We do not allege secret coordination. We observe public convergence. Each instrument was enacted openly. Their combined effect—mass detention capacity plus terrorism designation of political opposition plus criminal prosecution of association—has no precedent in American law outside wartime.
Joel McCleary, in Thomas Edsall, “‘When You Think of It, We Shouldn’t Even Have an Election’”
I want to be a good employee, I want to make good choices. But how can I tell if I’m following the program correctly? Some actions can have consequences that won’t become apparent until a time so far off I can’t begin to grasp it. Am I supposed to carry on with my job knowing that what I’m doing potentially works against the program? Or am I so pervaded by the program that I’m bound to act in accordance with it, no matter what? Am I the program’s hand? Still, update errors do occur, we all know it. It can’t be in the program’s interests. If I carry out an action that unbeknown to me is counteractive to the program’s momentum, I can do nothing but hate myself for it. But since I have no way of knowing whether an action in any given instance is antiprogrammatic, how am I to know if I’m to hate myself or not? Should I hate myself anyway? Where can I get an overview of what actions run contrary to the will of the program? Who do I go to for forgiveness? Is there an application procedure? I’d like to request some material concerning which actions require forgiveness. Does a thought count? A sufficiently negative thought? For instance, I might start thinking you’re not infallible, that you might be prone to error, but then I feel angry with myself and tell me it must be me there’s something wrong with. Why do I have all these thoughts if the job I’m doing is mainly technical? Why do I have these thoughts if the reason I’m here is primarily to increase production? From what perspective are these thoughts productive?
Olga Ravn, The Employees
I take an interest in attitudes of kindness towards that which we find unbearable, particularly regarding ourselves. That the unbearable can become a gift, a material, a something that does not need to be discarded or turned away from, seems significant to me. We need an illogical substance in this turning/task, something I might call “recalcitrant gentleness.” In daring to apply this sort of orientation to our own histories and those of others, we have need of revised forms of realism and representation. We must make writing more prismatic and multisensory, combinatory and irreducible, porous and deep, vibratory and timely, young and old, all at once. The hope is to train an inner ear that isn’t an ear, per se. This is an “ear” that hears paradox.
Lucy Ives, Three Six Five: Prompts, Acts, Divinations
The only problem was that the apartment was totally empty. It had nothing: no bed, no mattress, no chair, not even a plate or a fork. Nothing. None of the objects that populate our homes or hotel rooms. I had imagined going to live in a spacecraft and found myself in the emptiness of space itself. I hadn’t enough money to start furnishing it, nor to stay in a hotel, and knew no one in the city, so I lived for a week in a Platonic ideal of space instead of an actual home.
It was my most important experience of recent years. During those days I realized that space in its geometrical purity is physically uninhabitable. I had a home in which the most basic act of living was impossible.
Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy of the Home
Working out whether a question is actually worth highlighting is a lengthy, deliberate, and subjective process, often informed by historical experience on what good mathematics was generated (or not generated) while working on earlier problems of this type. In particular, being aware of the “difficulty landscape” in a field—what questions are very easy to answer with known methods, which ones can be solved but only with some effort, and which ones are impossible—is of crucial importance in making such determinations.
[…]
[I]t is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource.
Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.
Russ Foster, “A.I. Isn’t People”
Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch
water from wells in buckets, then pour it out
for those animals that, long domesticated, would
likely perish before figuring out how to get
for themselves. That dog, for example, whose
refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child,
for loyalty—when all along it was just blind… What
is it about vulnerability that can make the hand
draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem
the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force,
destructive? Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost
all of it, all the tenderness, away, someone screams
to someone else, in public—and looking elsewhere,
we walk quickly past, as if even to have heard
that much might have put us at risk of whatever fate
questions like that
spring from. Estrangement—
like sacrifice—begins as a word at first, soon it’s
the stuff of drama, cue the follow-up tears that
attend drama, then it’s pretty much the difference
between waking up to a storm and waking up
inside one. Who can say how she got there—
in the ocean, I mean—but I once watched a horse
make her way back to land mid-hurricane: having
ridden, surfer-like, the very waves that at any moment
could have overwhelmed her in their crash to shore, she
shook herself, looked back once on the water’s restlessness—
history’s always restless—and the horse stepped free.
Carl Phillips, “Monomoy”
It was amazing how little of the world we could see at any one time.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity
[W]hat I discovered, and have since found to be the case in a great many instances, is that it doesn’t matter what you focus on, where you zoom in, and that regardless of how small and restricted an area may be, it will always open up into something bigger.
Ibid.
I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. […] I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaced them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”
Ben Lerner, Transcription
“[Nineteen thirty-four]. In my memory [Hitler’s] voice rises without end. It’s strange that our brains will allow this—to hear a scale as eternally ascending, an impossible staircase. This is a wondrous but terrible fact of our wiring, how clockwise movement across the pitch class creates this impression. Pitch circularity, it is called. Or a Shepard tone. In psychoacoustics, which is a beautiful field, a quantum field. You must read my friend Diana Deutsch, as I’ve told you before. C-sharp is heard as higher than C; D as higher than C-sharp; D-sharp as higher than D; and so on endlessly. I think if I were interviewing me, what the businessmen call the ‘exit interview’—” —I would begin by asking about the airwaves of my youth, the ether. That I was a child when there were these angels and devils that spoke at a distance. It was not so new, of course, the radio, but it was all I knew, it was never And none of this was so for my parents, when they were born. I am making this distinction.” “It was always on at home?” “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law. It was on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet.
Ben Lerner, Transcription
Unfortunately, detached objectivity2 is often rapidly expanded to value-free objectivity2 […]. In value-free objectivity2, all values (or all subjective or “biasing” influences) are banned from the reasoning process. This meaning of objectivity derives support from the idea that values are inherently subjective things, and thus their role in a process contaminates it, making it unobjective. In an effort to prevent this, philosophers and scientists have argued that we need to exclude values from science, particularly ethical and societal values. Note how much broader this prohibition is from prohibiting values from supplanting evidence. Values can play many roles in the reasoning process aside from displacing evidence, from focusing interests and questions to determining which errors are more tolerable. However, we remain under the grip of a post-positivist hangover that all (non-epistemic) values in the (internal stages of the) scientific reasoning process are bad. We fear that any role for values (which some positivists defined as inherently meaningless) in epistemic processes will “distort” knowledge. We train scientists to believe that values are not allowed in science and they must ward off any appearance of personal values or personal judgments playing a role in their doing of science. Thus, scientific papers have a very formulaic structure in which the role of the scientist as active decision-maker in the scientific process is deftly hidden.
Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity”