These are ideas that I am reading and that resonate. Some are related to my fields of research, some I find beautiful or fun. It might be useful –to me and maybe to someone else?– to store them in the cloud, ready to be quoted if needed. Also, underlining and writing them helps me process their possible meanings.
SEPTEMBER 2023 - ONGOING
Command+F
Aristotle
Berardi, Franco (Bifo)
Bridle, James
Fanon, Frantz
Hofstadter, Douglas R.
hooks, bell
Saltz, Jerry
The Care Collective
Tzu, Lao
Wark, McKenzie
A lot of my convictions about creativity come from self-observation rather than from scholarly study of manuscripts or sketches of various composers or painters or writers or scientists. Of course, I have done some of that type of scholarship too, because I am fascinated by creativity in general–but I feel that to some extent “you don’t really understand it unless you’ve done it”, and so I rely a great deal on that personal experience. I feel that way “I know what I’m talking about”.
PXX
To me, boiling things down to their conceptual skeletons is the royal road to truth (to mix metaphors rather horribly). 🤣 ❤️️ PXXI
What is a question that can serve as its own answer?
P9
This is a sentence with “onions”, “lettuce”, “tomato”, and a “side of fries to go”.
This is a hamburger with vowels, consonants, commas, and a period at the end.
P10
You may quote me. 🏆
P17
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul. 🤣
P47
PXX
To me, boiling things down to their conceptual skeletons is the royal road to truth (to mix metaphors rather horribly). 🤣 ❤️️ PXXI
What is a question that can serve as its own answer?
P9
This is a sentence with “onions”, “lettuce”, “tomato”, and a “side of fries to go”.
This is a hamburger with vowels, consonants, commas, and a period at the end.
P10
You may quote me. 🏆
P17
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul. 🤣
P47
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1986.
I am chemically predisposed to liking.
P1
Take over space. Take over machines. Take over chemistry. Play from inside the signs, the tech, the real state. At least for a bit. There’s no outside anymore, but maybe we can find some fractal world on the inside. Now that’s a good rave.
P2
On a good night, everything at a good rave comes together with just the right tension of invention and intention.
P2
I’m interested in people for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.
P4
To rave, to rove, to rêve (dream).
P5
Nick: “Bring a nonentitled attitude. It is all about who is coming to co-create the space, who you can gather so it will self-organize.”
P12
In the gap between magic and property, the raver mice came out to play.
P15
Picking the right spot in the crowd can be its own art.
P39
Like the rave, writing is a practice where I can go and get free, of dysphoria, of sadness, of useless desire. The work is the cum stain of its inception.
P48
While the DJs might not want to hear it –the crowd is what makes the rave.
P62
Then there’s club kids. They need nightlife, like ravers do. But they go to be seen and see each other rather than to lose themselves.
P63
While a rave is temporary, raving is outside of time.
P65
The ongoing scar of Anthropocene dirt.
P65
Landfill is archive.
P65
You’re into this. Lost in it. The default dance someone does at a rave, after a good hour or so, becomes so intimate. To rave one gives oneself over to this gestural body, arrayed among others. Your side-to-side step. That oscillation of the shoulder. How tender it makes me feel to be near you, lost too.
P69
Our being with others is best when it invites othering our being.🩷
P69
This labor of making nothing but each other dance.
P70
A playground for nonlabor.
P71
Holding your hand so I don’t lose you in the dark.
P72
P1
Take over space. Take over machines. Take over chemistry. Play from inside the signs, the tech, the real state. At least for a bit. There’s no outside anymore, but maybe we can find some fractal world on the inside. Now that’s a good rave.
P2
On a good night, everything at a good rave comes together with just the right tension of invention and intention.
P2
I’m interested in people for whom raving is a collaborative practice that makes it possible to endure this life.
P4
To rave, to rove, to rêve (dream).
