Monthly Archives: June 2021

Saya Woolfalks Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plates 1-3) at Kimball Art Center. (Photo by Luke Jackson | The Daily Utah Chronicle)

Utopia in and of itself is an interesting concept. First written by Sir Thomas More, the word is essentially a combination of the Greek words for good place and no place. A utopia presents itself as a place of perfection and peace and, contradictorily, as a place that cant really exist.

But if a utopia is unachievable, what then is the point of describing and exploring it? The Kimball Art Center in Park City has dedicated their new exhibition When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes to not only answering this question, but further exploring the concept of utopia.

The exhibit brings together works from four artists Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Nicola Lpez, Cauleen Smithand Saya Woolfalk each of whom bring their own unique views on utopia. Their work explores their own personal utopian spaces and further inspires us to picture a more luminous future.

I made the drive up to Park City by myself on Sunday to explore the exhibition. As expected, Park City was bustling with couples and families taking in the sunshine and beauty afforded by the location. As I entered the Kimball Art Center, I was met with an unexpected silence. Afraid the exhibit was closed, I cautiously stepped forward. A very kind worker invited me in and encouraged me to take my time with each piece of art.

Being the only patron in the gallery allowed me to have an interesting and uniquely introspective experience with the pieces present. I moved slowly, trying to focus my energy on the art and what emotions it was evoking. I found myself touched and in awe by each artists individual take on utopia.

Amanze, with her wonderful use of blank space, caused me to consider finding utopia within the mundane.

Smith prompted me to reflect on my literary heroes and the authors who shaped my worldview, bringing my childhood inspirations to the forefront.

Lpez moved me to consider natures role in our societys future. Can utopia be reached only if we learn to move with the rapid changing of nature? Perhaps true joy comes from embracing natures whims instead of constantly trying to stay one step ahead.

While all the pieces brought beauty and inspiration, it was Woolfalks immersive piece Empathic Cloud Divination Room which touched me the most. It brought a silence to my overall experience which moved me to contemplate the role of religion and spirituality in utopia.

It transported me to a place of love, tolerance and learning where what mattered most was not my theology, but an environment of discussion and learning. No picture or description can do this room justice it is something that simply needs to be experienced.

As I concluded my time at the Kimball Art Center, I reflected again on the purpose of utopia. Regardless of the reality of a perfectly peaceful society, I was able to find inspiration in the notion. Who cares if we will never achieve literal perfection as a society? If we put aside our egos and come together with love and tolerance, wont the effort be worth it?

I know it sounds like a Hallmark card, but in a world full of division and hatred, When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes offers a reflective and rejuvenating safe haven where a better world doesnt seem so far away.

The exhibit is free of charge and running at the Kimball Art Center until June 13, 2021.

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'When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes' Exhibition Inspires and Reflects Utopia - Daily Utah Chronicle

When Ebony Turner was growing up, her favorite activity was baking.

"I was always in the kitchen with my grandmother," she said. "I've always been the baker in the family, and I've always loved it."

When Turner got to college, her initial studies focused on nursing, but those academic pursuits didn't last long.

"I had a change of heart," she said. "Instead, I thought, 'It seems like I would be happier if I went into the culinary arts.'"

She was especially after her coursework turned to baking and cake decorating and a cherished pastime evolved into a career. Turner started with a custom-cake operation out of her home kitchen, but by 2019 she had ramped up to a much roomier facility in a south Minneapolis church.

The connections she made there led to a catering job for a housing shelter. That 14-month gig, which ended a few weeks ago, kept her busy during the pandemic and allowed her to earn enough capital to jump-start her dream: a retail sweets shop that she's dubbed Dessertopia (20 W. 66th St., Richfield, dessertopia2021.com).

Leasing a storefront in the venerable Hub shopping center seemed preordained. Last year, Turner was running errands at the 67-year-old Richfield landmark when she spied a sign in a window that said, "This space is yours."

"And I thought, 'You're right, it's all mine,'" she said. "I'm really determined. There was a phone number on the sign, and I saved it in my phone under 'My New Store.'"

She eventually made it happen, signing a lease in March and devoting the next nine weeks to converting a grimy former Little Caesars franchise ("It was a complete horror story," she said) into her sparkling new brick-and-mortar enterprise.

The first customers walked through the doors on May 22, and Turner has already developed an enthusiastic clientele, proof once again that good bakeries make good neighbors.

"The response from the community has been overwhelming and humbling, to say the least," she said. "The enormous positive response has been just amazing. We've been ramping up production, and hiring more hands, to try to keep up with the demand."

The ever-expanding menu is anchored by cupcakes: chocolate cupcakes filled with caramel sauce and topped with whipped cream frosting and crushed Heath bars, vanilla cupcakes filled with cream cheese and strawberries and finished with vanilla buttercream icing, carrot cake filled with cream cheese and candied carrots and topped with cream cheese frosting and a drizzle of honey.

There are cinnamon rolls infused with maple and bacon, sticky pecan-caramel rolls, mini Bundt cakes and pretty single-serving cakes served in cups; think cake jars, minus the glass containers. Cannolis, too: peaches-and-cream, bananas Foster, caramel apple.

"They put you in mind of peach cobbler, banana pudding and apple pie," said Turner. "I'm doing different items that you won't see elsewhere."

Next up is ice cream, and Turner is continuing to produce the custom-order cakes that started her business.

The Dessertopia name is a nod to "The Giver," a favorite book.

"It's about a utopia, a perfect world," said Turner. "I like to play with words, and make them fun and whimsical. Pairing 'utopia' with 'dessert' seems perfect for a one-stop shop for your perfect dessert."

Dessertopia is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

More:

Cupcakes and cannoli at Richfield's newest bakery at the Hub - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Faith isnt faith if its based on evidence, so its wrong to say that I have faith in human progress. Unlike God, progress is objectively real, a demonstrable fact, as much so as evolution. Humanity has gotten wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful and smarter. We know more than our ancestors did, and were learning more all the time. These trends, any reasonable person must acknowledge, constitute progress. The question is, how long can this progress last?

Let me back up a moment. I recently concurred with megapundit Steven Pinker that over the last two centuries we have achieved material, moral and intellectual progress, which should give us hope that we can achieve still more. I expected, and have gotten, pushback. Pessimists argue that our progress will prove to be ephemeral; that we will inevitably succumb to our own nastiness and stupidity and destroy ourselves.

Maybe, maybe not. Just for the sake of argument, lets say that within the next century or two we solve our biggest problems, including tyranny, injustice, poverty, pandemics, climate change and war. Lets say we create a world in which we can do pretty much anything we choose. Many will pursue pleasure, finding ever more exciting ways to enjoy themselves. Others may seek spiritual enlightenment or devote themselves to artistic expression.

No matter what our descendants choose to do, some will surely keep investigating the universe and everything in it, including us. How long can the quest for knowledge continue? Not long, I argued 25 years ago this month in The End of Science, which contends that particle physics, cosmology, neuroscience and other fields are bumping into fundamental limits. I still think Im right, but I could be wrong. Below I describe the views of three physicistsFreeman Dyson, Roger Penrose and David Deutschwho hold that knowledge seeking can continue for a long, long time, and possibly forever, even in the face of the heat death of the universe.

