📿✨The Nexialist #0044
📿✨The Nexialist #0044
María Lionza | Syncretism | Smartphones and Rosaries | Year to Year | Meta: Fantasy of Power | Paradoxical Relationships | Marx ft. Nietzche: How Art Can Save Us | Tempo
Welcome again to my weekly list of chaordic content, The Nexialist
As you can see, I’m not too attached to Thursdays anymore. The Nexialist is becoming a bit less organized, a bit more chaotic… hence the chaordic word in the welcome. Actually, it has always been like that, but I was trying to keep some of the chaos away from you. Well, after 44 editions, I guess we have enough intimacy, right? I hope you enjoy this week’s selection. I know I did.
🇻🇪María Lionza
Arca has this power to make me stop and watch whatever she’s doing. This time it wasn’t different, with this neo-surrealist video set in a kind of metaverse. Dalí would be proud of her. When reading the comments, I learned about the reference of the first statue, of María Lionza sitting naked on a tapir. (See… sometimes it’s good to read the comments)
María Lionza is the central figure in one of the most widespread new religious movement in Venezuela. The cult of María Lionza is a blend of African, indigenous and Catholic beliefs. She is revered as a goddess of nature, love, peace and harmony. She has followers throughout Venezuelan society, from small rural villages to Caracas, where a monumental statue stands in her honor. The Cerro María Lionza Natural Monument (also known as Sorte mountain) where an important pilgrimage takes place every October, was named in her honour. (Source: Wikipedia)
The synchronicity about this is that I already had the following content lined up for this week’s Nexialist:
✞Syncretism
Assume that both are true
Syncretism is the act of integrating new cultural ideas into the ones that already exist.
It’s very common in the evolution of religious practice. Instead of ‘this’ or ‘that’, the answer might be ‘both’.
Sometimes, we’re so eager to fight off a new idea (to protect an old one) that we miss an opportunity to imagine how our world could go forward instead.
It’s much easier to be unequivocal. It’s also not that productive.
It’s possible to be in favor of something without being against something else.
Read: Seth Godin’s newsletter
📿Smartphones and Rosaries
The way Byung-Chul Han looks at the world and the clarity in which he describes it is quite eye-opening and unsettling. He’s the author of The Burnout Society (2015), Disappearance of Rituals (2020) and soon to be translated Undinge (or Nonobjects). I recommend reading the whole thing and being mindblown. Just the introduction is a sequence of beautiful slaps on our faces:
The material world of atoms and molecules, of things we can touch and smell, is dissolving away into a world of non-things, according to the South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. We continue to desire these non-things, and even to buy and sell them, Han says. They continue to influence us. While the digital world is increasingly blurred with what we still consider the “real” world, our existence is ever more intangible and fleeting, he believes. The best-selling thinker, sometimes referred to as a rockstar philosopher, is still meticulously dissecting the anxieties produced by neoliberal capitalism.
Also, this image comparing scrolling to the rolling of rosary bead gave me chills…
Q. Indeed, smartphones promised us a certain freedom... but are we not in fact imprisoned by them?
A. The smartphone today is either a digital workplace or a digital confessional. Every device, and every technique of domination, generates totems that are used for subjugation. This is how domination is strengthened. The smartphone is the cult object of digital domination. As a subjugation device, it acts like a rosary and its beads; this is how we keep a smartphone constantly at hand. The ‘like’ is a digital “amen.” We keep going to confession. We undress by choice. But we don’t ask for forgiveness: instead, we call out for attention.
