Chapter 1

In the first chapter, we learned that humanism came under attack in the 20th century by anti-humanist scholars, who critiqued the concept of the human as a white, male, rational figure. However, according to Braidotti, anti-humanists were more focused on deconstructing this notion than on proposing an alternative vision of what it means to be human.

For Braidotti, anti-humanist critiques revealed that human identity is shaped by relations—both material and immaterial. Historically, however, material relations have been undervalued, a point she seeks to redress.

A key concern for Braidotti is how this relational view of humanity reshapes subjectivity. But the posthuman, she argues, should also have profound implications for morality and knowledge.

Chapter 2

In Chapter 2, we return to Braidotti’s focus on materiality. She begins by emphasizing that a crucial aspect of the posthuman is its position in a post-Anthropocene world. Rather than placing humans at the top of a hierarchy, the posthuman perspective sees all life on a level playing field. This shift is grounded in Braidotti’s concept of Zoe, which describes the self-organizing force inherent in all living matter.

Braidotti notes that while "we" have struggled to cultivate a posthumanist sensibility for ethical purposes, capitalists have been remarkably adept at treating humans, animals, nature, and technology as interchangeable. There is, I think, an interesting parallel between Zoe and capital: like Zoe, capital—or the ability to reduce anything to a price—is a force that pervades all things. However, while Zoe elevates non-humans to the level of humans (e.g., through ethical treatment), capital does the opposite, reducing humans to the status of the non-human.

When it comes to subjectivity and the development of a posthuman sensibility, I would argue that we have already been restructured by capitalism’s own version of posthumanism. The widespread treatment of humans as resources suggests that, in many ways, we are already living within a posthumanist framework—just one shaped by market logic rather than ethical imperatives. Of course, people do still treat humans, animals, and nature as ends in themselves, but this often exists in tension with capitalism’s reductive tendencies.

This, I believe, presents a fundamental challenge to the broader project of developing a positive posthumanist sensibility: to break free from capitalism’s lens, people must act in ways that appear irrational within its logic. For instance, paying more for an ethically produced product only becomes "rational" when one steps outside the self-interested framework of capitalism. The increasing prevalence of loneliness, the static nature of our built environments, and the commodification of animals as products all shape our relational subjectivity in ways that make a Zoe-based perspective difficult to cultivate.

If we are to develop such a perspective, it seems we would need to radically restructure daily life—encouraging people to form relationships with non-humans, spend more time in nature, and live and work in close connection with others. Perhaps, then, the first steps toward a posthumanist ethics are as simple as getting more people to adopt pets, immerse themselves in natural environments, and engage in communal ways of living and working.

Chapter 3

There is a common fear that technology, especially when merged with the human, is something to be resisted. But Braidotti argues this has already happened. While bio-capital comes with its horrors, she urges us to focus on the generative potential of this entanglement—the death of the human. This death is not just metaphorical; in becoming cyborgs, the human as we know it ceases to exist. But Braidotti’s deeper point is that to see this transformation as affirmative and vital, we need a different conception of death—one that views life and death as a continuum, with death as a generative event.

Examples? The Arab Spring, sparked by a worker’s public suicide. Potlatch. The extinction of dinosaurs making way for other species. A felled tree turned into a table.

This chapter was difficult, but with rereading, it becomes more impactful. I’ve started feeling a deep connection to inanimate objects—seeing them, like myself, as matter shaped by historical trajectories. Developing a posthumanist sensibility feels more intuitive with objects than with humans.

Conclusion

What would a world look like if our sense of self, ethics, politics, and view of life and death were shaped by a posthumanist paradigm?

How do humanist and anti-humanist perspectives limit our understanding of the self? A posthumanist approach, like the growth mindset, might offer a more flexible and dynamic view of identity.

How do these perspectives constrain ethics? Humanist and anti-humanist ethics often fixate on what not to do rather than what to do. Maybe we need to make space for ethical ambiguity—if we accept that death is generative, then action, even if imperfect, becomes more viable. A choice that is 90% ethical might be enough.

How do these perspectives limit politics? Politics is where posthumanism’s impact is clearest. If we see power as distributed rather than centered in individuals, we can rethink political strategy. The American government’s system of distributed power could be seen as a posthumanist project—an attempt to move beyond monarchy as the closest embodiment of "the Human."

I’m leaving the book feeling more like an idiot, which is frustrating and makes it easy to dislike. But even if I don’t fully grasp the posthuman yet, I do agree that the human can’t be separated from violence—and that anti-humanism is too reductively negative.

It’s my view that projects are 1. all-consuming and 2. end in tragedy. To anyone who disagrees, I’d respond: OK, let me add the qualifier that any GOOD project is 1. all-consuming and 2. ends in tragedy. Moving forward, anytime I say "project," you can assume I’m talking about a good project.

Let’s start with this: all projects are ultimately idealistic. What I mean is that any good project 1. begins as an idea and 2. isn’t realistic, because it can’t be. The reason it can’t be realistic is that what makes a project good is that it is derived from one’s imagination, not from one’s pre-existing reality. Because projects are always birthed from idealism, they are almost doomed to fail once we get started on them.

If you disagree that a project needs to be unrealistic, I’d argue that the projects one imagines are artificially limited by 1. their environment, or what they have access to, and 2. their ego. So, if your projects aren’t ending in failure, you’re probably not dreaming big enough. This could be because you either 1. don’t have exposure to things that make you dream bigger, or 2. you don’t have a big ego. You might think number 2 is good, but when I say that projects end in tragedy, I mean that they end in catharsis.

Once you begin working on your project, you’ll quickly realize that things are harder than you thought. That’s because the project is the domain of the amateur. In other words, projects are always your first attempt at doing the thing you’re doing. If it’s not your first time, then it’s probably not a project—it might be a task or a job, but probably not a project.

While it might be your first time doing the specific thing you’re doing, it isn’t your first time exercising the skills required for the project to be completed. Projects are always a coming together of many skills. If you’re making an album, it certainly isn’t your first time playing an instrument, it isn’t your first time jamming with other people, it isn’t your first time making art, it isn’t your first time paying a professional for help, and it isn’t your first time telling the public about something you’ve made. Once you’ve made an album, the next one isn’t really a project unless it’s an album that’s completely different from your previous work.

Because projects are the domain of the amateur, they are usually DIY, which means wearing lots of different hats. Both a job and a task typically require doing one thing, more or less, but a project entails doing many things.

While projects require doing many things, they also require doing many things repeatedly. A project, more often than not, requires you to return to it and continue where you left off. In a sense, a project is a series of promises to your future self. If those promises are kept, they strengthen the trust you have in yourself. But if they are broken, that trust cracks and weakens.

If not immediately, then over time, you’ll find yourself butting up against your limits of what you’re capable of doing in some area. At this point, your blind spots emerge—the things you didn’t account for when you were just imagining what it would take for the project to come together. Tiny things that, in hindsight, seem obvious. These tiny things, which seem simple, end up taking a lot of your time because they are beyond your current skill level. As your project progresses, it seems these obstacles keep popping up, and eventually, stress becomes the most familiar feeling.

Being tasked with things that are beyond your skill level leaves you constantly stressed out. As a result, this stress begins to follow you into other areas of your life—it shows up in your personal relationships, your health, and so on. At this point, the project has taken over your life—it has become all-consuming.

Depending on one’s pain tolerance, completing the project is now mostly a mental challenge. It becomes a matter of managing one’s emotions well enough to avoid collapsing and giving up prematurely. By this point, you’ve received enough information to become disillusioned with the reality you once imagined. Looking back at how you started, you can see that the project (even if finished) fails to be exactly as you envisioned it—a little part of you dies tragically. And while there may be a moment of grieving that old self, the catharsis that eventually follows allows you to gain a strength you didn’t have before the project began.

At the foundation of a conversation are our desires. For instance, a man that desires a woman speaks to her in a flirtatious way – he produces innuendos and sustains eye contact.

While desire is fundamental to conversations, this example presents a simplistic view that overlooks the inherent dynamism of real conversations.

As an active production, a conversation’s dynamism changes our desires in the moment. What may have started as a desire to avoid an awkward dinner conversation can morph into a desire to win a political debate.

Once immersed in a conversation, we can begin to develop a desire for connection – a feeling that comes when a relationship emerges.

The production of a connection begins with the merging of minds. As each speaker produces speech the sounds circulate in both minds simultaneously as if they were one circuit. But this shared experience is complicated by interpretation. In order to form an emotional connection that allows for a sense of a relationship to emerge the speakers must take the other’s interpretive habits into consideration.

This act of considering the other’s interpretive perspective is what I call transperception. Transperception is a constant action that allows us to test the boundaries of the other’s interpretive habits. Once we have an idea of how the other thinks, transperception seems to fade into the subconscious mind and only emerges when statements we are considering are judged as ambiguous to our concept of the other speaker’s interpretive habits.

As two people with different histories, the perspective of the other can sometimes be opaque leading to a failure in transperception and the inability to create a connection. Unable to form a connection with others can create a lack of confidence in one’s own perspective triggering a downward spiral.

On the contrary, two people with similar experiences may have the ability to perceive the world like the other and form a connection that allows for a relationship to emerge. Unlike a failed connection, the emergence of a relationship can strengthen one’s confidence in their perspective.

But transperception is ultimately a filter; its function is to prevent certain utterances. As a fundamental component of conversations, transperception allows us to invert the common understanding of a conversation from being defined by what is said to what is not said. Perhaps one easy way of illustrating this is to consider how flirting creates a particular relationship. If someone says “you have nice lips”, they are choosing not to say “I’d like to have sex with you”. By omitting what is implied in “you have nice lips” from the conversation one creates a surplus that is the very thing that constitutes the reproduction of the relationship of the two people in the conversation.

What did you think of the Conspiracist Manifesto?

The outfit as an object has been said to be a matter of communication; a signal to others expressing who we are. As a widely held view, the logical progression of this idea is that what we wear should be an authentic expression of who we are as a person. That being said, it makes sense that Mark Zuckerberg’s new wardrobe has received a lot of criticism for being an inauthentic expression of his true self. By using Zuckerberg’s public transformation I will attempt to make the argument that the outfit isn’t an expression of the self, but the means to construct the self that begins not with an expression of who we are but with a negation of who we no longer are.

The Uniform

Over the past decade and a half, Zuckerberg’s appearance in the media has been marked by his singular look: blue jeans, gray t-shirt. When asked about why he wore the same thing every day, Zuckerberg said if he could eliminate unnecessary decisions like what to wear every day, it would give him more energy to devote to his company. Seemingly a reasonable response given his role as the CEO of Meta, the monotony of wearing the same outfit for the rest of your life seems like a Kafka story where one is transformed into a cartoon character trapped in a static world where nothing ever changes.

But in some sense so many people wear the same outfit everyday, only subtle variations allow us to say we don’t. The suffocating effect of a uniform reveals that an outgrown outfit can become a prison. While Zuckerberg’s prison was obvious, for many of us, the slight variation in what we wear obscures our fabricated limitations. Although the prison might not be immediately obvious, as time progresses, our outfits that we once embraced begin to feel like a layer of dead skin.

Staring at a closet full of clothes, thinking “I have nothing to wear”, we give in to wearing that outfit that imprisons us. But in the situation that we have something new, we must overcome the fear of judgment by a public married to the notion that one’s clothes must be an expression of who they are, and any attempt to misrepresent one’s self is a reflection of one’s poor character.

Becoming Human

But one day when we decide to boldly wear what we’ve never worn before, we find that the outfit has a transformative power. Walking down the street, or into a room, the subtle expressions that others give us alter our perception of ourselves. A double take, a lustful stare, or an approving look from someone we admire informs us that we are seen in a particular way. The outfit as a transformative force goes on to alter our perception of the world and our experience of it. In this sense the outfit is an embodied experience. Conceiving of the outfit as a form of authentic communication fails to see the outfit as a phenomenological matter that alters our perception and experience of the world. For many people, Zuckerberg’s new demeanor and outfit betrayed his robotic nature, which meant one thing: Zuckerberg was concealing the truth.

The Aesthetics of Collective Desire

In addition to getting attention for his new look, people have also been talking about Zuckerberg’s new interest in MMA. Unconcerned with which came first, the coexistence of his interest in MMA and his matching look of baggy shirts and gold chains is worth our attention.