If you are speculating about our long-term cosmic future, you must confront the second law of thermodynamics, sciences most depressing insight into nature. It decrees that closed systems, which dont get infusions of energy from an outside source, tend over time to become more disordered. Thats a euphemism for boring. The second law implies that the universe will inevitably lapse into heat death, in which everything, everywhere, is exactly the same temperature, near absolute zero, and nothing ever happens.

The discovery in the late 1990s that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate implies that we are approaching heat death, also known as the big chill, at an increasing rate. Not good. As the universe keeps ballooning, stars, including our own sun (after first becoming a red giant and incinerating the Earth), and even black holes will eventually radiate away all their energy, and the universe will go dark, forever. Cosmologists have calculated that we will reach this cosmic dead endin which time itself ceases, as physics writer George Musser points outin one googol years. A googol is 10 to the 100th power.

Yeah, thats a long time. (In contrast, the sun is expected to become a red giant and incinerate our planet in a mere five billion years, or five times 10 to the ninth power.) But this dreary prophecy makes all the progress weve achieved seem pathetically insignificant and meaningless, an infinitesimal backward eddy in the universes tsunamilike slide toward eternal night. All our knowledge-seeking will be for naught, because everything we have learned will be forgotten as the universe lapses into utter, irreversible mindlessness.

FREEMAN DYSONS SENTIENT GAS CLOUD

Disturbed by the prospect of cosmic oblivion, scientists have imagined ways in which we can avoid it. A pioneer in such speculation was Freeman Dyson, who died last year at the age of 96. Dyson was provoked into thinking about the long-term fate of the universe in the late 1970s by physicist Steven Weinbergs infamous remark that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

In a 1979 paper, Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe, Dyson asserts that the universe has a point, a purpose, as long as it harbors intelligence. Eons from now, he conjectures, our descendants may occupy other star systems and galaxies, perhaps after shedding their flesh-and-blood bodies and becoming clouds of sentient gas. Dyson presents mathematical arguments that these beings can, through shrewd conservation of energy, maintain the resources needed to survive, cogitate and communicate in an eternally expanding cosmos.

Our descendants will always have plenty to think about, Dyson insists. He takes heart from Kurt Gdels 1931 proof that any system of mathematical axioms is incomplete, posing questions that cannot be answered with those axioms. Gdels incompleteness theorem implies that both mathematics and physical reality will challenge us with inexhaustible problems. Dyson asserts that no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

After I mentioned Dysons paper in a 2018 column, he e-mailed me to point out that his paper is obsolete because it assumed a linearly expanding universe, which the cosmologists believed to be correct in 1979. We now have strong evidence that the universe is accelerating, and this makes a big difference to the future of life and intelligence. Dyson declined to speculate further about our fate in an accelerating cosmos until the observational evidence becomes clearer.

ROGER PENROSES ETERNAL CYCLIC COSMOS

Roger Penrose, who won a Nobel Prize last year, has carried on Dysons project of imagining our cosmic future. In 2005, Penrose was depressing himself by thinking of the wastes of time that stretch ahead of the universe according to the latest cosmological observations, which suggest an ever-accelerating expansion, according to an article in Physics World. Penrose wondered, Who will be around then to be bored by this apparent overpowering eventual tedium?

Penrose overcame his funk by inventing a new model of the universe, conformal cyclic cosmology, which he spells out in his 2010 book Cycles of Time. The theory holds that our increasingly vacuous cosmos will eventually produce a singularity, a rupture in spacetime similar to the big bang. In this way, an expanding universe can spawn new universes, one after the other, ad infinitum.

Better yet, according to Penrose and a collaborator, each new universe can pass on its accumulated information to the next in the form of the cosmic microwave radiation left over from its big bang. That means the microwave radiation pervading our universe might contain messages from previous universes. In the same way, the knowledge we accumulate may be passed on to inhabitants of future universes. Were not so insignificant after all!

Early in his career, moreover, Penrose made a mathematical discovery that lends support to Dysons claim that the universe will never cease to surprise us. Penrose showed that a class of polygons now called Penrose tiles can combine to form aperiodic patterns, which never repeat themselves. Like the incompleteness theorem of Gdel, and like the Game of Life, a cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway, Penrose tiles suggest that even a universe based on simple rules can generate infinite, unpredictable complexity. Nature will always present us with new riddles to solve, if we keep our eyes open.

DAVID DEUTSCH AND THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY

David Deutsch opens his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity by asking: Must progress come to an endeither in catastrophe or in some sort of completionor is it unbounded? Deutschs book is one long argument for unboundedness. (See my review of Deutschs book here and my conversations with him here and here.)

Deutsch asserts that all our progressmoral, political, technological, medical, artistic, scientificstems from our attempts to find good explanations. There will always be more to explain, Deutsch says, because our knowledge of reality will always be incomplete. Deutsch thus dismisses my claim in The End of Science that science might not yield any more insights into nature as profound as evolution, quantum mechanics and the big bang. The discovery of the acceleration of the cosmos, Deutsch argues, contradicts my thesis.

He suggests, moreover that our descendants might harness the dark energy thought to be fueling this cosmic acceleration so that knowledge-creation can continue forever. Heat death? No problem. Deutsch dislikes all human futures that smack of finality. He thus rejects the possibility of a utopia so perfect that we no longer have problems to solve. He told me in 2018 that the world will never be perfected, even when everything we think of as problematic today has been eliminated. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity. Never satisfied.

Deutsch is an adamant advocate of the many-worlds hypothesis, which seeks to explain why, when we observe an electron, we see only one of the many possible trajectories represented by the electrons wave function. The many-worlds hypothesis holds that all the possibilities embodied by the wave function are realized in other universes. When I interviewed him in 2018, Deutsch likened the evidence for alternate realities to the evidence for dinosaurs. Other universes are real, he said, get over it.

I recently asked Deutsch ask if he thought our descendants might be able to jump to other universes to continue knowledge-seeking. In his response, Deutsch showed that his optimism, like that of Dyson and Penrose, is tempered by hard-headed skepticism. Universe-jumping might be possible under certain exotic and highly speculative scenarios, Deutsch said.

But future generations might think it a little comical, he added, for us to be speculating about events 100-plus billon years in the future when our theories of basic cosmology are still changing on a timescale of decades. A bit like someone in 1400 speculating about the future domestication of fire-breathing dragons for steelmaking because their maps speculatively said here be dragons on unexplored regions.

Yes, the prophesies of Dyson, Penrose and Deutsch contradict my claim that science is finite. But we share convictions, too, namely that we will never entirely solve the riddle of reality, and that knowledge-seeking, more than any other endeavor, makes our existence meaningful. Moreover, the older I get, the more my hope that science is infinite outweighs my fear that its not. I guess I have faith in progress after all.

This is an opinion and analysis article.

