http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://artinfo.com/news/story/800410/can-artists-help-us-reboot-humanism-in-an-over-connected-age How does aesthetic experience fare in such an environment? Within art-tech circles, the buzz these days is about something called the “New Aesthetic,” a coinage of James Bridle, who launched a Tumblr of the same name dedicated to aggregating phenomena that blur together digital culture and real-world design, and seem characteristic of the present's plugged-in sensibility. In his response to the “New Aesthetic,” techno-pundit Bruce Sterling takes it to task for lacking any rigor or specificity, and just basically being a meusli of wicked cool images. My response to this response would be that it is this lack of rigor… ]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:44:07 -0700 http://artinfo.com/news/story/800410/can-artists-help-us-reboot-humanism-in-an-over-connected-age http://thebrowser.com/interviews/john-gray-on-critiques-utopia-and-apocalypse?page=full There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw in Iraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was… ]]> Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:43:55 -0700 http://thebrowser.com/interviews/john-gray-on-critiques-utopia-and-apocalypse?page=full http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values : http://t.co/VVPManIW cc @tomcolls ]]> Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:20:24 -0700 http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by… ]]> Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:42:54 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-02-08-metzger-en.html The new political ecology is thus emerging from a call for greater humility toward the world and all the life forms it may hold, both literally and figuratively. Rather than contrasting mankind to nature and the rest of the world, this perspective consistently perceives humans as relays in a dynamic mélange of relations that can be more or less open, inclusive, and stable over time, but without any preordained knowledge about how these relations may develop or change. ]]> Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:09:31 -0700 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-02-08-metzger-en.html http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The films are linked through their interest in using and reassembling the fragments of the past—recorded on film and video―to try and make sense of the chaotic events of the present. I first met Adam Curtis at the Manchester International Festival thanks to Alex Poots, and while Curtis himself is not an artist, many artists over the last decade have become increasingly interested in how his films… ]]> Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:36:52 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-adam-curtis-part-i/ http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine John Gray on Freud (the last great Enlightenment thinker?) http://t.co/cKMdkDWl ]]> Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:07:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/17/its-only-humanist/ To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been used in the past as a touchstone for artists who measure their own vision against an anthropocentric one. “Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty,” Apollinaire wrote in an essay about a 1912 exhibition of Cubist painting. “It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we… ]]> Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:16:49 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/17/its-only-humanist/ 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/ http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to consider the relation of displacement and humanism—a cultural ideal on the one hand, a social fact on the other. The two seem to have nothing in common. Yet I want to argue that they do; at the dawn of the modern era, a person’s capacity to manage and master displacement formed part of the humanist project, and, I argue, it continues to do so today, but on very different… ]]> Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:30:24 -0700 http://www.iasc-culture.org/publications_article_2011_Summer_sennet.php http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.
Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time, will explode – but one can’t say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate them and defuse in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though. In case of the minefields laid out by soldiers of one army you can… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:32:53 -0700 http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things http://thehumanist.org/july-august-2011/heaven-for-atheists/ It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re hardwired to want to leave a legacy. Many even invent afterlives, rarely accepting death at face value but instead saying that someone who’s died has “gone on to a better place.” Some don’t even call it death but rather feel the need to be polite in saying someone “passed away.” These are the comforts we afford ourselves so we don’t have to confront the inevitable. Cryonics, I have decided, is… ]]> Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:01:26 -0700 http://thehumanist.org/july-august-2011/heaven-for-atheists/ http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/apr/20/radical-ethology-jussi-parikkas-insect-media/ In a fundamental sense, technology is deeply non-human. While we might apply a humanist logic to the function and workings of technological systems, and view technological objects as extensions of the human body and its capacity for adaptive prosthesis, the very purpose of technology is to be that which the human is not or to achieve that which the human could not otherwise do. As such, technology exists beyond the humanist understanding of the individual, the body, and the subject, particularly in contemporary network culture in which technology is in part transformed from concrete and material objects into molecular, adaptive,… ]]> Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:25:08 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/apr/20/radical-ethology-jussi-parikkas-insect-media/ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback.

The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards life that has served Japan well in the post-Hiroshima era. It makes a powerful point, which is that looking for someone or something to blame is often a time-consuming exercise that rarely has positive outcomes. Whereas nothing can be done about an unfortunate event that has already occurred, we can mobilise our creative powers to fix problems that stare us in the face. History shows that… ]]> Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:48:19 -0700 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/susan-jacoby/the-myth-of-separate-magisteria By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science in the physical universe and religion in the moral realm. On this website, the philosopher Roger Scruton recently made the sweeping declaration that “genuine science and true religion cannot conflict.” A 2004 editorial in Nature magazine insists that science and religion clash only when the two “stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble.”

One might as well say that conflict arises between men… ]]> Wed, 10 Nov 2010 06:17:00 -0700 http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/susan-jacoby/the-myth-of-separate-magisteria http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-03-midgley-en.html by Mary Midgley

Does the term "humanism" really stand for a new and better form of religion? If so, what is that religion? Or is it something designed as a cure for religion itself, a way to get rid of it on Christopher Hitchens's principle that "religion poisons everything"?

Many people, no doubt, agree with Hitchens. But Auguste Comte, the founding father of modern humanism, would not have been one of them. For him, "humanism" was a word parallel to "theism". It just altered the object worshipped, substituting humanity for God. He called it… ]]> Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:58:00 -0700 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-11-03-midgley-en.html http://newhumanist.org.uk/2283/gloom-merchant The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:19:00 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2283/gloom-merchant http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man ow does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of… ]]> Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:54:00 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-soul-of-the-scientist-of-man http://io9.com/5478829/is-science-fiction-humanism-a-contradiction-in-terms People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity, and whether the universe will let us stay human.

It's easy to think of science fiction and humanism as going hand in hand: Science fiction is about, or else informed by, science, which is empirical and rejects "a priori" beliefs and superstitions. Both Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut served as honorary presidents of the American Humanist Association.

According to Wikipedia, other famous secular… ]]> Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:54:00 -0700 http://io9.com/5478829/is-science-fiction-humanism-a-contradiction-in-terms