For those who view style as a matter of semiotics, the similar appearance of members of a community is explained as a shared vocabulary that members use to communicate. In other words, chains and big T-shirts represent ideas. Attempting to reimagine the outfit without falling back on semiotics, we can think of the outfit not as a form of communication, but a means to construct a particular ontology. The clothing that characterizes a community then isn’t about communication but reflects a particular existence that members access through the ritual of getting dressed.

New outfits are not expressions of the self

Criticisms of Zuckerberg’s new look as being inauthentic rest on the assumption that the self exists prior to getting dressed. Perhaps it is this idea that turns the outfit into a prison – by conceiving of what we wear as a claim on who we are, we end up living inauthentically in order to appear authentic. By giving up the notion that the outfit is an expression of the self we make room for a new self to be articulated.

What did you take away from the first discussion?

Standing in front of a mirror, staring at myself in a suit I have to wear for a formal dinner, I don’t feel like myself. On a typical night, I’m likely wearing shorts and a sports jersey, eating wings and drinking beer at a nearby bar. Noticing my discomfort, she says, "Restaurants allow us to experience different versions of ourselves." Doubtful at first, I wonder if I really would experience a different version of myself if I stopped complaining and surrendered to the experience.

Arriving for an unusually late dinner, we met her friends from college who had just returned from Spain. They told us how Spain changed them and how they now only eat dinner after 9. She whispers to me that restaurants function as vectors of reproduction—they pass on tradition and a sense of how the world used to be and still is, to some extent. Originating from a particular space and time, each restaurant is an embodiment of culture. From the family-style serving sizes in Chinese restaurants that reflect a collectivist culture to the individual serving sizes at an American hotdog stand, restaurants reveal the world they emerged from. But far from being static snapshots of a moment in history, restaurants today also embody the times in various ways. From QR codes to online reservations, restaurants reproduce both the good and the bad.

Her friends are self-identified foodies. One of them comments on the table being pure oak. Shortly after, another comments on the linen napkins. She tells me the restaurant is an acid trip in the sense that the good and bad are amplified. Like an acid trip, each component matters. One of her friends mentions they heard the owner of the restaurant got into a big fight with their partner about needing to buy expensive paper towels for the restrooms because, if they didn’t, it would compromise their brand. Sensing my irritation with her friends’ concern for trivial things, she puts things in perspective by telling me that everything in the restaurant is an expression of the restaurant.

She points out the controlling restaurateur in the corner: one arm resting on top of the other, stroking their chin, staring blankly into the distance. She says the romanticist in her smiles, knowing that the restaurant remains a place for human error. Her friends are irked that the table next to us got their drinks before we did, despite the fact that we ordered first. While any error is generally regarded as an inconvenience, the disappearance of human error would imply the reterritorialization of the restaurant by computers and algorithms. Perhaps her friends would like that, or perhaps they’d also complain about it. They, like the restaurateur, seem to see the world through what she told me is called a humanist lens. From this vantage point, humans, through reason, can perfect themselves and society. Perhaps it's this pursuit of perfection that will lead to the disappearance of humans as a byproduct of being intolerant of errors.

After they clear away our plates, she says to her friends that eating at a restaurant is like eating on the edge of a cliff; death looms in the form of financial ruin. We laugh at first, but soon agree that the cost of dining out takes away some of the enjoyment. Her friends mention how eating out so often has sort of deflated the entire experience. When the bill comes, I put my card down and tell everyone they can Venmo me.

After saying bye to her friends, she tells me that a restaurant is hardly ever just about eating food. As an event, our experience of the restaurant is philosophical. Sitting at a table on the edge of a cliff, tripping on acid, a not-so-familiar version of myself becomes the medium for culture, both past and present, to express and reproduce itself.

The house can be divided into designated spaces that serve our fundamental needs. A kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom cater to our basic biological requirements. Embracing the idea that rooms fulfill specific needs, we can view ancillary rooms as central to our identities today. The office reflects our intellectual commitment to work, while the living room serves as a space to consume media, both essential to being an active member of mainstream society. Although the shower typically shares a room with the toilet, I propose it be allocated its own space, an 'aesthetic room,' to meet one of our fundamental needs—to be aesthetic objects.

Leaving a trail of clothes from my bedroom to the bathroom, I find myself standing naked in front of the shower. I can’t explain how weird a naked body is. Perhaps it’s the head that’s attached to a body that creates a sense of dissonance. As we walk around through the world, we are mostly floating heads with covered bodies. Maybe the face, as a representation of the self, becomes troubled when it is attached to the naked body. Perhaps there is a sense of our animal self and our civil self. Or our human and post-human self. The shower, as an object, brings our attention to this feeling of our two selves. It shatters our sense of self, momentarily elevating the body from a secondary to a primary component of who we are. In order to maintain our primary sense of self, represented by the face, we must come into contact with ourselves as an alien form.

I stick my hand behind the curtain and feel for the smooth handle. Cranking it up, I encounter a resistance that is so familiar to showering. The shower, like all objects, has a sense to it. I feel a slight reverberation through the pipes while touching the handle. A slight whistling precedes the sound of water spraying out of the shower head. The instantaneity of the water reminds me of what Heidegger said about the standing reserve. Water, always ready for our consumption, reveals the world as a resource to be used. No longer required to bathe in a river or under a waterfall, the shower robs us of an encounter with nature in all its power. The shower becomes possible only when nature is reduced to a mere resource.

Opening the curtain, I find myself staring at the tiled wall as water sprays against the tub. Entering the shower, I feel the water spray across my body, dripping onto the tub and surrounding my feet, with my wet hair covering my face. In two ways, the shower is an aesthetic experience. First, it restores a particular form of our appearance. Second, it exposes our skin to a stream of water. Like an angel with eyes across its body, our skin’s sensory capacity envelops our being, making touch the only sense that spreads itself across our body. The shower is not only involved in producing an aesthetic object but is itself a highly aesthetic experience.

Grabbing soap to wash myself, I think about the parallels between sewage treatment plants and our bodies. Our two to four million sweat glands secrete waste onto the surface of our bodies as we walk through the city, standing above millions of pipes that carry thousands of tons of waste to water treatment facilities. As I walk, a jogger runs towards me, covered in sweat. The sweat paints lines across their body that, like a canvas, hold an expression of who they are. Soap washes away a version of ourselves that we don’t want others to experience. By creating a distance from our natural scent, body soap contributes to the aestheticization of the self.

Staring at the shampoo bottle, I think about how my hair isn’t actually dirty, and although it hardly ever is, I wash it nonetheless. Perhaps if I worked a job that put my body into contact with chemicals, germs, or irritants, shampoo could serve to clean my hair. But sitting at a desk, writing code, and attending meetings makes shampoo appear unnecessary. It seems that shampoo is an example of what we might call cultural drift. I mean that perhaps in its infancy as a mass-produced commodity, shampoo was primarily used to clean dirty hair. However, a hundred years after Hans Schwarzkopf produced the first mass-produced shampoo, the world has changed but our views on shampoo have stayed the same. No longer just about cleaning our hair, shampoo now serves functions congruent with our times: styling our hair in a particular fashion by adding volume or keeping it healthy.

Despite my reluctance about the necessity to use shampoo, I do so out of habit. Reaching next for the conditioner, I realize the shower is definitely about creating an aesthetic experience of the self. In two ways, conditioner not only gives us a feeling of our self but also affects our hair so that it takes on a particular appearance. Thinking about the sense of self that we produce, I realize that all objects have a sense to them. After a long day, we might smell or feel the dried sweat on our legs—these sensations create a sense of self that makes us not feel right, motivating us to shower and restore our sense of self.

Overheating and feeling guilty for how long I’ve been in the shower, I turn the water off. The instant disappearance of the sensuous experience gives way to an unnameable feeling, consisting of standing naked in silence and stillness. Reaching for a towel to dry myself, I step out of the shower and dry off with what smells like an old towel. Standing there wrapped in cloth, I wipe the steamy mirror to see my familiar face, as if I were checking to see the finished product.

I remember what life was like before I met Charlene. I lived in LA. On my last night there, I asked a friend for money, who upon giving it to me told me never to contact him again. Later at a bar, I was desperately trying to get someone to come home with me. I was practically begging her. I didn’t even want to have sex; I just wanted someone to talk to. Alone in the city, I decided to spend the rest of my days drinking myself to death in Las Vegas. Where better to wither away than in the desert?

One night while driving drunk down the strip and listening to 'Lonely Teardrops' by Jackie Wilson, I came inches away from killing a woman walking across the street. By God's grace, I was able to slam on my brakes just in time. Realizing she was a prostitute, I got out of my car and asked her to come back to my hotel with me for the evening under the guise of having sex, but truthfully just to keep me company. Reluctant at first, Charlene agreed.

The beginning of a friendship often feels extraordinary in retrospect. Though the days themselves were ordinary in hindsight, we remember them as containing a sense of otherness. Whether it was fate or destiny that brought us together, we were kept together by a mutual longing to be loved and to love in return while we floated through time towards nowhere in particular. In a way, friendship involves constantly imbuing the ordinary with extraordinary qualities.

In the moment, though, the initial interaction usually isn’t special, perhaps because the friend doesn't always appear to us as we imagined them. Friendship often comes in a form that we don’t quite expect. I never thought my friend would be a hooker I picked up one night towards the end of my life. Floating through life hopelessly, the initial interaction seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. You might think it’s strange that a friendship could begin with a blowjob, but the truth is, I just wanted someone to talk to. I asked Charlene if we could just hang out and talk until our time was up.

I think she saw something in me—the same thing I saw in her. Someone who saw me for who I was and someone who could see her for who she was. It wasn’t clear at the time, but as soon as she left and I was all alone, I realized that she and I were going to be friends. Friendship always contains a dual experience. What I experienced was also experienced by Charlene. Friendship involves us simultaneously playing both the roles of giver and receiver.

Days later, sitting alone on a bench, drinking a martini, Charlene walked up to me. I told her I had been looking for her the previous night and asked if she’d like to get dinner. At dinner, we talked, and she asked me why I was trying to kill myself. I thought it would be the last time we saw each other, but she assured me she wasn’t judging me; she was just curious. We sat there for over an hour talking, and later, we walked home instead of taking a cab just so we could talk some more. I realized the thing about friendship is that when you’re together, the world disappears; nothing matters except the two of you. The activities are just there to hide the fact that you want to spend time with this person. With a friend, it doesn’t matter what you do—walking down the street is better than going to a party with people who make you feel alone. Being the more intuitive one, Charlene told me she wanted me to move into her place and that I could sleep on her couch. That was the moment I realized I had made a friend.

After I moved in, we did everything together—grocery shopping, parties, dinners, watching TV, going on trips, gambling, and even getting kicked out of casinos. Friendship consists of these little things. It’s a constant act of production, creating plans, experiences, memories, laughter, and inside jokes. These small things that we create together become part of our sense of self. Like the time we got matching tattoos, or how we've started to sound like each other and use the same phrases.

These changes are often detected by the other people in our lives. They pick up on our new beliefs, slang, clothes, our élan vital. At first, the changes were minor and her friends would dismiss them, but it was when we spent our first holiday together that they knew things had changed. Holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween that friends spend together are celebrations of friendship as an entity—a mutual recognition that we are both loved and needed. This friendship becomes an intangible but palpable object, expressed by the union of two individuals who are invigorated by each other as if it were a self-perpetuating machine, defying the laws of physics.

Over time, I developed an attachment to Charlene, and one day it surfaced in the worst way. At lunch, I gave her earrings I had bought for her. As I was putting them on her, I said something crass and hurtful about how she would be able to feel them tonight when one of her clients is pounding her from behind. I saw her mask her feelings from me. Ashamed of what I said, I got up and left. I felt like I couldn’t be honest with Charlene about how I felt anymore. The ability to communicate openly, which was the foundation of our friendship, was compromised. The emergence of feelings I didn’t want to share resurrected a sense of isolation I thought I had overcome. Upset that she couldn’t see how her work was affecting me, I acted out by bringing someone home that night. While we were together, Charlene walked in and saw everything. Friendships can be shattered by an act of betrayal, which is an attack on the friendship itself—a declaration that it no longer holds value. Friendships break when the freedom to speak openly is lost.

As I reached for my drink, Charlene stood there with tears in her eyes. She told me she wanted me to leave. For one week we didn’t see each other. During that time, I remembered what life was like before our friendship—a lonely existence where no one could hear me or see me. An existence where mundane activities drove me to distraction because that was all I wanted. As I moved through the world, everything reminded me of Charlene. There were moments when I had thoughts that I knew only Charlene would understand. I was certain she felt the same way. As I lay on what felt like my deathbed, wasting away, I called Charlene and told her I needed to see her.