Further Reading:

The End of Science (updated 2015 edition)

Was I Wrong about The End of Science?

Is Science Infinite?

A Pep Talk from Steven Pinker

Will the Universe Remember Us after Were Gone?

Is David Deutsch's Vision of Endless Understanding Delusional?

I admit to second thoughts about The End of Science in a recent chat on The Jolly Swagman podcast.

I also talk about the limits of knowledge in my online bookMind-Body Problems and my new bookPay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

Visit link:

Can Science Survive the Death of the Universe? - Scientific American

PEDESTRIAN.TV has partnered with Flatmates to help you find your next sharehouse MVP.

Lets get one thing straight sharehouse living can either be the communal utopia of your dreams or your little house of horror. And it depends, almost entirely, on your choice of humans to share said house with.

Now, Ive been sharing houses, bathrooms, fridge space and sometimes, to my absolute disgust towels for the better part of a decade now. Ive lived with everyone from the absolutely anal and downright dirty to the master chef, late-night partier and couch hog.

Ive lived with boyfriends and broken up with boyfriends. Ive lived with besties and made new ones for life. Sharehouse living can be a wild ride, but its also a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I wouldnt swap mine out for nada.

Im currently living in a sharehouse. All through lockdown, we were a peaceful abode comprised of three women, living and working together in zen-like tranquillity. But alas! Our Belgian housemate had to move back across the ocean and we were left to find a post-pandemic stranger to fill the empty room. Talk about daunting! Talk about needing to find the perfect roomie dynamic!

Heres what we did to make sure our new housie fit our vibe and wasnt a rubbish human:

Its one thing to chat online with potential housemates, but Im a firm believer in a face-to-face interview. Youre going to be LIVING with this person, you need to scope their energy, suss their vibe and ask them point-blank if they know how to scrub a bathtub.

We blocked off a week to hold house inspections and subsequently grill every person who walked in the door. Treat it like a job interview, ask the hard questions. Are they dating? Are they vegan? Are they off the booze wagon or on the booze wagon? Do they come with pets? What childhood trauma are they navigating? Whats their love language? Do they like Christmas movies? ASK IT ALL.

Platforms like Flatmates genuinely take all the hard work out of finding new roomies. It works like a dating site, where you plug in all your preferences like age, length of stay and price point rather than tall, dark and handsome and then swipe till you find the one.

Flatmates will filter people into matches based on your preferences (pet-friendly, LGBTQ-friendly, smoking or non-smoking, etc) saving you the hassle of scrolling through a heap of duds who cant afford your room rate. You can even write a bio about yourself and chuck up photos of the pad. Its stress-free and Im very pro it. Plus, I just like matching with people. Call me a narcissist, I dont care!

Okay, so youve got a short list of housemate applicants. The next step you should consider is plugging them into FB / IG / LinkedIn and seeing if youve got any friends in common. You do? Thats good news. Now go ahead and contact these mutual friends and ask them for a discreet, but honest, rundown on the potential roomie.

Its always good to get another persons objective opinion. Think of it as a low-key background check.

This is a no-brainer in todays modern world. Stalk the hell out of them. I know you cant necessarily judge a person based solely on their social media presence, but golly itll give you at least a little bit of insight.

Are they partiers? How do they spend their downtime? Do they seem to be normal and have normal friends and do normal things? How spiritual are they? Do they practice any weird occult rituals? Do they seem to have a stable job? Dont forget to hit up their tagged photos for the juicy, unfiltered stuff.

What would you do in the face of a zombie apocalypse? This question will help you identify their levels of selflessness versus psychopathy. It can also give you insight into their go-to survival methods, which, you never know, could one day come in handy. We are in the midst of a pandemic, after all.

If youre on the hunt for a housemate, just stress less already and start swiping on Flatmates. You wont regret it.

Read more here:

How To Tell If Your New Flatmate Is A Menace To Society Before They Move In - Pedestrian TV

Step inside Superette's new nostalgia-fueled pot playhouse.

Learn how to get your business funded in the Cannabis economy!

June17, 20212 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This week, Canadian cannabis super brand Suprette opened a store in the Glebe section of Ottowa, and honestly we've never seen anything like it.

Thedispensary is a technicolor, Willie Wonka-like stroll into a cannabis utopia. Part boardwalk carnival, part retro diner, and part cannabis store, the store is a joint venture between co-founders Mimi Lamand Drummond Munro.

The creative duo has opened three cannabis stores in the past two yearsandwon a Clio Award for their brand design. But the Glebe store takes their imagination to a whole new level. It even has a claw machine!

"This new store really shows the evolution of Superette as a brand and how we can continue to push the boundaries on our retail experience. From vintage diner to house of mirrors this customer journey will be unlike any other," saysMunro.

Let's take a stroll inside its trippy interior. All photos courtesy ofAlex Lysakowski.

Customers enter the store through aretro-inspired, diner-meets-candy shopand complete their ID check in a vintage custom photo booth. The Superette design team has inverted the traditional white tile/red grout color palette to create an eye-catching red-tiled wall that is anhomage to 1950s Americana and anod to capitalist consumerism with a contemporary twist.

The signature Flower Wallshowcasestheir extensive selection of fresh bud.

Superette Glebe is home to the world's largest cannabis menuso large that the manufacturer made them sign a liability waiver for the marquee.

An arcade-inspired claw machine wrapped in clouds is affectionately named Super Claw, where customers can try their best to snag unexpected prizes ranging from gifts from local designers and artisans and Superette merch to rare paraphernalia and big-ticket surprises.

Visitors can pass through a hidden door disguised behind a refurbished, old-fashioned soda machine and the diner then gives way to the surprise, middle dream space where three fairground-style funhouse mirrors distort reality as you move through the tunnel to reachsky-high ceilinged cannabis storebehind.

The merch shop offers a curated selection of gender-neutral clothing (including their newSuper Strains collection), products, and accessoriesfrom cult brands like Sundae School, Pure Beauty, and Yew Yew.

The rest is here:

This Dispenary Is Part Funhouse, Part Diner, and All Trippy - Green Entrepreneur

Here we go again. Another gang of neo-Nazi white supremacists thinks Maine is the next thing to heaven.

Id recommend anyone in Maine not interested in a white ethnostate to move out of Maine. Because theyre in one, Chris Pohlhaus, aka The Hammer, told me in a text.

Pohlhaus, a 34-year-old former Marine from San Antonio, Texas, is a man on a mission: Move to northern Maine with a band of like-minded misanthropes, buy up all the cheap real estate they can find, stock up on guns, set up their own schools and live nastily ever after.

And, oh yes, no people of color allowed.

It all began back in February, when Pohlhaus, whos cultivated a high profile in the world of rabid white supremacy by selling Nazi banners for banner drops on highway overpasses, opened a chat called Great Maine Migration on the instant messaging platform Telegram.

Vice News ran a story on the chat Monday after obtaining a transcript of the session from the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks extremist groups and, when possible, gums up their operations. The organization sent me a copy of the chat transcript Wednesday, along with Pohlhauss contact information.

