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The Ethics of Plenitude: Pluribus and the Paradox of Abundance

I just started watching Pluribus, and after three episodes, the show certainly is thought-provoking. An alien virus has made everyone around Carol Sturka perfectly happy, while she alone remains immune, exposing the absurdities of this artificially cheerful world. Like Gilligan’s earlier work and contemporary series such as White Lotus and Severance, Pluribus explores the ethics of abundance, showing how privilege and surplus can constrain perception, alienate consciousness, and reveal the limits of happiness itself. I don't think there are any spoilers below but buyer beware.

Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus emerges as a contemporary meditation on privilege, consciousness, and the paradoxical consequences of abundance. The series situates its protagonist, Carol Sturka, within a world of totalized plenitude, where an alien virus has imposed universal happiness, rendering conflict, frustration, and desire largely obsolete. Unlike Gilligan’s earlier work, where scarcity and ambition catalyze moral compromise, Pluribus stages a reversal: surplus itself generates existential tension and ethical exposure. The series’ formal and narrative ingenuity lies in this inversion; it posits that discontent is not merely a social or economic condition but an ontological necessity, essential to reflective consciousness and moral agency. Carol’s immunity to the hive-mind functions as the narrative fulcrum; her solitude enables her to perceive the absurdity of a world insulated from struggle and to enact critique through both observation and the meta-narrative of her authorship. Her vocation as a novelist within the series underscores the persistence of narrative as a medium for ethical and imaginative engagement, suggesting that even in an artificially harmonious society, reflection and moral discernment remain contingent upon the recognition of deficiency. For instance, when Carol observes neighbours engaged in superficially perfect domestic routines, their automated cheer and polite courtesy highlight the emptiness beneath their compliance; her marginality allows her to read these gestures as performative rather than authentic, echoing Gilligan’s interest in the moral visibility of character seen in Breaking Bad.

This exploration resonates strongly with another contemporary media offering: White Lotus, which similarly interrogates the vacuity and moral precarity of affluence, though it does so within a realist-comic register; for example, the tension between the wealthy resort guests and the staff exposes ethical blind spots, hypocrisy, and narcissism that parallel the hive-mind’s elimination of struggle in Pluribus. Whereas White Lotus relies upon character-driven friction and social satire, Pluribus employs speculative exaggeration to render the consequences of privilege both literal and philosophical; the virus functions as a structural amplification of the dynamics evident in the resort’s gilded microcosm, revealing how material plenitude can obscure ethical and emotional perception. Carol’s discontent functions as a critical mirror to the hive-mind, much as observational narration in White Lotus illuminates the foibles and insecurities of the wealthy; in each case, surplus does not generate freedom but exposes constraints on awareness and moral reflection.

This convergence of spectacle and structure reveals a shared concern with the architecture of insulation itself. Both White Lotus and Pluribus dramatize environments in which systems of comfort have assembled into invisible prisons, yet they differ crucially in their treatment of complicity. Where White Lotus stages privilege as a social performance requiring active maintenance (guests must continually rationalize, deflect, and perform their entitlement), Pluribus presents it as involuntary absorption, a condition imposed rather than chosen. This distinction illuminates a central anxiety in contemporary narrative: whether ethical failure stems from willful blindness or structural determination. Carol’s immunity renders her uniquely capable of witnessing both dimensions; she observes a society that has automated the very self-deceptions White Lotus‘s guests labour to sustain. The hive-mind represents the logical terminus of privilege; it produces a state in which ethical compromise requires no effort because ethical consciousness itself has been eliminated. Yet if White Lotus suggests that wealth corrodes moral perception through gradual habituation, Pluribus asks a more unsettling question: what remains of agency when happiness is no longer a pursuit but an imposition? This query finds its most acute articulation in Severance, where the mechanics of division literalize the psychic fragmentation latent in both earlier works.

Severance offers a further parallel in its exploration of alienation induced by structural and technological intervention; the bifurcation of work and personal consciousness mirrors the hive-mind of Pluribus, producing environments in which experience is regulated and perception constrained. The early scenes in Lumon Industries, in which employees operate under divided consciousness, echo Carol’s isolation: both narratives dramatize the cognitive and ethical consequences of insulation from the full spectrum of human experience. Both series suggest that ethical and existential reflection arises from disruption; in Pluribus, Carol’s immunity creates the friction necessary for perception, whereas in Severance, the narrative tension emerges from the impossibility of total integration. In each case, discontent and awareness are inseparable, demonstrating that narrative and moral agency require conditions of insufficiency or limitation, even within worlds engineered for optimization and contentment.

