dig – Page 138

NPR on Haiti

January 18, 2023January 18, 2023 dig

Crisis!

The constitutional mandate of Haiti’s de facto ruler, Prime Minister Ariel Henry — which some viewed as questionable from the start, as he was never technically sworn in — ended more than a year ago.

The country has had no president since its last one, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in 2021. Its Senate is supposed to have 30 members, and its lower legislative chamber should have 119; all of those seats are unfilled. Haiti’s elected mayors were all reappointed or replaced in 2020.

And last week, its 10 remaining senators departed office after their terms ended, leaving behind a nation’s worth of elected offices that now sit empty after years of canceled elections.

The country of 12 million people last held national elections in 2016.

Rampant inflation has sent the cost of food and gas spiraling; food insecurity is so widespread that about 40% of the population do not have enough to eat. And the disasters have combined to keep thousands of the country’s schools closed, meaning millions of Haitian children have lacked steady education and meals since the beginning of the pandemic.

via NPR.

Berlant, back in 2012.

January 17, 2023January 18, 2023 dig

Lauren Berlant on the Critical Lede, August 25, 2012. They introduced Cruel Optimism (2011).

“… forms of optimism, I’m very interested in, are the kind with which you attached your endurance in the world, with which you attached your continuity in the world

… what it means to have a life […] there’s so many people but one normative model of having a life […] it’s the job of politically engaged critical work to try to imagine other ways of having a life”

all of that is about the way that the labor of the reproduction of life in the historical present is sustain by the fantasy of the good life but is lived as an ongoingness

you make your political claim in the present

the present […] as a place where people are figuring out life

affect works in the present, it’s the bodies response to the world

attempts to change people’s political consciousness, not by changing their ideology, but by changing their affective relation to inhabiting the public

what ought to be in the collective imaginary for flourishing”

… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.
via Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Thought process

January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 dig

Joshua Rothman on forms of thinking, in New Yorker.

“our inner voices are powerful tools that must be tamed. […] The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-management.

[…]

Schwitzgebel thinks it’s a mistake to categorize dreams one way or the other. “We should also consider the possibility that our dreams are neither color nor black-and-white,” he writes. Dreams are unreal, and might not lend themselves to being described during waking life. In describing them, we give them a fixity they may not have.

[…]

Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. […] Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds.”