Lets start with the transcript.

It reads like a bunch of teenage boys planning an adventure that in all likelihood will never happen. While some said theyre on the verge of pulling up stakes and buying a place in Aroostook or Piscataquis County this summer, others lamented that the only thing holding them back is their bad credit or lack of what one called provable income.

Either way, from where they sit, Maine is some kind of nirvana.

The sheer number of snowmobile/atv trails in Maine is huge. Itll be a good alternative to the regular roads, noted someone calling himself Nurmof. Im starting to map out trails that connect to other friends in the northeast.

Yes, replied Master Orwell. That will be so sick.

Back to Nurmof: A nazi home owners association would be cool too. Anybody can make one. Use the fees as a community safety net. Use the money to build a community center with a gym etc etc.

Find an abandoned house and squat, chimed in Awakened Saxon.

The only way you could do something like that is an abadoned cabin the woods. But even then if found out they will remove you, warned Jack Corke.

And on it went. They exchanged real estate listings. They discussed buying buildings that would make good schools. They went down rabbit holes such as how to protect your electronic equipment from a solar flare, or how former Gov. Paul LePage was great for Maine because he once warned that Black drug dealers were coming to Maine and impregnating white women.

Too bad he isnt still governor, mused Nurmof.

And punctuating it all were racial slurs and stereotypes too offensive to repeat here. If washing mouths out with soap was still an antidote to bad language, this bunch would be speaking in bubbles.

Over it all sat The Hammer. Alluding to Maines reputation as one of the whitest states in the nation, he speculated, Maybe with our efforts we can raise it higher than it is now.

Which brings us to my online conversation with Pohlhaus, the face behind The Hammer.

Over the course of 90 minutes, a portrait emerged of a young man motivated not so much by hatred and anger but by fear. A man who claims to have Black friends, even relatives, on the one hand, but sees people whose skin color doesnt match his as a threat to what I am.

I dont want to go extinct, he wrote after I asked how he feels about people of color. Anyone who is in the way of what I am is an existential threat.

Should he and his fellow neo-Nazis actually make it to Maine, I asked, what kind of reception do they expect?

I will not need a reception, Pohlhaus replied. I have my own people.

Doesnt sound too neighborly, I observed.

I wish I could be neighborly. But people want to destroy me and make me homeless.

He sent me an image of the groups flag. Filling the background are three yellow, orange and red stripes we picked autumn colors to represent maine. The centerpiece is a white swastika. In the upper left corner sits a triple Tyr rune, an ancient pagan German symbol that Pohlhaus said represents victory and it also represents the forest I have distributed maybe 50 of (the flags) so far.

So, what are we dealing with here? A man-child from Texas whos a legend in his own mind? A rerun of Tom Kawczynski, who in 2018 was fired as town manager in Jackman after selectmen learned that he was actually in Maine to establish an all-white community called New Albion?

Or, as white nationalism spreads like a brush fire all over the United States in the post-Trump era, does Pohlhaus represent something more nefarious?

Steve Gardiner is assistant research director at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based nonprofit committed to exposing movements, institutions and ideologies that threaten human rights. Hes watched Pohlhaus emerge over the past two years as a rising star in the neo-Nazi movement and, in an interview Thursday, offered a mix of realism and caution in dealing with uninvited, white nationalist newcomers.

These folks, as obnoxious as they are, are going to live somewhere, Gardiner said. And that means someone is going to be their neighbor, and (somewhere) is going to be their town.

But at the same time, he said, chatter like Great Maine Migration goes on all the time. Often, he said, its just that idle blather about a white separatist utopia that will never materialize.

If these guys did everything that they said they were going to do in a chat room, the country would have been in flames long ago, Gardiner said.

Still, he cautioned, its a mistake to ignore Pohlhaus and his ilk outright.

The point is to right-size the threat, to pay attention, he said. And when they start coming, you dont organize to get rid of them.

Rather, Gardiner continued, you demonstrate to them that your neck of the woods is not what they envisioned. You vocally support the most vulnerable in your midst, organize community fundraisers and activities that run blatantly counter to neo-Nazis toxic belief system. You make them feel unwelcome not with confrontation, but by simply holding fast to the way life should be.

Good advice. Time will tell whether well need it.

In our one-on-one conversation, Pohlhaus actually tried to convince me how lucky we Mainers are.

We must move somewhere and in my opinion maine is the perfect choice, he wrote. You should be flattered we think so highly of you to get so many people so excited on the move.

Flattered? Try repulsed.

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Bill Nemitz: Neo-Nazis moving to northern Maine? Say it ain't so - Press Herald

Welcome to Sims 4 cottagecoreScreenshot: EA

Tons of people turned back to wasting hours playing Sims 4 during the pandemic, but Sims didnt seem to catch up much with what its supposed demographicadolescents are into. Okay well, with the exception theStar Wars expansion packthat, to be fair, is pretty cool (in part because you can marry Kylo Ren, if thats your thing). The outfits available in the game are still painfully 2000s, and the only semblance of social media is Instagramthough its perhaps better that in this utopia, Twitter doesnt exist. But the Sims developers are finally paying attention to what the TikTok crowd wants.

Sims 4 is coming out with a Cottage Living expansion pack on July 22, and in case you needed more convincing to buy itSims got Japanese Breakfast to record a version of Be Sweet for the trailer. Japanese Breakfast joins the ranks of other bands thatve had the honor of creating Simlish versions of their songs. Those lucky artists include: Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen, Car Seat Headrest, Paramore, and The Black Eyed Peas.

Besides giving us the expectations that this Simlish version of Be Sweet will be available on the game, the expansion pack includes fairytale-worthy homes, cute barnyard animals (with the option of making them wear sweaters, if you want to go full Disney), flower booths, town fairs, and Stardew Valley-style farming. Its been a while since Sims has released an expansion pack worth spending money on when countless creators have made their own custom content for the game thats better than anything EA has come up with, but this seems worth spending money on. After all, you can only hear Shane ramble on about how much he hates himself on Stardew Valley before you need a change of scenery. Might as well play something where you can have a storybook life.

Read more from the original source:

Sims 4 is introducing cottagecore to the game with a new expansion pack - The A.V. Club

The title of this years Liverpool Biennial, The Stomach and the Port, postponed from 2020, refers to the central role the city played in the Atlantic slave trade. Almost half of Liverpools trade was with Africa and the Caribbean in the second half of the 18th century, with one in five enslaved people brought through its port, which was also used for importing goods like tobacco, coffee and sugar from the New World. You know the Beatles song Penny Lane (1967)? James Penny was a slave trader.

Theexhibition at Tate Liverpool (which has its own, less direct relationship to slavery) is curated by Manuela Moscoso. The press release states that the works are interlinked through [] feminism as a form of rebellion against the dominant narratives of white, heterosexual, male power and a political orientation that takes as its aim the liberation of the many over the few, regardless of gender. This is a laudable and urgent aim, but the show has a rather dated perspective on feminist art, as well as a somewhat blinkered approach to the aims of the biennial itself.

