#singular

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular. ↗

— Brian Eno

#had #history #intrusions #music #occasional

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own. ↗

— Basil Bunting

#common #jug #kind #listen #look

Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end - therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further. ↗

— Joan Chen

#beauty #been #comes #end #experience

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ↗

— John Keats

#appear #excess #fine #highest #his

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#best #cities #context #create #desired

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point. ↗

— Lucy Grealy

#life #pain #singularity #ugliness #ugly

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

The stammer was a way of telling the world that he was not like others, a way of expressing his singularity. ↗

— Ted Morgan

#his #like #others #singularity #stammer

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? ↗

— Vernor Vinge

#approach #how #human #human world #singularity

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. ↗

— Vernor Vinge

#singularity #technological #will