Lately I found myself walking the streets of Rome; it has been a while since my last encounter with the muse of old, and it was clear from the first gaze that Rome’s beauty is unbeatable, effortlessly portraying my limits in appreciation of beauty… after all how many ‘moments’ can one have in duration?
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Walking in Rome is like no other landscape I know, while roaming I meet an urban palimpsest that invites the beholder to extract the narratives that are the ‘makers’ of human history. Moving between the ‘Roman Forum’ to Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, across a renaissance courtyard and into a modern city junction, reveals architectural structures as reflective-organs that both protect and maintain across time the unique desire-modes, the beating hearts of the narratives of which Rome is made of.
Yes, walking in Rome is like coursing within a library, the contents of which are a milieu of desire-modes, acting as engines of poiesis, generatively creative of the ‘human’ by the human. As if there was a silk thread to connect all these manuscripts of desire. The flow of an endless number of minds along the Tiber and through the river of time, looking forward, deep into the “not-yet” and calling for a difference in the aesthetics of everydayness.
Encapsulated in the city ruins, a swarm of desire-modes, of many time-threads, join to interface the actual with the mounting intensity of times-past. The whole extruding towards the not-yet, towards the arousal of consciousness. There, at the folds of consciousness awaits poiesis – the event of reconstructing the horizon of intelligence.
Yet, while walking I think that the current brings now a profoundly new factor in the timeless flow, in the big-transition that we are, the map of desire-forms is expanding beyond the human, we are not anymore (if ever) the exclusive source of dreaming. Today, the map unfolds multiple sources of desire-forms: Technology, Nature, Corporate Business, Finances, Nation-states and processes like cyborgization and urbanization, and more.
The understanding infiltrates that the makers of history, are beyond human control. The more we progress, it is not Gods that we become, not at all… but children again, in this weird and new world, occupied by the need to learn how to navigate and orient ourselves with and in this emerging world.
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This reflective thread recalls not unsimilarly to the description of the human individual as a superorganism, composed by the diverse entities that for all practical purposes constitute us, while pursuing their own interests, such as microbes, viruses, foreign strains of DNA and human cells. In the light of such sights , the “I” is basically a complex that defines in a joint fashion who we are, (as in: Humans as Superorganisms: How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior” by Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan (Padua).
The Technium proposed by Kevin Kelly is another version of Superorganism, very much pursuing and further developing Marshall McLuhan’s stance in ‘Understanding Media, 1964:
“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and evolve ever-new forms.“
Kevin Kelly in ‘What Technology Want’, 2011, writes:
“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself. Yet, like all systems it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.”
And Susan Blackmore in her recent article ‘The Third Replicator’ is enlarging the Milieu of ‘Things that want”, in adding a new term to the pool of Genes and Memes:
“The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping-stones from one replicator to the next.”
In all of our related existential spheres: The biological, the cultural, the technological, the social and the network of eventful processes, we start to recognize underneath our becoming the same (un)convenient pattern and emerging truth. We are walking upon new grounds and under the influence of a new set of Meta-forces.
We should learn and fast what every God eventually learns the hard way, that openness means separating origination from directionality. Or better put as a paraphrase upon the uncertainty principle – it is impossible to know at once origination and directionality of a system, open system that is.
So yes, the project called man ignited and originated all that is emerging around us and in us, but those forces that are radically and irrevocably rearranging the world, self and mind, are not under our control.
![]()
To recalculate orientation is our new task and wonder, because possibly this time the key(s) are not contained by the past, nor are they a fully developed promise engraved in the bowels of the future(s).
Once more, not differently from 10,000 years ago, man is like a child again, facing forces greater than our scope of imagination, with no sufficient language to think, to act and to dream the rapidly transforming times.
And so the times-past seem to whisper, we need to reconstruct our horizon… again… and maybe it is our first (serious) sign of success.