Taken together, these works reveal a contemporary preoccupation with the paradoxical consequences of abundance; wealth, comfort, and structural optimization do not guarantee moral clarity or emotional fulfillment but frequently amplify alienation, narcissism, and ethical fragility. This shared concern marks a departure from earlier interrogations of privilege, which tended to focus on the mechanisms of acquisition or the violence required to sustain advantage. Instead, Pluribus, White Lotus, and Severance direct their attention to the afterlife of privilege: the psychic and moral conditions produced when comfort becomes totalizing. Pluribus extends Gilligan’s longstanding interest in character under pressure into a speculative register, literalizing the effects of privilege and happiness as externalized conditions rather than internal compromises. Where Walter White’s descent required accumulating choices and moral erosions, Carol’s predicament is imposed from without; she suffers not from what she has done but from what has been done to her world. Her suffering is not simply an individual deficit but a diagnostic lens, revealing the limitations imposed by a world in which friction, conflict, and scarcity have been removed. The work thus inverts the logic of Gilligan’s earlier achievement: if Breaking Bad demonstrated how scarcity and ambition corrupt, Pluribus reveals how surplus and satisfaction anesthetize.

The series’ alignment with White Lotus and Severance situates it within a broader aesthetic discourse in which contemporary anxiety about wealth, control, and social engineering is interrogated through narrative form, characterological depth, and speculative exaggeration. Yet Pluribus occupies a distinct position within this discourse; it combines White Lotus‘s satirical acuity with Severance‘s speculative architecture, producing a hybrid form that is simultaneously comic, philosophical, and dystopian. Carol’s authorial vocation becomes crucial here; as a novelist within the narrative, she performs the very act of critical observation that the work itself enacts. Her writing functions as resistance, a refusal to accept the hive-mind’s foreclosure of narrative complexity and moral ambiguity. In this sense, Pluribus is not merely about the dangers of imposed happiness but about the necessity of narrative itself as a mode of ethical engagement. The work suggests that storytelling requires discord; without conflict, there can be no plot, no character development, no meaningful choice. Carol’s immunity preserves not only her consciousness but her capacity to generate narrative, to transform experience into reflection.

Carol's immunity positions her as a failed node, a processor that refuses synchronization with the network. This technological allusion underscores the series' concern with systems engineering applied to consciousness itself, suggesting that the hive-mind represents not natural evolution but an imposed architecture of connectivity that sacrifices autonomy for seamless integration.

Ultimately, Pluribus functions as both philosophical inquiry and literary artifact, dramatizing the necessity of discontent for consciousness and moral judgment. By centring a protagonist immune to artificially imposed happiness, Gilligan stages a meditation on the enduring value of imperfection and the ethical imperative of observation. The series reveals what White Lotus and Severance also demonstrate: that contemporary anxieties about wealth, control, and social engineering find their most incisive expression through narrative speculation. Where White Lotus exposes the vacuity beneath privilege through guests’ frustrated desires, and Severance reveals how structural division constrains ethical awareness, Pluribus literalizes these dynamics through its alien virus, rendering metaphorical conditions concrete. Together, these works suggest that the most profound human tensions and imaginative possibilities emerge not from deprivation alone, but from the recognition of what abundance obscures. Privilege does not merely corrupt; it blinds, narrows, and flattens the texture of experience until existence becomes indistinguishable from performance. In a world engineered for contentment, Carol’s suffering becomes diagnostic: it reveals that meaning, agency, and moral clarity require precisely the friction that privilege seeks to eliminate. Her pain is not pathology but lucidity; her isolation is not exile but the necessary distance from which critique becomes possible. The work thus moves not toward resolution but toward affirmation: that consciousness, narrative, and ethical life depend upon the preservation of discomfort, the refusal of totalized harmony, and the recognition that human flourishing requires not the absence of struggle but its meaningful presence.

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Flesh in Suspension: Process, Perception, and the Emergence of the Body in Bacon

Francis Bacon Painting (1946) From – https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79204

In the spectral interior of Painting (1946), a solitary figure occupies a suspended space, standing or perhaps hovering beneath an umbrella whose ribs inscribe a faint geometry across the violet air. Behind him, carcasses hang in sanguine suspension, their surfaces rendered with visceral immediacy that resists narrative containment, while a yellow boutonnière glows on the figure’s lapel with the precision of a small Rembrandtian sun. Curtains frame the scene like a stage, yet the space itself evades conventional depth, oscillating between theatre, interior, and liminal field. The image, scraped from the residue of catastrophe, does not pursue representation or abstraction in any conventional sense; it enacts the human body as an event within paint, registering its presence through tension, exposure, and gesture.

