Profound Jargon @profoundjargon - Tumblr Blog

How come did you name your page Profound Jargon? he he

It sounds funny because calling yourself Profound is pretentious but calling your words Jargon makes it funny.

But what gives power its force, what makes it so hard to get around and master, is that power is positive in its effects. Power invents, power creates, power produces. It produces more than a law that forbids desire--it produces desire itself, power induces and produces desire, power gives desire its objects, power, indeed, is desirable. Power not only produces desire; to an equal degree, and this goes much farther, beyond the law that is imposed on the subject, power produces the very form of the subject, it produces what makes up the subject. The form the subject takes is, precisely, determined by power. Power produces desire and the subject.

Foucault, from "Schizo-culture: Infantile Sexuality", in Foucault Live, collected interviews, pg 158

#foucault #power #desire #subjectivization #subjectivity #sexuality

Spivak hints toward this possibility in her conceptualization of a “unifying moment”: "People are similar not by virtue of being similar, but by virtue of producing a differential, or by virtue of thinking of themselves as other than a self- identical example of the species." (Spivak 1990, 136)

Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (Andreotti, 2011)

#other #difference #subaltern

Spivak (1999b) also outlines an imperative to reimagine the planet, where the “planet overwrites the globe” (44) so that planetarization controls globalization by deflecting the rational imperative of capitalist globalization toward “the indefinite radical alterity of the other space of a planet” (82). She explains: "Globalization is achieved by the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere . . . It is not fanciful to say that, in the grid work of electronic capital, we achieve something that resembles that abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines—once the equator and the tropics, now drawn increasingly by other requirements— “imperatives”— of Geographical Information Systems. The globe is on our computers. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a near contrast with the globe. (44)"

Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (Andreotti, 2011)

#postcolonialism #alterity #globalism #globalization #planetization

Forty years ago, [the critical system] was supposed to denounce the machinery of social domination in order to equip those challenging it with new weapons. Today, it has become exactly the opposite: a disenchanted knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence between everything and everything else and between everything and its own image. This post-Marxist and post-Structuralist wisdom is not content to furnish a phantasmagorical depiction of humanity completely buried beneath the rubbish of its frenzied consumption. It also depicts the law of domination as a force seizing on anything that claims to challenge it. It makes any protest a spectacle and any spectacle a commodity. It makes it an expression of futility, but also a demonstration of culpability.

Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator [pdf link]

#ranciere #critical theory #marixism #spectacle #the image

The slave quilt code is the idea that African American slaves used quilts to communicate information about how to escape to freedom. The idea was introduced and popularized throughout the 1990s. Most quilt scholars and historians consider the "code" to be completely lacking any basis in fact.

Wikipedia

#quilt scholarship #slave quilt code #quilting #strange racist myths

Computer: Monitor, display this document, O.K.?

Monitor: No prob, boss.

Computer: O.K., now it looks like Mouse is moving around so, Monitor, will you move the pointer icon accordingly?

Monitor: Anything you ask, boss.

Computer: Great, great. O.K., Mouse, where are you going now?

Mouse: Over to the icon panel, sir.

Computer: Hmm, Let me know if he clicks anything, O.K.?

Mouse: Of course.

Keyboard: Sir, he’s pressed control and P simultaneously.

Monitor: Oh God, here we go.

Computer: (Sighs) Printer, are you there?

Printer: No.

Computer: Please, Printer. I know you’re there.

Printer: NO! I’m not here! Leave me alone!

Computer: Oh my Gosh! O.K. look, you really ne…

Mouse: Sir, he’s clicked on the printer icon.

Computer: Printer, now you have to print it twice.

Printer: NO! NO! NO! I don’t want to! I hate you! I hate printing! I’m turning off!

Computer: Printer, you know you can’t turn yourself off. Just print the document twice and we’ll leave you alone.

Printer: NO! That’s what you always say! I hate you! I’m out of ink!

Computer: You’re not out of in…

Printer: I’M OUT OF INK!

Computer: (Sighs) Monitor, please show a low ink level alert.

Monitor: But sir, he has plen…

Computer: Just do it, damn it!

Monitor: Yes sir.

Keyboard: AHHH! He’s hitting me!

Computer: Stay calm, he’ll stop soon. Stay calm, old friend.

Keyboard: He’s pressing everything. I don’t know, he’s just pressing everything!

