"No lendário anúncio da Apple que, em 1984, cintilava no ecrã durante a Super Bowl, aquela aparece como uma figura libertadora contra o Estado vigilante de Orwell. Numa grande sala, trabalhadores sem vontade e apáticos escutam, olhando para o ecrã, o discurso fanático do Big Brother. Uma mulher que corre irrompe na sala, perseguida pela polícia do pensamento. Avança sem hesitar e transporta um grande martelo [...]. Carrega decididamente sobre o Big Brother e arremessa ferozmente o martelo contra o ecrã que explode. os homens despertam da sua apatia. Ouve-se uma voz anunciar: "A 24 de janeiro, a Apple Computer lançará o Macintosh. E verás então porque é que 1984 não será como 1984". Ao contrário do que sustenta a mensagem da Apple, o ano de 1984 não assinala o fim do Estado vigilante de Orwell, mas o começo de uma nova sociedade de controle que supera sobejamente a sua eficiência. Comunicação e controle coincidem na totalidade. Cada um de nós é o pan-ótico de si próprio."
Byung-Chul Han, "Psicopolítica"
Goodbye Cuco's Nests / Welcome to the Pan-Optic digital where Big Brother is laughing at you
How to do things with words
A "performative utterance" is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says, "Guilty," to a defendant, or a groom says, "I do," the words alter material reality.
Words about the vagina create environments that directly affect women's bodies. The words women hear being used about their vaginas change, for better or for worse, what they purport to describe. Because of their effect on female autonomic nervous system (ANS), words about the vagina can either help or hurt actual vaginal response. New studies, as we saw, show that the autonomic nervous system in women is directly connected to optimal sexual arousal functionality in vaginal tissue, circulation, and lubrication itself — so verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina.
Vagina, Naomi Wolf
How to do Things With Words
At the drug convention...
"The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline – which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it – but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the "dangers of marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes... and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action."
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The female price of male pleasure
Or, since sex is the subject here, what about how our society's scientific community has treated female dyspareunia — the severe physical pain some women experience during sex — vs. erectile dysfunction (which, while lamentable, is not painful)? PubMed has 393 clinical trials studying dyspareunia. Vaginismus? 10. Vulvodynia? 43.
Erectile dysfunction? 1,954.
That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.
Women are constantly and specifically trained out of noticing or responding to their bodily discomfort, particularly if they want to be sexually "viable." Have you looked at how women are "supposed" to present themselves as sexually attractive? High heels? Trainers? Spanx? These are things designed to wrench bodies. Men can be appealing in comfy clothes. They walk in shoes that don't shorten their Achilles tendons. They don't need to get the hair ripped off their genitals or take needles to the face to be perceived as "conventionally" attractive. They can — just as women can — opt out of all this, but the baseline expectations are simply different, and it's ludicrous to pretend they aren't.
Aqui
Sex is sexist / On th liberating of the vagina
"This ideology [the Libertarian 'Sex as Play'] – descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debasd form, Friedrich Nietzsche – argues that sensation, even extreme sensation, is good for its own sake alone. This sexual "will to power," adorned with a dollop of Freud's argument that the individual gets a "pass" for whatever the subconscious comes up with – since one can have no responsibility for, and hence no guilt about, subconscious desires – fit perfectly with the heady, consumerist postwar economy in the West. It prepared a fertile ground for the entrenchment of the pornographic experience of sex and of the vagina in particular.. It came to be how we thought "sex was" – rather than letting us understand that this way of thinking about sex is just one of many possible sexual ideologies. And it cleared the way in the minds of both women and men for the rise in the next few decades of wider and wider acceptance and then internalization of the moral flatness, distractedness, and fixatedness of pornography.
But is what one does in bed with someone else – with all the hopes, intimacies, and possibilities for grief involved – really just "a dream you are in"? The next three decades would call the worldview's vision of consequence-free sex and fantasy into question."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina
More links:
Inga Muscio
Joani Blank
Andrea Dworkin
Steven Seidman
Germaine Greer
Judy Chicago
Shere Hite
Eve Ensler
Feministing.com
Vulvavelvet.com
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| The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago |
Shere Hite speaking about her report.
Shere Hite press conference (1985)
"Not biologically based but culturally encouraged" – Shere Hite
A rose is a rose
Suppose, to suppose, suppose a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here
and there there arose and instance of knowing that there are
here and there that there are there that they will prepare, that
they do care to come again.
Are they to come again.
To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here
and there there arose and instance of knowing that there are
here and there that there are there that they will prepare, that
they do care to come again.
Are they to come again.
Gertrude Stein
Vídeo Youtube: Пионеры модерна - 1900е - Loie Fuller
Relying on predictions
"You can't predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors. And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
On speaking out
" we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell."
Salma Hayek on Harvey Weinstein, here
da objectificação
"There is a deep sadness when I witness a man that can’t recognize the emptiness he feels when he objectifies himself as a bank and truly believes he can buy love with things and status. It is painful to witness the betrayal when a woman takes him up on that offer."
Jada Pinkett-Smith: “The War on Men Through the Degradation of Women”
Aqui.
On Takatoshi Kato's predictions / suit-and-tie-wearing hotshots
"These were days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. Listening to Kato's presentation, I could not control myself and flew into a rage in front of two thousand Koreans – I was so angry that I almost started shouting in French, forgetting that I was in Korea. I ran to the podium and told the audience that the next time someone in a suit and tie gave them projections for some dates in the future, they should ask him to show what he had projected in the past – in this case, what he had been forecasting for 2008 and 2009 (the crisis years) two to five years earlier, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. They would then verify that highly Venerable Kato-san and his colleagues are, to put it mildly, not very good at this predictionizing business. And it is not just Mr. Kato: our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not so close to zero; it is zero."
