Vanished

“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic.” Erwin Schrodinger (What is Life?) "This rationale holds that the conditions of social life will, in fact, be far less encumbered by atavistic allegiances, xenophobic nationalism, racism and sexism. in direct proportion to the preponderance of market rationality as the basis for allocating social goods. The market alone can achieve the kind of smooth equilibrium that always must elude the irrationality of state, management, coordination, and control." Samir Gandesha (Identifying with the Aggressor) “You don’t need to worry, you will not die until you have finished … [Read more...]

The Savage Judge

"Not only are his fellow men unconscious of his presence, but all animate nature has cast him out: no bird or living creature acknowledges his being.” George Frederic Watts (speaking of the Biblical figure of Cain, quoted by John Berger, Landscapes) "Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?" Jeremiah, 12 “To make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” Russell Conwell (Acres of Diamonds, quoted by Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon) “Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod … [Read more...]

The Apocalyptic Fear

"There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space, for example at one of the two holes, independent of actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!" Heinz Pagels (Quoted by Paul Davies, The New Physics) "The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience." Phillip Goff (Galillo's Error) "What contemporary society still gives that is good and beautiful comes from its humanistic roots from an ancient, poor and religious world. But the consumer society is irreligious, and therefore arid." Pier … [Read more...]

Unknowable

"What can be done?“ said Zeus, “for all is given; The crops, the hunt, the marts are no more free." Friedrich Schiller (The Division of the World, tr. Wm Wertz Jr.) " W.E.B. Du Bois deciding he had “not been Freudian enough” when he observed the body parts of a lynched Negro displayed in a local store." Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud) "Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God—the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see." Sigmund Freud (Moses and Monotheism) "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly … [Read more...]

Houses of Eternity

"Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world such that man may endure exposing himself to the problems and tensions of the real world." Morse Peckham (Man's Rage Against Chaos) "The study of Homer and Picasso are once again a class prerequisite, a luxury for the wealthy." Curtis White (Bad Science of Something Else? Orion Magazine) “...the thinkers, the artists and the heroes { } ...They are lonely, self-centred, not by choice but by necessity. Genius has no place for team-work. Poets and prophets do not go into committees." Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (An Idealist View of Life) “Our critique of science, technology and the industrial system is a critique of … [Read more...]

The Child in the Tree

"Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross." John Milton (Paradise Lost) "We don’t just talk anymore, we run programs. Whom do they serve?" Jonathan Beller (Digitality and the Media of Dispossession) "Bad philosophers are like slum lords." Ludwig Wittgenstein ( Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics) "Our supposedly algorithmic culture is not a material phenomenon so much as a devotional one, a supplication made to the computers people have allowed to replace gods in their minds, even as they … [Read more...]

Stone Age Brain

"...the artist who has the habit of art has a hand that trembles." Dante ( Paradiso 13.77–78) "Newspeak is the new lingua franca. All Ur-Fascist literature, including scholastic texts, revel in the use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments of complex and critical reasoning. A related objective is also to undermine culture and the cultivated taste for quality, because quality, in the fascist’s book, is retrograde." Anjan Basu (Fascism Come in All Shapes and Sizes But the 'Family Resemblances' Can No Longer Be Denied, The Wire, July 2021) "Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose … [Read more...]

The Comfort of the Metropole

"...artificial intelligence is a registry of power.” Kate Crawford (The Atlas of AI) “Cornell’s art assumes a romantic universe in which inexplicable events can and must occur. Minimal art, notwithstanding the cartesian disclaimers of some of the artists, draws its being from this charged, romantic atmosphere, which permits an anonymous slab or cube to force us to believe in it as something inevitable.” John Ashbery (Reported Sightings) "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; and in the lowest deep a lower deep..." John Milton (Paradise Lost, IV) "It is not true that the human mind has undergone no development since the earliest times and that, in contrast to the advances in … [Read more...]