Category Archives: theory

‘Marker, who continually challenges his viewer, has provoked me to search the origin of “ornate” and I find that it comes from the Latin verb “to equip.”  It means, originally, well equipped; then later, adorned and elaborately embellished.  I remember that when I played the partitas of J. S. Bach, there came a point when the embellishments were so thoroughly learned and accomplished that they became, in themselves, only music:  that is, the notes being embellished and the embellishments upon those notes ceased belonging to separate categories, and there were no longer any embellishments at all.  To see adornment is always to presume the true “unadorned” nature of a thing.  Schivelbusch, for instance, notes “the typical nineteenth-century desire to disguise the industrial aspect of things by means of ornamentation.”’

‘Now I know “new” is just an illusion. “New” is not my logic, it’s capitalism’s logic. “New” is a lie, actually. It’s not about possibility, it’s just killing the possibility. Capitalism’s culture is always the same: we are creating a new thing, we are discovering the possibilities of the world, of everything. But this discovery is actually to manage it, to name it, to fix it. After this, no more possibilities. Real possibility means you have to keep something in the unknown, in the mystery, in the chaos.’

“The Birth of Tragedy is driven by the famous contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, “the two art deities of the Greeks,” and by the “tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” (BT 1). Nietzsche aims to show that Attic tragedy represents the truce between, and the union of, Dionysus and Apollo, and that it also resolves an assortment of other oppositions in Greek theology, art, culture, psychology, and metaphysics that can be keyed to the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition: the Titans/the Olympians, lyric poetry/ epic poetry, the Asiatic-barbarian/the Hellenic, music/sculpture, intoxication/dreams, excess/measure, unity/individuation, pain/pleasure, etc.

The Apollonian affirms the principium individuationis, “the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense” (BT 4). The Dionysian, by contrast, affirms “the mysterious primordial unity” (BT 1 and passim), “the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being” (BT 8). The Apollonian is associated with “moderation” and “restraint,” the Dionysian with “excess” (BT 4, 21). The Apollonian is concerned with pleasure and the production of beautiful semblance, while the Dionysian is fraught with “terror,” “blissful ecstasy,” “pain and contradiction” (BT 1, 5 and passim). The Apollonian celebrates the human artist and hero, while the Dionysian celebrates the individual artist’s dissolution into nature, which Nietzsche calls the “primordial artist of the world” (BT 5; cf. 1, 8).

The Apollonian is a gallery of “appearances,” “images,” and “illusions,” while the Dionysian consists in the perpetual creation and destruction of appearances. “In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism,” Nietzsche writes, “nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: ‘Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of appearances, I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of appearances!’” (BT 16, cf. 8; WP 1050).

Nietzsche insists on the reality of “alteration,” “change,” and “becoming,” noting that only a “prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity,6 identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood [and] being” (TI,“ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” 5; cf. GS 110, 112, 121). A few pages earlier, Nietzsche calls unity, thinghood, substance, and permanence “lies,” praising Heraclitus “for his assertion that being is an empty fiction,” and praising the senses for telling the truth by showing “becoming, passing away, and change.”

“what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?

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In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”.

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the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)

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I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94).

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as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative […] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)

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Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham).

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homelooseness

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excerpts (from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1581 and elsewhere)

Throughout his writing on drugs Benjamin circled around the German term Rausch, usually rendered in English as “intoxication” but with deeper resonances: its underlying literal meaning of rush, roar, or thunder and, prominent for Benjamin, Nietzsche’s use of it to denote Dionysian ecstasy, the rending of the veil of appearances to reveal the primal life force. In its grip, as Benjamin wrote in his wanderings around Marseille on hashish, “images and chains of images, long-submerged memories appear”; the borders between subject and object weaken, imagination bleeds into reality, the world comes to life in new ways.

It is not purely a dream or a fantasy but “a continual alternation of dreaming and waking states, a constant and finally exhausting oscillation between totally different worlds of consciousness.” “Intoxication” suggests a transient state of impairment, but Rausch describes an “ecstasy of trance” that holds out the possibility of reenchanting the world without demanding a romantic or religious leap of faith. It is not an effect of the drug per se but “a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”

In Rausch, as he wrote at the end of his evening on hashish in Marseille, “our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like gold coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so they can thus purchase new birth.”

