Marked and Unmarked Defaults

Whenever considering a system of categorization, some categories are marked: they’re stated and described. Others can’t be. Some categories are unmarked because they are unknown: this disease hasn’t been witnessed before, we’re still trying to figure out what it is. Still others are unmarked because they’re what the others are a deviation from: consider, there are ten thousand thousand different maladies and diseases in the world; how many kinds of health are there? Consider, also, the Anna Kareinina principle, articulated by Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Commentary, Philosophy, Written by: CameronCameron SummersSeptember 2, 2020Epistemology, Unmarked Default, Queer theory, Edvard Munch, Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, The Intercept, Jon Schwartz, Basil Zaharoff, World War I, Deleuze and Guattari, Nikola TeslaComment

How Exhausting It Is To Live Through History (Time of Monsters, #3)

I’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth, but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.

Written by: Cameron, Time of Monsters, Political, PhilosophyCameron SummersJuly 22, 2020History, Historiography, Metaphysics, Time, Current Events, Portland, V. I. Lenin, Dark City, Deleuze and Guattari, China Miéville, Politics, Anti-OedipusComment