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There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.
All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness. |
✖ Via Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, tr. Carol Stewart, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [1960]1962, p. 15 (originally published as Masse und Macht, Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1960) |
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Jul 13 link notes
communication
community
relation
touch
fear
together
politic
body
skin
society
panic
security
immunity
space
distance
protection
defense
aggresion
environment
crowd
mass
power
Canetti
 | Contrary to “primitive” peoples, who endow everything that moves with personal expression ―or even the first Greeks, who deified every aspect and force of nature―modern humans are obsessed by the need to depersonalize (or impersonalize) all that they most admire. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is analysis―that marvelous instrument of scientific research to which we owe all our advances, yet which allows the soul to escape from one undone synthesis after another, until we are left facing a pile of disassembled parts and evanescent particles. The second is the discovery of the sidereal world―which is such a vast subject that it seems to destroy all proposition between our own existence and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. A single reality appears to subsist that is capable of covering both the infinitesimal and the immense at once: energy, that universal floating entity from which everything emerges and into which everything falls back, as if into an ocean. Energy is the new spirit, the new god. The impersonal is at the Omega of the world as well as its Alpha. |
✖ Via The Human Phenomenon by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, tr. by Sarah Appleton Weber, Sussex Academic Press, [1956]1999, p. 183 Here’s the original French version:
“A l’inverse des « primitifs » qui donnent un visage à tout ce qui bouge, — ou même des premiers Grecs, qui divinisaient toutes les faces et toutes les forces de la Nature, l’Homme moderne est obsédé par le besoin de dépersonnaliser (ou d’impersonnaliser) ce qu’il admire le plus. Deux raisons à cette tendance. La première est l’Analyse, — ce merveilleux instrument de recherche scientifique, auquel nous devons tous nos progrès, mais qui, de synthèse en synthèse dénouées, laisse échapper l’une après l’autre toutes les âmes, et finit par nous laisser en présence d’une pile de rouages démontés et de particules évanescentes. — Et la seconde est la découverte du monde sidéral, objet tellement vaste que toute proportion paraît abolie entre notre être et les dimensions du Cosmos autour de nous. — Capable de réussir et de couvrir à la fois cet Infime et cet Immense, une seule réalité semble subsister : l’Énergie, entité flottante universelle, d’où tout émerge, et où tout retombe, comme dans un Océan. L’Énergie, le nouvel Esprit. L’Énergie, le nouveau Dieu. A l’Oméga du Monde, comme à son Alpha, l’Impersonnel.”
Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1956, p. 177. PDF.
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega. |
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Apr 11 link notes
technology
communication
energy
God
philosophy
ecology
media
medium
world
space
infinity
community
fragment
separation
analysis
 | Do you admit to this certainty: that we are at a turning point?
―If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point. The fact of being part of the moments in which an epochal change (if there is one) comes about also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would whish to determine this change, making certainty as inappropriate as uncertainty. We are never less able to circumvent ourselves then at such a moment: the discreet force of the turning point is first and foremost that. |
✖ Via Maurice Blanchot, quoted as the epigraph for Bernard Stiegler’s first volume of his trilogy Technics and Time, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 1 [Amazon] Here’s the French version:
— Admettez-vous cette certitude : que nous sommes à un tournant? — Si c’est une certitude, ce n’est pas un tournant. Le fait d’appartenir à ce moment où s’accomplit un changement d’époque (s’il y en a), s’empare aussi du savoir certain qui voudrait le déterminer, rendant inappropriée la certitude comme l’incertitude. Nous ne pouvons jamais moins nous contourner qu’en un tel moment : c’est cela d’abord, la force discrète du tournant. |
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Mar 16 link notes
communication
lost
space
critic
crisis
history
modernity
author
time
Blanchot
Stiegler
 | Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, studies information design, and he is fascinated by these fragments of “demotic” wayfinding. Stiff has been accumulating homespun maps for three decades now. One of his very first finds: a map picked up from the floor of a corridor at his work, something that was “literally, a back-of-the-envelope sketch. Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient—they edit out unnecessary information. |
✖ Via Slate: “Do You Draw Good Maps?” by Julia Turner, March 4, 2010 This article is part of an ongoing series by Julia Turner focusing on “The Secret Language of Signs”.
Previously on Skandalon: maps. |
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Mar 11 link notes reblogged from Bobulate
technology
communication
map
space
orientation
data
visualization
design
graphic