Ines Doujak and John Barker, Masterless Voices, 2014. Installation view at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Global strategies of revolt drive Ines Doujak and John Barkers Masterless Voices (2014), a carnivalesque musical by the Austrian artist and British writer, exploring themes of rebellion and utopia through a series of surrealist video vignettes. The work begins with a prologue featuring stomach microbes dressed as harlequins with overlarge heads and exaggerated curls that look in a moment of eerie prescience like COVID-19 spikes. One of the gut flora stands at a DJs mixing table, which looks like its being used to build a bomb, singing about drums, personal trainers, love and rage; of masterless voices/singing songs in the dark. The rest is surreal, sparkly and kinetic: a mountain dances by itself, voiced by a throat singer describing how men sought glory climbing his skin, then plumbed his insides to see what he was worth. Cut to a carnival in Bolivia; brass players, drumming, dancing; all the festivities of the gut now out in the air. Cut to a group of Black men dancing in a small courtyard, joined by a younger boy who looks overjoyed to be there.

As joyful and beautiful as these dancers are, there is something off in the way they perform for a film directed by two white artists. The men make a strange and troubling parallel to the harlequin stomach dancers. If the biennial is meant to call attention to economic systems whereby white people get rich off the labour of Black people, Masterless Voices feels suspiciously like more of the same. Whatever these men were paid for their dancing, its hard to imagine it equating to the commission the artists are likely to have received for their work, and the cultural capital they accrue by means of it.

Judy Chicago, Through the Flower #3, 1972. Courtesy: the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco;photograph: Donald Woodman/ARS, New York

American artist Martine Symss Borrowed Lady (2016) stages a smarter challenge to the circulation of Black bodies through a process of mimicry: on four screens, artist and poet Diamond Stingily mimes gestures and facial expressions typically used by white people in reaction gifs on social media. Images and text jump from one screen to the next against a purple backdrop. Building on Symss ongoing investigation into the social history and dissemination of emotive movements, particularly in relation to Black femininity, Borrowed Lady captures not only the racial politics of social media but also its hyperactive state of distraction.

The undoubted star of the show, however, is Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson, with her dazzling and difficult contributions fraughtfor those who bear/bare witness (2018) and when the cry takes root (2021). These two, enormous, multi-layered tapestries drip with decorations: fake butterflies; dusty, wilting flowers; photographs; a sequin hummingbird; a big, jewelled spider; a diamant lizard. Everything natural made artificial, like Jean des Esseintess jewelled tortoise, which collapses under the weight of its own embellished shell in Joris-Karl Huysmanss novel Against Nature (1884). The effect is an explosion of texture, a riot; there is violence here. The outlines looks like continents Europe, Asia where there are no borders, just tears in fabric and needlepoint; the sense that the work is not just built up, but that it might actually be in a state of entropy.

Martine Syms, Borrowed Lady, 2016. Installation view at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial 2021. Photography: Rob Battersby

Specially commissioned for this show, when the cry takes root is essentially a giant tapestry ship, partly suspended from the ceiling by fishing line, as if caught while drifting along the gallery floor. At its prow, a peacock perches on gold conch shells like Venus rising from the waves, its feathers made of black Mardi Gras beads (complementing the carnival theme in Masterless Voices); beads spill off the vessel on both sides, which is bordered by racy kitchen gloves trimmed in red lace. Brown hands stick out here and there, one palm up in a wave or to beseech or just to stretch in this long journey across the Atlantic. Beneath all the glove ruffles is a dead body made of glass. These seemingly infinite details are part of the point; the work of art is inescapably kitsch in the face of slavery and colonialist exploitation, but we piece it together anyway, because thats all we can do: keep endlessly gluing sequins to our tapestries.

While the intersectional approaches of these video works overlap with histories of womens liberation, they differ from other more self-consciously feminist pieces on show, like Judy Chicagos Through the Flower No. 24 (1972), which despite being seen as a foundational series in the field of feminist art seems to suggest, reductively, that the female body is organized around a central absence. The punk photomontages on display by Linder are not her best or wittiest, in my view, although the crowded layering of nude men, women, flowers and bugs (one models stockings cunningly echoing a bright yellow caterpillar) frolicking in some Edenic space in Daughter of the Waters (2017) nicely echoes Pattersons work. Still, for Chicagos central-core imagery and Linders pin-up girls, however subversive, to be the shows most explicitly feminist artworks felt narrow and frustrating. Hanging nearby, the swoopy genital shapes in British surrealist Ithell Colquhouns paintings, such as Earth Process (1940) which are much weirder and more explicit in their global, earthy message of seasonal cycles and energy taken from and given back to the earth looked essentialist in their company.

Linder, Bower of Bliss, 2021. Installation view at Liverpool ONE. Photography: Mark McNulty

The final room speaks back to Chicagos images with ironic, knowing intent. The German artist Jutta Koethers A380 naked (2020) shows us an airplane with boobs against a sky of boobs, with a border made of boobs and beautiful, amorphous markings on the bottom, like scarves being waved in semaphore all of it in the brightest shades of pink and orange. Building on the artists ongoing inquiry into the creaturely aspect of inanimate objects, this feminization of a technology not widely associated with women is a defiant statement in favour of prettiness in art, and a redemption of colours and images associated with femininity. As the trans writer Andrea Long Chu writes in her 2019 book Females: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.

Main image:Ebony G. Patterson,when the cry takes root, 2021, installation view at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial.Courtesy: the artist and Liverpool Biennial; photograph: Rob Battersby

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The Liverpool Biennial's Blinkered Approach to Feminist Art - frieze.com

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat. I dont much care where said Alice. Then it doesnt matter which way you go, said the Cat. so long as I get somewhere, Alice added as an explanation. Oh, youre sure to do that, said the Cat, if you only walk long enough. Lewis Carrol, Alices Adventures in Wonderland

Every body has its dark side. That goes for individual and collective bodies alike. Every multitude, every community, every collective has its labyrinths with no way out. And this is so because of the confusion that arises betwixt notions of singular and plural, because of the evil spirit that hovers between I and us. In this very abyss, the multitude reflects itselfbecause the multitude has uniting but also destructive power. And this is the case with political movements: political thought from antiquity to the present has been founded on the differentiation between the one and the several, the many. But the multitude is both the one and the many at the same time.

This is the space in which the key political, but also ontological, battles of our present take place. The combat erupts from questions of: How to create a community within the arena of biopower without killing off the individual? How to create a collective, and not some zombifying crowdedness, while living in a democracy that is currently being transformed into a discursive category debated at conferences? How to create a body, a Hamletian body that will stand against and redefine the imposed lie of capitalism, of injustice?

