Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not. (AC)
And from the Journal: “‘It is difficult to know exactly how to make money on AI,’ said Mike Ogborne, founder of Ogborne Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm in San Francisco that oversees a position in Nvidia. ‘This could be the first day of a lot more pain.’” “It is difficult to know exactly how to make money in AI” does seem like an essential aspect of the AI trade; we have talked about OpenAI’s claim that “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” and also about a venture capital bet that the way to make money on AI is by buying up homeowners’ association management companies. But the actual answer turns out to be “build a cheap AI model and short Nvidia.” —Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion Money Stuff.
Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.
From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.
McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where
the products of collective human labour in the cultural realm become mere property. But what is distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not rest directly on the status of the thing as a commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory. Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And what is distinctive about détournement is that it can restore to the fragment the status of being a recognisable part of the process of the collective production of meaning in the present, through the combination of the détourned fragment into a new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees the process of creation from the private property of the image.
within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden
…
I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
The Eightfold Fence is the fourth episode of the FX limited series, Shogun. The episode premiered on March 12, 2024. A reference steeped in Japanese mythology and the Shinto faith, handled poetically and with agency by several female characters.
Teresa Gierzynska, Four pictures, 2004. via MalaGallery.
How to construct a picture that will communicate all the magic of spring: augury of something that will inevitably come – space, innocence? And what about the quintessence of the rich, ripe autumn? How to present euphoria and freshness contained in the summer. And, finally, or perhaps first of all: how to present the depressive winter: its moody and full of harmony aura in a way acceptable to us, allowing us to appreciate its qualities, making us to stop complaining and allowing us to rest – before summer euphoria? How to present it another way?
As its name implied, psychogeography attempted to combine subjective and objective modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environ ment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city. The reader senses Debord’s desperation to negotiate this paradox in his “Theorie de la dérive” (Theory of the derive), a key document first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les levres nues in 1956 and republished in Internationale Situationniste in 1958. The drift, Debord explained, entailed the sort of “ playful-constructive behavior” that had always distinguished situationist activities from mere pastimes. The drift should not be confused, then, with “classical notions of the journey and the stroll”; drifters weren’t like tadpoles in a tank, “stripped . . . of intelligence, sociability and sexu ality,” but were people alert to “the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” capable as a group of agreeing upon distinct, spon taneous preferences for routes through the city.23
[…]
Psychogeography thus produced a social geography of the city, especially important at a time when social geography was still struggling to emerge from the shadow of academic geography. Against academic geography’s “scientific” taxono my of the physical factors that supposedly deter mine the character of a space, social geography theorized space as the product of society84 It was an approach pioneered in the late nineteenth cen tury by the former Communard [Elysée] Reclus, who recog nized in geography “nothing but history in space.”85 Situationists were naturally inclined toward the goals of social geography, which opposed academic geography’s reduction of the city to “the undifferentiated state o f the visible-readable realm “ (to use Lefebvre’s d is dainful phrase) and to the homogenization o f the conflicts that produce capi talist space 86 Fragmented yet tied together by their arrows, situationist maps explored the very same “three orders of facts”— “class struggle, the quest for equilibrium , and the sovereign decision of the individual”— that Reclus claimed were revealed by the pursuit of social geography. 87
[…]
The experiments in detournement that situationists carried out on literature, political the ory, and film (all of Debord’s films were built around detournement) were intended as just the start. The situationists aimed to eventually “detourn” bits of city. This inclination to transgress the boundaries found in culture and cities also characterized the work o f Henri Lefebvre, which was so seamlessly assimilated by situationism , and vice versa, that for the purposes of this discussion it is hardly possible or useful to distinguish the two.
[…]
Above all, they sought to understand that moment when people gain insight into the rational ized and alienated patterns o f their everyday lives. Lefebvre’s interpretation of the eruptive “moment” as embodying “fleetin g but decisive sensations (of delight, surrender, disguise, surprise, horror or out rage) which were somehow revelatory of the totality of possibilities contained in daily existence” could stand just as well for the situationists’ notion of the “situation.”88 Both Lefebvre and the situationists looked to the declaration of the Paris Commune as history’s sublime “moment” and “situation,” when ordinary citizens decided to become self-governing. “The Commune was the biggest festival o f the nineteenth century,” the second situationist thesis on the Paris Commune declared. “Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see the insurgents’ feeling that they had become masters of their own history, not so much on the level of ‘governmental’ politics as on the level of their everyday life.”
