"...technology places a frame around everything; it artificially limits what sort of world of meaning we can access. It guarantees inaccessibility. The information we have isn’t the information we want; the information we want isn’t the information we need; and the information we need is impossible to get." Duncan Reyburn (The question concerning AI, Eucatastrophologist, Substack) "If, for example, an AI passes a theory of mind test in such a way as to suggest that the AI can understand people’s mental states, it is more likely that the test is not testing what the test designers think it is testing than that the AI has a theory of mind. An implicit agreement with the technological frame … [Read more...]

"Plato’s Phaedrus implies that Socrates had theoretical objections to writing philosophy, since writing is always less truthful than the direct medium of speech. Socrates probably never gave official public lectures or founded a philosophical ‘school’. He seems to have imagined philosophy as something close to conversation." Emily Wilson (The Death of Socrates) “A tide of unnecessary publications is rising through our universities and libraries, it is threatening to drown real intellectual life and nobody knows how to stop it.” Noel Malcolm (Sinking in a Sea of Words, The Independent, 1998) "The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one … [Read more...]

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Miles Davis “Throughout the animal kingdom we find the welfare of the individual subordinated to that of the species.” Ernest Starling (Elements of Human Physiology) "In the affluent society, the authorities are hardly forced to justify their domination. They deliver the goods; they satisfy the sexual and the aggressive energy of their subjects. Like the unconscious, the destructive power of which they so successfully represent, they are this side of good and evil, and the principle of contradiction has no place in their logic. " Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) "I'm mad on technology." Adolf Hitler (Table … [Read more...]

"The more we understand about primitive mentality, which constitutes a deep layer of advanced mentality, the harder it becomes to escape the idea that its implicit sense of and quest for irrational nondifferentiation of subject and object contains a truth of its own, granted that this other truth fits badly with our rational world view and quest for objectivity." Hans Loewald (The Waning of the Oedipus Complex) "All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato, Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it? It should have prevented this." Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize speech) "The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has … [Read more...]

"Under the two-tiered moral code of the racial contract, we have been living with one set of morals for whites and another for nonwhites (Mills 1997). However, the architects and beneficiaries of this white, racialized world also benefit from obscuring how race (the system they created) works. The epistemology of ignorance is a framework that inculcates peoples with a self-deception that makes them blind to or denies the reality of how racial hierarchy materially and epistemically shapes our world. This ignorance is not accidental, but purposeful. " Shuchen Xiang (Chinese Cosmopolitanism) "For nineteenth-century Germans, so unsure of their own Germanness, the Jewish Question was … [Read more...]

"For, according to Lacan, even the word "corpse" is a euphemism in reference to the real." Friedrich Kittler (Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter) "If all goes well, I will be able to treat myself again with one or two fashion shows." Walter Benjamin (in letter to Greta Karplus {Adorno}, quoted in Philipp Ekardt's 'Benjamin on Fashion') "They want a contact with the opposite sex—or perhaps simply access to sexuality itself—which cannot be named, a contact in which they can dissolve themselves while forcibly dissolving the other sex. They want to penetrate into its life, its warmth, its blood. It seems to me that they aren't just more intemperate, dangerous, and cruel than Freud's harmless … [Read more...]

"Art is not about creating polemical alternatives; art means rather, through nothing other than its form, resisting that world-course which everyday points a gun at mankind’s chest." Theodor Adorno (Notes to Literature) "My sword should bite it. Not the dreadful spout Which shipmen do the hurricane call, Constring’d in mass by the almighty sun, Shall dizzy with more clamor Neptune’s ear, In his descent, than shall my prompted sword Falling on Diomed." Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida, Act 5 sc.2) “Freud thus introduces into the psyche what might be termed a universal of perverse difference: all human beings have a potential proclivity for crime, sex, transgression, madness, … [Read more...]

"Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings [by Zeno,Han Yu, Robert Browning, and Søren Kierkegaard], to a greater or a lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." Jorge Luis Borges (Kafka and His Precursors) "The discontent in our culture has assumed a new quality: It appears as a universal, diffuse cynicism. " Peter Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason) “I decide who is a Jew.” Karl Lueger (Mayor of Vienna, 1897) "Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But … [Read more...]