"What was getting me in that state of anger was my realization that forecasting was not neutral. It is all in the iatrogenics. Forecasting can be downright injurious to risk-takers – no different from giving people snake oil medicine in place of cancer treatment, or bleeding, as in the story of Geaorge Washington. And there was evidence. Danny Kahneman – rightfully – kept admonishing me for my fits of anger and outbursts at respectable members of the establishment (respectable for now), deeming such behavior to be unbecoming of the wise member of the intelligentsia I was supposed to be. Yet he stoked my frustration and sense of outrage the most by showing me the evidence of iatrogenics. There are ample empirical findings to the effect that providing someone with a random numerical forecast increases his risk taking, even if the person knows the projections are random.
All I hear is complaints about forecasters, when the next step is obvious yet rarely taken: avoidance of iatrogenics from forecasting. We understand childproofing, but not forecaster-hubris-proofing."
The financier Warren Buffett states that he tries to invest in businesses that are "so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Quando a incompetência ajuda
"The famine in China that killed 30 million people between 1959 and 1961 can enlighten us about the effect of the state "trying hard." Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pierre Yared examined its variations between areas, looking into how the famine was distributed. They discovered that famine was more severe in areas with higher food production in the period before the famine began, meaning that it was government policy of food distribution that was behind much of the problem, owing to the inflexibility in the procurement system. And indeed, a larger than expected share of famine over the past century has occured in economies with central planning.
But often it is the state's incompetence that can help save us from the grip of statism and modernity – inverse iatrogenics. The insightful author Dmitri Orlov showed how calamities were avoided after the breakdown of the Soviet state because food production was inefficient and full of unintentional redundancies, which ended up working in favor of stability. Stalin played with agriculture, causing his share of famine. But he and his successors never managed to get agriculture to become "efficient," that is, centralized and optimized as it is today in America, so every town had the staples growing around it. This was costlier, as they did not get benefits of specialization, but this local lack of specialization allowed people to have access to all varieties of food in spite of the severe breakdown of institutions. In the United States, we burn twelve calories in transportation for every calorie of nutrition; in Soviet Russia, it was one to one. One can imagine what could happen to the United States (or Europe) in the event of food disruptions. Further, because of the inefficiency of housing in the Soviet state, people had been living in close quarters for three generations, and had tight bonds that ensured – as in the Lebanese war – that they stayed close to each other and lent to each other. People had real links, unlike in social networks, and fed their hungry friends, expecting that some friend (most likely another one) would help them should they get in dire circumstances.
And the top-down state is not necessarily the one that has the reputation of being so."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Avoiding black swans and becoming more antifragile
"Knowledge has not improved massively. We do not have advanced knowledge. read Seneca and you'll see that in world sciences and in a lot of fields we have not advanced that much. In the complex domain we have not advanced that much. So, being a generalist as people were 500 years ago, is still feasible." [NT]
"Why is it, that we humans denigrate the systems ability to correct themselves on their own? We act as if we were necessary for things to take place. And that's a big problem. We always tend to think that we're smarter than Nature. We have that bias. So this is the problem I'm working on. Is how to mitigate that. How to replace the instinct with something that's not as harmful." [NT]
In praise of procrastinantion
"The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition – or a bonus – for it. [...]
A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve their objectives, but rather to accommodate the fact that these objectives are moving targets. Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. And of course members did change their minds after seeing the failures and horrors of Stalinism and similar regimes.
There is a latin expression festina lente, "make haste slowly." The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, "passive achievement."
Nassim Taleb, in "Antifragile"
The importance of developing skills
"The first thing about developing skills for ordinary craftworkers – people who work in what we don't think of as the elite sort of jobs, people who do everyday kinds of, both manual and service work – is that getting a skill in the craft is slow and long. One measure of the time it takes to become skilled in the practice of a craft is what's called 'The ten thousand hour rule'. And this rough number (but a good one) translates into practicing, for instance, three or four hours a day, for five to seven years. The time that's needed to gain mastery whether one is learning piano technique, glass blowing, sport or surgery."
Richard Sennet
"Best-practice is a form of 'de-skilling'"
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"Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.
The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things." Aqui
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Political annealing e o Princípio de Peter
"It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life — so you can imagine what it would be like to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain amount of randomness is needed the most.
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness — very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing — and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients — again, those ancients! — were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parlementary system."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Entrevista a Philippe Starck
Comprou uma propriedade perto de Grândola. Chamou-lhe Figueira Feliz. O que pretende fazer lá?
Vou pela primeira vez na vida fazer uma casa que não é uma casa moderna. Sempre construí casas de vanguarda, mas quando cheguei às planícies de Grândola, encontrei de tal forma um local de harmonia absoluta — as proporções, a luz, a temperatura, a vibração... — que percebi que não podia fazer nada que não saísse naturalmente do solo. Quero construir uma quinta com arquitetura alentejana. É a primeira vez que o faço, não sei o que pensar. Será que estou a ficar velho? Vou fazer vinho evidentemente biodinâmico, biológico, não filtrado e sem sulfito, o vinho perfeito. E vou fazer também azeite com uma empresa que tenho em Espanha. De resto, não sei. Vou inventar, vou ver.
Aqui
The most British Japanese, or shall I say, the most Japanese British
"Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished. [...] Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth."
Kazuo Ishiguro, in The Remains of the Day
Memórias de território
O corpo, um território com memórias (cicatrizes), histórias...
E a distância óptima será definida pelas histórias que ele encerra (o corpo).
Arrisco dizer...
