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Jules of Nature
if i look back, i am lost
wallacepolsom
AnasAbdin
Keni
Today's Document
@theartofmadeline
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Love Begins
Kaledo Art
dirt enthusiast
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
cherry valley forever
h
Andulka
🪼
titsay
styofa doing anything
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Greece
seen from Türkiye
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
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@harplord
Ideas are the only voids of the body. Those interferences of absence and want between two movements of a brilliant reality that the body, by its singular presence, has never stopped thrusting forward.
Antonin Artaud, 'Shit to the Spirit'
[T]here are many kinds of narrative in programming, and systems may have a postmodern character in some aspect but modern character in others. For example the Microsoft Common Language Runtime is postmodern in that it supports a large number of programming languages—modern（C), postmodern (Perl), and historical (COBOL), high culture (Haskell) and low (Visual Basic), with access to low-level features as necessary (a modernist would consider this a fault). However, it is modern in that it achieves this by enforcing a common bytecode format—indeed, a particular subset of the format, and that it deploys the apparatus of power (verifiers, compliance kits, bytecode type checkers, developer certification, code component certificates) to enforce the commonality. […] C++ is an interesting case. Early C++ — C with Classes, the C++ used in the Design Patterns book is essentially a modern object-oriented programming language: classes are the primarily (and only) modelling technique, no-one seriously advocates the procedural features of a language—or rather, these faults in construction are tolerated as faults within the modern narrative. As C++ evolves, into what we call ‘Late C++’ (templates, exceptions, dynamic casting) the discourses surrounding C++ change also—leaving the object-oriented grand narrative, and becoming postmodern, building a theory of multi-paradigm design and programming upwards from the language features. While Design Patterns (as one data point of C++ circa 1994) has essentially no examples of C++ free functions, by the late 2000 Late C++ is clearly advocated as a postmodern language. Finally, it is interesting to consider Java vs. C♯. Both are arguably postmodern languages, although less so than Perl, and with stronger streaks of modernism, especially in the one-language rhetoric surrounding Java, matched by the CLR rhetoric surrounding C♯. There are no significant technical differences between the two languages—both with C++ syntax, somewhat moderated by the Pascal tradition, with a ersatz-Smalltalk object model and a handful of Modula-3 thrown in for concurrency and modularity. The key reason these languages are postmodern is that they cannot be considered against technical criteria: comparing them is like comparing Pepsi and Coke: you don’t drink the cola—you drink the advertising.
Noble & Biddle - “Notes on Postmodern Programming” (2002), pp. 9 & 14 (via writingcapital)
Iannis Xenakis: All of these are concrete inventions. It was music however, which introduced [automata as an] abstraction.
Michel Serres: So then, why is a fugue an automaton?
Iannis Xenakis: I think that it corresponds more or less to the definition of a scientific automaton which came about in the twenties, thanks to Weiner and cybernetics. It can be summarized in the following manner: An automaton is a network of causes and effects, meaning a temporal chain of events, eventually coupled or multicoupled with certain liberties. An automaton can be closed. It suffices to plug in energy and it works cyclically. It can be relatively open, complete with data entries and external actions, thanks to the help of buttons for example. Every time new data entries are given, an automaton can produce different results, despite the internal rigor which defines it.
Michel Serres: Its syntaxes are repetitive but not its performances.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling someone out.
Joan Didion, 'A Preface', Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.”
René Char (via heteroglossia)
…sickness of the mind and misfortunes take their origin especially from too much love toward a thing which is liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess. For no one is disturbed or anxious concerning anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, and enmities arise except from love for a thing which no one can really fully possess.
Spinoza, EIVp20s (via scowlofminerva)
I am driven by a strong disinclination to ‘belong’ to any group, because it always seemed to require excluding and killing those who don’t belong to the sect. I have an almost physical horror of the libidinous drive to belong. You will notice that this drive is rarely analyzed as such, since it supports all ambitions and serves up the most widespread morality.
Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (via spiritandteeth)
opium...
In the rain on the way to S_ we pass through a group of e-smokers puffing away happily, clouds of nicotine laced steam rising. In the glorious interface between bodies, language and the technology standing in the spring rain. They remind us of Cocteau’s plea in Opium to scientists to make his favorite drug safe. At least they no longer smell you think…
In a social order dominated by capitalist production, even the non-capitalist producer is dominated by capitalist ways of thinking.
Marx, Capital Vol. 3 I.1. Translated by David Fernbach (via adornography)
Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour
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John Tresch and Bruno Latour
Much like sex during the Victorian period, objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt. They exist, naturally, but they are never to be given a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants, they live on the margins of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to be represented as such.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to the Actor-Network Theory, (2005, Oxford: Oxford University Press), 73. (via detrituss)
The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum”, “that which is shown forth or revealed.” The same root also appears in the English word “demonstrate” and several less common words (such as “remonstrance”) that share the same sense of revealing, disclosing or displaying. In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth. This may seem worlds away from the usual modern meaning of the word “monster” - a strange, frightening, and supposedly mythical creature - but here, as elsewhere in the realm of monsters, appearances deceive. Certainly monsters are strange, at least to those raised in modern ways of approaching the world. […] The association between monsters and terror, too, has practical relevance, even when the creatures we call monsters fear us far more than we fear them. The myth, the terror and the strangeness all have their roots in the nature of the realm of monsters and the monstrous - a world of revelations where the hidden and the unknown show furtive glimpses of themselves. If we pay attention to them, monsters do have something to reveal. They show us the reality of the impossible, or of those things that we label impossible; they point out that the world we think we think we live in and the world we actually inhabit may not be the same place at all.
John Michael Greer, “Monsters” (via overcoding)
La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Ophüls
Only the materialist view makes any sense...
The second Picrocholine war that has been waged for centuries against the materialist view of mind and that continues to be waged today is laughable, and would have made Lucretius and Democritus smile. In line with Verne’s cave and with the view held by the world itself, these two philosophers both affirmed that atoms of matter connect with one another in the same way that letters of the alphabet together forms words, which then either make sense or are absurd assemblages that the letters themselves reject. In other words, atoms code. These hard element act as if they were made of something soft: they share information mutually; they elect, choose, reflect, repel themselves…. Their world like ours is one of collusion, weaving itself together from different and complex codes through which they create and arrange themselves.
They code, we code, they count, we count; they speak, we speak. Science thus consist of listening and the interpreting the the languages of things, languages that are predominantly mathematical. The philosopher listens and attempts to speak all these languages at once… M. Serres (Textures of the Anthropocene (RAY p 325))
If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant point suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. The science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry … As we experience time – as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as les temps of history as les temps of weather – it resembles this crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simplified one.
Michael Serres in conversation with Bruno Latour (via theagonistes)
Vintage Magic Squares
From the September 1915 issue of Himmel und Erde. The author, W. Ahrens (of Rostock) had written on different aspects of the magic square in the South Pacific, and in general in his Mathematische Unterhaltungen und Spiele (1901). Some examples date from the 15th century.
http://thesciencebookstore.com