Before this work, Bacon’s early paintings had already revealed a fascination with the body as a site of dissolution and transformation. His prewar experiments, such as Crucifixion (1933), translated Expressionist and Surrealist vocabularies into a distinctly personal idiom, merging biomorphic abstraction with the residue of figuration. By the early 1940s, this interest in corporeal fragmentation reached its first major articulation in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). There, distorted forms occupy a shallow, orange field, their mouths opened in silent convulsion, suggesting both scream and species—part human, part animal. The work’s triptych structure evokes religious painting while stripping it of transcendence, presenting flesh as spectacle and ordeal rather than redemption. The spatial compression and the emphasis on bodily distortion anticipate Painting (1946), where similar compositional tensions are reimagined within a more architectonic field. Between the two works lies a continuity of inquiry: the crucifixion as event becomes the grammar through which Bacon formulates a postwar phenomenology of the body.

Created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Painting (1946) has often been read as an allegory of slaughter, a meditation on human destructiveness and the dehumanization of modernity, sometimes described in terms of “sacred violence.” Yet this reading risks imposing a moral narrative onto what Bacon approached as a phenomenological inquiry: the encounter with the body as matter, sensation, and site of perceptual engagement. In this sense, the painting is not a story about what happened to humanity, but a study of how the human figure emerges in paint, how forms coalesce under the pressures of gravity, space, and attention. The figure, the umbrella, and the surrounding carcasses operate within a unified visual ontology, each element a node in the network of perception that the painting constructs.

Bacon’s sense of embodiment is intensified by the historical moment, as the atomic bomb, the devastation of London from aerial bombing, and the collapse of Britain’s imperial order shaped his perception of the human body and its vulnerability. The postwar image-world, documented in photographs of ruins, mass graves, and the anonymous debris of cities, transformed the visible into a register of loss, where vision and memory were inseparable; to see was to recall, to witness, and to bear the imprint of catastrophe. Within this visual economy, Bacon’s figure appears precarious and contingent, dwarfed by forces political and technological as much as material. It does not restore order to experience but reveals the body as residue, caught within the circulation of destruction and survival that defined postwar perception. The painting enacts a phenomenology in which human finitude is measured against impersonal, almost cataclysmic forces; flesh becomes an emergent property, appearing only through its interaction with the conditions that undo it.

Bacon’s own account of the work underscores the primacy of emergence over prefiguration. He claimed the image “happened” to him, beginning as a bird alighting on a field and transforming into something grotesque, unbidden, and particular. In this methodology, accident is not a lapse of intention but a condition for the work’s very possibility. Each mark, smear, and overpainting becomes both material and event, a residue of process made visible. Art historians have identified a subtle echo of Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf in these chaotic, contorted forms, where the human propensity toward frenzy, disintegration of order, and moral collapse are rendered through the careful choreography of bodies; Bacon internalizes and abstracts this, translating collective panic into a visceral, corporeal experience. The painting’s surfaces, shaped by the interplay of control and contingency, open a space for the viewer to apprehend the body not as symbol or narrative vehicle, but as a dynamic presence in time and space. The human figure appears as both phenomenon and condition of appearance, establishing a template for Bacon’s postwar practice in which body, matter, and perception are inseparable.

The body in Bacon’s work exists as matter before meaning. It is not a symbol, nor a vehicle for narrative; it is a residue of perceptual forces, a site where sensation, gravity, and temporal pressure converge. The surrounding carcasses reinforce this ontology of flesh, presenting mass and texture stripped of moral commentary, while the umbrella and suit, though formally distinct, are subjected to the same forces that govern the composition. Each element registers its presence through the tension of appearance rather than representation, even as critics have noted visceral associations with slaughter; as The Guardian observed, Bacon’s paintings recall the “smell of death” evoked by crucifixions and meat, yet this association emerges from perception rather than imposed narrative. The hanging flowers in the work allude to how butchers would manage this smell in their own shops.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence (2024), published by the National Portrait Gallery, offers a comprehensive look at Bacon’s portraiture from the 1950s onward, highlighting his psychologically charged approach, responses to other artists, and the development of his groundbreaking practice.

