StumbleUpon | b-bear's URL reviews

http://www.usyd.edu.au/museums/pdfs_docs/Sigmund_Freuds_Collection_Catalogue.pdf

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:19:03 -0700

Sigmund Freud collected a wall of phalluses. I want one.

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=psar.035.0151.fig005.jpg

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:18:53 -0700

Ouch! Straight through the heart. Our projections onto animals - be they the ones that divide friends and enemies - become us.

Font - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:36 -0700

The new black - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:27 -0700

The new black is X is the new Y.

W e b l o g -- Charles Bernstein

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:07:19 -0700

Graphic Witness: visual arts & social commentary [Frans Masereel]

Mon, 25 May 2009 06:01:08 -0700

The Idea [Die Idee], first published 1920, has been republished by The Redstone Press, 1986 and reprinted 1991. The small, 1991 boxed edition contains two (out of a total of eight) original novels by Masereel, all of them "told in woodcuts." These two are titled The Idea and Story Without Words. The cover of the box cites Thomas Mann's response to them "'...so compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas that one never tires of looking at them.'"

"An Idea springs from the mind of the Thinker and goes out into the world. She is naked, female, radiant, a pocket Venus embodying all ideals, and she finds herself in the mean streets of a twentieth century city -- among politicians and fat cats, torturers and striptease audiences, who take the Idea and use it for their own ends, or reject and try to destroy it..." [from a review in The Independent]

The first image in the book: the "Thinker" is blocked, as though his thoughts were caught in a web.

In the second image, the Idea strikes, with the force of lightning. [Next] we first meet the Idea as she springs from his now web-cleared brain.

The Thinker demonstrates his love for the Idea, and sad to let her go, sends her out into the world (in an envelope). But this beautiful Idea is not well received. People try to change the Idea, (rather than let the Idea change them); they attempt to clothe her, to tone down her alluring charms. Inspired by the Idea, one person is arrested and ultimately shot by a firing squad, but of course the Idea cannot die so easily.

After unsuccessfully offering herself to people in the countryside, the small town and the big city, the Idea attracts the attention of a scientist, who tries to confine her -- however, Ideas must be free. She flees and finds refuge at a book publisher. The books and materials that contain the Idea are burned, but as ever, the Idea is not destroyed.

{ftp sent to me by the clever and generous filippi. Unless we are caught in the University system, we are arguably no longer faced with these difficulties that beset the Idea in Die Idee. That is, unless one wants to freshen up the story and think of the internet as a place that catches your ideas in the web. But puns are a bad Idea!}

Sigmund Freud: Conflict &Culture (Library of Congress Exhibition)

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:37:58 -0700

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.

Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents
1930

Street life | adaptivereuse.net

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:21:23 -0700

Homelessness is a global problem that has no easy solution. The social basis for this problem is found in the ownership and territorialisation of space, a process which would be better understood as the disastrous failure to provide inhabitable space for life in general.

Because homelessness has many different causes and is faced with many exacerbating responses, it may never have a complete solution. But a particularly appalling example of the 'inventive small-minded malevolence' that takes a problem like homelessness and makes it worse is what I would call the anti-sit movement. Exposed in great detail by Mike Davis in his study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, the anti-sit movement attacks the homeless, vagrants and lingerers by using malicious anti-sit devices. Anyone who is not a paying customer is for the wealthy residents and businesses the target of medieval-style torture. Some examples of anti-sit devices are below, found here. It seems that in many cities today the wealthy classes, rather than acting to end homelessness, would prefer designing uninhabitable spaces, little altars to the cruelty of the dollar.

foreignergrls reviews - StumbleUpon

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:06:13 -0700

Baruch Spinoza, as he appears to Foreignergirl, a stumbler who seems to embody the best of many worlds. Her understanding makes me weep tears of joy.

http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol6/number3/pdf/jwsr-v6n3-prigogine.pdf

Sun, 24 May 2009 09:52:00 -0700

For the Russian-born Belgium scientist and theorist Ilya Prigogine, the rise of the internet and networked societies in the past few decades has destroyed 'the classical deterministic view of nature'. The freedom and self-organization that occurs in online communities has supposedly crippled the capacity of any single group to predict and control the movement of humans and nature. Yet to hold true to scientific values, Prigogine must mean only that the capacity to classically determine such a movement has been destroyed: the old means of understanding nature must change in the face of a revolutionary situation. In knowledge, theory and practice, the old borders of nations in sovereignty, cultures, communities, space and knowledge are breaking down in a global swarm.

Theorists such as Prigogine favor analogies to explain the Internet, and they draw them from the lives of insects:

In small colonies the complexity is localized at the individual, while in large ones complexity is more on the level on the interactions between the individuals. It is certainly not coincidental that in the largest and most integrated colonies--that is, in the army ants and termites--the individuals are practically blind. The networked ant societies are capable of extraordinary performances. In recent years, super colonies of ants, which contain hundreds of millions of individuals, have been discovered. These large colonies develop a network of communication between individual nests on tenths of kilometers--millions of times the size of a single ant.

When scrutinized, this is hardly the optimistic vision of the Internet we might expect. The destruction of classical determinations enables 'extraordinary performances', although beyond gathering and amassing we cannot say for what end. We are come to the future: 'the blindness of individuals' in the army of ants, termites and bytes. Where a super colony may connect many different nests, it would seem that it is only in small, nestling colonies that complexity belongs with individuals. Surely our own StumbleUpon is one of these super colonies. SU confirms the blindness of individuals, the generic complexity of the whole group and the individual complexity of small groups.

Yet Prigogine and many theorists of networked societies fail to point out that small groups continue to find ways, in a networked society, to interfere, control and determine the nature of the larger group. Such small groups have certainly long given up the classical deterministic view of nature: they've replaced it with a Machiavellian view; for them control does not need to be proved by a theory. If 'the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent', to quote the poet, so too can the embedded mediation of the online communities - i.e. the systemic agents, engineers and controllers who work behind the scenes or the marketers and observers who make money out of the mere quantity of extraordinary performances. Just take a look at what's happening with Twitter.

Regardless of my problems with some of Prigogine's assumptions, I think that his three general questions are some of the central ones: