Goethe waging war on doom scrolling over two hundred years ago:
"Having always been convinced, and increasingly so of late years, that newspapers exist essentially in order to string the multitude along and warp its judgment... I have stopped reading them." (Annals, 1808)
Nikola Tesla's remark here (from a 1931 NYT interview celebrating his 75th birthday) aligns with Bergson and Deleuze in seeing reality as continuous change and denying stable individuality and resemblance, though it leans more toward mechanistic determinism than their creative visions of becoming.
"A world market extends to the ends of the earth before passing into the galaxy: even the skies become horizontal."
—Deleuze and Guattari
(What is Philosophy?, 1991/1994: 97)
Canetti (1943/1978): "I cannot become modest; too many things burn me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me. [...] I want to feel everything in me before I think it."
June 25... The day Blade Runner arrived and Foucault departed.
There's a revelatory moment in learning where you're so tuned into a thinker's mapping of the world that you start anticipating concepts and connections before you've read them.
"The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and 'discovers' a new world within the known world."
—D.H. Lawrence
('Chaos in Poetry,' 1928)
The successor to Nietzsche's typewriter . . .
"We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it.
Everything is vision, becoming.
We become universes.
Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero."
—Deleuze and Guattari
(What is Philosophy?, 1991/1994: 169-170)
"It may be said of man that he continually feels the need of what does not exist."
—Paul Valéry
('Politics of the Mind,' 1932/1962: 97)
"The greatest possible poet is—the nervous system.
Inventor of everything—or say, rather, the only poet."
—Paul Valéry
(Analects: Collected Works, Vol 14, 1970: 541)
"Schizo-analysis can be done anywhere, anytime, with anyone, without a contract, without transference."
—Deleuze
('Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Interview on Anti-Oedipus with Raymond Bellour', 1973/2020: 239; trans. Ames Hodges)
I suspect this was really a collab between Paul Virilio (philosophy), Quentin Tarantino (cinematography), David Lynch (sound design), and David Byrne (choreography) – disguised as a Belgian rock band:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ctO...
Soul and funk invite possession:
Have you got soul?
Who got da funk?
Jazz simply asks:
Can you keep the feel going?
You can't possess jazz; you inhabit it and propagate its flows.
Might have to steal this line . . .
Earlier today… #Trump makes the case to Carney and the Press for #Canada becoming the 51st state—unconventionally blending economics, urban planning, geometrical determinism, and a dash of real estate aesthetics:
McLuhan '58:
"[I]n the 1840's when the telegraph was in a very early phase, Edgar Allan Poe [...] invented ... the symbolist poem and the detective story]. [...] It has taken us 100 years from then to realize that the meaning of the electronic revolution is a 'Do-it-yourself movement.'"
A brief chat between a musician (Stephen Morris), scientist (Brian Cox), and designer (Peter Saville), that touches on physics, representation, aesthetics, music, becoming, etc.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj8_...
As you will know, there's been that long-running theory that the US president is rather like a puppet who actually has little real influence and simply performs the role that deeper systems of power require of him. For me at least, Trump has—regrettably, in this case—put that theory to rest.
In a strange twist of kinship, McLuhan's transatlantic sparring partner, Raymond Williams, once wrote: "Where poets run, scholars follow." If they'd managed to get past their differences, I suspect they'd have found they had much in common. For starters, they both followed poets around.
"[T]he web of this primeval tapestry [Aeschylus's The Oresteia] makes me marvel. Past, present, and future are so felicitously interwoven that in beholding it you become a seer yourself… And that, when all is said and done, is the ultimate triumph of poetry…"
—J.W. von Goethe (1816)
"The last fifty years brought a different vibration through inventions of telephones, radios, television. What has happened to artificial things has happened to the body. The movements are essentially the same, but the timing is different."
—Martha Graham (1937)
Montaigne, 1588:
('On Vanity', Selected Essays, 1943: 261; trans. D.M. Frame)
Lacan (1967): "M. Deleuze ... writes on masochism undoubtedly the best text that has ever been written! [...] [T]his text really anticipates everything that I am, now, going to have effectively to say about it... [All] the analytic texts [must be] remade in this new perspective."
Heisenberg:
"If harmony in a society depends on the common interpretation of the 'one', of the unity behind the multitude of phenomena, the language of the poets may be more important than that of the scientists."
(The Athens Meeting 1964; published in 1966: 42)
Who is the author?
Stengers:
"He [Galileo] must invent the means of conquering the skepticism that is always a priori the 'normal response'; he must invent the means of having his fiction recognized as not just one fiction among others." (1997: 156)
McLuhan (c. 1952): "[The Mechanical Bride] is really a new form of science fiction, with ads and comics cast as characters. Since my object is to show the community in action rather than prove anything, it can indeed be regarded as a new kind of novel.'"
The founder effect: McLuhan sensed the medium, Media Studies read the message.
"To this day I cannot read King Lear, having had the advantage of studying it accurately at school." ('The Education of an Englishman,' 1926: 197)
"The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence." ('Universities and their Function,' 1929: 93)