Essential Codes of Action

… The collaborative philosophy will indeed yield added value …

This is from Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles edited by Charles Gerday and Nicolas Glansdorff (2007):

… The ice sheet has existed for 15 million years or more, isolating the lake from the atmosphere. The origins of Lake Vostok may thus date back to the Miocene.

[line break added] The residence time of the lake water has been calculated to be in the range 55, 000 to 110,000 years. Estimates for the age of the water body range from 1 million years to 15 million years; it is a “fossil ambient” which evolved during a very long time span in almost total isolation from the biosphere.

… After reaching the water, it would be sad to see studies on Lake Vostok deprived of the essential contribution to biology, or — even worse — to see the beginning of lengthy disputes on whether a microorganism found in the lake is a contaminant or not. However, we are confident that the science community will succeed in preserving this scientific treasure.

… The danger of irreversibly contaminating extraterrestrial bodies with biological material coming from Earth is an even greater concern for space missions, and again, this calls for extreme care. Consequently, safe drilling and appropriate experimental procedures not only are a must for accessing the ecosystems of subglacial lakes but will have the added value of providing essential codes of action in astrobiology.

… All of these great challenges are in common with subglacial-lake explorations and will entail enormous logistic efforts and are hard for a single country to afford, again calling for multinational and multidisciplinary projects. The collaborative philosophy will indeed yield added value to these exciting ventures.

My most recent post from this book is here.

-Julie

One Grasps Better

… looking lovingly at being in its flux, as often as it might take to perceive how things are.

This is from ‘The Predications and Implications of Monet’s Series’ by Charles Stuckey, found in The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse edited by Eik Kahng (2007):

… aside from his leading role during the 1860s and 1870s in the development of stenographic Impressionist brushwork as an idiom to record the capricious flux of visual sensations, Monet’s dedication to making works in series and presenting these works as ensembles was his most important, influential, and abiding legacy to modern art.

… Whether or not Renoir ever saw fit to exhibit similar works together à la Monet, he surely subscribed to thinking about art in series. According to his son Jean Renoir, “This question of ‘subject,’ as we know, concerned him not at all. He told me one day that he regretted not having painted the same picture — what he wanted to say was the same subject — throughout his entire life.

[line break added] “That way, he could have devoted himself entirely to what constitutes creation in painting: the relationship between forms and colors, which vary infinitely within a single motif, and which variations one grasps better when one no longer needs to concentrate on the motif.”

… As a largely invisible force … the idea of series art continues still today to pervade the fundamental meaning of modern art when it seeks the insights that can come from looking lovingly at being in its flux, as often as it might take to perceive how things are.

My most recent post from this book is here.

-Julie

Flesh Into Bullets

The Epic Stars
by Robinson Jeffers

The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem —
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle —
We don’t know enough, we’ll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and Gods for granted.

-Julie

The 3rd Way

… only the complexion of a fact thought of as eventually possible.

This is from ‘Some Problems of Philosophy’ found in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (1987):

… We must take one of four attitudes in regard to the other powers: either
1. Follow intellectualist advice: wait for evidence; and while waiting, do nothing; or
2. Mistrust the powers and, sure that the universe will fail, let it fail; or
3. Trust them; and at any rate do our best, in spite of the if; or, finally,
4. Flounder; spending one day in one attitude, another day in another.

This 4th way is no systematic solution. The 2nd way spells faith in failure. The 1st way may in practice be indistinguishable from the 2nd way. The 3rd way seems the only wise way.

‘If we do our best, and the other powers do their best, the world will be perfected’ — this proposition expresses no actual fact, but only the complexion of a fact thought of as eventually possible. As it stands, no conclusion can be positively deduced from it.

[line break added] A conclusion would require another premise of fact, which only we can supply. The original proposition per se has no pragmatic value whatsoever, apart from its power to challenge our will to produce the premise of fact required. Then indeed the perfected world emerges as a logical conclusion.

We can create the conclusion, then. We can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of which we trust the other parts to meet our jump — and only so can the making of a perfected world of the pluralistic pattern ever take place. Only through our precursive trust in it can it come into being.

My most recent post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

Something That We Meet

… not only from contemporaries but also from future generations.

This is from Becoming an Artwork by Boris Groys (2023):

… We know Leonardo da Vinci not because we “remember” him, but because we see his paintings in museums, their reproductions in books, etc. In other words, the image of Leonardo is not something that we remember from the past but something that we meet here and now.

… A human is seen not as an ordinary thing but rather as a treacherous, unstable thing — a thing on which one cannot build, cannot rely. As a tool, the human being is not as good as other tools. The human is assumed to have consciousness and thus of being treacherous.

… For a human, becoming an artwork means coming out of slavery, being immunized from violence, not being used as means for the social good, becoming an object of protection. The word curator comes from the Latin word cura.

[line break added] The curator cares about the health of artworks as a physician cares about the health of humans. Both forms of care are intimately interconnected. The artist — this modern Narcissus — expects care and admiration not only from contemporaries but also from future generations.

My most recent post from Groys’s book is here.

-Julie

The Jargon of Authenticity

… compounded in historical determinism, organicism, occultism, solipsism …

This is from ‘The Poietic Fallacy’ (2004) found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):

… there is simply no point in maintaining the pretense that Schoenberg’s music is music like any other music. More than any other body of music that I know, it represented a crux in the history of ideas. That does indeed make it (and him) supremely important.