The new nature of the political body resembles a singular, disoriented tissue that refuses its own organic unity. Civically, aesthetically, and economically speaking, it is a body without organs. It is a Hamletmachine, which, in Heiner Mllers telling, is not Hamlet. I dont play a role anymore, his protagonist says. My words have nothing more to tell me. My thoughts suck the blood out of the images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the set is being built. By people my drama doesnt interest, for people it doesnt concern. It doesnt interest me anymore either. I wont play along anymore. Earlier in the play, when he was Hamlet, this Hamletmachine stood on the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA, at [his] back, the ruins of Europe. He goes on:

The bells sounded in the state funeral, murderer and widow a pair, the town councilors in goose-step behind the coffin of the High Cadaver, wailing in badly-paid grief: WHO IS THE CORPSE IN THE MEAT-WAGONS STY / FOR WHOM IS THERE SUCH A HUE AND CRY? / THE CORPSE IS OF A GREAT / GIVER OF ESTATE. The pillar of the population, work of his statecraft: HE WAS A MAN WHO ONLY TOOK ALL FROM ALL. I stopped the corpse-train, sprang the coffin with my sword, broke it to the hilt, succeeded with the blunt remains, and distributed the dead progenitor FLESH ENJOINS HAPLY FLESH to the surrounding faces of misery.1

It can be concluded that it is not easy to understand the identity or anatomy of this non-Hamlet, and all that he may represent. His is a dying body, but one that is not fully aware of its mortality.

Post-emancipatory epochs are characterized by the entropy of traditional social bodies. The new social body fights the old urge to remain in a subordinate, largely comfortable position. It aims to create a dynamic landscape of relations, as opposed to the hitherto static one. Long-established social bodies demarcate the culture of silence. Emerging ones aim to articulate whats been stifled.

We must learn what this new body, this fresh tissue, can do. The tissue of the multitude is in a constant state of avoidance: of the tendency to drown in power, of the unpleasant aspects of culture, of capitalist norms. Its flesh cannot be ensnared by the imperatives imposed by dominant cultural dogmas, because it cannot fit into the molds cast by traditional political hierarchies.

This projected, but also in some social pockets realized, multitude is an open, expansive network where all differences can be freely and equally expressed. It offers tools for living and working together through encounters with our own disappearance. We live in a time of omnipresence, of the cult of availability. All of this emphasizes our disappearance from the space of relations, and our absence from ourselves. We float in the illusion that we are embodied in our community; in fact, only our shadows reside there.

The project of assembling a true multitude demands a participative global society built on equity. Today, however, rotting ideologies and a particular, constant socioeconomic state of exception endanger the possibility of a democratic, multitudinous body. All of the above, along with our constant state of anxiety, is dictated by capital and a false sense of freedom. The latter has been manufactured on the premise of an emancipatory, democratic utopia, and has all the effect of a billboard slogan. In fact, what we may believe to be freedom is a continued state of captivity generated by various nodes of power.

The common social body is a viable matrix that resides within the very core of the production and reproduction of contemporary society. It carries the potential to create a new and alternative society, or at least new, alternative communities. These communities are comprised of an amorphous tissue that has yet to form a new body. Their armature should be built with entwined fibers of resistance and critical social inclusion. They are, in essence, friendships formed for the public good. In order to hold their shape, they must develop tactics for maintaining deep social insight and a willingness to combat all carcinogenic political phenomena. They are the nuclei of cells that will be mobilized for creative confrontation. Individual integrity and diversity will become a vital organ of the common social body.

And who or what exactly will form that type of body? Will it be molded from the service industries of capital, or will it crystalize under the pressure of marginalization? Is this body going to be the new Frankensteins Monster or Cabalas Golemboth of them yearning for love and acceptance, each a paradigm of the excluded, the unwanted? Certainly, this new social body can be reduced to a productive organ of the eclipsing global figure of capital. But there is another possibility for autonomous organization through a particular power of the tissue. The power of the collective body is to transform itself.

To experience the real is to experience horror, which is often accepted as normal or even invisible. Horror is of course material and present, and our individual, social, and political bodies are shaped in large part by either responding to it or not. However, the current social body, especially as it functions under panoptical power, sometimes has an easier time accepting existent horror as simply an illusion of reality, as some unpleasant, walking daydream that never escapes the realm of the suppressed.

We need to see that our conceptions of reality have been hijacked by the unjust, fragmented social body designed for profit and by the absence of an applicablenot only discursiveidea of the commons. In other words, we must clarify our collective vision and rearticulate the real. If we do not want to experience entropy on every social level, we need new modes of production (of life), of understanding the meaning and function of community. If we, the emerging social body, want to be situated in a reality based on political and even aesthetic solidarity, we need to create an autonomous zone of trust between individuals who share a vision of an emancipatory community that relies on mutual care. In the present world, in the life offered by our state and political apparatuses, we can see, as if through a palimpsest, the dominion of carelessness. The dream, then, is to create space for a multitude of concepts and opinions that will not be operatively blocked by dominant political narratives based on particular interests. This zone of trust can overcome the provincial and personal existential fears that plague the present. It can encourage a fearless step away from imposed political concepts and cultural behaviors, a horizon which will in turn move continually further away.

We must also create strategies for constructive confrontations. In the present era, the dominant social body wishes to avoid seeing radical otherness, precariousness, discomfort. This body wishes to be safe, comfortable even in its suffering. The illuminated billboards of today advertise the following slogan: better to be in submission than at risk. If others do not agree with us, we leave the conversation at that; we do not try to penetrate their otherness. If the other suffers, too, then that is their own problem. Death is the only force or topic that can bring us back from our shared, fear-induced coma. We must reinvent risk and adventure and work against certainty. It is of urgent importance to search for new, confrontational forms of political imagination.

The new topography of economic, cultural, and political hierarchies transcends national borders. Today, processes of state legitimization rest upon the biopolitical productivity of power. We need to find a way to recognize the warning signs of new and extant forces that drive injustice and internal socioeconomic and cultural tensions. In such vigilance we can recognize the potential of our contemporary world. We live in a state of global apartheid. It is not only a system of exclusion, but also a productive systemone that produces representations of power. This is common for developed, democratic spheres full of discourse dedicated to equality, inclusion, diversity. However, the language of democracy is often inapplicable to reality, and it remains on the level of populist advertisement.

Democracy has remained an unfinished project throughout modernity, trapped in its fragmentary national and local forms. The processes of globalization in recent decades have only added to its challenges. The primary obstacle to democracy, however, is the permanent state of exception mentioned above. Therefore, the dream has been irretrievably lost, a project with pieces strewn and buried under panoptical weapons and security regimes.

Global society is being read as a regime of global security. And of course, political scientists say that existing nation-states and the old international order can no longer protect us from the threats facing our world today. They maintain that various new forms of sovereignty need to be created in order to manage the conflict between the world and itself. None of their arguments, however, allows for a full realization of the concept of democracy, since they all preserve the organization of social elements in an organic political body, thus inescapably reducing freedom for action, and establishing hierarchies among them. The democratic multitude cannot be a political bodynot in its modern shape, at least.

Robert Wilson, Hamletmachine,Kunsthalle,1986,Hamburg.Photo:Friedemann Simon.

I cant stand fear. I hate being afraid. There is only one way to free yourself from fear. It leads to its core. Peter Hoeg, Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow

Let us not deceive ourselves: we are afraid. Very much afraid. We tremble like cherry blossoms in the wind at the very thought of fear itself. And because of that, we cannot even recognize fear, articulate it, name it. We are also afraid of the absence of fear.

