Sixian

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that caring involves an “ethico-political commitment” to the neglected and oppressed and a concern with the affective dimensions of our material world. We care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value.

This approach intends to produce what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges,” or “views from somewhere.” The “somewhere” is important because, Haraway writes, no single view is complete: you can only begin to know a subject by reading many views from many somewheres. No writer works in a vacuum, and no writer is without motives; by the same... See more

There will be dust. There is always dust. By that I mean there is always time, and materiality, and decay. Decomposition and damage are inescapable. There is always the body, with its smears and secretions and messy flaking bits off. There is always waste and it always has to be dealt with, and shipping it out of sight overseas to the developing... See more

To paraphrase René Girard: we set out in search of the one thing we think we truly want, which we believe must be hidden under the one rock that is too heavy for us to lift. If we get something that we wanted, we believe we must have wanted the wrong thing. We go in search of a new model.

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.