When Charlene arrived, she hugged me. We were no longer angry at each other; we were just happy to be back together. Like a broken bone, friendships can become stronger than before if they heal correctly, though sometimes they leave scars that don’t fade away. She and I spent that last night together before I died in my sleep. Thankfully, we had reconciled, which meant that while I passed away, our friendship lived on. Frozen in time, Charlene could carry it with her, looking back on it fondly as a source of life.

Holidays are emotional. Throughout the country, they stir up feelings ranging from excitement to anger, sprinkled with moments of anxiety and jouissance. Across the nation, millions of excited children, frustrated college students, and lonely parents together create an emotional snapshot of the country. By focusing on emotions we can bypass cliche representations and edited photos to get at the holiday as a lived experience.

Waking up on July 4th I thought “it’s July 4th” – which is usually the sort of thing that I think first thing in the morning on a holiday. Subconsciously happy I find myself suppressing my excitement. Wondering why, I imagine it’s my body’s reaction to a feeling of cognitive dissonance. How could I be excited for a holiday that celebrates the birth of the American empire? Perhaps the answer to that question is holidays are really only ever about one thing – the renewal of the family.

Most mornings I grab coffee at a cafe before I begin my day – an expensive habit that I picked up during the pandemic. But on holidays the economy is suspended, the gears of capitalism slow to the bare minimum; or at least that was the case when I was a kid – nowadays it seems more stores are open than before. Nonetheless, for a significant portion of the country the holiday is a day of rest – a break from the workplace and one’s place within it. A holiday can do several times a year what anti-capitalists only dream of. Although the cafe that I go to in the mornings is open, I decide to make coffee downstairs with my family. As a force, the holiday suspends the normal world transporting us in time from a market-based society to a familial one.

After coffee and breakfast I go back to my room where I think about the rest of the day. I realize that besides watching fireworks at night we don’t have much else planned. Looking at the clock I notice I have about 12 hours to kill before the fireworks go off. On a regular day I’d spend my time working on personal projects, but given that I hardly see my family I set aside the day to spend it with them. Imagining myself in New York for the fourth, I’m sure I’d at least call my parents to check in and see how they’re doing. As families spend less holidays together, people begin to question the purpose of holidays.

I go on Instagram and see people posting about 4th of July. Someone posts a thirst trap with text that says something like “America is fucked, so why not at least party. Happy 4th!!”. Other people are complaining about how bad fireworks are for animals, and Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of him surfing in a tuxedo while drinking a beer and holding the American flag. I close the app and realize not a single one was about the renewal of the family. Perhaps holidays need a superficial reason in order to fulfill the real purpose.

Sitting around I find myself waiting for the arrival of the ceremony. But this waiting is where the holiday takes place. It takes place as I’m outside drinking a beer with my dad doing absolutely nothing except waiting for the time we have to go watch the fireworks. Wasting time especially in the age of the achievement subject feels excessive, but this expenditure serves to affirm the sacred place that the family holds.

Every holiday is marked by a ceremony that requires preparation beforehand. Whether it’s gifts or costumes or cooking, the preparation reveals the performative nature of the ceremony. Each person’s role changes throughout their life as they take on different familial roles. As a child your job is mostly to learn and experience the ceremony. As an adult your role takes on a more productive role. At 8 PM everyone gets ready to watch the fireworks.

Walking down the street, I think I’ve never seen so many families at once out together in my neighborhood. On most nights I might see couples in their 60s walking together at the park but never with their kids. When we get to the park we try to find the optimal spot for the kids to watch the fireworks. Standing around all the other families with children running around and screaming I feel a strange energy that I usually only feel on holidays.

As the fireworks start the screaming and running stops. Distracted by the explosions, presents, or costumes of holiday ceremonies, we fail to realize that the holiday more or less occurs before and after the ceremony. It’s in the seemingly meaningless moments that the holiday fulfills its function. As families separate, the holiday as a feeling of belonging is forgotten, thereby throwing into question its purpose.

After the fireworks end, we start walking home. On the way I notice a family saying goodbye on the sidewalk. The son and the father standing stiffly move to give each other a quick and awkward hug goodbye before turning separate ways where they won’t see each other until the next holiday.

The monotony of the day can wear us down. Everything appears in their familiar forms. It doesn’t feel like one’s world, it feels Other. As the sun sets, electricity sustains the day. Only when we turn the lights off in the bedroom and close our eyes does the night really emerge. Unable to see anything, the world disappears, only the immediate matters. But as a metaphor the night as a shrunken world reduces vision from the most dominant sense to the least. Perhaps sound becomes dominant. A predator walking nearby is heard but not seen. Drifting off to sleep the mind escapes the logic of the day. A series of random associations connect and disconnect rapidly. The world embodied gives shape to a nightlife and a new sense of self.

Leaving my apartment, I meet up with Victor and walk from Myrtle-Wyckoff to a party near Herbert Von King. Somewhere above us is the moon, though the buildings and city lights hide it. For the most part, house parties take place at night. The absence of the sun shrinks the world down. Unable to see as well what’s in the distance, the night takes with it a concern for the past and future, leaving us only the immediate. The depreciation of vision shapes our conversation; leading us to change the subject rapidly as we approach new things that catch our attention. It becomes apparent how the night makes it easier to give our attention to the present moment.

As we approach the house party we run into some friends and all linger outside the building trying to figure out how to get in. Someone pulls out their new high tech vape and ends up sharing it with everyone. Unlike the bars that we passed along the way, the privacy of the house party replaces exchange relations with communal relations. Drugs and people circulate freely. Like dreams, house parties suspend normalcy, making room for other forms of engagement. Humor, playfulness, and innuendos circulate more than reason. The difference becomes contagious, producing jokes and laughter that annoy the neighbors trying to sleep. After a few minutes of standing outside a group leaving the party lets us in.

Inside, the decor and people come together to form a series of short lived assemblages that create an atmosphere of variation and rapid change. Connections break as quickly as they form. After taking a shot a friend asks if I want to check out the basement. On our way I see a friend that seems to be trapped in a dull conversation and pull them out. Static situations make the party’s dynamism palpable.

In the basement a DJ plays to an empty room so we decide to check out the backyard and come back later. Unlike a bar, multiple rooms create a sense of being on a carousel. Circulating in and out of different rooms creates a sense of movement that can distort one’s sense of time allowing the future and the past collapse into the present.

In the backyard people stand in circles, talking and drinking. Alcohol, like sleep, also distorts the passage of time. Staring at my drunk friend I notice he seems a bit more confident and expressive than usual. In a way he seems more himself. This idea of more appears throughout the party. The consumption of more is a means of approaching our limits. If one allows themselves to experience their limit a new experience of the self emerges. A more confident self, a more expressive self. The house party is an object that allows one to experience a version of themselves not accessible during the day.

But as limits are reached, a return to normalcy pulls us towards it. Saying goodbye to a few friends I order a car and stumble out to the street that’ll take me back home.

Standing in an aisle, I crouch down so that the shelves and people around me block the security cameras monitoring us. The 'see something, say something' messaging pushed by tough on crime campaigns is rendered ineffective in today’s attention economy. Looking at the iPad kid sitting in the shopping cart next to me and his dad comparing prices on Amazon, I feel shielded by their devices.

As I’m crouched down I become undetectable. A tear in the body of the store opens up, creating an opportunity for me to move the products on the shelf into the opening of my bag. This opening, like all openings, is short-lived and emerges when a system’s limits have been exceeded. A power failure, an obscured camera, or a distracted worker create openings that are necessary for stealing.

As my arm moves the products into my bag, it opens up the possibility of moving towards the exit without detection. Stealing is a series of openings and closings that make possible undetectable movement.

Exiting the store, the subject becomes a thief. This act of self-creation positions the thief in direct opposition to the sovereign, who is inherently incapable of committing a crime. Taken to their limits, both the thief and sovereign are outside the law, and both identities are established by the act of stealing.

As systems are becoming elastic, limits are becoming unreachable. As a result, openings necessary for the creation of a sovereign life are becoming scarce.

Thursday Night

I’m part of a group chat for art openings. I think it was originally called “Art Boiz”, then “Assigned Art Boy At Birth”, and now “Tentatively Making Art Plans”. While eating lunch and scrolling on my phone, someone sends a flier to the group chat for an opening on Thursday evening, and since I’m writing this piece, I decide to go. I’m not sure how Thursday became the de facto day for art openings, but for those who attend them regularly, the effect of having openings on Thursdays creates a sense of an extended weekend. While galleries are sprinkled throughout the city, there are a few neighborhoods where they cluster. As a result, gallery hopping on a Thursday night can become a thing even if one doesn’t plan on it. One can simply be pulled by the sight of another gallery opening across the street. Similar to the predictable formation of an open-air market that forms on the weekends, the art opening has a social characteristic that emerges from the spatial and temporal rhythms that dictate when and where these events should occur.

Public Gallery

As I approach the gallery, I’m not required to show membership or purchase a ticket; access is public. The public gallery creates a veneer of democratization of art compared to the private showings that occurred at the royal academies. The exclusion of certain painters from these prestigious institutions led to the establishment of public galleries. Yet, behind each gallery is an aristocratic structure: the free laboring intern, the underpaid gallerina, the commission-based sales rep, the authoritarian director, and the noble financier. Each gallery is its own fiefdom, a market where one can find artisans and merchants. Just like the aristocrats that threw parties to appease and impress the masses, the gallery’s public art opening with its free wine, wealthy patrons, and starving artists creates an environment conducive to an aristocratic embodiment.

White Cube

Stepping into the gallery, I find myself enveloped by a white cube. Like the spatial and temporal conformity, the interior of the gallery is an embodiment of homogenization. True to the aristocratic ethos, conformity to tradition and customs finds expression throughout the art opening. Perhaps the white cube was initiated with the intention of eliminating anything that could distract viewers from the art. Stripped of context, each artwork is forced to stand on its own. Though in reality, each work stands against the context of the gallery’s white walls. Viewed together, the two reveal an alliance between the gallery and artist. Seemingly obvious, this alliance reveals itself as the fundamental social relation in the art world. The alliance as a social relation is the embodiment of the aristocracy.

The Artist

With my attention on the alliance as a fundamental social relation, I begin to look around for the artist. When I spot her, I first notice the age discrepancy between her and those she’s talking to. They seem to be twenty years older than her. My friend tells me the man owns the gallery and represents another artist he knows. I wonder about the alliance and exchange of material and symbolic value between both parties. While the alliance can result in financial gain, I think about the symbolic aspect of the alliance. Certainly, the alliance must at the very least maintain one’s reputation and ideally improve it. Forming an alliance with a prestigious gallery raises one’s social capital. From the gallery’s perspective, perhaps one evaluates potential allies with an aristocratic sensibility, focusing on the artist's lineage and existing alliances by running through questions like: Do they have an MFA from Yale? Do they fall into a particular race or gender? Are their parents billionaires?

New Mediums

Since the Impressionists were kept out of the official Salon by the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, art history seems to be demarcated by militaristic victories. Though not always successful, the emergence of a new movement can appear as a rupture in the social order of the art world. The emergence of new movements like Impressionism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art appeared as declarations of war on the previous generation. Or perhaps movements are more analogous to gladiators in the coliseum, with spectators cheering for their favorite. As the spectacle comes to an end, alliances are reconfigured.

Art and Language

But behind every war is the writer. As I finish my wine, I notice Jerry Saltz talking to someone and wonder if he’s going to write about the opening. Like priests interpreting the word of God, the critic’s opinion is taken by many as some sign of authority. An endorsement by a famous critic can give credibility to a new movement. Cited by sales reps, how the artist’s work was featured in Art Forum last month in order to inflate the value of the work. We see that not only must the people in the art world form alliances, but the alliance between art and criticism has led to the ascension of both fields.

Leaving

As we’re leaving, I begin to think of the art as royalty, something to be looked at but never touched. Something that has its picture taken while it gets paraded around behind plexiglass. Something that is recorded in history books, unlike ordinary people, until someone like Gavrilo Princip lets his intrusive thoughts win. Staring at the nonsensical exhibition text, I decide to give the critics something to write about.

