#intellectualhistory — Public Fediverse posts

What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?

https://www.thinkingcomplete.com/2017/09/what-have-been-greatest-intellectual.html

#HackerNews #greatestachievements #intellectualhistory #knowledgeinnovation #thoughtleadership #criticalthinking

NEU: #WerkstattGeschichte 93 »grenzen internalisieren«!
🧵 5/

@frankwolff beleuchtet die wichtige Rolle, die #Kolonialität im Prozess der europäischen Integration für die Herausbildung eines europäischen Selbstverständnisses in Abgrenzung nach außen und von der Vergangenheit spielte:
➡️ https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-93-frank-wolff

@histodons

#histodons #Europa #EU #Kolonialismus #Grenze #BorderStudies #KalterKrieg #IntellectualHistory

NEU: #WerkstattGeschichte 93 »grenzen internalisieren«!
🧵 5/

@frankwolff beleuchtet die wichtige Rolle, die #Kolonialität im Prozess der europäischen Integration für die Herausbildung eines europäischen Selbstverständnisses in Abgrenzung nach außen und von der Vergangenheit spielte:
➡️ https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-93-frank-wolff

@histodons

#histodons #Europa #EU #Kolonialismus #Grenze #BorderStudies #KalterKrieg #IntellectualHistory

NEU: #WerkstattGeschichte 93 »grenzen internalisieren«!
🧵 5/

@frankwolff beleuchtet die wichtige Rolle, die #Kolonialität im Prozess der europäischen Integration für die Herausbildung eines europäischen Selbstverständnisses in Abgrenzung nach außen und von der Vergangenheit spielte:
➡️ https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-93-frank-wolff

@histodons

#histodons #Europa #EU #Kolonialismus #Grenze #BorderStudies #KalterKrieg #IntellectualHistory

NEU: #WerkstattGeschichte 93 »grenzen internalisieren«!
🧵 5/

@frankwolff beleuchtet die wichtige Rolle, die #Kolonialität im Prozess der europäischen Integration für die Herausbildung eines europäischen Selbstverständnisses in Abgrenzung nach außen und von der Vergangenheit spielte:
➡️ https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-93-frank-wolff

@histodons

#histodons #Europa #EU #Kolonialismus #Grenze #BorderStudies #KalterKrieg #IntellectualHistory

NEU: #WerkstattGeschichte 93 »grenzen internalisieren«!
🧵 5/

@frankwolff beleuchtet die wichtige Rolle, die #Kolonialität im Prozess der europäischen Integration für die Herausbildung eines europäischen Selbstverständnisses in Abgrenzung nach außen und von der Vergangenheit spielte:
➡️ https://werkstattgeschichte.de/abstracts/nr-93-frank-wolff

@histodons

#histodons #Europa #EU #Kolonialismus #Grenze #BorderStudies #KalterKrieg #IntellectualHistory

Book Club: Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

https://boffosocko.com/2026/03/08/book-club-yuval-noah-hararis-nexus-a-brief-history-of-information-networks-from-the-stone-age-to-ai/

If every action shapes tomorrow, which habit in your life deserves more care right now? #CauseAndEffect #HumanBehavior #Responsibility #SocialOrder #RationalThought #Stoicism #IntellectualHistory #ScientificThinking #PersonalAccountability #SharedWisdom #ModernLife #BetterLiving
https://spiritulality.stayingalive.in/inspiring-harmony/nothing-happens-by-accident.html

If every action shapes tomorrow, which habit in your life deserves more care right now? #CauseAndEffect #HumanBehavior #Responsibility #SocialOrder #RationalThought #Stoicism #IntellectualHistory #ScientificThinking #PersonalAccountability #SharedWisdom #ModernLife #BetterLiving
https://spiritulality.stayingalive.in/inspiring-harmony/nothing-happens-by-accident.html

If every action shapes tomorrow, which habit in your life deserves more care right now? #CauseAndEffect #HumanBehavior #Responsibility #SocialOrder #RationalThought #Stoicism #IntellectualHistory #ScientificThinking #PersonalAccountability #SharedWisdom #ModernLife #BetterLiving
https://spiritulality.stayingalive.in/inspiring-harmony/nothing-happens-by-accident.html

👉🎯"Intellectual history has long suffered from a materialist deficit. The discipline, as Samuel Moyn argues, is in sore need of “a theory of ideology” that conceptualizes ideas as not merely intellectual but also material forces. Absent an awareness of the social dimension of ideas, Moyn contends, intellectual history risks sliding into idealism, substituting a theory of discursive context for what should be one of social relations.