P5
Nick: “Bring a nonentitled attitude. It is all about who is coming to co-create the space, who you can gather so it will self-organize.”
P12
In the gap between magic and property, the raver mice came out to play.
P15
Picking the right spot in the crowd can be its own art.
P39
Like the rave, writing is a practice where I can go and get free, of dysphoria, of sadness, of useless desire. The work is the cum stain of its inception.
P48
While the DJs might not want to hear it –the crowd is what makes the rave.
P62
Then there’s club kids. They need nightlife, like ravers do. But they go to be seen and see each other rather than to lose themselves.
P63
While a rave is temporary, raving is outside of time.
P65
The ongoing scar of Anthropocene dirt.
P65
Landfill is archive.
P65
You’re into this. Lost in it. The default dance someone does at a rave, after a good hour or so, becomes so intimate. To rave one gives oneself over to this gestural body, arrayed among others. Your side-to-side step. That oscillation of the shoulder. How tender it makes me feel to be near you, lost too.
P69
Our being with others is best when it invites othering our being.🩷
P69
This labor of making nothing but each other dance.
P70
A playground for nonlabor.
P71
Holding your hand so I don’t lose you in the dark.
P72
Wark, McKenzie. Raving. London: Duke University Press, 2023.
The three origins of poetry are (1) the artist’s instinct for imitation, (2) our instinctive pleasure in recognising a good imitation, (3) our instinctive pleasure in harmony and rhythm.
P8
To be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only for the philosopher but also to the rest of humankind.
P9
To learn is to gather the meaning of things.
P9
P8
To be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only for the philosopher but also to the rest of humankind.
P9
To learn is to gather the meaning of things.
P9
Aristotle. Art of Poetry. Edited by W. H. Fyfe. London: Oxford University Press, ed. 1966.
The truth is always stranger, more likely and more expansive than anything we can compute.
P101
The close scrutiny enabled by our technology reveals not a rigid map, but a pattern of interference, all the way down to the quantum dance of energy field behind everything.
P102
We thoughtlessly assume that by observing the world, we fix it into knowable forms, but timelapse reveals that the nature of the world is changeable. As Karen Barad, the philosopher of quantum physics, would say, it’s made of intractions: it’s in the invisible gaps between the frames that things encounter one another and vibrate.
P130
We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to computation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutabiliy and a moral impunity.
[...]Ideas about how we should think are located into our culture. It’s a problem exacerbated by technology. Once a way of seeing the world has been moulded into a tool it’s very hard to think otherwise.
P175
From this error flows all kinds of violence: the violence which reduces the beauty of the world to numbers, and the consequent violence which tries to force the world to conform to that representation, which erases, degrades, tortures and kills those things and beings which do not fit within the assumed system of representation. P178
The world is not like a computer. Computers –like us, like plants and animals, like clouds and seas– are like the world.
P179
To make a model is to abstract and represent: it is an act of distancing from the world.
P179
One number is not random; it only becomes random in relation to a sequence of other numbers, and the degree of its randomness is a property of the whole group. You can’t be random, in modern parlance, without having some shared baseline of normality or appropriateness to measure yourself against. Randomness is relational.
P219
P101
The close scrutiny enabled by our technology reveals not a rigid map, but a pattern of interference, all the way down to the quantum dance of energy field behind everything.
P102
We thoughtlessly assume that by observing the world, we fix it into knowable forms, but timelapse reveals that the nature of the world is changeable. As Karen Barad, the philosopher of quantum physics, would say, it’s made of intractions: it’s in the invisible gaps between the frames that things encounter one another and vibrate.
P130
We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to computation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutabiliy and a moral impunity.
[...]Ideas about how we should think are located into our culture. It’s a problem exacerbated by technology. Once a way of seeing the world has been moulded into a tool it’s very hard to think otherwise.