👁Meta: Fantasy of Power
I’ll just leave this here because I can’t stop thinking about Zuckerberg’s Meta move:
Despite its slipperiness, going meta has another, firmer meaning. In Greek, the prefix meta (μετα) refers to transcendence. About-itselfness, the way ironists and epistemologists use the term today, offers one interpretation. But meta- also has a more prosaic meaning, referring to something above or beyond something else. Superiority, power, and conquest come along for the ride: A 1928 book on eugenics is titled Metanthropos, or the Body of the Future. A metaverse is a universe, but better. More superior. An überversum for an übermensch. The metaverse, the superman, the private vessel of trillionaire intergalactic escape, the ark on the dark sea of ice melt: To abandon a real and present life for a hypothetical new one means giving up on everything else in the hopes of saving oneself. That’s hubris, probably. But also, to dream of immortality is to admit weakness—a fear that, like all things, you too might end.
Read: The Metaverse Is Bad by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic
🗝Paradoxical Relationships
This is one of the most fun podcast episodes I heard in the last months. To be fair, I was not listening to a lot of podcasts these days, but my boyfriend Juan sent this to me and I had a blast. Starting with the fact that these two women (Brené Brown and Esther Perel) have changed my life, and how I see vulnerability and relationships. So it’s a pleasure to hear them all over each other like BFFs admiring each other’s work because I feel the same.
I’m talking to Esther Perel, psychotherapist, New York Times best-selling author, and podcaster, about relationships in the pandemic and beyond. She blew my mind around some patterns that Steve and I have discovered over the past months in lockdown. We also talk a lot about paradox and straddling the tension of two competing ideas that can both be true. It’s maddening and inspiring. And you’ll hear in real time how I’m wowed, impressed, and completely Esther Perel-ed before it’s all over.
Apart from the important revelation that Esther had been in a Brazilian band in her youth, it was so good to learn some new terms and ideas from them. Starting the paradox that we live in. Brené puts it beautifully how she tried to give her kids the best education she can offer, and that still there will be things that affect them as adults. And it’s ok, those scenarios can coexist. Then Esther talks about Splitting the Ambivalence: we all have paradoxical desires inside us, but when we are in a relationship, we tend to pick sides. And this happens even on a societal level as well. It’s so clarifying when she explains it.
🎨Marx ft. Nietzche: How Art Can Save Us
It should be noted that, for Marx as for Nietzsche, aesthetic activity is not confined to literal works of art, such as you could place in a gallery. Rather, their ideal is to approach life itself in an aesthetic manner. As Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, “we should learn from artists while otherwise being wiser than they. For usually in their case this delicate power stops where art ends and life begins; we, however, want to be poets of our lives.” [5] Nietzsche would emphasize that by reflecting on our lives as art pieces, we can see them as beautiful wholes telling a coherent story. Marx, on the other hand, would emphasize that even when we produce items for practical use, for instance, furniture or clothing, we can design them according to “the laws of beauty,” and in so doing express ourselves, and see ourselves reflected in the objects we create and among which we live. In either case, the goal is to make life beautiful through our own creative activity.
One of those texts you finish with a smile on your face and validates my wish to get off-screen and do more manual work. I hope you enjoy it too.
Read: Marx and Nietzsche: how art can save us | Jonas Čeika » IAI TV
🕰Tempo
NASAYA&MARO released this beautiful EP, Pirilampo (Firefly in Portuguese). NASAYA is from Reunion Island, a place I had never heard about, and MARO is from Portugal. Expect some Portuguese, Spanish and English words with a great chill sound. These are the lyrics from the song above, Tempo, a bit of a tongue (and mind) twister.
Deixa ver se o tempo dá mais tempo ao tempo que o tempo tem
Cuando cuentes cuentos, cuenta cuantos cuentos vas a contar
If you understand what I just said then I’m actually surprised
⏳Year to Year
I have said it and will say it again, Yaeji is one of the coolest people alive. I loved this trippy track and video talking about how time passes (even if I can’t understand it, I’ll look for the lyrics):
Morning air is good for you
Morning apple's also good for you
Finally it's happening to me
I been waiting for this day all my life
Time flies faster
As we grow older
Right now is it
I can't pinpoint it out like that
This is something I've been told
This is something I can't control right now
Time flies faster
As we grow older
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