In Moyn’s work, intellectual history stands accused of operating on an “implausible” theory of historical agency and change. It imagines ideas to arise at the point where historical context meets writerly intention but, in doing so, fails to acknowledge that both history and intention are themselves socially and materially conditioned. This leaves it generally ill equipped to confront the role ideas play in perpetuating and justifying material inequalities or relations of dominance.

We are seeing the effects of this analytical deficit today. As we bear witness to far-reaching shifts in not only the political economy but the intellectual life of advanced capitalist societies, our capacity to interpret how we got here appears pallid and incomplete." 🎯👈

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/02/stuart-hall-ideology-and-neoliberalisms-reactionary-drift/

#Neoliberalism #Ideology #Idealism #Materialism #PoliticalEconomy #IntellectualHistory

Ancient Alexandria, founded by Alexander, became the world’s greatest intellectual hub — home to the Library, Musaeum, astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians. Its loss erased centuries of knowledge forever.
#AncientAlexandria #LostLibrary #IntellectualHistory #AncientScience#Storytelling #DidYouKnow #HistoryFacts #DocumentaryShort #WeirdHistory
Read more:https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/ancient-alexandria-city-0019944

Ancient Alexandria, founded by Alexander, became the world’s greatest intellectual hub — home to the Library, Musaeum, astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians. Its loss erased centuries of knowledge forever.
#AncientAlexandria #LostLibrary #IntellectualHistory #AncientScience#Storytelling #DidYouKnow #HistoryFacts #DocumentaryShort #WeirdHistory
Read more:https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/ancient-alexandria-city-0019944

Ancient Alexandria, founded by Alexander, became the world’s greatest intellectual hub — home to the Library, Musaeum, astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians. Its loss erased centuries of knowledge forever.
#AncientAlexandria #LostLibrary #IntellectualHistory #AncientScience#Storytelling #DidYouKnow #HistoryFacts #DocumentaryShort #WeirdHistory
Read more:https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/ancient-alexandria-city-0019944

Ancient Alexandria, founded by Alexander, became the world’s greatest intellectual hub — home to the Library, Musaeum, astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians. Its loss erased centuries of knowledge forever.
#AncientAlexandria #LostLibrary #IntellectualHistory #AncientScience#Storytelling #DidYouKnow #HistoryFacts #DocumentaryShort #WeirdHistory
Read more:https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/ancient-alexandria-city-0019944

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/susan-sontag-a-critic-at-the-crossroads-of-culture

I haven't read enough Sontag, and that reading took place years ago, so perhaps I should return and make my own evaluation. I suspect that I will think of her being more than the "transitional' figure described in this piece from twenty years ago.

That suspicion might arise from my not sharing the author's esteem for Derrida and Lacan, an esteem which in its turn now seems to belong to a fashion now faded.

#Criticism #SusanSontag #IntellectualHistory #USHistory

You might have the impression from the thread I've just posted on Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" that I neither enjoyed nor profited from the book.

That impression would be mistaken, because I both learned from it and thoroughly enjoyed it as a well written work of history, even if I do not share Herring's esteem for Bergson as a philosopher.

She is especially strong on showing how the Belle Epoque acclaim for Bergson represented a yearning for the re-enchantment of a world now mechanized and soulless. She is also acute in her observation of the split between Bergson the solitary philosopher and Bergson the academic networker, the misogyny in his contemporaries' accounts of his popularity, and the gap that opened between Bergson the man and Bergsonism the movement.

So I would recommend "Herald of a Restless World", not for what it might provide for the future of philosophy, but for what it tells us of the past of modernity.

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfARestlessWorld #Modernity #France #Books

🧵 1/3

https://wellreadherring.substack.com/p/herald-of-a-restless-world-out-now

I've just finished Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People", which the author hopes will inspire a Bergson revival.

