distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the... See more
In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility... See more
Both writers force us to consider how particular technologies not only exacerbate and deepen forms of social alienation and control, but graft onto already-existing social arrangements. Further, both foreground the ways that speculative futures draw upon racialized and casted anxieties in delimiting who is human or robotic, worthy of being healed... See more
This is, I think, why being a creative or an entrepreneurial person is one of the steepest paths to self-actualization. To succeed at what you are doing, you HAVE to manage yourself wisely (and thus face and break patterns that no longer serve you) to make the path work. Your ability to thrive is dependent on your ability to make what is... See more
Dialogues of the dead differ from symposia of the living not only because people of different eras and cultures converse, but also because, as shades living posthumously, they no longer consider the life circumstances in which they speak. What they say can no longer benefit or harm them.
I have been thinking about growth and decay, the interplay between the two, the way all growth requires regeneration, which in turn requires a shedding, a composting, a reconstituting of old material. We don’t always know what needs to be shed, or what the optimal direction of growth is. This is where the “blind optimism” of a tree is helpful —... See more
We relate to each other through the digital interface, and yet there can be discomfort and anxiety around how technology intersects with dance. This happens particularly when technology is read as a replacement for embodied knowledge, for muscle memory, for the body becoming an archive of practice. If you could record what you have learned, does... See more