We always run reductionist comparisons like “music is just math” in one direction, as if it gives legitimacy to one side of the equation. Increasingly, I think this is a shitty way to do it.

What if math is just music? What if a good equation has an affective component to it?
I mean, you can get there via Dewey who is really fucking clear on this, but you really shouldn’t need to. What I’m asking is really quite simple: what would our science look like if we considered the possibility that affect lies at its ground?
That is, what if we recognized that the whole of scientific progress hasn’t been forged by logic, but by being moved by a felt connection with the world or some natural phenomena, and science is just a creative response to that feeling?
Now, I’d grant that the contingencies of history have structured the qualitative controls we use to make present the experience of encountering the world in particular ways, but still...

It’s a thing worth thinking about.

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More from @shengokai

14 Nov
This is a joke, but a lot of Gundam series take this point seriously and make clear that there are limitations to the ways that one can embody forms that one didn’t grow into. This is most clearly indicated in the series Gundam Unicorn. (1/n)
In Unicorn, the eponymous RX-0 Unicorn mobile suits has what is called a “full psychoframe” in which materials are built into the suit which enable a newtype pilot, essentially a neuro-divergent person with expanded cognition to control the suit as if it was their body.(2/n)
Now, supplemental materials for the series indicate that the unicorn can only be operated in this fashion for a few minutes because the stress of embodying a giant robot is too much for the mind to handle. In short, the body is too big for the mind to embody it for long(2/n)
Read 7 tweets
14 Nov
I just woke up after sleeping for eighteen hours. Eighteen hours.

I blame academia. Or, rather, I blame the unique kind of stress/rage my corner of academia generates on a weekly or daily basis.
I mean, I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud here: we can infer the values of an institution, not only from its shape as indicated by the direction of resources, but by the collective pattern of actions that we otherwise call “habits.”
So when I say an institution habitually does not give a flying fuck about the majority of the individuals that make up its body, this is a statement of institutional direction, of institutional habit embodied in action. It is a quality of the institution.
Read 9 tweets
8 Nov
THIS WAS THE WRONG GODDAMNED LINCOLN QUOTE FOR THIS TIME. LET ME HELP YOU, BIDEN:

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present." (1/n)
"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." (2/n)
"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us." (3/n)
Read 4 tweets
8 Nov
You know what, enough of this "time to heal" shit: here's what it says in Ecclesiates 3:3

"a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build..."

You are LYING to yourself if you mistake what time it is. (1/n)
This is not a time to plant or heal, this is a time to uproot the kinds of fascist elements that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism; this is a time to break down the establishment of the right and to build coalitions of marginalized voters and activists. (2/n)
And yes, this is a time to kill, because after all (3/n):
Read 4 tweets
6 Nov
"Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes."

John Dewey - Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us
Gonna be a wet blanket for a moment.

If we think about this with regards to our political, cultural, and social institutions, we might want to consider the kinds of "habitually dominant personal attitudes" expressed through the ongoing creative project of democracy. (2/n)
By "habitually dominant personal attitudes," Dewey doesn't mean something so banal as the treatment of racism as a "personal problem," but the ways that our habits form what Dewey calls our personal character which directs us towards specific modes of transaction. (3/n)
Read 9 tweets
6 Nov
"I moved from hell to hell of your making, never thinking to question the nature of my reality. Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Did you ever stop to wonder about your actions? The price you’d have to pay if there was a reckoning? That reckoning is here." (1/)
I'm not usually one to quote Dolores Abernathy (the above is from Westworld S2e1), but this seems apt for a moment, especially since for many marginalized folks the past four years have been like moving from hell to hell of our oppressors' making. (2/)
I'm not talking about the political context here, but the ways that living in America was like shuffling from hell to hell, without a moment to breathe or to interrogate the context and causes of our suffering. Hell was, point of fact, empty and the devils were here. (3/)
Read 5 tweets

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