While hiking in Japan, I came across a shrine dedicated to Okuchi-no-Makami, a deity revered for protecting travelers. Using Google to translate a placard, I learned that the deification of the wolf known as Okuchi-no-Makami occurred after a prince named Yamato Takeru was saved while lost in the woods by a white wolf that guided him to safety. Looking around the shrine grounds, I noticed others praying and making offerings to Okuchi-no-Makami. Unfamiliar with the Shinto religion, I stood back and watched. As a spectator, I found myself feeling a bit disconnected from history, nature, and myself.

Boarding

Waiting at the gate to board my flight to Japan, I find myself scrolling on autopilot through Instagram. Unlike the people in Japan that I’ll get to know, the thought of offerings and prayers doesn’t cross my mind as I prepare to travel. With a short attention span, I look up from my phone. The couple in front of me looks like digital nomads, the kind of people who probably meditate and microdose mushrooms to become better versions of themselves. I wonder if traveling is more of a spiritual experience for them or if, like mindfulness and psychedelics, it has been disenchanted by our cultural amnesia. Over the loudspeaker, a worker announces it’s time to begin boarding.

A feeling of excitement dissipates when I realize its not my groups turn to board yet. How one gets assigned to a group isn’t quite clear. This lack of clarity permeates the entire experience of flying. Mediated by a series of interfaces, the inner workings of the flight remain obscure to the passengers. Standing at the back of a mile-long line, I feel like a car stuck in traffic. Seemingly banal, the line serves as a form of order and control, shaping the experience of flying. The slow movement of the line is disrupted by an authorization checkpoint, similar to the transportation of cargo, where each passenger must be accounted for. Transformed into cargo, the passengers on a plane are lent to countries for their economic potential. In 2022, global tourism generated $7.7 trillion. As I scan my boarding pass, I realize how many forms I had to fill out to get here. A chain of forms as far as the mind can recall: the form to buy the ticket, the form to create an account on JetBlue’s website, a form to apply for the credit card I used, a form to apply to the job that pays me, a form to apply to the college that I attended, ad infinitum. As I’m handed back my boarding pass, I feel the road to paradise is through a bureaucracy.

Seating

Struck by the diversity of people on my flight, I think of the plane as an affective force capable of bringing together a heterogeneous set of people. A set of individuals with different intentions and backgrounds are simultaneously transformed into passengers. The hundreds of alarm clocks that were set, the hundreds of cabs that were taken, were all affected by the flight. The few stragglers who barely make it on time reveal the contingency of the group. The chain of events that allow or prevent someone from making the flight draws my attention to the concept of control and how central it is to our way of life.

Looking around the plane, it doesn’t seem like many people, except those in first class, are incredibly comfortable. On the plane, there’s always a sense of class consciousness that arises. One can feel themselves becoming Robespierre, staring at the decadence in first class. One day, I checked to see how much it would cost to upgrade to first class. The unbelievable amount shocked me into opting for an aisle seat in economy. In my bag is a copy of Fernand Braudel’s book The Wheels of Commerce. Braudel explains how early open-air markets that have been around for thousands of years spread over time into all areas of society. I was shocked to read that in Moscow, during winter, people organized markets on a frozen river. I wonder how shocked they would be to learn that today, we find markets miles high, traveling through the stratosphere at hundreds of miles per hour.

The Pilot

The pilot begins speaking to us over the loudspeaker. His voice is deep, and he sounds confident as he tells us about the weather as if he had control over it. His disembodied voice, emanating from above, like God or something, creates a sense of traveling as a spiritual journey. But up in the cockpit is a highly developed piece of human technology. The pilot’s body has been transformed into an instrument for a specific purpose. The plane, as an affective force, transformed the pilot into an instrument. We can imagine him as a little boy watching his mother staring googly-eyed at a captain. With an anxious attachment style, the future pilot thinks, “What does that captain have that I don’t have?” His desire for his mother’s undivided attention catapults him toward becoming a machine capable of controlling this 400,000-pound plane. Years later, after speaking to us over the loudspeaker, he dims the lights as if he were God. The purple lights that shine softly from above the overhead bins look beautiful. Staring at them like they’re a celestial lightshow, I think about our faceless father and the idea that in the beginning was the word, and the word was God.

As we get ready for takeoff, we can hear the engines running. I crack open the window cover and stare at the fan blades. I remember learning that jet engines are made of titanium and nickel alloys, which can withstand extreme temperatures, and that a single engine can produce enough thrust to lift 10-15 large semi-trucks off the ground. Mined, transported, and refined, the plane is seen as an achievement of human ingenuity; the power of science and engineering. Yet the plane was derived from nature, a force more powerful and fundamental than science. As it begins to rain, I don’t find myself praying for a safe flight; I assume our faceless God and the invisible system undergirding this experience have deemed the weather conditions probabilistically suitable. A vague faith in statistics assuages any anxiety. Secular data replaces religious narratives, leaving me in a world without meaning.

Take off

As we take off, the engines begin burning fuel. The fossil fuels reveal the symbiotic relationship that we have with an event that took place 65 million years ago. The plane’s entanglement with time makes it a strange object. An event that happened millions of years ago makes traveling at an inhuman speed possible. The plane, as an object, is one of many that constitute our inhuman world. Far from being angels, passengers take on an embryonic form. The gestation of a post-humanist subject will culminate with their birth into a new world.

Watching a movie

Stuck in my tiny, inhuman seat, surrounded by a hundred embryos on drugs and alcohol, I select a movie to watch. I start watching Napoleon starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. When Napoleon heard his wife was cheating on him while he was in Egypt, it took him 1.5 months to return home. Today, that would be a five-hour flight. As I fall into the movie, I forget about the bureaucratic system undergirding the flight. I forget about the quasi-religious experience for the backpackers sitting by me. And I forget about the scientific limitations that are always present but only noticed when nature reveals itself untamable force. Covered up by distractions, interfaces, technology, and habits, the plane, like so many objects, is an opaque mystery that can be felt but evades understanding.

Turbulence

Suddenly, the plane begins to shake. The pilot turns on the fasten seatbelt sign. It gets worse. All of a sudden, I find myself thinking about the possibility of dying, about my family, my partner, and I realize how much I still want to live. The human as a conqueror of the world becomes much smaller at 30,000 feet. The turbulence reminds us of our fragility and the limits of our ability to control nature. While the plane can be opaque, it seems to also have the ability to make clear that which was hidden to us.

Descent

With only 30 minutes left until we land, the pilot announces we will begin our descent. The hundreds of embryos begin moving and kicking as they get ready to be born into a new world. As immigration forms are passed out, the bureaucracy that lingers underneath the surface rears its head. I talk to my neighbor for the first time when he asks to borrow my pen. The plane, as an affective force, gets every embryo to bring their seats up, close their tables, and fill out forms. As we touch down, I feel a sense of existential anxiety dissipate. It seems to exist only above ground, and I can be certain it will be there next time I fly. Without it, I begin to forget about the existential condition and fall back into a state of normalcy.

Landing

Waiting to exit the plane, we sit staring at our phones. After hours of being on airplane mode, there is a moment of reconnecting with the people in our lives back home. The plane is like a retreat in a way—a brief moment away from the network that follows us around more or less permanently. While the plane used to be able to separate us from our life back home, the cell phone has reduced the plane’s transformative power. Perhaps the phone’s presence deflates the experience of the plane as a bridge to another world.

As we walk in a single file line towards the exit, we find our faceless God in human form. People in front of me are saying thank you as they exit, but all I can do is stare at the clipboard in his hands full of forms.

Separation of mind and body

In ancient Greece, the gymnasium was a space for the development of one’s body, mind, and soul. For Socrates, the development of one aspect and the neglect of the others would result in corporeal forms short of ideal. Speaking about the effects of only developing one’s body, Socrates said a person will become hard and brutal. And for the philosopher that neglects their body only to develop their intellect they will turn soft. In order to develop an ideal citizen, there would need to be a place dedicated to their development. For Socrates, this institution was the gymnasium. Today, far from what Socrates had in mind, gyms have become devoted to the development of a body divorced from the mind. Go down the street to a local gym, and you won’t find debates taking place; unless they happen to be about who had the equipment first. No longer a space for philosophers, the gym has become devoted to the development of bodies. While today’s gym might seem Cartesian because it lacks equipment for the development of one’s intellect, the inseparability of mind and body reveals a development of a mind, albeit one that belongs to a body that has become hard and brutal.

The branded subject

As I approach the gym, I notice the name which has become widely recognized. Large, capitalized, bold, white letters, printed on a plain black background, connotes a sense of seriousness that has become a key aspect of the gym’s brand. Branding, which has early connotations with cattle, reveals the quick identification of something with its aesthetic form. Today’s notion of being self-branded reveals the masochistic tendency to create, maintain, and grow one’s aesthetic form. As I enter the building, I notice everyone working out. Clanking metal and the dozens of spinning treadmill belts create a soundscape evocative of a factory. As I walk towards the locker room, passing by everyone, I wonder what their motivations are and the sacrifices they’ve had to make. Each one becoming a different version of themselves. Walking down the hall, I see a bright red branding iron spiraling towards me. Struck by it, my flesh melts and the image of the gym as a tool for self-branding is seared into my mind.

Spectacle

Changing in the locker room, I feel some eyes avoiding contact with my body while others encounter it. The gym as a private-public space can feel like a stage -- a choreography of bodies. But where did this choreography come from? In the 20th century, the gym reemerged and took two interesting directions. First, by the YMCA, which promoted the gym as a place for the growth of mind, body, and spirit. Secondly, by Jack LaLanne, who founded The Gold Gym in California, near Hollywood in the late 1950s. Tracing the choreography of bodies back to its origins near Hollywood, we find the organizing power of the spectacle too close to be a mere coincidence. As I leave the locker room, I notice everyone wearing AirPods. The music in the gym conceals the silence that's present. Not speaking, not listening, just looking, the gym takes on the feeling of a Hollywood movie set.

Through repetition difference is produced

Out in the main room, as I'm exercising, I find myself engaged in a series of repetitions. Between sets, I imagine two men in ancient Greece wrestling while others throw javelins in the background. While each javelin thrown is a form of repetition, the exercises today are comically repetitive. Although it might feel like one isn’t making progress in the gym, there comes a point where one starts to feel a bit stronger or lighter. And eventually, one starts to see that difference. The gym, through its focus on external changes, reveals the temporal nature of Being. To those outside, the gym can appear to aggrandize a static form of being, but for those inside, the gym is more about the dynamic process of becoming.

The gym is a singularity

As a place for the transformation of the self, the gym can be conceived, in Deleuzian terms, as a singularity. The intensity of the gym's singularity, as Socrates alluded to, can transform one’s entire existence. The gym can alter one's daily schedule, diet, sleep, health, friends, routine, attention, and desires. But the image of the gym is associated with a certain type of body that lends itself to an ontology of being. The gym as a singularity shifts our attention from the body to one’s life. It extends itself beyond the physical location.

Everything is a gym

As I leave the gym, I notice it following me. I see it in my food, my schedule, and my decisions. Looking around, I notice it following other people too. The facade of each gym takes on a slightly different appearance. I watch as someone at the bus stop does ten reps of Instagram on their phone. Each rep slowly transforming their life. The world reveals itself as a multitude of objects that connect with the body and, through becoming entangled, transform it. The gym, as a transformative life machine, can be extended to all objects we encounter.

In the morning, the sun shines through my window, covering my plants with a constant stream of light waves. Photosynthesis animates them. Meanwhile, I lay inanimate under my covers, staring at my phone. I’m waiting for TikTok to load. When it does, Michelle, an acquaintance from years ago when I lived in Oakland, is staring back at me. TikTok is asking if I want to follow her. Intrigued to see what she’s up to, I click on her profile. I find out she’s moved to LA and has started a podcast. I click on one of her videos, which is meticulously edited, as if she followed a framework for how to make viral videos. Scrolling farther back than one should, I click on her first post. The clip has over a million views. It’s a dance video with her friend. It ends with her sticking her tongue out to the side, winking, and flashing a peace sign at the camera. According to one user on the internet the tongue out winky face “...is pretty much just a trend on straight tiktok, which is often considered the worst side of tiktok to be on. You won’t see anything like that on frog tiktok, or beans tiktok”. I laugh uncontrollably, not so much because of the dance but because of how different it is from the content on her Instagram. The extreme curation presents a stark contrast to the ironic photodumps I remember. While every social media platform has its own aesthetic, I can’t help but think that a series of events preceded her full-blown transformation.

Later that evening, I meet up with a friend to get drinks. Telling her about how I can’t stop thinking about Michelle’s transformation, I find myself unironically sticking my tongue out to the side. My friend's eyes widen. “What was that?” she asks. Unsure of what just happened, I pause before laughing out of embarrassment. “I don't know, I didn’t do it intentionally, it just happened,” I said. My friend tells me it’s only a matter of time until I’m asking to borrow her ring light. “That is if they don’t ban it,” she says, referring to TikTok. A few weeks ago, everyone was talking about how the US government wanted to ban TikTok. I remember listening to the story on NPR. A Republican senator told the reporter it was a national security issue because TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. The implication being that information is a powerful force. With over a billion users across the globe, TikTok presents a substantial challenge to the traditional authority of the nation-state.

In "A Thousand Plateaus," Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of the War Machine. Originally a weapon employed by nomads, the War Machine is co-opted by the state and used as a tool to capture those living outside its territory. Similarly, TikTok and its algorithms of capture are wielded to absorb subjects outside of its control. However, unlike traditional mechanisms that are confined to physical territories, TikTok operates in a virtual reality, thereby undermining the conventional limitations of the physical world that have determined the modus operandi of nation-states. Free from the limitations of physical space, TikTok is able to reterritorialize users by channeling the flow of information through fiber optic light cables. Like the plants on my windowsill, users of TikTok are animated by the flow of light signals, thereby giving new meaning to the idea of photosynthesis. Thinking about this, I imagine Michelle and myself as two domesticated house plants stretching our bodies towards the sun.

After the bar, we take the subway in the same direction. I drunkenly ask my friend if she wants to scroll through my TikTok. She rolls her eyes jokingly and says, "of course." Sharing my AirPods, I tell her she can scroll. The first video is a guy doing stand-up comedy. I zone out while she watches, thinking about TikTok as a comedy. Perhaps social media was first a tragedy, and now it's a comedy. Considering TikTok as a comedic apparatus of capture, owned by a foreign state, weaponizing the mimetic power of information to channel Gen Z into eating raw meat, finding God, and dancing for strangers, it sounds more like an episode of South Park than the dystopian representations we find in books and movies like "1984" and "Blade Runner." I think about the monopoly seriousness has over political and social discourse, and I’m reminded of a Nietzsche quote that Bataille cites in the foreword of "Inner Experience": “To see tragic natures sink and to be able to laugh at them, despite the profound understanding, emotion, and sympathy that one feels, that is divine.” For Bataille, it is seriousness that fails us.

Tuning back in, my friend exclaims, “What the fuck is this?” referring to a video of a raw meat influencer promoting a bone broth. As I try to explain, she finds the concept hilarious. Gasping for air while she writhes, she attempts to confirm she understood me correctly. Clicking on his profile, she laughs uncontrollably when she sees he has 2.3 million followers. His bio mentions something about community, and I realize that TikTok creates a sense of community for millions of people. According to their website, “72% of the TikTok community feels it's easy to connect and bond around shared life experiences on the platform. This sense of community fosters digital kinship among users, enabling them to connect over specific topics, interests, and experiences.” Perhaps at the heart of TikTok’s apparatus of capture is a sense of community—a hilarious idea given the traditional notion of what a community is. One of the first accounts of what we know as phantom limb syndrome was described in the sixteenth century by a French military surgeon named Ambroise Paré, who documented the pain that soldiers with amputated limbs reported feeling. Centuries later, the soldiers of TikTok wield camera phones instead of rifles. With no physical counterpart, the community that one senses while using TikTok appears to be like a phantom limb. More real than real, the community on TikTok is hyperreal.

Approaching my friend's station, I look around and see almost everyone staring at their phones. While this sight would normally strike me as dystopian, I find myself struck by the absurdity instead. What would usually evoke a feeling of resignation is replaced by a bout of laughter. As my friend exits the subway, she turns to me, sticks her tongue out to the side, winks, and flashes a peace sign.

Invented in the 1970s, the graphical user interface (GUI) lowered the barrier of entry for personal computers. The requirement to have a technical understanding of how to operate the computer was more or less eliminated by introducing this layer of abstraction. While at the time it might not have seemed like a door to a new world had been opened, 50 years later, the interface has been seen as crucial to capturing and retaining users so much so that an entire field has been created for the design of effective user interfaces. Unlike the personal computers of those early years, today, interfaces not only allow users to interact with their personal device but also a network of machines distributed throughout the globe. The interface no longer is limited to returning information but can now alter the flow of matter in the physical world.

As I pull out my phone to order an Uber, I type in my destination and hit "Request." The interface, as a layer, covers up everything beneath the surface. The legal, financial, and technical disappear behind a digital curtain.

As I wait, I realize that Uber itself is an interface—a layer between me and the machine that is the car. The need for any technical understanding of the car disappears. Freed from the need to operate the machine, I now have time to respond to emails, read the news, or scroll through social media. What a relief for those who have to spend every day commuting to have the option to relax. But an interface is not something that can be turned off; it is imposed on users. It interferes. The bright blue glow on someone’s face as they stare at an interface reminds me of the idea from Deleuze and Guattari that the face is the expression of subjectivity. To me, there is something beautiful about a blue face illuminated in a dark room that captures the current moment.

My phone vibrates. I can sense it’s a notification from Uber reminding me my driver is almost here. I couldn’t explain to you how I know, but that’s the thing about bodies; they’re inseparable from cognition. I rely on the notifications to tell me when it’s time to leave. This idea makes me realize that my mind really is extended in the way that David Chalmers & Andy Clark say it is. Putting together the idea that cognition is embodied and the mind is extended, I begin to think of the Uber as my extended body. Since cars aren’t new, the personal car can be seen as an extension of one’s body. In my living room, I have some art depicting men on horses hunting animals. Staring at it, the idea of an extended body seems less like science fiction and more real. While horses were replaced by personal cars, Uber might be the next mutation in the genealogy of the extended body. Unlike the personal car, Uber extends our body into a network. In a sense, the body becomes disorganized. Every Uber is a new body. Uber is the networkification of bodies.

As I walk outside, I see the car with its hazard lights on. Thinking of the Uber as an extended body, I realize that in this time I don’t own my body. Ownership is being replaced by rent. The ephemeral connotation that I have with rent makes me confident that I won’t have memories of these cars. Memories will be offloaded into my extended mind in the form of Uber receipts.

As I open the door to the 2024 Black Toyota Camry, I wonder how different the world looks today compared to the person who opened the door to the first Uber in 2009. Uber, like the graphical user interface, is a door that we opened and entered. Inside the metaphorical door is a specific world that unfolds with every ride. I search the internet for how many Uber rides there are a day. Google tells me that number is 23.4 million. With each ride, that world expands.

Once in the car, I put my seatbelt on out of habit. Habit comes from the Latin word "Habitare," which means “to live.” Over 7 billion people a year live with Uber as an extended and ephemeral body.

The driver and I are talking about Uber. In a sense, we’re gossiping about the person not in the room. Even if people were raised hearing that they shouldn’t gossip, everyone seems to do it. The same seems to go for using Uber. The long list of reasons why one shouldn’t use Uber makes me feel a sense of guilt every time I use it. I’m thinking of the show Shark Tank and how founders will explain their businesses by saying “it’s Uber for X.” As the world becomes more like Uber, will guilt become more common? Perhaps the interface conceals everything that might spawn a sense of guilt.

As we arrive at my destination, I say goodbye to the driver who is already accepting his next rider. As I exit, I watch as my networked body turns the corner on its way to become someone else’s. My phone receives a notification. I know it’s asking me to rate my ride. As I open it to give him 5 stars, I think about the theoretical 35 billion stars that will be created in the Uberverse this year.

Rhythms, cycles, revolutions, repetitions, are hard to conceptualize in concrete terms. Much easier to conceive is a loop. A short digital recording played continuously. But repetitions are harder to conceive perhaps because in each instance a degree of difference is present. No two Christmases are the same. No two beach days are the same. But rhythms and repetitions are the same in abstract terms because they are constituted by an abstract set of identical relations. Christmas is the same every year in the sense that the relations of dates are the same, it is every December 25th. But attempting to make the abstract notion of repetition more concrete, how does a repetition feel? Perhaps it feels familiar. Perhaps it feels like an opportunity. A familiar opportunity perhaps. But opportunities only seem to come once and when they’re gone they’re gone. So what is a familiar opportunity? The little knowledge I have of the death drive is a concept that is the failure to overcome repression, a failure to break past one’s limitations. An unconscious desire to relive a moment in order to overcome it. If any opportunity is new then there is no history to contend with. But a familiar opportunity contains within it a sense of history & as a result a sense of the future – a sense of incompetence to seize the opportunity. Or perhaps a feeling to live up to the great beach day of last year.

Every year as the earth rotates around the sun, summer returns. Stuck in traffic, the wheels not rotating, the familiar opportunity as a texture can be felt but hard to name. In the back of the car is a cooler of beer. The cooler like my bathing suit repels nature. But perhaps the bathing suit’s ability to repel water is a bringing closer of our natural state – nudity. Perhaps the cooler of cold consumable beer will bring me back to a pre-linguistic state. Perhaps the beach day is a returning to the primordial ocean of mother earth. On the beach as I open a beer to turn off my mind, I find others preferring a sober day of reading. I don’t know if I’ve ever read more than a page at the beach. But every time I attempt to I fail, a familiar opportunity with a familiar outcome. Looking out across the beach, the crowd of families, and familiar friend groups create a crowd aesthetic. The aesthetic of the crowd is both familiar and new, which I guess is a matter of focus. As a plane flies by advertising Jesus Loves You, I wonder what we look like to them. The impossibility of adjusting their focus to see the new in the familiar turns the crowd into a mass. Appropriate given the nature of advertisers to reduce individuals into data points. This ugly aesthetic brings my attention back. My friends are talking about how they hope so and so finds us since they don’t have any service. Everyone’s phone emitting GPS coordinates can paint a picture of the beach day. The text messages reveal the disappointments of being left on read, or the trepidation of asking a new acquaintances if they’d like to go to the beach. They reveal the presence of what I’m calling the friend economy. Inside of the friend economy plans are capital, they are created, sold, consumed. If successful the actors of the friend economy reinvest into new productions. The photos being taken and uploaded in sum measure the GDP gross domestic plans. The photos being viewed by anyone bored in the city might inspire them to do nothing not at home but at the beach. The general activity of doing nothing at the beach seems to challenge the idea of what boredom is. Perhaps it isn’t so much a lack of activity but a feeling. A feeling of being dislocated. We often think of the cure to boredom as doing something but perhaps it is really going somewhere even if it is to do nothing. And perhaps this is what the beach day is all about – about being where one should be, about a sense of belonging in the world, with nature, and with friends.

Embodiment involves two ideas. The first is the idea that perception is indeterminate. This idea contrasts with what is called the constancy hypothesis, which states our perception of the world is essentially a one-to-one mapping. What we see is what there is. In reality, the mind constitutes what we perceive. Early phenomenologists may have supported this idea by arguing our intention in any given situation determines our perception. For example, a boulder becomes an obstacle when our intention is to get past it. More contemporary examples show how, when presented with a novel image of what can be described as a series of blobs, the mind perceives it as such, but after being shown an image with additional data that makes the blobs meaningful, subsequent viewing of the blobs leads to the mind constructing one’s perception in such a way as to reveal the content of the second image.

As a result, anthropologists are interested in the moment that this preobjective indeterminacy transcends into an objective experience. In order to answer how we transcend from the preobjective to the objective, we turn to Pierre Bourdieu to understand the second aspect of embodiment. Given that there are just too many variables at play in any given moment, perception can’t be predetermined by society either; therefore, there must be some generative principle at play. For Bourdieu, persistent social conditioning plus our generative capacity for meaning-making constitutes what he calls habitus. For embodiment, this mechanism allows us to turn our sensations into meaningful objects and reasonable actions. Bourdieu also extends the concept of perception that is important to our discussion by illustrating that we have a sense of things, like a sense of justice, a sense of style, etc. These feelings in their preobjective state must be transcended by habitus.

Taking these two ideas together, the body is seen as the existential ground of subjectivity; only through our senses & habitus can the preobjective world transcend into an objective reality where our actions become meaningful and a sense of subjectivity can be developed.