*From the series Cogitating Ferocities
*Art works by J.D Doria
Image 1 - Sun Waves
Image 2 - Reconstructing the Horizon.. Again
Image 3 - The Green Fairy
Walking in Rome is like no other landscape I know, while roaming I meet an urban palimpsest that invites the beholder to extract the narratives that are the ‘makers’ of human history. Moving between the ‘Roman Forum’ to Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, across a renaissance courtyard and into a modern city junction, reveals architectural structures as reflective-organs that both protect and maintain across time the unique desire-modes, the beating hearts of the narratives of which Rome is made of.
Yes, walking in Rome is like coursing within a library, the contents of which are a milieu of desire-modes, acting as engines of poiesis, generatively creative of the ‘human’ by the human. As if there was a silk thread to connect all these manuscripts of desire. The flow of an endless number of minds along the Tiber and through the river of time, looking forward, deep into the “not-yet” and calling for a difference in the aesthetics of everydayness.
Encapsulated in the city ruins, a swarm of desire-modes, of many time-threads, join to interface the actual with the mounting intensity of times-past. The whole extruding towards the not-yet, towards the arousal of consciousness. There, at the folds of consciousness awaits poiesis – the event of reconstructing the horizon of intelligence.
Yet, while walking I think that the current brings now a profoundly new factor in the timeless flow, in the big-transition that we are, the map of desire-forms is expanding beyond the human, we are not anymore (if ever) the exclusive source of dreaming. Today, the map unfolds multiple sources of desire-forms: Technology, Nature, Corporate Business, Finances, Nation-states and processes like cyborgization and urbanization, and more.
The understanding infiltrates that the makers of history, are beyond human control. The more we progress, it is not Gods that we become, not at all… but children again, in this weird and new world, occupied by the need to learn how to navigate and orient ourselves with and in this emerging world.
This reflective thread recalls not unsimilarly to the description of the human individual as a superorganism, composed by the diverse entities that for all practical purposes constitute us, while pursuing their own interests, such as microbes, viruses, foreign strains of DNA and human cells. In the light of such sights , the “I” is basically a complex that defines in a joint fashion who we are, (as in: Humans as Superorganisms: How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior” by Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan (Padua).
The Technium proposed by Kevin Kelly is another version of Superorganism, very much pursuing and further developing Marshall McLuhan’s stance in ‘Understanding Media, 1964:
“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and evolve ever-new forms.“
Kevin Kelly in ‘What Technology Want’, 2011, writes:
“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself. Yet, like all systems it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.”
And Susan Blackmore in her recent article ‘The Third Replicator’ is enlarging the Milieu of ‘Things that want”, in adding a new term to the pool of Genes and Memes:
“The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping-stones from one replicator to the next.”
In all of our related existential spheres: The biological, the cultural, the technological, the social and the network of eventful processes, we start to recognize underneath our becoming the same (un)convenient pattern and emerging truth. We are walking upon new grounds and under the influence of a new set of Meta-forces.
We should learn and fast what every God eventually learns the hard way, that openness means separating origination from directionality. Or better put as a paraphrase upon the uncertainty principle – it is impossible to know at once origination and directionality of a system, open system that is.
So yes, the project called man ignited and originated all that is emerging around us and in us, but those forces that are radically and irrevocably rearranging the world, self and mind, are not under our control.
To recalculate orientation is our new task and wonder, because possibly this time the key(s) are not contained by the past, nor are they a fully developed promise engraved in the bowels of the future(s).
Once more, not differently from 10,000 years ago, man is like a child again, facing forces greater than our scope of imagination, with no sufficient language to think, to act and to dream the rapidly transforming times.
And so the times-past seem to whisper, we need to reconstruct our horizon… again… and maybe it is our first (serious) sign of success.
*From the series Cogitating Ferocities
*Art works by J.D Doria
Image 1 - Sun Waves
Image 2 - Reconstructing the Horizon.. Again
Image 3 - The Green Fairy
