MachineMachine /stream - tagged with being http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com "The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of the object is..." http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/21811775211 “The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of the object is entirely external; it results from manufacture; I know what the object I have made is; I can make another one like it, but I would not be able to make another being like me in the way that a watchmaker makes a watch (or that a man in the “age of the reindeer” made a blade of sharp stone), and as a matter of fact I don’t know what the being is that I am, nor do I know what the world is… ]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:24:52 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/21811775211 Being Human (Blame it on Andy) http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs. ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:55:48 -0700 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:16 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called… ]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:48:43 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8709269169 “The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.”

- Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:27:41 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8709269169 Secularism and Its Discontents http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:57:04 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7350819493 “Nothing new under the reign of the same and under the same reign, preserved. Nothing new and nothing to be born, no nature. This is death, eternally. Nature put to death, its birth unwanted. The science of this is nothing. It is calculably nothing. Stable, immutable, redundant. It recopies the same writings, with the same atom-letters. The law is the plague. Reason is the fall. The reiterated cause is death. Repetition is redundancy. And identity is death. Every­thing falls to zero: the nullity of information, the emptiness of knowledge, non-existence. The same is Non-Being.”

- The Birth of Physics by Michel… ]]> Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:03:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7350819493 The Fuccon Family - mikey being kidnapped http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PardfjrIXag&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:58:20 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PardfjrIXag&feature=youtube_gdata The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.”
This charge reflects… ]]> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:48:39 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings Into the Uncanny Valley http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/ Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny… ]]> Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:08:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/uncanny_valley/ On Being in Japan and Elsewhere http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an…

]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:05:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html Fallacy of misplaced concreteness | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_misplaced_concreteness In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are for a physical or 'concrete' reality. Whitehead proposed the fallacy in a discussion of the relation of spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a concrete physical object in the universe can be described simply in spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field located in both space and time. "...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there… ]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:08:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_misplaced_concreteness The phenomenology of text http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/102022 The phenomenology / ontology of text: has anyone examined this issue directly in philosophical, literary and/or critical terms? I am interested in the experience and perception of text, both within readership and on an abstract (more holistic level perhaps) as the archetypical mediator and virtual-archive of human culture. I wish to explore it via its mediums (e.g. book, computer screen), its modes (e.g. semiotics, translation) and its means (e.g. poetry, fiction, encryption).

I came at this problem through Heidegger (most specifically in his re-appropriation of the term 'techné'), looking at text as a technology.

I have… ]]> Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:21:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/102022