P175
From this error flows all kinds of violence: the violence which reduces the beauty of the world to numbers, and the consequent violence which tries to force the world to conform to that representation, which erases, degrades, tortures and kills those things and beings which do not fit within the assumed system of representation. P178
The world is not like a computer. Computers –like us, like plants and animals, like clouds and seas– are like the world.
P179
To make a model is to abstract and represent: it is an act of distancing from the world.
P179
One number is not random; it only becomes random in relation to a sequence of other numbers, and the degree of its randomness is a property of the whole group. You can’t be random, in modern parlance, without having some shared baseline of normality or appropriateness to measure yourself against. Randomness is relational.
P219
Bridle, James. Ways of Being. Beyond Human Intelligence. Dublin: Allen Lane - Penguin Random House UK, 2022.
Friends cohabited, looked after each other’s children and performed palliative care for the sick and the dying. The problem was, and remains, that there was not enough state recognition of these friendships to furnish them with either the decision-making powers the resources necessary to care as well as they would have wished, making them less secure over the long term.
P36
‘The friend’ could easily replace ‘the mother’ as the archetypal figure in our caring imaginaries, and that ‘networks and flows of intimacy and care’ should replace the family as the prime relational unit.
P36
Kinship is not tied only to blood or family but extends to the land, water, and the animals on whom we depend for livelihood.
P40
Kinship is also a process: ‘making kin is to make people into familiars in order to relate’.
P40
If care is to become the basis of a better society and world, we need to change our contemporary hierarchies of care in the direction of radical egalitarianism [...] This is what we call an ethics of promiscuous care.
P40
There are four core features to the creation of caring communities: mutual support, public space, shared resources and local democracy.
P46
P36
‘The friend’ could easily replace ‘the mother’ as the archetypal figure in our caring imaginaries, and that ‘networks and flows of intimacy and care’ should replace the family as the prime relational unit.
P36
Kinship is not tied only to blood or family but extends to the land, water, and the animals on whom we depend for livelihood.
P40
Kinship is also a process: ‘making kin is to make people into familiars in order to relate’.
P40
If care is to become the basis of a better society and world, we need to change our contemporary hierarchies of care in the direction of radical egalitarianism [...] This is what we call an ethics of promiscuous care.
P40
There are four core features to the creation of caring communities: mutual support, public space, shared resources and local democracy.
P46
The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto. The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso, 2020.
Always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets.
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mystery –
The gateway of the manifold secrets..
P5
Are you capable of not knowing anything?
P14
The reason I have great trouble is that I have a body.
P17
When there’s a lack of faith, there is a lack of good faith.
P21
When cleverness emerges
There is great hypocrisy
P22
The myriad creature in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing. 😅️
P47
The great square has no corners.
The great image has no shape.
P48
Deal with a thing while it is still nothing;
Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.
P71
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put in practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.
P77
The people treat death lightly:
It is because the people set too much store by life
That they treat death lightly.
P82
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mystery –
The gateway of the manifold secrets..
P5
Are you capable of not knowing anything?
P14
The reason I have great trouble is that I have a body.
P17
When there’s a lack of faith, there is a lack of good faith.
P21
When cleverness emerges
There is great hypocrisy
P22
The myriad creature in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing. 😅️
P47
The great square has no corners.
The great image has no shape.
P48
Deal with a thing while it is still nothing;
Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.
P71
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put in practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.
P77
The people treat death lightly:
It is because the people set too much store by life
That they treat death lightly.
P82
Tzu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin Classics, 1963.
The native laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s worlds. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.P33
The thing he does not see, precisely because he is permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking, is that the settler, from the moment that the colonial context disappears, has no longer any interest in remaining or in coexisting.
P35
The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal.
P36
The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought.
P36
The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend –these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie.
P36
We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler –not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler.
P41
In under-developed countries the occult sphere belonging to the community which is entirely under magical jurisdiction.
P43
We see the native’s emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and of possession. The native’s relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits.