Excerpts (from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/21/sartres-bad-trip/?fbclid=IwAR0QoM6Qrneq_nLvVMNKi5whUxyU8IAx2e6yIDhukJUt2E3zfGVGCiTmMNg)

Excerpts (from https://www.fastcompany.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at-airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)

Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

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Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright appropriation. Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple, were shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment that they listed on the platform for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office, down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard, and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects (in 2012 Airbnb itself had rented Las Cases and Dewé’s space to host a party). The couple sued Airbnb in late 2015. “They are branding their company with our life,” Dewé told BuzzFeed. In making the replica rooms, company designers would “reproduce the exact sofa, as close as they could to the exact chair,” recalls Lisa Bottom, a design director at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the office in 2014.

Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, the RISD graduates. Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that, “when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little snapshots of various cities,” Bottom says. All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.

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Schwarzmann critiqued the lack of locality in generic places, but Haid’s company suggests a different, paradoxical definition of locality: desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable. In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.”

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Yet the AirSpace aesthetic that Airbnb has contributed to, and the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic (“the vanilla tourist”) falsely defined as the norm. It is a “hallucination of the normal,” as Koolhaas writes. This is the harmful illusion that so much technology, and technological culture, perpetuates: if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must be doing something wrong.

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Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected source. “If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel like the mass. There is still a sense of unity,” he says. “We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that magic to them, the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country.”

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We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds.

Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

Excerpts (from https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/)

Well, one of the most common misreadings of my work and of my research has been to say, “Oh, Abram is suggesting that writing is bad and that the alphabet is the cause of all our problems.” This is a terrible misreading, because I’m a writer and I love the written word and I love to read, and I’m deeply given to the exquisite power of the written word to open wonders. I’m not at all claiming—and this is quite important—I’m not at all suggesting that writing is bad, but, rather, that writing is magic, and that the alphabet is a very potent form of magic, a very concentrated form of animism.

For our Indigenous ancestors, one could be wandering through the terrain and have one’s attention snagged by a boulder with patches of crinkly black and red lichen spreading on their surface, and you would focus your eyes on a patch of lichen and abruptly hear the rock speaking to you. Well, that’s not so different from us waking up in the morning, walking to the kitchen, opening up the paper, and focusing our eyes on a few bits of ink on the page, and suddenly we hear voices and we see visions of events happening in the White House or in Iraq.

We focus our eyes on these ostensibly inanimate bits of ink on the page and we hear voices, conversations unfolding between people on the far side of the world. This is animism, folks. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it’s animism, nonetheless; as outrageous as a talking stone. We just do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our oral ancestors were doing the same thing with bent twigs, tree forms, leaves, cloud shapes, animal tracks — everything in the surrounding terrain was speaking to us. But this new, very concentrated form of animism only speaks with a human voice, and the words that we experience as we read are human words.

So, again, the alphabet closes us into a space of exclusively human meaning and verbiage, while the wider, more-than-human terrain doesn’t seem to speak at all. And in that sense, this new, very concentrated form of magic that we call the alphabet makes possible the forgetting of the lives and perspectives of all the other animals, of the plants, of the mountains and rivers. It doesn’t force us to forget these other beings, but it makes possible that we begin to neglect them.

So, I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly. If we don’t recognize writing as a very potent magic—that is, as something that has much more than rational effects upon our experience—if we don’t recognize it as a magic, we tend to fall under its spell. The word “spell” has that double meaning, both to cast a magic within the world and also simply to arrange the letters. But those two meanings were once one and the same, because to learn to read with this new magic was to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses.

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I’m not in any way trying to reduce the mystery of spirit to the wind, but rather to expand our sense of the wind and the breath and the air as something irreducibly weird and richly mysterious and deeply magical and filled with meaning: this meaning-filled plenum in which we find ourselves bodily immersed, from which we drink steadily to fire our hearts and our awareness. It does seem to me that one very interesting way of looking at climate change is to recognize that climate change is the simple consequence of forgetting the holiness of the invisible medium and beginning to treat it as just empty space.

‘“Utopia” comes from the Greek “ou-topos,” or “no-place.” It promises a paradise lost, defined by nonexistence. Many of the people Field photographed emphasized the temporary nature of living in this way, the gift of transience hemmed by the threat of eviction. Mobility, which is something like freedom, allows the construction of ephemeral utopias, no-places, gone by morning.’