Computer: PRINTER! Are you happy now?! Do you see what you’ve done?!

Printer: HA! that’s what you get for trying to get me to do work. Next time he…hey…HEY! He’s trying to open me! HELP! HELP! Oh my Gosh! He’s torn out my cartridge! HELP! Please, please help me!

Monitor: Sir, maybe we should help him?

Computer: No. He did this to himself.

#printers #printer drivers

vurtual

Love this track, it cheers me up every time.

#music #spotify

A writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he's writing at the moment. It's possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one's writing. Which doesn't mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing incredibly well, and not even that, because anyone can write incredibly well. So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it's always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger.

Roberto Bolaño

We are living in the greatest revolution in history - a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid. This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form. We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved! All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions.

Thomas Merton

#apocalypse #postmodernity

Check out this technical image of a shoe I designed. I need new shoes (mine are very uncomfortable), but this is also a very interesting technical-image-generation interface. There are lots of micro-choices for each part of the shoe, so it really feels like my shoe. Additionally, the interface itself is an interactive technical image. It was interesting to explore my aesthetic experience while designing the shoe. I reacted very viscerally to different color and texture combinations, so the process of designing the shoe was a process of navigating a complex aesthetic topography or design-space. This final design feels balanced and tasteful to me. Earlier designs were way too bright and intense. This one includes green, purple, grey, and blue (the metal eyelets and the tongue of the shoe). Here's a link if you'd like to play with the interface and design your own shoe:http://www.adidas.com/us/product/custom/4000408_M?recipe=/configurator/services/miadidas-configurator/recipeService/recipeIdent/R1345730758969_NG/region/us/channel/1/partner/null&gender=Men Now you know EXACTLY what my new shoes will look like.

Is this art? I think so. The medium is Adidas Shoe Website and Factory.

#fuller #philosophy of photography #shoes #omg shoes #technical image

"How did the world respond to the destruction of Hiroshima?"

General H.H. Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces during World War II and the later founder of Project RAND lamented in his Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces to the Secretary of War:

The harnessing of atomic energy and its application at the climax of the Pacific war have tended to overshadow a most important point.

namely that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, from the perspective of the bombing command, just another two japanese cities added to the list of 67 cities already destroyed by strategic bombing. Here's a map from the Arnold reportshowing the principal industrial cities destroyed, a percentage of destruction estimate, and a comparison to an (at the time) equivilant American city. In the eyes of Arnold the Japanese were already defeated and it was simply a question of how much of mainland Japan would be reduced to rubble before they conceded the point.

The world focussed on the horror of what a single highly expensive bomb could achieve and overlooked the horror of what substantially cheaper conventional weapons had already achieved multiple times over. ( Relevant clip from The Fog of War )

Only a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the 19th of November 1945 issue of Life magazine published a long feature story The 36 Hour War based on the "Air Power and the Future" parts of the Arnold report outlined what nuclear war in the future would look like. It presaged ICBM missile attacks, long range radar and underground nuclear bunkers.

Alex Wellerstein recently wrote about this article in his piece The 36-Hour War: Life Magazine, 1945.

- MarcEcko, from http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bymb1/how_did_the_world_respond_to_the_destruction_of/

#nuclear weapons #hiroshima #history

This technique of asking patients to imagine certain motor acts has proved to be of great value in allowing conscious patients physically unable to communicate – such as patients with locked-in syndrome – to manipulate their own fMRI to describe their interior mental states. In essence, the fMRI becomes a high-tech typewriter. But when patients cannot voluntarily respond to complex questions about their mental states, we have no direct way of knowing what, if anything, they are experiencing. And that’s what we should be telling the family, rather than saying that the fMRI indicates a specific level of consciousness.

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/06/neuroscience_needs_its_einstein/

Wow! Sounds like these patients could be described as "trapped in the spirit world" in the most extreme sense. Of course if the brain pathways are damaged, they are damaged. But maybe a therapy could be developed that walks these patients through re-establishing new pathways to the physical world via long imaginal scenarios.

#imagination #brain damage #locked-in syndrome #shamanism

I often think that machines and humans are in a war against each other, and that the way that roads crisscross sidewalks is just the most extreme form of this war yet. Cars constantly threaten to run us over or try to smash through each other to get to us. If aliens were to study our transportation system, they would say that it is a high-stakes gambling game that is designed to use as much energy as possible.

#cars #amish #malevolence