P44
There are no limits – for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity to dissolve as in volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rites, imaginary mass murders – all must be brought out. The evil humours are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava.
P45
The Front de Libération Nationale, in a famous leaflet, stated that colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.
P48
The politicians who make speeches and who write in the nationalist newspapers make the people dream dreams [...] dreams are encouraged, and the imagination is let loose outside the bounds of the colonial order.
P53
In the long run, neutralism is destined to be respected by capitalism. 🎯
P63
Neutralism produces in the citizen of the Third World a state of mind which is expressed in everyday life by a fearlessness and an ancestral pride strangely resembling defiance.
P65
(Western observers about natives) They are ninety-eight per cent illiterate, but they are the subject of a huge body of literature. P65
The thing he does not see, precisely because he is permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking, is that the settler, from the moment that the colonial context disappears, has no longer any interest in remaining or in coexisting.
P35
The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal.
P36
The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought.
P36
The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend –these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie.
P36
We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler –not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler.
P41
In under-developed countries the occult sphere belonging to the community which is entirely under magical jurisdiction.
P43
We see the native’s emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and of possession. The native’s relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits.
P44
There are no limits – for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity to dissolve as in volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rites, imaginary mass murders – all must be brought out. The evil humours are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava.
P45
The Front de Libération Nationale, in a famous leaflet, stated that colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.
P48
The politicians who make speeches and who write in the nationalist newspapers make the people dream dreams [...] dreams are encouraged, and the imagination is let loose outside the bounds of the colonial order.
P53
In the long run, neutralism is destined to be respected by capitalism. 🎯
P63
Neutralism produces in the citizen of the Third World a state of mind which is expressed in everyday life by a fearlessness and an ancestral pride strangely resembling defiance.
P65
(Western observers about natives) They are ninety-eight per cent illiterate, but they are the subject of a huge body of literature. P65
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
Art [...] exerts an ancient force that gives me access to a place where things are more than the sums of their part, where–in violation of all natural law–objects give off more energy than went into their making.
P8
Modernism had become lost in its own myth.
P10
Bad art can tell you as much as good art, sometimes more.
P13
[...] looking only forward makes a culture blind.
P15
I loved that ancient artwork at the Field Museum was for more than just looking at. It was meant to cast spells, to heal, to protect villages from invaders, to prevent or foster pregnancy, to guide one through the afterlife.
P23
In all writing about art, I value clarity and accessibility over jargon. I want critics to be as radically vulnerable in their work as I know artists are in theirs.
P29
P8
Modernism had become lost in its own myth.
P10
Bad art can tell you as much as good art, sometimes more.
P13
[...] looking only forward makes a culture blind.
P15
I loved that ancient artwork at the Field Museum was for more than just looking at. It was meant to cast spells, to heal, to protect villages from invaders, to prevent or foster pregnancy, to guide one through the afterlife.
P23
In all writing about art, I value clarity and accessibility over jargon. I want critics to be as radically vulnerable in their work as I know artists are in theirs.
P29
Saltz, Jerry. Art is Life. London: Hachette, 2022.
Although we live in close contact with neighbours, masses of people in our society feel alienated, cut off, alone. Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people. Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish. (…) Left alone in “me” culture, we consume and consume with no thought of others. Greed and exploitation become the norm where an ethic of domination prevails. They bring in their wake alienation and lovelessness. Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.
P105
Love makes us feel more alive. Living in a state of lovelessness we feel we might as well be dead; everything within us is silent and still. We are unmoved. “Soul murder” is the term psychoanalysts use to describe this state of living death. It echoes the biblical declaration that “anyone who does not know love is still in death”. Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence, the false insistence that it is natural for the strong to prey upon the weak, for the more powerful to prey upon de powerless. In our culture the worship of death is so intense it stands in the way of love. On his deathbed Erich Fromm asked a beloved friend why we prefer love of death to love of life, why “the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia.” Coming from Fromm this question was merely rhetorical, as he had spent his life explaining our cultural failure to fully embrace the reality that love gives life meaning.