[line break added] But that history has been largely forgotten, and (as Santayana might have warned us) its repercussions linger even into our shiny new post-modern millennium. We must do a better job of comprehending the sources of Schoenberg’s “inner compulsion” — and of the poietic fallacy, too — if we want to escape from them, or even accept them in full, free consciousness.

… Looking at Schoenberg through the prism of the poietic fallacy makes it possible, even at this incredibly late date, to contend (and even believe) that the only thing militating against the widespread acceptance of his art is its novelty.

[line break added] On the contrary: its greatest obstacle is the exceedingly old-fashioned, even outmoded, esthetic — compounded in historical determinism, organicism, occultism, solipsism — that so obviously informs it, along with a host of hoary elitist and sexist clichés, and a megadose of the jargon of authenticity.

… When all of that is done; when Schoenberg is placed in proper perspective as one of the twentieth century’s most powerful musical minds, but also one of its most eccentric; and when the poietic fallacy at last gives way to a view of “serious” music that takes adequate account of its function as a communicative medium, then such music (Schoenberg’s, to be sure, but far more important, our own contemporary concert music) may once again — perhaps eventually — become one of the arts that matter.

My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.

-Julie

Handling the Machines

… task orientation, with its attendant socially situated skills and presentations, is the primary condition of our being at home in the world.

This is from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold (2000, 2022):

… I have already observed that machines do not perform tasks; only people do. The operation of technology, with or without inputs of human labor-power, is a machine performance.

[line break added] Coping with machines, on the other hand, entails a multitude of tasks, calling for specific aptitudes and sensibilities which occupy the attention of workers on the shop floor. It is as persons not as units of labor-power that they engage with the industrial equipment around them, and the meanings that this equipment holds for them arise within the context of that engagement.

[line break added] Here then we rediscover task-orientation at the very heart of industrial production, in the workplace. For this discovery, I am indebted to François Sigaut, who has pointed out that as fast as machines have been contrived to do what had previously been done by skilled hands, different skills have sprung up for handling the machines themselves.

[line break added] He calls this the ‘law of the irreducibility of skills,’ in the light of which ‘the entire history of technics … might be interpreted as a constantly renewed attempt to build skills into machines by means of algorithms, an attempt constantly foiled because other skills always tend to develop around the new machines.’

… Clocks are a ubiquitous feature of the environment of people in industrial society, who have to learn to cope with time just as they must cope with other kinds of machines. But the time intrinsic to the experience of coping with clocks is not itself clock time.

… The dwelling perspective has not been replaced by the commodity perspective. Indeed, the whole thrust of my argument is the contrary — namely that task orientation, with its attendant socially situated skills and presentations, is the primary condition of our being at home in the world. As such, it constitutes the baseline of sociality upon which the order of modernity has been built, and from which we have now to come to terms with it.

My most recent previous post from Ingold’s book is here.

-Julie

Vitrified Glass

… Conventional wisdom assumes an entirely inactive state.

This is from Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles edited by Charles Gerday and Nicolas Glansdorff (2007):

… Extremely cold ice formations — those with temperatures that fall below the eutectic of seawater (–55 C [–67F]) — have rarely if ever been examined for the presence of living microbes. Such environments — surface glacial ice in winter, ice aggregates in the troposphere — are either rare or generally inaccessible on Earth. Elsewhere — on Mars and Europa — they are commonplace.

… In what state do cells exist in vitrified glass [solid ice]? Conventional wisdom assumes an entirely inactive state. New experiments with C. psychrerythraea strain 34H suggest otherwise. If the starting suspension of cells is in a sea-salt solution enriched with EPS [extracellular polysaccharide substances], protein synthesis appears to continue even at subeutectic temperatures.

[line break added] Tracers to measure the synthesis must enter the cell at lower temperatures permissive of solute diffusion, but incorporation into protein appears possible via conformational changes of enzymes that do not require diffusion. The wonders of life in the extreme cold continue to beckon.

My most recent post from this book is here.

-Julie

Its Very Perception

… It provides the possibility of evaluation and thus a means of validation …

This is from The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse edited by Eik Kahng (2007):

… It is difficult not to suspect that the ascendancy of repetition is directly connected to philosophical nihilism in general as the normative worldview of a secularist Western hegemony; a godless worldview based on the impossibility of meaning unless defined relatively; the impossibility even, of repetition itself.

… Repetition in this sense is not a choice: in modernity, it has become a necessity for the activation of meaning and value. It provides the possibility of evaluation and thus a means of validation, not in terms of distance from a prior original, but in terms of its very perception.

[line break added] Now we have returned to our starting point as my argument dovetails with that of Kubler. The shape of time can be seen through the repetition of the material artifact in both form and expression. In modernism, the art object’s currency in terms of perceived hipness and monetary value is established by its susceptibility to repetitiveness.

My previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

Cold Mind

Time of Disturbance
by Robinson Jeffers

The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive life, not to take sides.
Leave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the streets, to back their horse or support a brawler.

But if you are forced into it: remember that good and evil are as common as air, and like air shared
By the panting belligerents; the moral indignation that hoarsens orators is mostly a fool.

Hold your nose and compromise; keep a cold mind. Fight if needs must; hate no one. Do as God does,
Or the tragic poets: they crush their man without hating him, their Lear or Hitler, and often save without love.

As for these quarrels, they are like the moon, recurrent and fantastic. They have their beauty but night’s is better.
It is better to be silent than make a noise. It is better to strike dead than strike often. It is better not to strike.

-Julie