Ştefan Tiron > Ştefan's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 100

« previous 1 2 3 4 next »

#1

“What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?”
― Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

tags: agency, animate, automaton, history, lively, mechanical, mechanistic, water-theatre

0 likes

#2

“And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt.
It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead.”
― Chris Beckett, Dark Eden

tags: affect, cargo-cult, critique-of-pure-feeling, diaspora-aesthetics, fable, feeling, gravitational-waves, lost-tribes, reverberates, star-lost, time-drift

1 likes

#3

“You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.”
― Alfred Bester

tags: cargo-cult, darwinian, survivalist-sects, the-stars-my-destination

1 likes

#4

“Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.”
― Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

tags: biology, biomedical, biotechnological-object, cell-tissues, georges-canghuilhem, history, hybrid-thinking, kurt-goldstein, laboratory-anthropology, life-sciences, science, science-and-technology-studies, sts

0 likes

#5

“Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

tags: business, capitalism, corporations, corporatism, downsizing, flexploitation, jobseeking, motivational

0 likes

#6

“As every good marxist already knows, the ideological shift toward a terminally optimistic humanism was vital to the rise of bourgeoisie, and the decline of aristocracy.”
― Terre Thaemlitz, Nuisance - Writings on identity jamming & digital audio production

tags: americanization, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, critical-thinking, happiness-science, humanism, infantilization, new-optimists, nuisance, pessimism, positive-thinking

1 likes

#7

“Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

tags: aesthetics, beauty, darwinism, evolution, feedback-loop, mate-choice, natural-selection, ronald-a-fisher, sexual-selection

24 likes

#8

“MARSILIO
Data cannot grasp the depth of such images, which do not pass away or cease bleeding into things.”
― Nicola Masciandaro

tags: forsaken, mirroring, oculus, sacrifice

3 likes

#9

“FRANK
... so, many things happen in the 70s to transform the horror genre. Present end premodern fears mix, birthing scary movies which are more seedy, grim, but also more artistic and religious. Criminal evil escapes the prison of murder-mystery and revenge plots, making us see trough the eyes of killer and victim. Supernatural evil is freed from the gothic frame, making viewers believe again in the reality of the devil and other medieval superstitions. If the 60s were about love, the spirit of the 70s is fear. Which means they are more horribly real, more perversely in touch with the dark mystery.”
― Nicola Masciandaro, SACER

tags: 1970s, cioran, fear, horror

0 likes

#10

“Dear Sirs," Flick began before loudly inhaling, "On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts - Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She's healed up now so you don't have to worry about it happening again.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

tags: afropessimism, black-lives-matter, flint-michigan, generational-spaceship, interstellar-travel, philosophy, puerto-rico, scavenger-cosmologies, sci-fi, slavery

4 likes

#11

“A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.”
― Alexis Carrel

tags: biology, cellular, event, hannah-landecker, history, natural-history, organism, process, time, tissue-culture

2 likes

#12

“Not to use bacteria as model organisms for more complex animals, but the reverse: to literally make complex animals more like their model organisms, by making living matter conform to the shape, time, and technical forms of simpler experimental models.”
― Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

tags: biological-time, biology, cell-fusion, cytology, history, lab-anthropology, life-sciences, microorganisms, model-organism

0 likes

#13

“The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

tags: geophilosophy, planet, ungrounded, unhuman

5 likes

#14

“You're a smart one. You know as good as me and as Flick that there is no Promised Land. Matilda's an orphan, a daughter of dead gods. But Ancestors is real and their spirits are at work. Baby sun giving out is how they making a fuss.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

tags: afropessimism, capitalism, science-fiction, scifi, slavery, spaceship

1 likes

#15

“I would like to say that the following days were filled with awe and excitement, with marvels and wonders, astonishing discoveries. If they were, the marvels went unrecognized.
Mysteries we did find, and they were many. But I learned that something can be too mysterious, too alien - so mysterious or alien as to approach being meaningless:
-two connected rooms crisscrossed by metal rods; we had to laboriously climb through them each time we went in or out of the ship until we found a curving passage that bypassed them. We couldn't even guess at the purpose or function of the rooms or the rods.”
― Richard Paul Russo, Ship of Fools

tags: alien, cosmic-pessimism, numinous

0 likes

#16

“By necessity there are other characteristics that are not accounted for, that are not measured, and that remain hidden and occulted. Anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total. This remainder, perhaps, is the "Planet". In a literal sense the Planet moves beyond the subjective World, but it also recedes behind the objective Earth. The Planet is a planet, it is one planet among other planets, moving the scale of things out from the terrestrial into the cosmological framework. Whether the Planet is yet another subjective, idealist construct or whether it can have objectivity and can be accounted for as such, is an irresolvable dilemma. What's important in the concept of the Planet is that it remains a negative conceit, simply that which remains "after" the human. The Planet can thus be described as impersonal and anonymous.”
― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse

tags: after-you, cosmological, horror-of-philosophy, planetary, planetary-shift, unknowable, via-negativa

0 likes

#17

“Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.
Not the Edge lecture again, I said.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

tags: cambridge-analytica, capitalism, cyberpunk-scifi, data-wars, fb, multinationals, post-industrial, science-fiction, sentience, sentient-capital

2 likes

#18

“Subsequently there ensues an epoch of complex, proliferating intrigues and conspiracies among the ranks of double agents, whose agendas become so densely intertwined that they are virtually indistinguishable. Ever the Governing Executives of OneiriCon, many of whom are defectors from the Nightmare Network, throw themselves into the depths of the new order and lose all sense of identity in the ever-expanding nebula of blind ambition, which possesses a power and impetus that belongs entirely to itself.”
― Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror

tags: corporations, dark-vitalism, flow-chart, nightmare-network, power, sense, sentient-beings

1 likes

#19

“but now we see that the subject controls the time of its environment. While we said before, "There can be no living subject without time," now we shall have to say, "Without a living subject, there can be no time.”
― Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning

5 likes

#20

“I would rather call evolution an "emergence myth" than an origin myth: it's an ongoing, nonlinear story in which past, present, and future all communicate with each other.”
― Tom Idema, Environmental Posthumanism in Literature and Science: Stages of Transmutation

tags: biology, environmental, phylosophy, posthumanism, temporality

1 likes

#21

“[Walmart]s largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central Fordist principle of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle: paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of the “working poor” to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than falling into the “black hole” of total immiseration. WalMart is part and parcel of how the “new economy” has largely been founded upon transferring wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. ”
― Steven Shaviro

tags: america, economics

10 likes

#22

“Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital.”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

5 likes

#23

“For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified, and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified, and meaningful, a “content” that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions.”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

3 likes

#24

“A map does not just replicate the shape of a territory; rather, it actively inflects and works over that territory.7 Films and music videos, like the ones I discuss here, are best regarded as affective maps, which do not just passively trace or represent, but actively construct and perform, the social relations, flows, and feelings that they are ostensibly “about.” In”
― Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect

3 likes

#25

“What is the appeal of accelerationism today? It can be understood as a response to the particular social and political situation in which we currently seem to be trapped: that of a long-term, slow-motion catastrophe.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

3 likes

#26

“Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

4 likes

#27

“We should therefore reject the entire dichotomy between central planning, on the one hand, and market “rationality” on the other.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

2 likes

#28

“This leads to a veritable Kantian Antinomy of the aesthetic under late capitalism. Aesthetics must be simultaneously promoted beyond all measure, and yet reduced to nothing.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

2 likes

#29

“life’s intensity, like a sine wave, closes in on a limit without ever reaching it.”
― Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

5 likes