In this text from 1966, Robert Smithson quotes Roland Barthes as saying the “undifferentiated mass of organic sensation.” But I can’t find the origin of the quote. A skewed translation? or possibly just made up by Smithson? Any ideas where it might come from appreciated.

I read a quote recently, and cannot find it again. It was in an article or interview about better worlds, about the possibility of utopia. And the person writing/being interviewed quoted another thinker's doctrine, something like: "A possible world is only worth considering if it is better regardless of who you are in that world." i.e. imagine that you don't know who you would be born as in a possible world, and build your utopia from there.

“Our usage of the word ‘objectivity’ (French objectivite; German Objektivitdt) is hopelessly but revealingly confused. It refers at once to metaphysics, to methods, and to morals. We slide effortlessly from statements about the ‘objective truth’ of a scientific claim, to those about the ‘objective procedures’ that guarantee a finding, to those about the ‘objective manner’ that qualifies a researcher. Current usage allows us to apply the word as an approximate synonym for the empirical (or, more narrowly, the factual); for the scientific, in the sense of public, empirically reliable knowledge; for impartiality-unto-self-effacement and the cold-blooded restraint of the emotions; for the rational, in the sense of compelling assent from all rational minds, be they lodged in human, Martian, or angelic bodies; and for the ‘really real’, that is to say, objects in themselves independent of all minds except, perhaps, that of God. In its thick layering of oddly matched meanings - it is not self evident, for example, what the repression of the emotions has to do with the ontological bedrock - our concept of objectivity betrays signs of a complicated and contingent history, much as the layering of potsherds, marble ruins, and rusted cars would bespeak the same in an archeological site.” - Lorraine Daston (via textbookmaneuver)

“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 and I would not be able to produce another one by any means.” - Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

“I’m not sure I want to evolve, when it comes right down to it.”

by Marcos Novak

To inscribe is to write in, to place the mark of one thing within the fabric of another. Carving is the prototypical kind of inscription, though every other kind of writing partakes in this modification of one substance by another: the particles of ink lodge themselves within the roughness of the paper and will not leave without a trace. Even invisible ink enters the pores of the paper upon which secrets are trusted. Visibility itself is not a measure of inscription, modification of the substratum is.

Digital writing celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure. What is undone is as if not ever done. Thus digital inscription is of another order than any previous inscription, closer to speaking to another without the presence of a third as witness, than, even, to the passing of a ciphered note.

“Models of communication are…not merely representations of communication but representations for communication: templates that guide, unavailing or not, concrete processes of human interaction, mass and interpersonal.” - James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

The Shannon and Weaver Model - The Late Age of Print

The position of human beings in relation to this techno-cultural un-conscious cannot, therefore, be that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside this space, presumes to know or control it.It must in-stead be a relation of connection to, of interaction with, that which has been seen as “other,” including the unsettling processes oftechno-culture itself. To accept this relation is to let go of part ofwhat it has meant to be human,to be a human subject,and to allow ourselves to change,to mutate, to become alien, cyborg, posthuman. This mutant, posthuman status is not a matter of armoring the body, adding robotic prostheses, or technologically transferring consciousness from the body; it is not, in other words, a matter of fortifying the boundaries of the subject, of securing identity as a fixed entity. It is rather a matter of unsecuring the subject, of acknowledging the relations and mutational processes that constitute it. A posthuman subject position would, in other words, acknowledge the otherness that is part of us. It would involve opening the boundaries of individual and collective identity, changing the relations that have distinguished between subject and object, self and other, us and them.

How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas

Lewis F. Richardson

“Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.” - J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (hat tip outsiderindustries)

“Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take place. There can’t be an argument between two people if one speaks a language the other can’t understand. […] Can an individual actor, lost in these gigantic masses, still say ‘I’ when the old collectivities, themselves so lightweight, have already been reduced to uttering a paltry and outmoded ‘we’?” - Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

“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 Serres

“All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.” - Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

by Niklas Luhmann

The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means of another distinction which then assumes the function of a guarantor of reality. Another way of expressing this is to say the operation emerges simultaneously with the world which as a result remains cognitively unapproachable to the operation. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the connection with the reality of the external world is established by the blind spot of the cognitive operation. Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46