P106
P105
Love makes us feel more alive. Living in a state of lovelessness we feel we might as well be dead; everything within us is silent and still. We are unmoved. “Soul murder” is the term psychoanalysts use to describe this state of living death. It echoes the biblical declaration that “anyone who does not know love is still in death”. Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence, the false insistence that it is natural for the strong to prey upon the weak, for the more powerful to prey upon de powerless. In our culture the worship of death is so intense it stands in the way of love. On his deathbed Erich Fromm asked a beloved friend why we prefer love of death to love of life, why “the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia.” Coming from Fromm this question was merely rhetorical, as he had spent his life explaining our cultural failure to fully embrace the reality that love gives life meaning.
P106
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: HarperCollins , 2021.
Economic inflation happens when more and more money is needed to buy fewer and fewer goods, and semiotic inflation happens when more and more signs buy less and less meaning. Chaos loomed in the frantic acceleration of the info-sphere during the Spanish Golden age, and it is in this conjuncture that the baroque imagination is rooted.
P18
When the acceleration of cyberspace breaks the rhythm of mental time, and we no longer know what is relevant and what is irrelevant in our surrounding environment, this is what we call “chaos”: the inability to attribute meaning to the flow, the breakdown of our framework of relevance. A special vibration of the soul spreads out at this point, which we call “panic”: the subjective recording of chaos.
P20
Indeterminacy is inherent to the bio-social sphere, while techno-automation is based on mathematical determinism. A small amount of indeterminacy may lead to enormous amounts of disruption. As automated systems are more and more interconnected, disruption tends to spread and proliferate. This is why I suggest that the automated world is simultaneously a space of order and chaos–order in the sphere of connection, and chaos in the interaction of the connected sphere with the pulsating sphere of conjunctive bodies.
P30
Within the conjunctive sphere of the biorhythm, signification and interpretation are vibrational processes. When the process of signification is penetrated by connective machines, it undergoes a reformatting and mutates in a way that implies a reduction–a reduction to the syntactic logic of the algorithm.
P48
The distinction between intelligence and consciousness is the interesting point here. Intelligence is the faculty of recognizing patterns and of choosing between decidable alternatives. Deciding between decidable alternatives is a task that can be formalized and therefore performed by an algorithm. Consciousness, if I may reduce the complexity of this concept to a simple and insufficient definition, is the ability to decide between undecidable alternatives. 🧠️
P49
P18
When the acceleration of cyberspace breaks the rhythm of mental time, and we no longer know what is relevant and what is irrelevant in our surrounding environment, this is what we call “chaos”: the inability to attribute meaning to the flow, the breakdown of our framework of relevance. A special vibration of the soul spreads out at this point, which we call “panic”: the subjective recording of chaos.
P20
Indeterminacy is inherent to the bio-social sphere, while techno-automation is based on mathematical determinism. A small amount of indeterminacy may lead to enormous amounts of disruption. As automated systems are more and more interconnected, disruption tends to spread and proliferate. This is why I suggest that the automated world is simultaneously a space of order and chaos–order in the sphere of connection, and chaos in the interaction of the connected sphere with the pulsating sphere of conjunctive bodies.
P30
Within the conjunctive sphere of the biorhythm, signification and interpretation are vibrational processes. When the process of signification is penetrated by connective machines, it undergoes a reformatting and mutates in a way that implies a reduction–a reduction to the syntactic logic of the algorithm.
P48
The distinction between intelligence and consciousness is the interesting point here. Intelligence is the faculty of recognizing patterns and of choosing between decidable alternatives. Deciding between decidable alternatives is a task that can be formalized and therefore performed by an algorithm. Consciousness, if I may reduce the complexity of this concept to a simple and insufficient definition, is the ability to decide between undecidable alternatives. 🧠️
P49