"Poor Things" gets at a famous philosophical problem: Are we our mind or our body? Over the past forty years, many anthropologists have taken up a particular view that rejects the very question itself. Influenced largely by two thinkers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher, and Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist, anthropologists have rallied behind the idea that the body, and not the mind, is the existential ground for subjectivity. Put differently, without the body, we do not exist. To illustrate the concept of embodiment, we can look at the characters in the new film "Poor Things," but first, an explanation of what embodiment is is in order.

An Explanation of Embodiment

Embodiment involves two ideas. The first is the idea that perception is indeterminate. This idea contrasts with what is called the constancy hypothesis, which states our perception of the world is essentially a one-to-one mapping. What we see is what there is. In reality, the mind constitutes what we perceive. Early phenomenologists may have supported this idea by arguing our intention in any given situation determines our perception. For example, a boulder becomes an obstacle when our intention is to get past it. More contemporary examples show how, when presented with a novel image of what can be described as a series of blobs, the mind perceives it as such, but after being shown an image with additional data that makes the blobs meaningful, subsequent viewing of the blobs leads to the mind constructing one’s perception in such a way as to reveal the content of the second image.

As a result, anthropologists are interested in the moment that this preobjective indeterminacy transcends into an objective experience. In order to answer how we transcend from the preobjective to the objective, we turn to Pierre Bourdieu to understand the second aspect of embodiment. Given that there are just too many variables at play in any given moment, perception can’t be predetermined by society either; therefore, there must be some generative principle at play. For Bourdieu, persistent social conditioning plus our generative capacity for meaning-making constitutes what he calls habitus. For embodiment, this mechanism allows us to turn our sensations into meaningful objects and reasonable actions. Bourdieu also extends the concept of perception that is important to our discussion by illustrating that we have a sense of things, like a sense of justice, a sense of style, etc. These feelings in their preobjective state must be transcended by habitus.

Taking these two ideas together, the body is seen as the existential ground of subjectivity; only through our senses & habitus can the preobjective world transcend into an objective reality where our actions become meaningful and a sense of subjectivity can be developed. In order to illustrate these ideas, I’ll now turn to the characters in the 2023 film "Poor Things."

Godwin Baxter

Godwin, AKA God, is a highly esteemed surgeon, scientist, and lecturer whose body has been subjected to the domination of the scientific mind. His father, a great scientist, treated him more like a research subject than a son. With a disfigured body, we get the impression that God hasn’t had the most social life, such as when two students cringe as they comment on his appearance, or when at the park, he rushes to leave at the sight of people. His cold, calculating demeanor towards everyone else is contrasted with his warm affection for Bella, who we see him cuddling with at the beginning of the film. As Bella’s desire to see the world grows, God does his best to stop it. At an important turning point, she tells God that she’s going to Lisbon and that if he stops her, she will hate him. Immediately upon hearing her ultimatum, God agrees to let her go. Realizing that she might not come back, he and his assistant, Max, begin a new experiment. As time passes, God finds he has a tumor that has spread throughout his body, making death imminent. He tells Max to find Bella so that he could see her before he dies. By this point in the film, it starts to become clear that Bella isn’t just an experiment to God. Raised without social relationships and indoctrinated into a scientific worldview, God lacked emotional connection. At one point, he says to Max, “We are men of science; this emotionality is unseemly.” The lack of emotional sensation robbed God of the opportunity to become more than what he was. Only near the end of his life, through his relationship with Bella, was God able to become more than a scientific curmudgeon. In his last scene with Bella, we see how God’s body was the existential ground for his transformation from creator into father.

Bella Baxter

“She’s a creature of free will,” says God. Eventually, her own creation, Bella, begins her life as the creation of God. After finding the body of a woman who had committed suicide floating in the river, God retrieved the body and noticed the woman was pregnant. Seizing the opportunity, God transplanted the fetus' mind into the body of the woman. Born again, Bella lacked the social conditioning that would take years to form. Locked away in God's house, Bella was isolated from polite society and, therefore, its social conditioning. As a result, the transcendence from the preobjective to objective is made possible by a habitus that is primarily her own creation. But it is through the sensations she feels that she is able to know herself. Her insatiable curiosity to know the world is simultaneously a desire to know herself. Persuaded to leave her private world, Bella ventures first to Lisbon with Duncan Wedderburn. Once in Lisbon, Bella has a whirlwind of sensuous experiences, finding her own limits and the irrational restrictions of polite society. Taken from Lisbon to Greece, Bella finds herself stuck on a cruise for several days, during which she begins to develop an appetite for knowledge. In one scene, we see in Bella an affinity with Diogenes. When asked by the powerful Duncan Wedderburn what she wants, since he can give her anything, she says, “I want you to get out of my sun,” a reference to the story where Diogenes said the same thing to Alexander the Great. It was during this period that Bella became a thinker, and her pursuit of who she truly was becomes clear. As Bella develops, each new sensuous experience informs her view of the world and adds to her self-awareness. The power of embodiment can be understood by imagining an alternative life for Bella. Had Bella stayed in God's house for the rest of her life, would she have become the same person that she developed into after her adventures? Taken further, would Bella be the same person if she stayed in God's house but read about the world through a book or a screen? From the perspective of embodiment, the answer is no – the body is the existential ground for subjectivity.

Duncan Wedderburn

Hired to create an unusual marital contract, Duncan Wedderburn is part attorney part playboy. Fantasizing about the woman, Bella Baxter, of said contract, he sneaks into her room where he falls in lust. The two flee to Lisbon where they eat oysters, drink champagne, and have a lot of furious jumping. Duncan’s self identifies as a womanizer bored with and unlike the members of polite society that he happens to be a part of. Throughout his time with Bella, Duncan’s identity is revealed to be more of a facade. Shortly after having sex in their hotel room, Bella lets Duncan know shes ready to go again. Visibly stunned by the suggestion, Duncan claims to be physically incapable which seems dubious given a previous remark about limiting the consumption of pasteis de nata. As Duncan falls asleep Bella ventures out into the world. When she returns in the evening Duncan feigns indifference though we are shown him waiting impatiently for her to return. Frustrated by her lack of conformity with polite society Duncan lets it slide. At dinner Bella spits out her food, says shell punch a baby, and talks about sex with the guests at dinner. Duncan pulls her aside and attempts to correct her behavior, only to later be frustrated at his inability to tame her. The blasé playboy eventually loses it when Bella informs him she slept with someone, throwing him into a state of rage and self-inflicted pain. Although Duncan sees himself as a libertine, his habitus prevents him from perceiving the world the way Bella does. Although he might feel a desire to be free, his restraint reveals to us his lack of freedom. Unable to escape the cultural constraints of his habitus, Duncan is driven to insanity, transforming into a madman.

Martha and Harry

On her first night of the cruise, Bella approaches two philosophers, Martha and Harry. Petting Martha’s hair, Bella talks to the two of them about her views on the world. In one scene, Bella says to them, "It is the goal of all to improve, advance, progress, grow. I know this in me, and I am sure I am indicative of all.” Harry, a cynic, informs Bella her views are wrong and that the world is a cruel place. Unconvinced by Harry’s cynicism, Bella takes Martha’s suggestion to develop herself by reading philosophy. On one of their last nights together, Harry shows Bella a view of the world unlike the one on the cruise ship. From a balcony, Bella witnesses a group of people living in squalor and conditions unlike those she is familiar with. With a desire to know the world and herself more, it wasn’t philosophy but Harry’s attempt to shatter Bella’s view of the world by moving her eyes from the pages of philosophy books to the concrete world that enabled her to transform her sense of self. No longer guided only by a pursuit of pleasure, Bella dedicates her life to making the world a happier place for all.

Madame Swiney

As the head of a brothel, Madame Swiney employs Bella. One day after work as Bella lies in bed, dejected, Swiney tells her that the pain she's feeling isn’t permanent and that, in order to see its value, Bella has to keep going. This moment reveals the indeterminacy of perception. The feeling is not predetermined but is constituted by the mind’s generative capacity. The passing of time reconstitutes our perception of something into another object.

Toinette

Arguably Bella’s first friend, Toinette and Bella meet each other while working in Paris at Madame Swiney’s brothel. Without a desire to control Bella or a predisposition to judge her, the two develop a friendship that knows no boundaries. After what we might assume is Bella’s first experience with a woman, Toinette, looking at Bella’s C-section scar, asks Bella about her child. After Bella claims to have never had one, Toinette asks, "Why lie?" On her perpetual quest to discover who she is, the key to Bella’s genesis lies in the scar on her body. Eventually returning to London to visit God before he dies, Bella learns about her suicide, her baby, and how she came to be. In the most literal way possible, Bella’s scar shows the body as the existential ground of subjectivity.

General Alfie Blessington

At the altar, moments before marrying Max McCandles, a voice interrupts the wedding, asking if he is too late. The man is General Alfie Blessington, Bella’s previous husband. Asked to come with him and presented with another opportunity to know herself more than she thought was possible, Bella leaves the church to return to her life with Alfie. But once back at their estate, Alfie learns of Bella’s work as a prostitute and informs her that until she returns to her old self, she will be more or less his prisoner. The next day, while standing outside of a room, Bella overhears a doctor telling Alfie that the solution to Bella’s promiscuity can be solved by female circumcision. With a solution found, Alfie informs the doctor he will drug Bella and bring her to him in the afternoon. As Alfie attempts to incapacitate Bella, his plan backfires, culminating in poetic justice. A man of war, Alfie’s habitus viewed everything as a territory to be conquered. Instrumentalizing the irrationality of science, Alfie’s attempt to isolate Bella from the world and mutilate her was an effort to diminish her sensuous capacity and destroy her sense of subjectivity.

Conclusion

Embodiment not only challenges many widely held notions, but it also flips many of them on their head. Perception is not a one-to-one mapping of object and representation; it is a creative process that is constituted by our place in the world and the habitus, whose generative capacity frees us from a predetermined social construct, thereby accounting for the diversity of subjectivity. Such a view challenges popular notions that the seat of subjectivity is consciousness by collapsing the mind-body dichotomy and recognizes that the body, in its entirety, is the existential ground of subjectivity. As a result, the child of a mad scientist, whose body is experimented on, becomes a man of science isolated in his lab. A member of polite society becomes an indulgent consumer, constrained by self-imposed limits. A military general becomes someone who views other people as something to be conquered. And a woman, whose mind has been freed of social conditioning and isolated from polite society for most of her life, develops a sense of freedom that cannot be dulled.

Betty is a starry-eyed young actress from Ontario who comes to Hollywood to make it big. She stays in her aunt's apartment, who happens to be an actress. Alone in the apartment, Betty is startled when she finds Rita, a stranger, naked in the shower. While Betty initially believes Rita is a friend of her aunt's, she later learns that Rita was in some sort of accident that has given her amnesia, resulting in her inability to remember who she is. The only clues they have are Rita's purse full of cash and a mysterious blue box without a key. Betty's big heart leads to the two of them becoming friends as they spend their time attempting to figure out who Rita is. While their story constitutes the primary narrative, the film is complicated by several other threads that include Adam, a director with a big ego, a shadowy faceless corporation that will stop at nothing to get their way, and a few other minor characters.

The film is notorious for its ambiguity, but what seems to be widely accepted is the film’s commentary on Hollywood. Usually described as a neo-noir film with surrealist qualities, I’m beginning to think of it as a horror movie. Unlike most horror movies where the characters are being mutilated by a masked psychopath, Mulholland Drive's monster is the city itself.

In his paper, "The Temporality of the Landscape," anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the landscape "is constituted as an enduring record of — and testimony to — the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves" (152). Viewed from a horror movie perspective, this description could be interpreted to mean that the landscape is haunted.

Unlike a haunted house that is possessed by an immaterial figure, Ingold holds on to the material. This is where he begins to introduce his perspective. For Ingold, debates over what a landscape is have been divided into views that it is either material or cultural. However, for Ingold, this binary is artificial. The truth, according to Ingold, is an interconnection between the material and the cultural. In Mulholland Drive, the Hollywood hills are pregnant with the past and reproduce cultural symbols in the form of houses of the rich and famous. The aerial shots of LA’s opaque skyscrapers reveal faceless corporations that use communication networks like a nervous system to organize the weak and willing participants of the city. The palm trees sprout from the city’s skin, and movie theaters capture the attention of attendees, blurring the lines between what is real and what is fake.

By dissolving the boundary between the human and the world, Ingold seems to be announcing the death of the human.

