12.5.2021
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
If you’re getting this email for the first time, welcome. Generally, this section is reserved for promoting last week’s Newsletter. However, given that it was Thanksgiving, I gave thanks to all of you who have been keeping up week by week for a year now.
Reflections II
As of November, it’s been a year since I started this Newsletter, and I wanted to take some time to reflect on my trajectory as a writer and overall where the project started and where it is going.
When I started this writing project, it was primarily a way to channel some of my ideas that were too long to condense into 280-word tweets. I explained this in a piece titled “Why?” in which I detail flushing out the project as a form of expressionism in the same vein as writers like Deleuze.
To quote Deleuze directly: The shame of being a man — is there any better reason to write?
With hindsight in mind, not only was I able to channel those Ideas, but I was able to form connections with people along the way and develop my thinking in certain areas. I noticed that one’s thinking does not change all that much, but the connections to one’s thinking, the things you can plug yourself into, do change. The circumstances, your emotions change, and the reasons you may write, but ultimately one “metaphysics” don’t change all that much. So I found ways of elaborating the same core ideas differently and to different audiences. Eventually, I saw writing this Newsletter the same way a Mangaka serializes their work. A Mangaka, crudely put, is a Japanese graphic novel illustrator. Their release schedule follows a weekly timeframe in which they create a small piece of a serialized narrative.
I’ve always loved the work ethic and idea of doing something of particular mental or physical rigor to be quite virtuous. Although I didn’t write either out of sanity or pure laziness, I tried to push myself to at least release something consistently of general consistency. I found that I have grown as a writer; However, I don’t consider myself a particularly strong one. I have found that my clarity and ability to convey a message have significantly improved. The cliche is that practice makes perfect, but I find the cliche to be inaccurate or, at the very least incomplete. I’ve found that in reality, there is no tangible perfection. Still, the repetition in itself is the process of perfection, similarly to how assembly-line mass-production flatlines our understanding of time by creating a replicable commodity by standardization. I was able to, at the very least, produce at regular intervals works of relative consistency. What that means in terms of content and quality, I leave that up to you as the reader.
In terms of the trajectory of my thought, as already stated, I didn’t find that it changed all that much. I was able to introduce new themes concepts and expand on what I’ve said previously, but ultimately my “image of thought,” my aesthetic, hasn’t changed.
As to where this Newsletter is going, I hope that I’m able to produce content of even higher quality at close to the same consistency that I am already following at this time. I might do more of these reflections, which tend to be on more of a personal register and don’t tend to be as rigorous or as “crunchy” with theoretical sustenance, but I figured that dropping these from time to time helps the reader understand some background that wouldn’t be particularly obvious unless you met me IRL.
Anyway, I don’t mean to drag this out more than I needed to, and I certainly didn’t want to end the year with a “look-back,” which is why you’re getting it now.
If you missed the last “Reflections,” it’ll be linked here.
As for the Next Newsletter, we will continue with the scheduled programming.
“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with land surveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
― Gilles Deleuze
As always, I would love to thank all of you who are subscribed to this Newsletter. If you are viewing this directly from a browser or link, please consider subscribing.
I would also like to send a special thank you to my Patrons:
My Patreon is connected to the podcast I co-host with @YAgamben.
We recently opened up a Patreon to help support the expenses to keep some of these operations running, including hosting and things of that nature.
We strictly want to follow a “buy me a cup of coffee” model, so any “donation” for any period of time is welcome. If you would like to support any of the work we put out, consider becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/Decodecast
-C.N