At present, we live in cruel times in which market parameters are also applied to practices of ontological exchangeof identities, thoughts, and feelings. The psycho-dynamics of this exchange determine the paths our lives take. And this journey goes by extremely fast. This speediness produces an even bigger emptiness, where we are losing exactly what we are trying to exchange. Enticed by the mystery of new individualisms, we have tripped and fallen down a rabbit hole. At this moment, a collective, or if you wish, cloned, Alice rules the roost. She is endlessly reflected in microscopic prisms that she hopes will clearly reveal all aspects of her journey. Hers is a quest to make distinctions between communities and mobs, between critical and creative resistance to the silently, democratically, and consensually accepted suppressive concepts of social order. She still proceeds, intent on creating maps of specific trajectories that will lead to a common space. Alices journey this time is not in Wonderland, but in the land where our longing and our bodies are thrown on the garbage heap of economic and political violence. Alice finds herself in the infinity of emptiness, in a hall of mirrors showing crooked images of reality instead of what shed wished to see. In these reflections, reality is simulated through a false overcrowding of activities, actions, products, projects, worksall sorts of engaged acceleration. And the rabbit is always late and never manages to get to the most important tea party. And he is confused because the celebration is still going on, but without him. Fear has become the only consistent thing that can retrieve and construct the stories we tell about our wholeness, about the justification of our existence here and nowour avowals that we are not virtual, that our lives are not phantasms, that we are not writing them out by following certain commands. And nothing but the fear of our own impermanence feels more fitting to provoke our reflections on community. Nothing is more disturbing than the entropy of the idea that the community is property jointly owned by the subjects that join in it.

In the cauldron of this entropy of identities and in the semantic worthlessness of their definition and naming, we are left only with fear. The fear we are aware of stands against the fear that is not yet articulated and is suppressed. We refuse to consider it the principal force behind the evil done in its wake. As such, fear has become one of the most exciting emotions, a refuge from our endless, sorrowful drifting from birth to death. By knowing our fear, we get stronger, we get nobler, we overcome it, while the Other, for whom this fear remains the single motor for practicing power, paradoxically weakens. Fear can provoke an illusion that simulates a longing for life. Sometimes we stoke fear by not facing it and resolving it in the first place. Fear activates the feeling that we are alive, that we have a kind of motive for living. But we fail to notice that this fear is, in fact, our death.

But what kind of fear are we talking about? We are talking about a fear of the anesthetized man who has distanced himself from everything that can make him face himself, the Other, or even the very meaning of FEAR itself, laid bare and recognized. The man who does not know that he is afraid is like a crystal glass on the verge of being broken into a thousand pieces with a single touch.

And therefore, His Majesty, FEAR, remains enthroned. The present is marked by a lack of communication, or to put it more correctly, an onslaught of hypertrophic, empty communication codes, charged with high-frequency public and private noise, with the rhythm of indifference keeping the beat. Were locked in a struggle to invent an apathetic, automatized, pleasant coexistence that is supposed to camouflage the discontents of culture. Fear becomes the second name for the thing that is to remind us, not of life, but of being alive.

We are afraid of making decisions, of travelling, flying, staying put, being jolly, crying, of loving, of commitments, of looking at ourselves through the eyes of the Other, of being gentle, different, silent, saying no, saying yes, of confrontation, of standing up. We are afraid of freedom although we keep summoning it and dreaming about it (but we say to ourselves, it is all right, it should stay there, in the sphere of the unconscious, because it is easier to be subjugated than freefreedom demands responsibility and love!). We hate terrorism and violence, but we would not know what to do without them. We are appalled by the ruthlessness of political crime, but we say to ourselves, woe betide if we are to deal with ourselves and our evil, and not with the unconscionable stupidity of others. We fear that the film tape of our life will be clumsily cut by some bad editor during the most important sequencethe scene that was going to finally show our true face, in soft focus. And while fearing, we hide our fear behind the cloak of fearlessness. We cover up all the fears mentioned above by persistently and repeatedly practicing them in vain.

We know that the fluid life we lead is a result of inconstancy, taking place in a situation of sustained uncertainty. The hardest and most acute concern that haunts the fluid life is the anxiety that one will not keep pace with time, with swiftly changing eventsthat one will miss the sell-by date, that one will be overcrowded by the things one owns but no longer needs, that one will miss the moment that signals a change in direction. This fluid life is an endless string of new beginningsand for that very reason, the ends come quickly too.

Disjointedness, incoherence, and surprise are common phenomena. We might not even be able to live without them anymore; they have become inherent to our sense of self and community. Our warped conception of joy can no longer be fed with anything else but sudden changes and new stimuli. We cannot stand anything that lasts.

That is why fluidity is the other determinant, for better or for worse, that shapes our bodies, our communities. Our being fluid is a suitable metaphor to help us understand the nature of the present, which is, by many indicators, a new stage in the history of modernity. We spill out, we diffuse, we leak, we melt. And thus, we discover the cracks and crevices in the body of life through which we manage to escape from the unpleasant and uncomfortable, from radical otherness, perhaps undamaged. This process of leakage and escape stands in contrast to the experience of the solid bodies among usthose which are, in biopolitical terms, desirable, healthy, incontestable, and which dont ruin the perfect, imagined backdrop of societys stage. Solid bodies do not have critical capacities and they ignore the fact of our universal finitude. By facing the finiteness, we, the less solid, face the fragility of the community, the fact of losing our loved ones and values. Contemporary times have found solid bodies in a particularly advanced stage of denial and decomposition.

How to address all of this decay in our midst? The key idea behind democratic socialism, which could help us resolve many dilemmas (without, one hopes, becoming the new religion), is to have institutions (including educational institutions and modes of political thinking) that enable individuals to lead their lives in full recognition of their dependence on others and on collective projects. And it is crucial for democratic socialism to have institutions in which people participate, because we recognize ourselves and our freedom in their shape. This participationincluding in the care work we acknowledge as necessary for the maintenance of our societyshould not be forced, but rather motivated by our active commitment. The primary task of our democratic society is to be organized in such a manner as to motivate us to contribute and transform its current life span, owing to the fact that we have been educated to fulfil our spiritual freedom. This fulfilment must also include the opportunity to criticize or reject the preestablished forms of participation. Just as the institution of marriage is not an institution of freedom unless it allows for the legal possibility of divorce, democratic socialism as an institution of freedom must also offer a practical possibility to refuse to partake in a given form of life. Otherwise, our participation will not be free, but a result of material concerns.

Nothing appears more suitable and more necessary in this moment than the reconsideration of the notion of community. The old idea of community as shared property is problematic at best. The fluid modernity we inhabit consists of societies in which conditions change faster than their members can imagine, faster than it takes improvised modes of functioning to consolidate into habits and routines. These fluid contemporary communities, just like fluid life, cannot maintain the same shape, nor keep moving in the same direction.

