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Aggregated by: José López Serra. San Juan - Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. Messages are welcome; conversations, encouraged. Flickr

[busket]

"im tired of living through major historical events" is now "dear lord please let me witness a high profile political assassination in the next 1-2 years. amen"

[borderepisteme-deactivated20260]

“So the first point for me is that what was true in my study of workers education in the 19th century is this simple notion: everybody thinks. And so you do not have two categories of individuals: individuals really entrapped in the universe of pain, suffering, and emotion, and individuals situated on the side of knowledge. And what I tried to show, for instance in my study of Louis-Gabriel Gauny’s reconstruction of the working day, out of his own experience, is that it was not the expression of a pain and suffering. It is already a kind of intellectual construction, a way of understanding what happens, what happens in the working day, what it consists of, etc. And it's always a form of knowledge of a system of domination. I would say that Gauny’s intellectual reconstruction of the working day is a form of knowledge, while Marx's analysis of the working day as a kind of matrix of capitalism, capitalistic dynamics, is another form of knowledge.

We have not knowledge on this side and ignorance on the other side. We have two forms of knowledge about education and domination, and two forms of knowledge about how a system of domination takes its grip on time. For me, this is the first point. The second point is that you do not have knowledge on this side and feeling on the other side, that in fact, every form of knowledge is also tainted by a certain regime of affect.”

Jacques Rancière

[humanoidhistory]

Interfaces in Aliens, 1986.

[funeral]

Descartes’ demon, Kant’s deathbed sigh, Nietzsche’s mad laughter – if philosophy amounts to anything, it is a testament to the stark realization that thought is an aberration. We are mistaken if we think that thought serves us as human beings, our hopes and desires. Thought fails us – thought works too well for our own good. What hubris to think that thought is “inside” our cavernous, hollowed-out skulls…

Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

[camillefaglia]

[nobrashfestivity]

Unknown, American 19th Century The Cat oil on canvas National Gallery of Art Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch

[ormundshightower]

The Substance (2024) // Shrek (2001) & Shrek 2 (2004)

[nobrashfestivity]

Cindy Sherman Untitled #311 [Horror and Surrealist Pictures] 1994

[evilvarric666-archive]

"Weird energy in here today" I say, referring to the inside of my brain.

[speakingbeing]

“…But there is a second observation, strictly correlative to the first, here to be made: it is for those who refer to “god” in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of his will, that everything is permitted. These are, of course, the so-called fundamentalists who practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called the religious suspension of the ethical.

So why are we witnessing the rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today? Precisely because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilised as the basis of mass violence – in other words, since the hegemonic ideology enjoins us to enjoy life and to realise our truest selves – it is almost impossible for the majority of people to overcome their revulsion at the prospect of killing another human being.”

- Slavoj Zizek, If there is a God, then Anything is Permitted

[charliejaneanders]

“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”

— Ted Chiang’s essay about ChatGPT is required reading

[alienerad-deactivated20240703]

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. [...] Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object — and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."

/ Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

[wrenchwenches]

[thirdity]

“Instead of always trying to impose our will on Nature we should sometimes be quiet and listen to what she has to tell us. If we did so I am sure we would gain a new perspective on our own feverish lives.”

— Rachel Carson, “Of Man and the Stream of Time”

[granstromjulius]

Georges Seurat

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[wetheurban]

There’s a difference between being desired and being valued.