I’m so utterly, utterly exhausted from people’s opinions, even those that I “agree with.” Surely there are better ways for us to interact with each other over matters of belief, and surely there are better ways to link our thinking minds to the things in the world around us. But by “surely,” I mean I’m not so sure at all, while surer every day that we are poisoning ourselves with regurgitation and excrement, and that opinions are the toxic waste product of industrialized thinking, the runoff from the process that farms and harvests our attention.
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Ghost self
Leopardi, 25
There are two kinds of incredulity, one that derives from science, and the other (far more common) from ignorance, and from not knowing how to see what is can be, from knowing only a few possibilities, etc., only a few truths and hence only a few probabilities, etc., from not knowing how far possibility extends. (612)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 24
There is no more effective means of gaining access to the origins of nations (together with the progress of the human mind and the history of the peoples, matters all faithfully represented in languages), their remotest epochs, their provenance, the spread of mankind, and its distribution throughout the world, in short, the history of the obscurest beginnings of society and its first steps, than through etymologies, which, by going back up from language to language until the first origins of a word, offer the clearest ideas we can hope to have regarding the term’s first relations, thoughts, notions, etc. (607)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 23
The analysis of things spells the death of their beauty or greatness and the death of poetry. So too with the analysis of ideas, resolving them into their parts and elements and presenting these parts or elements in isolation, bare, without any accompaniment of concomitant ideas. (589)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 22
Certain quite extraordinary intelligences that nature has from time to time produced as if by some miracle have been either entirely or very nearly useless, precisely on account of the excessive power of either their intellect or their imagination which ended up unable to issue in anything or produce any specific result. (562)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 21
Use of money is one of the principle obstacles to the preservation of equality among men and hence of free states, to the preponderance of true merit and of virtue, etc., etc. And its use is one of the principal reasons that introduce and gradually force society into oppression, despotism, servitude, the burden placed by single classes on others, in short, that extinguish the moral and inner life of the nations, and the nations themselves as nations. (561)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 20
The best use and effect of reason and reflection is to destroy or diminish reason and reflection, and their use and effects, in man. (556)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
The chain of sacrifice
Dominant ideologies require sacrificial victims at their core to function.
Our notions of the rule of law are fueled by the sacrifice of black and brown lives at the hands of law enforcement. Our notions of national destiny are fueled by the sacrifice of native people at the hands of our history. Our notions of a pseudo-individualizing right to bear arms are fueled by the sacrifice of children at the hands of school shooters. Our notions of the right to life are fueled by the sacrifice of women at the hands of rapists. Our notions of human exceptionalism are fueled by the torture and killing of billions of animals every year.
Rather than cynical viewing these victims as a cost or as collateral damage, I view them as the structural heart of the ideologies built upon them.
What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook
“Audit culture and business ontology enculturate a reliance on quantification to evaluate whether an insatiable ‘desire for more’ has been fulfilled. These conditions compel Facebook’s users to reimagine both self and friendship in quantitative terms, and situates them within a ‘graphopticon,’ a self-induced audit of metricated social performance where the many watch the metrics of the many.”