Borromini’s Bricks: Matters of Immanence in the Roman Oratory
And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Stupid, but not that Stupid: Unknown Unknowns and the Outside of Thought
Errol Morris has written an essay, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is,” which The New York Times published in five installments last week. Morris opens with an epigraph taken from The Surrealist Manifesto in which Andre Breton writes, “Existence is elsewhere.” This quote, as well as the first installment [...]
The Limits of Control as Machinic Opera
If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of [...]
