, “Ugly Feelings”, described feelings that are difficult to categorize. One of them is animatedness, and talking about Black Americans being stereotyped as people with exaggerated emotions. We have memes of Black people that people of other races use to express their emotions without the living experience. I feel like Asian people, maybe more of just where I'm from, are on the other end of the spectrum. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
39 | Superlinear | http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html | Essay | a8c | Work | Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they're full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you're lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing occasionally you're probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
40 | https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/us/antisemitic-speech-palestine-israel-protests.html | Article | “Antisemitism isn’t primarily about hurting or killing Jews, and it’s not based on some theory of racial inferiority (or superiority),” he wrote. “Instead, antisemitism is a fear, and hatred, of Jewish power — expressed primarily as a readiness to believe that Jews, when organized and acting together on large scales, are dangerous, the very essence of evil.” | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
41 | Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear | Steve Goodman | Book | Lent by Jared | Sound, Politics | No doubt, as Winthrop-Young argues, it would be possible to explain aspects of the origin of most of the media around which Kitte' argument revolves in nonmilitary terms, especially with the many recent instances of entertainment media preceding military use, for example, simulation technologies developed in the field of video games that have migrated back to the military. But this misses the more fundamental argument about modern society that has been asserted since the early twentieth century by the Italian futurists, Ernst Junger, and McLuhan right up to Virilio and Kittler. For these thinkers, war has come to mean much more than battles between nation-states; rather, it expresses an ontological condition. For all of these writers, the concept of war becomes an attempt to describe a low-intensity warfare that reconstitutes the most mundane aspects of everyday existence through psychosocial torque and sensory overload | As opposed to a sound artist, he describes the sonic effects of his work as side effects, or artifacts, merely an expression of a more fundamental subsonic vibrational ecology? Bain seeks to tap into a "secret world of sound resident within materials. Using multiple oscillators... it becomes more like an additive synthesis type of production." He unleashes the contagiousness of vibration in the production of a "transient architecture that describes a system of infection where action modulates form ... where stability disintegrates" and effects are "re-injected into the walls of the "host' site in a "translation of sorts, one building's sound infecting another." | |||||||||||||||||||||||
42 | Why we should bulldoze the business school | https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school | Article | Self | Capitalism, Business School | The first thing that all these areas share is a powerful sense that market managerial forms of social order are desirable. The acceleration of global trade, the use of market mechanisms and managerial techniques, the extension of technologies such as accounting, finance and operations are not routinely questioned. This is a progressive account of the modern world, one that relies on the promise of technology, choice, plenty and wealth. Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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