"I reject the division between inner and outer worlds - respectively of mind and matter, meaning and substance - upon which such distinction rests. The landscape, I hold, is not a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the mind's eye; nor, however, is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order. 'The idea of landscape', as Meinig writes, 'runs counter to recognition of any simple binary relationship between man and nature' (Meinig 1979b: 2). Thus, neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it on the side of humanity against nature. As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us, but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it.” (154)

In Mulholland Drive, after her accident, Rita has no memory of who she is; all she has is a mysterious locked box and a purse full of cash. Throughout the film, we see moments where Betty and Rita are, in a way, living the same life. At one point, Rita adopts a blonde wig, and later Betty plays the successful actress in the back of a limo. While we don’t know Rita’s past, if the two are on the same trajectory, it seems reasonable to assume that Rita once was as innocent as Betty. Through her time in the city, her old self was killed off in exchange for nothing more than a purse full of money. Slowly, the city incorporates itself into the human, revealing that it is in us and we in it. While the city’s incorporation is welcomed by some, Adam, the hotheaded director, shows us how the landscape’s dominance can lead to resistance. Adam’s story portrays the individual's fight for sovereignty in a place that wants to reduce the human to a docile body.

By animating the landscape, Ingold makes something that was once static dynamic. To account for its dynamism, Ingold introduces a set of ideas that are crucial to thinking about a living landscape. Important to the dynamism of the landscape is attention, resonance, movement, rhythm, and the generative nature of forms. When Rita is sitting at Winkie’s, the name Diane Selwyn grabs her attention. Unsure what the name means, she and Betty are moved by its resonance to the point of following it by moving their bodies throughout the city. Betty’s aunt was an actress, Rita was too, and at one point in the film, Betty hears a director described as being past his time. In this sense, the city has a rhythm to it. And lastly, towards the end of the movie when things start to get more confusing, we see how a person’s form is generated by the sum of their relations with the city.

While I don’t think we’re likely to hear people describing Mulholland Drive as a horror movie anytime soon, I think the possibility affirms Ingold’s argument that it is our attention, the stories we tell, the rhythms we encounter, and the resonances we feel that can generate new forms of life.

Julia Scher: American Landscape

Ortuzar Projects, 5 White Street

Opening reception: Thursday, March 7, 5-7pm

Ortuzar Projects is pleased to present 'American Landscape, the gallery's second exhibition with Cologne-based artist Julia Scher. The exhibition features works made over the past four decades centered around the gallery-scaled installation, 'Security By Julia XLV, alongside new marble sculptures and previously un-exhibited paintings from the 1980s.

Chad Murray • Landscapes

Opening Thursday, March 7, 6-8pm

105 Henry St

Sadie Laska's (@sadiealaskaa) 'Homesick'

Opening reception is March 7, 6 - 8

60 Lispenard, NYC.

With oil paintings, fabric works and monoprints, Laska creates a spectacle that is political but not polemical, posing questions and provoking reflection as she takes on the ambiguities of contemporary life. While opposing the normalization of war, environmental destruction and social dysfunction, Laska stands up for people living in conscientious connection with one another, able to fulfill authentic desires. Through image and text, Laska endeavors to wrest the power of language away from double-talking politicians and pushers of rapacious consumerism, delivering its innate power back to people.

Stan VanDerBeek: Transmissions

March 7 from 6-8pm

159 Canal St

Transmissions, a solo exhibition of the artist's collages, drawings, and films. The exhibition expands across three floors to include a curated selection of works made between 1950 and 1970 that demonstrate how VanDerBeek's experiments with transmission, animation, and recomposed fragments of ephemeral media ramify throughout his rich archive.

COSMIC ALCHEMY

175 Rivington St

Where Thought and Matter Merge, an exhibition in various media that reflects upon the age-old quest of humanity to change matter and substances by turning them into precious elements- and to materialize the immaterial. As time passed on Earth, and with developing scientific knowledge, the alchemist's quest of transmutation became a chemist's endeavor; and it was not far from there - and not long from then- that physicists discovered particle collision that set the stage for astrophysicists to discover stellar or large particle cluster/galaxy collisions that can create the heaviest elements in the periodic table, from precious metals through to the heaviest radioactive elements.

There's something interesting about software companies that should be concerning.

Unlike a deli or a plumbing company, software companies under capitalism can not be what we call mom-and-pop shops for very long.

The reason seems to be that the internet collapses time & space & time and space protect small independent companies.

Time and space act as a way to limit competition. For example, if a plumber is only willing to travel 30 minutes in every direction for work then their competition is limited to plumbers within two hours of them. But if time and space collapsed so that all plumbers were within 30 minutes from every broken toilet then the market would be dominated by a few plumbers assuming they could clone themselves (like software) and serve everyone.

To be clear this isn't a problem with software, it's not even a problem with markets, it's a problem caused by private property. For example, open source software projects can exist even if they don't have much support -- I think Wolfram was being developed for 30 years. It's not a problem with markets because software that doesn't sell can sit alongside the most popular competition. The problem is private property that forces software companies to maintain a profit in order to exist. This is what forces them to expand & acquire as many customers as possible. This is what makes it impossible for software companies to stay small for very long.

With that being said I think Yanis Varoufakis is probably right when he says capitalism has ended.

it is my estimation and this is a controversial hypothesis that capitalism has already ended ... suppose this was 1776 and we were in London and we're having a discussion about the state of the world now everywhere we looked in 1776 we would see feudalism we would see feudalism in the House of Lords in the House of Commons in government in every local council around the world um on the land we would see peasants we would see you know aristocrats and yet we do know that don't we already feudalism had died and was being gradually but fast being replaced by something called capitalism the magnificent shift of power from the owners of land to the owners of machinery of uh steamships of electrical grids later on and the shift of wealth creation from rent accumulation to profit-making my view is that we are already experiencing a similar transformation wherever we look we we see capital we see markets we see capitalists doing extremely well and yet I think that already we have undergone a transformation to something like feudalism but a very technologically advanced version of it markets have been replaced by platforms so amazon.com is not a market it looks like a market but it's more like a digital fiefdom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osVib1ddXwM&ab_channel=euronews

a four week long series looking at highly cited contemporary works from the field of anthropology.

A few topics covered include epistemology, the city, embodiment, affect, violence, time, & sound.

There will probably be an online series in addition to the in person discussions.

The morphogenic history of capital is characterized by a smoothing out of the social body’s rough edges; a territory whose jagged contours and uneven surfaces acted as sources of friction, impeding the effortless flow of capital.

The rough terrain of the social body allowed one to feel the slow passage of time between moments of production. Between the time one wrote a letter to secure capital for a new venture and the moment one received a response, days or weeks could have passed. The smooth surface of today’s social body has accelerated the flow of capital to such an extent that the downtime that once separated moments of production has disappeared, taking with it all that depends on the slow passage of time. The feelings and fantasies that once developed between events, along with their significance, have grown scarce in an age of instantaneity.

Distance-Demolishing Technologies

To smooth out a territory one must identify points of friction that impede the potentiation of a body (species). If we assume the configuration of space is an expression of power relations then we could expect to see the logic of capital necessitating the transformation of space from a rough terrain to a smooth and homogenous grid. In his research on the formation of states, James C. Scott states the resource needs of mature capitalism required distance-demolishing technologies: all-weather roads, bridges, railroads, airplanes, modern weapons, telegraph, telephone, and now modern information technologies.[1] These distance-demolishing technologies replaced the “mountain peaks, jumbled together, without any plains or marshes to space them out”[2] with a highly coordinated system meant to transform space and time into manageable units.

Taylorism

The management of space extended beyond the natural world. At the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. In the introduction, we see a handoff from the state to the private sector.

President Roosevelt, in his address to the Governors at the White House, prophetically remarked that “The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary to the larger question of national efficiency."

The whole country at once recognized the importance of conserving our material resources and a large movement has been started which will be effective in accomplishing this object. As yet, however, we have but vaguely appreciated the importance of "the larger question of increasing our national efficiency."

We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of "national efficiency," are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated.[3]

For Taylor, the inefficient use of resources was, at its core, an issue with the management of bodies.

For Taylor, there were four principles that, if applied, would transform the workspace into a smoothly functioning machine.

1. The development of a true science

2. The scientific selection of the workers

3. His scientific education and development

4. Intimate friendly cooperation between the management and the men[4]

For Taylor, management of the workplace lacked "uniformity." Smoothing out the bumps and edges would allow for "The elimination of avoidable wastes, the general improvement of the processes and methods of production, and the just and scientific distribution of the product."[5]

While the scientific management of bodies preceded Taylorism, his fourth principle—cooperation between managers and workers—foreshadowed the future of the subject.

Neoliberalism

The efficiency of the workplace relied on the smooth integration of the worker into the production process. The unmotivated, lazy, and unreliable workers were impediments to the smooth flow of capital. While bodies could be managed by systems of control, cultivating the attitudes favorable to a productive worker required the opposite approach. In order to integrate the worker smoothly into the social body, a sense of freedom would need to form the basis of the future relationship between capital and labor.

The rhetoric of neoliberalism espoused the freedom of individuals from all constraints, thereby laying the responsibility for their life circumstances on their own choices.

Individuals were encouraged to follow their hearts and pursue their passions—to create a happy and meaningful life. Implicit in the rhetoric of neoliberalism's promise of prosperity is the looming threat of ruin for those who do not or cannot adapt to its demands—the failure to create a happy and meaningful life is seen as the product of one's own shortcomings. Championed by movie-star politicians, affirmed by business leaders, and fictionalized by Hollywood, the diffusion of neoliberal rhetoric throughout the social body has led to an internalization of power relations. No longer does the worker need to be managed; today, the worker is their own boss. This collapse of the old binary results in a transformation of the working class into a class of entrepreneurs.

Ferrisism

Since the death of Frederick Taylor, many thinkers have continued to evangelize the power of scientific management. Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster, has written about how to efficiently create the life you want in his books like The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. While Taylor espoused the power of measurement and optimization in the workplace, Ferriss applies the same philosophy to the self. In his article Productivity Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me), Ferriss provides an "8-step process for maximizing efficacy."

1. Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. E-mail is the mind killer.

2. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper.

3. Write down the 3-5 things — and no more — that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually = most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.

4. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”, “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?”

5. Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.

6. Block out at least 2-3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.

7. Block out at least 2-3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work.

8. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.[6]

While some might see Ferriss’ approach to life as excessive, his popularity indicates a transition from Taylorism to Ferrissism. Instead of a goal-oriented manager organizing the bodies of workers, subjects today manage their own time in the most productive way possible. Through the use of techniques, scientific research, and technology, the self is treated as a project that is optimized for the greatest return on investment. Smoothing out the points of friction in one's life leads to seamless integration with the social body and results in an acceleration of capital.

While the smoothing out of nature, the workplace, and the self all contribute to the acceleration of capital, it seems reasonable to assume that throughout the morphogenic history of capital, each level of the social body experiences a molecular existence. These three historical moments are, perhaps, best understood as representing lines of flight that have opened the social body to reconfiguration.

Desert

As the circulation of capital accelerated, the transformation of the subject into a project turned every moment into a potential moment of production. Consequently, the time between two contiguous moments of production shrank to the point where free time all but disappeared. With the vanishing of non-productive time, we have lost everything that relies on its existence. In Byung-Chul Han's work, we can find numerous examples of experiences that have largely disappeared due to the acceleration of capital and the lack of intermediate time between moments of production.

Contemplation

Three changes have contributed to a restructuring of our attention and cognition. First, the constant optimization of distance-demolishing technologies has accelerated the transmission of information. Second, the transition from being a subject to becoming a project has fueled our compulsion to produce. These two changes, combined with the asynchronous nature of modern collaborative work, create conditions that normalize multitasking, leading to scattered attention. The time that once separated moments of production and made contemplation possible has diminished. For Han, the shift from contemplation to multitasking represents a regression from the good life to mere existence.

“We owe the cultural achievements of humanity – which include philosophy – to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a ‘dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.’ If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”[7]

The structural changes wrought by distance-demolishing technologies have altered the attention and cognitive tendencies of many individuals. On a massive scale, this shift affects culture, revealing how collective cognition is in fact a social structure. While uninterrupted production can lead to individual burnout, at a societal level, it can also precipitate cultural stagnation.

Eroticism

As production speeds up, consumption follows at an equally rapid pace. Today, streaming services and same-day delivery have become benchmarks for consumer expectations. Following suit, online dating has sought to expedite the creation of romantic experiences. Dating apps essentially serve as digital marketplaces where people market themselves. For Han, this brand of exhibitionism results in the erosion of eroticism.