I doubt that any such revival is in the offing. Consider the three most important terms of Bergson's philosophy:

-- Élan vital. Bergson came up with this in his 1907 "Creative Evolution" to name a force that he thought of as driving evolution forward. In spite of Herring's claims to the contrary, I find little significant difference between Bergson's notion and the life forces posited by Bergson's vitalist contemporaries. Bergson published his work during late C19/ early C20 "eclipse of Darwinism", and his views on biology are of the same vintage and degree of relevance to today's concerns as disagreements over home rule for Ireland, prohibition, or the dangers posed by bicycling to women's health.

Follow the thread for the other two!

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfaRestlessWorld #Modernity #France

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

Interested in #IntellectualHistory, #NeoLatin, and/or #DigitalHumanities? Looking for a funded PhD position (3 years, 75%)? Come join my excellent colleague Christoph Sander and his @scigma project and work with us at CERES @ruhr-uni-bochum.de! https://jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/1b63dff2eab1d2c4f72e32ca6fa4fb65c85f9cfe0?ref=homepage RTs welcome! #FediHumJobs

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

I continually think I have written about gutting books in the past, but have only mentioned it and alluded to it. When I bring it up I often get asked about and want to point to my explanation, as there are few resources elsewhere (there is one that surfaced in 2009 from Naomi Standen guiding her students How to gut a book).

Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, reprint/translation 2015 [1977]) goes into greater depth on taking one’s guttings and turning them into new material. 

Read the full blog post: ghil.hypotheses.org/... #IslamicHistory #Sufi #sufism #OttomanHistory #ColonialHistory #IntellectualHistory #middleeaststudies 📷 Ottoman Egyptian author and poet Muhammad Tawfiq al-Bakri. Public Domain. 4/4

An Intellectual Sufi between E...

Yep. I also suspected it was a bit on the Poppish Intellectual History, especially when compared to Philip Mirowski and Wolfgang Streeck...

"Slobodian’s​ story is fascinating, but the problem with his account is that he doesn’t much want to explore how the ideas he describes found their way into the mainstream, or what else had to happen to make that possible. He is content with tracking the ideas back to their sources and pursuing them across the obscure university departments, cranky newsletters and weird work outings where they first got going. He has a colourful cast of characters – like the bouffant-haired Peter Brimelow, who started out as a fairly standard Thatcherite in the UK and ended up in the US as a white supremacist, or Murray Rothbard, who went from paleolibertarianism to promoting David Duke and Holocaust denial – but after a while they are hard to tell apart. It’s difficult to get a sense of which ideas mattered most, which alliances gained real traction, which people knew what they were doing politically and which of them didn’t really care. The neoliberal origins of the populist right are treated as though they existed in a kind of ideological vacuum, the various ideas tumbling down on top of each other as we repeatedly discover that some bad people knew plenty of people who were even worse.
(...)
Slobodian has an interesting thesis about the way Hayek’s ideas got turned inside out, but it feels overdetermined and undertheorised. Hayek’s Bastards is a short book – 176 pages – yet it has 52 pages of notes and a 38-page bibliography. Something is out of whack here."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n09/david-runciman/hokey-cowboy

#Neoliberalism #IntellectualHistory #PoliticalEconomy #PoliticalTheory

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

The legacies of scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi transcend borders, belonging to all of humanity. timesca.com/scientists-o... #Science #CentralAsia #IbnSina #AlFarabi #IslamicGoldenAge #IntellectualHistory #ScholarsOfHistory

Scientists of Ancient Central ...

The legacies of scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi transcend borders, belonging to all of humanity. timesca.com/scientists-o... #Science #CentralAsia #IbnSina #AlFarabi #IslamicGoldenAge #IntellectualHistory #ScholarsOfHistory

Scientists of Ancient Central ...

The legacies of scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi transcend borders, belonging to all of humanity. timesca.com/scientists-o... #Science #CentralAsia #IbnSina #AlFarabi #IslamicGoldenAge #IntellectualHistory #ScholarsOfHistory

Scientists of Ancient Central ...

