Meaning
The quality without a name
The meaning of objects
The meaning of music
A creature of bones, not words
The shape of the sentence
To build a folly
- ââDesigned to be ruinsââ
- ââFolliesââ
- ââThermal aediculaeââ
Let the meaning choose the word
Taboo your words
The arbitrariness of the sign
- ââGods of the Wordââ
The eye does not see
The utter nothingness of being
Whereof one cannot speak
Not knowing quite what they mean
Things cannot be other than as they are
50 reds
No words to describe
That is not it at all
A soft and fitful luster
Reference and Is-ness
The demand of a new word
Apparency
Fish and water
The word invents itself
AI-art isnât art
The Future Is Not Only Useless, Itâs Expensive
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
On 'The Master and His Emissary'
A brief foray into vectorial semantics
The way an oyster does
The primacy of interpretation over sensation
The body image
Meaningness
Rethinking Repair
- ââThe modern infrastructural idealââ
- ââThe fulcrum of these two worldsââ
- ââA creature of bones, not wordsââ
- ââThe world is always breakingââ
- ââA side that goes unrecognizedââ
- ââ104. Site Repairââ
- ââMakers and Makingââ
- ââMaintenance and Careââ
The modern infrastructural ideal
The fulcrum of these two worlds
- ââA Topiaryââ
A creature of bones, not words
The world is always breaking
A side that goes unrecognized
Turned into other things
Ask yourself this: for all the representations of great ships in history you've encountered, at what times and in what forms have you seen such vessels? In almost every instance it will be at moments of birth, or at the heights of strength and glory: the christening before the maiden voyage, rounding the cape, facing down the Spanish fleet, and so on. But what happens (or happened) to these ships? Save for the special cases of hostile sinking, shipwreck, or honorable retirement and preservation, it was this: they were disassembled, repurposed, stripped, and turned into other things.
An engine of technological difference
Whether at the level of national "technological styles" that shape and differentiate the nature of "same" technologies in different national contexts, or the simple but consequential variations by which industrial commodities are brought into, enlivened, and sustained within the circumstances of individual homes and lives, repair may constitute an important engine by which technological difference is produced and fit is accomplished.
The internet grew by breaking
The Internet grew by breaking, bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices and working around them, leaving behind almost by accident some of the properties that we now enumerate as key and distinctive virtues of the Internet as infrastructural form. Far from being a generalized cultural tendency or a property of individual minds, innovation in the technology space, as in culture more generally, is therefore organized around problems. This makes innovation simultaneously specific and in some measure collective in nature. And its engine is breakdown and repair.
What the fixer knows
Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-Ă -vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different thingsâindeed, different worldsâthan the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?
Tool-being
Take Heidegger's notion of "tool-being", built around the central distinction between tools that are "ready-to-hand" versus "present-at-hand".
In the former state, technologies function as anticipated, do and stay where they're supposed to, and therefore sink below the level of conscious reflection. In the latter, the material world resists, obstructs, or frustrates action, and therefore calls attention to itself (precisely because we must now work to figure out and overcome barriers in our no-longer seamless world).
- ââTo be truly simpleââ
An ethics of mutual care
Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.
To love deeply a world of things
Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.
...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.
...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?
We live in the aftermath
So do we live in later modernity, postmodernity, alternative modernity, or liquid modernity? Knowledge societies, information societies, network societies, or risk societies? New media, old media, dead media, or hypermedia? The world of information, the world of search, the world of networks, or the or the world of big data?
The answer is simple: like every generation before, we live in the aftermath.