Eric Hobsbawm noted: Never was the word community used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life.2 He proceeds to say that people look for groups to belong to, temporarily or permanently, in a world in which everything else moves and shifts and nothing else is certain. And at the very moment when the community collapses, identity is invented. The community is a home that, for the majority of people, is just a fairy tale rather than the reality of their personal experience.

What is the confusion, then, that arises with respect to the community and the individualwhat is the trap? To be an individual means to be unlike anybody else. To be an individual means I am what I am. The problem with this is that the others that are the same, and from whom you cannot differ, are the very same people who incite you to be different. This is what we call a community, a society, in which you are only one of many members, only one in the mass of people, known and unknown, who expect you and everyone you know to possess undeniable proof that you are individuals, made different from others, either by someone else or by yourself. In the society of individuals, it is expected that everyone should be an individual. But paradoxically, not only are differences completely annulled, but everyone is also exceptionally similar to each other. They have to follow the same life strategy and use shared, recognizable, and readable signs that convince others that they are actually acting as individuals. They announce their autonomy, in other words, by the book.

Individuality belongs to the spirit of the crowd and to the demands imposed by that crowd. To be an individual means to be similar to everyone else among the manyeven identical to everyone else. Under such conditions, when individuality is a universal must and everyones burden, the only thing one can do to be different and truly individual is to try not to be an individual, and that is indeed very hard. This is the Gordian knot of the presentan almost unsolvable problem. It is not only logically contradictory; it is also a practical task whose solution haunts us from cradle to grave. We have no choice but to follow the path that will cause us to probe deeper inside ourselves, which appears as the best refuge in an already overcrowded and noisy world of experiences that resembles a marketplace. We seek to wander inside ourselves, unpolluted and intact, untouched by external pressures.

Individuality is the final product of societal transformation. The rise of individuality marks the progressive weakening of the dense network of social relations, and this marks the loss of the power of the community or the loss of interest in the normative regulation of its members. This normative emptiness is filled with a new ordering of the social space that leaves out of its focus all interpersonal relations, as well as the microworld of closeness and directness.

The relation between secrets and responsibility, that is to say, between the mysterious/sacral and responsibility, is perhaps of key importance in the articulation of the conditions under which those of us interested in fostering an emergent social body are now trying to build community. Many philosophers, Martin Hgglund among them, warn of the danger of the daimonic (divine) as a sort of plundering whose effect, and sometimes paramount purpose, is to remove all responsibilitythat is, to cause a loss of the meaning of responsibility and to annul our awareness of it.

We humans tend to incline towards the daimonic, to the authoritarian, to the concept of deus ex machina, and we do all of this in order to avoid responsibility. The daimonic must be correlated with responsibilitya relation that does not initially exist. The daimonic is first defined through irresponsibility, or, if you wish, through the absence of responsibility. It belongs to a space where the command to be responsible for has not echoed yet: the call for being responsible for oneself, for ones actions and thoughts, for the other, has not been heard yet. The genesis of responsibility is not related to the history of religion or to religiosity. It should instead be analyzed in relation to the genealogy of the subject who says I, to the genealogy of the relation of this I to itself as an instance of freedom, of uniqueness, and of responsibility, of the relation to itself as an existence before the otherothers with their endless alterity, the ones who see without being seen, but also the ones whose endless goodness gifts an experience that can be reduced to gifting death. To gift death: this expression is equivocal.

Trapped in historicity, we can ask ourselves whether the communities that read themselves based on national identity can perceive their own history as a history of responsibility, illuminated by pain. Is historicity the idea that kills the political and annihilates the aesthetic? If a historian of national identities fails to interrelate historicity with responsibility, for all that this history tells ofwhich is typical, for example, of Europe, and perhaps of all humanitythis historian will reveal the defeating fact that historical knowledge is used to mystify, block, and satiate all questions, all foundations, but also all abysses. In the very heart of our history, our present, and perhaps also our future, there exists one such abyssa huge cleft that opposes the longing for change, emancipation, and a redefinition of all quandaries regarding our history, to the political and ethical responsibilities of the community.

Stanisaw Lem Garden of Experiences,Czyyny, Krakw, Poland. Photo: CC BY 3.0/Wikimedia Commons.

Last night I dreamt about reality. What a relief it was to wake up! Stanisaw Lem

Oblivion, rejection, erasure, and effortless replacementthese are the new paradigms for survival, for sparing us from bare life. And for this very reason, this life could be characterized as the story of a constant, uninterrupted string of endings.

The paradigms we live by in our societal, cultural, political, and even artistic spaces are the following: creative destruction, uncertainty as value, and instability as fear and motivation. The most contemporary survival skill is a sort of acceptance of disorientation, immunity to fainting, adjustment to vertigo. It is clear that our new collective body does not foster, but is rather a result of, inconstancy; it moves fluidly to occupy its place in a continuous state of uncertainty. In this space we must create an alternative collective body, one that squirms and cries in pain. In the maelstrom of death we must build new models of communityautonomous zones of trust.

The world is at war again. This is not a traditional conflict between sovereign political entities, that is, nation-states; there are new, supranational forms of sovereigntya global empire that has changed the forms and nature of war and of political and economic, and even aesthetic, violence. War has become an immanent part of the quotidian, and it is in communication with infinity.

As Giorgio Agamben emphasizes in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, there is nothing more important in times of oppression and unbearable confrontation with bare life than to become a witness, archiving the memory of suffering.

Bearing in mind the political, cultural, and economic context in which we live, which produces a meaningless void in a fld of action and information, it seems all the more important to become responsible witnesses to the hidden traps in our societies. We are losing ourselves in this void, even as we work to renew the idea of the commons, community, and togetherness. The societies in which we live inflict noble, invisible humiliation, violence, and even tyranny (in addition to the very visible versions of these). Witnessing and making visible all of the tools of suffering is not a step toward resentment and revenge, but rather a foundation for launching a constructive battle against what Virginia Woolf terms the false tyranny of plot. Since we inhabit the very core of several overlapping tyrannies (capitalist, ecological, climate, populist), with foreseeable complications but unforeseeable resolutions, it is our duty to be authors, artists, and creators not only of resolution but also of complications. We must not allow anyone else to create our own tyranny of plot. We must remain a creative, authorial, and conceptual step ahead of the tyrant.

In the early stages of the transformations that produced todays world, young Karl Marx noted in one of his secondary-school essays that at sunset, moths fly toward the lights inside peoples houses. When imagining what our contemporary light-in-the-dark might be, what comes to mind are the individuals and small groups appearing all over the world with a still-hushed but extremely important voice for the voiceless, for a more just society. And indeed, the attraction of night-lights grows proportionally with the darkening of the external world.

Iskra Geshoska is a cultural worker and writer, with a main focus on critical theory, political philosophy, and developing new interdisciplinary models in contemporary art and cultural practices. She is a founder of Kontrapunkt and CRIC, a platform for critical culture (kontrapunkt-mk.org).

2021 e-flux and the author

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The Collective Alice, or, on Fear, Death, Multitudes, and Pain - E-Flux