John Steppling

"The rose is without why; she blossoms because she blossoms. She pays no attention to herself, does not ask if anyone sees her." Angelus Silesius "I never had a memory for myself, but always for others." Masha Ivashintsova "What you didn't see, don't say...having seen keep quiet." Solon (Apophthegmata) "The capitalistic order produces modes of human relations even in their unconscious representations..." Felix Guattari (in conversation) There is a collective regression to contemporary thinking. Or maybe it is the loss of thinking itself. But overlaying this can be seen a collection of resentments and fears, of desires and identifications with power and aggression. And … [Read more...]

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.” Wittgenstein (Tractatus) “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few” Ecclesiastes 5:2 "The criteria distinguishing history from poetics involved the modes of representation, which (if we might exaggerate somewhat) were intended to articulate either being or appearance. " Reinhart Koselleck (Futures Past; On the Semantics of Historical Time) “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel Boorstin Many years ago I was reading a lot of … [Read more...]

"In theory, “affirmation” refers to every discourse, such as positivism, that silences the negative, the dark, the inassimilable, or the contradictory nature of the real. In practice, “affirmation” designates reconciliation with the world as it is, submission to so-called reality, moral resignation, political defeatism, and approval of the status quo in general." Theirry De Duve (Aesthetics at Large: chapter 7 Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant) "...let’s do ugly non-art pictures, let’s not be good. Let’s not learn from others. No talent is the talent." Edith Schloss (Letter to Jean-Michael Basquiat) "I want to be a machine." Andy Warhol What art means, what that word means, is a … [Read more...]

"The dream screen, as I define it, is the surface on which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank background, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action of ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it. Theoretically it may be part of the latent or the manifest content, but this distinction is academic. The dream screen is not often noted or mentioned by the analytic patient, and in the practical business of dream interpretation, the analyst is not concerned with it." Bertram D. Lewin (Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream Screen, 1949) "Thoughts precede thinking. They need to be thought in order to be recognized as thoughts. … [Read more...]

"The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol. All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good. As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen. Milton Pedraza, the chief executive of the Luxury Institute, advises companies on how the wealthiest … [Read more...]

"There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one's actions, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance." Eric Zencey "We project onto the future what we cannot endure as something which already occurred, or which is happening now. We still believe that the worst is yet to come—it is a perspective, but not a reality, and therefore our reality is still not that bad. A fear of the future and anxiety about some indefinite event (“we will all die”) is easier to suffer than a certain, irreparable, and irreversible horror that has just happened (“we are all already dead”)." Oxana Timofeeva (E Flux, June 2014) “The end of the … [Read more...]

"That is, medicine has been (and continues to be) an important social institution for reasons other than its ability to heal." Jacob Stegenga (Medical Nihilism) “Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.” Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) “Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.” Hippocrates & Galen (Galen) "Crazy as two waltzing mice." Raymond Chandler (Farewell My Lovely) Discussing health and illness is fraught with contradictions and confusions. Almost any definition of disease relies on certain notions of normalcy, or functionality. To call a condition, say depression, dysfunctional becomes a circular … [Read more...]

"All reading is projection. But, of course, it is not only projection." Peter E. Gordon (Adorno and Existence) “Mankind which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Homeric gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Walter Benjamin (Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) "...outside of here is death." Samuel Beckett (Endgame) "The ghost of Hamlet’s father keeps appealing to us lest we forget him and pursue our own desires." Rainer Nagele (Reading After Freud) Adorno's first dissertation (or first major disseration) was on Kierkegaard, … [Read more...]