The legacies of scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi transcend borders, belonging to all of humanity. timesca.com/scientists-o... #Science #CentralAsia #IbnSina #AlFarabi #IslamicGoldenAge #IntellectualHistory #ScholarsOfHistory

Scientists of Ancient Central ...

The legacies of scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi transcend borders, belonging to all of humanity. timesca.com/scientists-o... #Science #CentralAsia #IbnSina #AlFarabi #IslamicGoldenAge #IntellectualHistory #ScholarsOfHistory

Scientists of Ancient Central ...

🧵 3/3

"Philosophy in a New Key" was published in 1942, so today's readers, as well as wincing at her some of her discussion of "primitive" peoples, may also be aware that more than one revolution has since taken place in the philosophy of language and that university presses and learned journals have printed countless pages on the topics in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology on which Langer touches.

Nevertheless, I believe her thinking about aesthetics and symbolism in general is of enduring interest. I very much want to read a later book she wrote devoted to aesthetics, her 1953 'Feeling and Form".

"Philosophy in a New Key" is also of interest from a historical point of view. The book's original publishers, Harvard University Press, were surprised by its popularity; appearing as a Mentor paperback, it went on to sell more than half a million copies. I would guess that popularity is explained by both the postwar expansion of higher education and a public thirst for meaning and value beyond science and technology in a world haunted by memories of the Depression, world war, and extermination camps, and now living with the threat of an atom bomb apocalypse.

In spite - or perhaps because of - this popularity, Langer did not get a full time long term faculty position for years, despite her excellent academic pedigree (Radcliffe/Harvard - Ph.D supervised by A. N. Whitehead), teaching at Columbia, and scholarly productivity. As well as just plain jealousy and suspicions of dilettantism, part of the explanation perhaps lies in the marginal position that aesthetics occupied in US philosophy departments blinded by Quine's dictum that "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough".

Yet one must also suspect that both individual prejudice and institutional discrimination against Langer as a woman kept her trapped in part time and temporary positions. All this would have added to suspicion of aesthetics and talk of feeling as "girly".

I'm glad to see renewed interest in Langer, and I will be reading and think more by her and about her to make sense of kpop and much else besides.

#SusanneKLanger #Philosophy #History #IntellectualHistory #CulturalHistory #Sexism

https://monoskop.org/images/6/6c/Langer_Susanne_K_Philosophy_in_a_New_Key.pdf

Also born on March 4th:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%81yszczy%C5%84ski

Not only does he sound interesting, so does his reputation amongst 20th century Polish academics.

#History #PolishHistory ##PolishLithuanianCommonwealth #KazimierzŁyszczyński #Atheism #IntellectualHistory

2024 Wrap-Up: Talks

Some of my talks from this year are available online.

* Why You Should Read #TheLastMan by #MaryShelley
Link: https://youtu.be/_k9pH0dNPVg

* Why You Should Read #Frankenstein by #MaryShelley
Link: https://youtu.be/19gOThR5dZw

* A Fortnight in the Wilderness with #Tocqueville
Link: https://youtu.be/OaT-17hgAFU

* “Missing Students & Their Fictional Afterlives: #TrueCrime, #CrimeFiction, & #DarkAcademia" (given at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining #Crime in #PopularCulture” conference)
Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q221yilebjot8zb6yn8a1/Missing-Students-and-Their-Fictional-Afterlives-presentation.mp4

#SFF #ScienceFiction #History #Literature #19thCentury #IntellectualHistory #Books

2024 Wrap-Up: Talks

Some of my talks from this year are available online.

* Why You Should Read #TheLastMan by #MaryShelley
Link: https://youtu.be/_k9pH0dNPVg

* Why You Should Read #Frankenstein by #MaryShelley
Link: https://youtu.be/19gOThR5dZw

* A Fortnight in the Wilderness with #Tocqueville
Link: https://youtu.be/OaT-17hgAFU

* “Missing Students & Their Fictional Afterlives: #TrueCrime, #CrimeFiction, & #DarkAcademia" (given at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining #Crime in #PopularCulture” conference)
Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q221yilebjot8zb6yn8a1/Missing-Students-and-Their-Fictional-Afterlives-presentation.mp4

#SFF #ScienceFiction #History #Literature #19thCentury #IntellectualHistory #Books