meditations on the passing apocalypse. meditations on the destruction of hyperfixation. meditations on the augmentation and annihilation of the physical form. an aquapocalyptic narrative. let us become something else. let us release all once we held dear. let us experience the light of the dawn, a black light / green blade revealing our entrails underneath our flawed casing.
a story of ascension told through fractured remnants of virtual dungeons and hyperfictional hymns. a necrotic-rush of vortical [wave]-drifts and abysmal bass. a wave of post-musical electro-thanatoid anti-rhythm production, [void]punk-nihilism updated into an androgynous [xeno]future.
Tara is joined by Republican political strategist John McLaughlin to discuss the hot-button issues that are fueling Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s poll numbers and guiding their individual campaigns. They take a deep look at the mood of each key swing state, break down strategic differences between the 2020 and 2024 races, and debate RFK Jr.’s possible impact in November.
The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.
“From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.
A game of two halves. The first half of the book is an inspiring synthesis of thought on the subject of inactivity and its necessity to a life well lived. Shot through here and there with the author’s disdain for the internet – nothing you haven’t read a couple of dozen other people write. And, curiously, in its explorations of contemplation, it doesn’t go much farther east than Greece. But it’s good stuff
‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time.
Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges.
When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life.
If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function.
There was a lot to think about in the first half of this book, and I recommend it for the first half alone.
When language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance. It becomes worn out, and keeps reproducing the same. The French writer Michel Butor says that the current crisis of literature is a result of communication: ‘For ten or twenty years, almost nothing has happened in literature. There is a flood of publications, but intellectual stasis. The cause is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are admirable, but they produce an enormous noise.’
It is, I note again, synthesis. It’s a lyric essay. But no less valuable.
The other half… well. The author starts to get, to my eye, sloppy with language and definitions. And then he mounts a rehabilitation of Heidegger, followed by an extended bout of what seems like weirdly personal philosophical score-settling with Hannah Arendt, who has been dead since 1975 and therefore cannot possibly have done anything to merit such spite.
But that first half? Very useful, very thought-provoking.
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With digitalization, availability reaches new heights. By bringing about total producibility, digitalization suspends facticity itself. The digital regime does not acknowledge an unavailable ground of being. Its motto is: being is information. Information makes being fully available. When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible. Like a hunter, the gaze screens its surroundings.
Well, I had all kinds of plans for this morning, and then one of the chickens died in their sleep – these rescue chickens often don’t last long, the damage is done by the time we get them and they can pop off at any time. It’s a shame, and I thought this one was recovering well. So I was digging a hole first thing today, and I’m waiting for my hands to return to normal after jamming the shovel through clay.