“Capitalism heightens the pornographication of society by exhibiting everything as a commodity and handing it over to hypervisibility. It seeks the maximization of exhibition value. Capitalism knows no other user for sexuality.”[8]

“Direct putting-on-display of nudity is not erotic. The erotic place of a body is located ‘where the garment gapes,’ where skin ‘flashes between two edges’ — for example, between a glove and a sleeve. Erotic tension does not arise from the permanent exhibition of nudity, but from ‘staging … appearance-as-disappearance.”[9]

“This semantic fuzziness is erotic. Moreover, the erotic presumes the negativity of the secret and hiddenness. There is no erotics of transparency. Precisely where the secret vanishes in favor of total exhibition and bareness, pornography begins. It is characterized by penetrating, intrusive positivity.”[10]

With an appetite for immediacy, we have normalized transparency. In the marketplace of desire, there is no space for secrets — capitalism unveils all, taking the erotic with it.

Freedom

As the world speeds up, activity becomes hyperactivity. The compulsion to say 'yes' instead of 'no' to the next thing reflects our slide into hyperpassivity. Nietzsche, who is cited by Han, considers saying 'no' a sovereign action. It is something that must be cultivated. Only by learning to say no can we block out the stimuli that seek to distract us from what deserves our time. This inability to resist hyperactivity, Nietzsche asserts, is a deficiency.

“Nietzsche writes: ‘Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity … in this regard they are lazy … The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.’ Different kinds of action and activity exist. Activity that follows an unthinking, mechanical course is poor in interruption. Machines cannot pause. Despite its enormous capacity for calculation, the computer is stupid insofar as it lacks the ability to delay.”[11]

In these three examples, we see the disappearance of three experiences. Regarding multi-tasking, exhibitionism, and passivity, none is inherently concerning. In a society where contemplation is prevalent, an individual multi-tasking isn’t an issue. Only when structural changes make contemplation scarce does multi-tasking become a social issue. The disappearance of a contemplative, erotic, and free society results in a social desert. Occupying this desert are two figures. The first is the burnout, physically and existentially exhausted. The second is the achievement subject, optimized, self-controlled, and hyperactive. Uniting both figures is the internalization of power relations. Alone in the desert, they wander with faint memories of all that was slow, looking for others and a way out.

Notes

1. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 11.
2. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 1.
3. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1998), 1.
4. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 56.
5. Robert Franklin Hoxie, Scientific Management And Labor (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1920), 8.
6. Tim Ferris, "Productivity Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me)," November 3, 2013, https://tim.blog/2013/11/03/productivity-hacks/, accessed November 1, 2023.
7. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 13.
8. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 24.
9. Han, The Transparency Society, 25.

This interview is taken from Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.

Q. You’re in your fifties. You’re a reader of Le Gai Pied, which has been in existence now for two years. Is the kind of discourse you find there something positive for you?

M.F. That the magazine exists is the positive and important thing. In answer to your question, I could say that I don’t have to read it to voice the question of my age. What I could ask of your magazine is that I do not, in reading it, have to pose the question of my age. Now, reading it ...

Q. Perhaps the problem is the age group of those who contribute to it and read it; the majority are between twenty-five and thirty-five.

M.F. Of course. The more it is written by young people the more it concerns young people. But the problem is not to make room for one age group alongside another but to find out what can be done in relation to the quasi identification between homosexuality and the love among young people.

Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?” Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are. The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.

Q. Did you think so at twenty, or have you discovered it over the years?

M.F. As far back as I remember, to want guys [garçons] was to want relations with guys. That has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be “naked” among men, outside of institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people.

Q. Can you say that desire and pleasure, and the relationships one can have, are dependent on one’s age?

M.F. Yes, very profoundly. Between a man and a younger woman, the marriage institution makes it easier: she accepts it and makes it work. But two men of noticeably different ages—what code would allow them to communicate? They face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other. They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.

One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a reassuring canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. I think that’s what makes homosexuality “disturbing”: the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up. Look at the army, where love between men is ceaselessly provoked [appelé] and shamed. Institutional codes can’t validate these relations with multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing forms. These relations short-circuit it and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit.

Q. You were saying a little while ago: “Rather than crying about faded pleasures, I’m interested in what we ourselves can do.” Could you explain that more precisely?

M.F. Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But ascesis is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains. Can that be our problem today? We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable.

Q. That means that a young homosexual must be very cautious in regard to homosexual imagery; he must work at something else?

M.F. What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure [plaisirs]. We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities.

Q. Can one see the first fruits of strong constructive relationships in the United States, in any case in the cities where the problem of sexual misery seems under control?

M.F. To me, it appears certain that in the United States, even if the basis of sexual misery still exists, the interest in friendship has become very important; one doesn’t enter a relationship simply in order to be able to consummate it sexually, which happens very easily. But toward friendship, people are very polarized. How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life?

This notion of mode of life seems important to me. Will it require the introduction of a diversification different from the ones due to social class, differences in profession and culture, a diversification that would also be a form of relationship and would be a “way of life”? A way of life can be shared among individuals of different age, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life.

Q. Isn’t it a myth to say: Here we are enjoying the first fruits of a socialization between different classes, ages, and countries?

M.F. Yes, like the great myth of saying: There will no longer be any difference between homo- and heterosexuality. Moreover, I think that it’s one of the reasons that homosexuality presents a problem today. Many sexual liberation movements project this idea of “liberating yourself from the hideous constraints that weigh upon you.” Yet the affirmation that to be a homosexual is for a man to love another man—this search for a way of life runs counter to the ideology of the sexual liberation movements of the sixties. It’s in this sense that the mustached “clones” are significant. It’s a way of responding: “Have nothing to fear; the more one is liberated, the less one will love women, the less one will founder in this polysexuality where there are no longer any differences between the two.” It’s not at all the idea of a great community fusion.

Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.

Q. Women might object: What do men together have to win compared to the relations between a man and a woman or between two women?

M.F. There is a book that just appeared in the U.S. on the friendships between women. The affection and passion between women is well documented. In the preface, the author states that she began with the idea of unearthing homosexual relationships—but perceived that not only were these relationships not always present but that it was uninteresting whether relationships could be called “homosexual” or not. And by letting the relationship manifest itself as it appeared in words and gestures, other very essential things also appeared: dense, bright, marvelous loves and affections or very dark and sad loves. The book shows the extent to which woman’s body has played a great role, and the importance of physical contact between women: women do each other’s hair, help each other with make up, dress each other. Women have had access to the bodies of other women: they put their arms around each other, kiss each other. Man’s body has been forbidden to other men in a much more drastic way. If it’s true that life between women was tolerated, it’s only in certain periods and since the nineteenth century that life between men not only was tolerated but rigorously necessary: very simply, during war.

And equally in prison camps. You had soldiers and young officers who spent months and even years together. During World War I, men lived together completely, one on top of another, and for them it was nothing at all, insofar as death was present and finally the devotion to one another and the services rendered were sanctioned by the play of life and death. And apart from several remarks on camaraderie, the brotherhood of spirit, and some very partial observations, what do we know about these emotional uproars and storms of feeling that took place in those times? One can wonder how, in these absurd and grotesque wars and infernal massacres, the men managed to hold on in spite of everything. Through some emotional fabric, no doubt. I don’t mean that it was because they were each other’s lovers that they continued to fight; but honor, courage, not losing face, sacrifice, leaving the trench with the captain—all that implied a very intense emotional tie. It’s not to say: “Ah, there you have homosexuality!” I detest that kind of reasoning. But no doubt you have there one of the conditions, not the only one, that has permitted this infernal life where for weeks guys floundered in the mud and shit, among corpses, starving for food, and were drunk the morning of the assault.

I would like to say, finally, that something well considered and voluntary like a magazine ought to make possible a homosexual culture, that is to say, the instruments for polymorphic, varied, and individually modulated relationships. But the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing. There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings, this need that Americans call “coming out,” that is, showing oneself. The program must be wide open. We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: What can be played?

"Isomorphic" is a term originally from mathematics and biology, meaning having the same form or structure. In the context of social theory, it refers to a concept where different social systems, organizations, or cultures evolve towards a similar form or structure, often due to similar pressures or constraints. This can be seen in organizations adopting similar practices or structures to conform to societal norms, legal requirements, or industry standards. The concept highlights how different entities can independently develop similar characteristics or behaviors in response to their environment.

Hyperreality is a term in semiotics and postmodern philosophy describing an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. It refers to a state where what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there's no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. This concept was popularized by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Hyperreality is seen in situations where the simulation of something becomes more real or preferable than the original, often involving technology like virtual reality or media culture.

probably gonna go to this & hopefully not get too drunk

Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-born German philosopher, introduces the concept of the "achievement subject" in his critique of contemporary society and culture. In his work, Han examines how modern societies have shifted from what he terms "disciplinary societies" (a concept borrowed from Michel Foucault) to what he calls "achievement societies."

In an "achievement society," individuals view themselves as entrepreneurial selves, responsible for their own fate and success. The "achievement subject" in this context is an individual who is constantly striving to be productive and successful, often driven by internal pressures rather than external constraints or commands.

Han argues that this shift has significant psychological and cultural implications. Unlike the disciplinary societies where power was exerted through external surveillance and control, in the achievement society, the power is internalized. The achievement subject is both the master and the slave; they are constantly pushing themselves to achieve more, leading to potential burnout and psychological distress.

This self-exploitation, as Han sees it, is more efficient than exploitation by others because it hides its own oppressive nature. People in an achievement society are driven by a compulsion to perform, to produce, and to succeed, often at the cost of their own well-being.

Byung-Chul Han's exploration of the "achievement subject" is a critical reflection on contemporary work culture, mental health, and societal values, offering a profound critique of the ways in which modern capitalist societies drive individuals towards constant self-optimization and productivity.

Biopolitics is a complex concept that has been developed and discussed by various theorists, most notably by Michel Foucault. It refers to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their citizens through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations."

Key aspects of biopolitics include:

Regulation of Bodies and Populations: Biopolitics focuses on the management of life itself, including how states influence and control individual bodies and entire populations. This includes practices like public health measures, reproductive controls, and genetic screening.

Power and Knowledge: Foucault argued that power in modern societies is exercised not just through laws and direct political control, but also through the creation and dissemination of knowledge about human bodies. This power-knowledge relationship is crucial in understanding how societies regulate and control individuals.

Surveillance and Control: Biopolitics often involves surveillance, where the state observes and monitors individuals to manage and control them. This can range from health surveillance to monitoring social behaviors.

Health and Medicine: Biopolitics is closely linked with the fields of health and medicine, where the state often has a vested interest in controlling disease, ensuring public health, and managing healthcare systems.

Bioethics and Biotechnology: In contemporary discussions, biopolitics also touches on bioethics, particularly with advancements in biotechnology. This includes debates over genetic modification, cloning, and other issues where life is directly manipulated.

Normalizing Societal Standards: It also involves the establishment of norms regarding health, fitness, and what constitutes a 'normal' body or lifestyle, which in turn can lead to the marginalization or stigmatization of those who don't fit these norms.

Biopolitics highlights the ways in which biological life is entangled with politics, particularly in the context of modern, bureaucratic states. It's an essential concept for understanding how modern power is exercised not just through force or ideology, but through the regulation of life itself.

A four week long series on Graham Harman’s book Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything starts January 16th. Group meets every Tuesday from 630-830. Reach out if you’re interested in joining.

Anomie is a concept developed by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, and it refers to a state of normlessness, or the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community. This term becomes particularly relevant in times of rapid social change or upheaval, when social norms are disrupted and can no longer provide a stable framework for individual behavior.

In a state of anomie, individuals may feel disconnected from the broader society. This disconnection can result from a variety of factors, such as rapid technological changes, economic upheaval, or significant shifts in social values and norms. When societal norms are weak, unclear, or conflicting, it can lead to feelings of aimlessness, despair, and isolation.

Durkheim particularly associated anomie with the lack of social regulation in modern societies, which often place high value on individualism and less on collective well-being. This can lead to an imbalance where the desires and aspirations of individuals are not adequately regulated by societal norms, potentially leading to deviant behavior.

Anomie is a critical concept in sociology because it highlights the importance of a stable and coherent social framework for the psychological well-being of individuals and for the smooth functioning of society as a whole.

While mentally drafting a caption for social media today, I included the phrase 'mother fucker.' My superego immediately raised concerns about the appropriateness of this phrase, which led me to a question I couldn't answer: Are we post-woke yet?