The Myth of the One

In contemporary Western capitalist society, the myth of “the one” is pervasive. This is the persistent belief that given a functional socio-economic role defined with rigorous specificity there exists an individual conforming to all preexisting expectations for that role. “The one” is out there, we just need to find them.

That this belief manifests most acutely in those doing the searching is no surprise. “The one” is the quintessential object of fixation for job recruiters and unattached individuals seeking long-term relationships. Because it is a myth, technology can only be expected to intensify the searching, leading to escalating expenditure and waste in true capitalist fashion without leading to resolution.

Organisms Under Threat

To live in the modern world is to exist in a state where every breath is painful and where every motion is inhibited by heavy oppression. It is to have all streamlines, streaklines and pathlines totally and completely circumscribed by a design beyond comprehension and unyielding to compromise. It is to exist in a state where even keeping one's eyelids open is a feat, for the air stings with a painful burn and is clouded by a heavy fog that induces sleepiness, comatose, and death. It is to be an organism under threat.

Those that are not threatened have already crossed the material divide; they are not organisms: they are no longer even living. They are the exalted beings of capitalism: those who have willingly given themselves over to be reformed, recast, and re-implemented as more perfect designs under the capitalist frame. They eagerly await the promised total liberation from materiality: the complete annihilation of the physical¹, capitalism's promise/threat of subsuming the universe and finally extinguishing its insectoid-drive.

Some of the (Many) Limitations of Affinity Designer

I've been using Serif's Affinity Designer for about six months now, having been forced out of the Adobe ecosystem due to it being financially untenable. While there's still a lot of depth to the program that I have yet to explore, I feel there's some value in documenting what I've found to be its limitations as it pertains to the work that I do, particularly since it seems hard to find solid information on what Designer can't do.

For those unfamiliar with the product, Affinity Designer is a vector illustration app by Serif positioned as an affordable alternative to Adobe's Illustrator. It is available as an app for iPad as well as an app on the desktop. I use a Microsoft Surface so my experiences pertain to the desktop app on Windows. I understand the app / MacOS is the primary focus for Affinity, so certain things (like performance) may be expected to be better there than what I experience on Windows.

The Weird and the Eerie of Swing You Sinners!

There's a peculiar feeling one gets when, after a long time absent, one feels oneself pulled into a familiar orbit. Not that there is an inevitability to it; it's not that all paths lead back to the same place, but rather that some regions are like drains for our psyche, threatening to slowly draw us in from a multitude of directions should we fail to keep our distance. So it was for me recently with a return to electro-swing.

The End of Design

In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed¹. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.

Totalitarian Capitalism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism form the more familiar forms of tyranny known to us as dictatorships. Totalitarianism is a term reserved for Nazism and Bolshevism, as seen under Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Arendt stresses that totalitarianism is not to be confused with fascism, and points out that the Nazis themselves were keen to distinguish Nazism from fascism, and looked down with contempt on Mussolini's fascist Italy. While dictatorships have often been driven by totalitarian movements, once they acquire power they seize the power structure of the state. By the very maneuver with which they seemingly take on complete control they straight-jacket themselves; dictatorships are characterized by a complete takeover by the state, but also a containment within the state. They satisfy themselves with the bureaucratic confines and enter into a state of equilibrium. The totalitarian drive is extinguished. Conventional dictatorships are not unfamiliar, and while they are oppressive and brutal, the Western world has never been adverse to dealing with them. Operating as they do within the state structure they offer a degree of stability and predictability¹.

Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.

Limbic Thinking Extended

Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another¹. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.