This attentiveness to surface, to the way flesh registers and refracts light, aligns with a broader epistemology of vision. Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “period eye,” describing historically contingent structures through which visual culture is perceived, resonates with Bacon’s approach in postwar Britain; the painter’s gaze is informed by photography, medical atlases, and wartime documentation, yet translated through a highly personal material practice. The body is dissected and catalogued not to convey scientific knowledge as Muybridge had done, but to make visible the conditions under which perception and sensation cohere. It is an epistemological inquiry enacted through paint.

Through this method, painting becomes a phenomenological operation. The surface records pressures, accidents, and iterative decisions of the studio while mediating the viewer’s encounter with the body. Portraiture is reflexive. Bacon establishes a principle that will define his postwar oeuvre: the human figure emerges through process and is inseparable from the physical, temporal, and perceptual forces that both produce and destroy it. Flesh is both object and event, and the work’s authority derives from its insistence on presenting the body as an active site of appearance rather than a preordained icon.

Camera: Francis Bacon – Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting by Martin Harrison examines how photographs, film, and media images shaped Bacon’s work. It traces influences from Velázquez, Poussin, Rodin, Muybridge, and Eisenstein, showing how these sources informed his painting practice and contributed to his stylistic development.

The environment around the main figure functions as more than backdrop; it actively shapes the experience of the body. Curtains, partitions, and the umbrella’s geometry organize the composition while simultaneously interrupting the gaze, producing a controlled yet unstable field of perception. These devices create a tension between containment and exposure: the figure is both framed and restrained, present yet partially obscured. The slatted geometry of the umbrella, and faint parallels to blinds or screens, introduces a subtle modulation of vision, suggesting that seeing is always mediated by structural conditions.

Through attention to framing and architecture, Bacon situates painting as an active negotiation between perception and presence. The visible world is not merely represented but interrogated; boundaries, partitions, and light conditions articulate the limits and possibilities of seeing, while the figure registers their effect. In this sense, the work functions simultaneously as a study of corporeal vulnerability and an exploration of the mechanics of vision, demonstrating that spatial organization is intrinsic to both the production and apprehension of the human form.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (2019), edited by Ben Ware, brings together essays exploring Bacon’s art through existential, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic lenses, engaging thinkers from Freud to Heidegger to illuminate his work and methods.

Painting (1946) gathers the formal and conceptual motifs that would shape Bacon’s postwar practice: the suspended figure, the carcass, the enclosing partitions, and the slatted geometries that regulate vision. Yet some of these elements predate the work itself and anticipate later developments. The figure’s dark suit and white collar recall the papal vestment in Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1650), while the partial enclosure evokes the architecture of both tribunal and confessional. These correspondences would resurface with full intensity in Head VI (1949) and the later Pope series, where the seated figure becomes the locus of both containment and exposure. The agape mouth reveals Bacon’s dialogue with the visual archives of the twentieth century, particularly the photograph of Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportpalast, captured mid-oration with his mouth open in a gesture of command and fury. This image, a study in the performative collapse of authority, resonates alongside imagery from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), where the scream becomes a register of terror and resistance.

Within this visual system, repetition operates not as redundancy but as investigation. Bacon revisits these motifs to test how the body, framed by its architectural and historical conditions, can register sensation without narrative mediation. Each recurrence refines the logic first articulated in Painting (1946), in which the figure is both object and event, suspended between enclosure and eruption. The later Pope paintings can be seen as variations on this initial grammar: they preserve the structure of the isolated body within a bounded field while deepening the tension between visibility and concealment that defines Bacon’s vision of postwar embodiment.

The spatial and material strategies crystallized in Painting (1946) consolidate concerns already present in Bacon’s earlier work, yet they also inaugurate the formal vocabulary of his postwar practice. Motifs (Rosie Broadley calls them ciphers) such as the suspended body, the enclosing framework, and the calibrated interplay of light and shadow had appeared in tentative form before 1946, but here they achieve a structural and conceptual coherence that would persist through the 1950s and 1960s. In the triptychs and later variations on the reclining figure, Bacon returns to these devices not through repetition alone but as a method of inquiry and study; each reengagement tests how flesh, form, and perception are continually reconstituted within the material field of painting.

Ultimately, Bacon’s work is significant not for a single figure or scene, but for the method it establishes, rendering the human body in all its fragility and intensity. His portraits function as studies of others and of himself, with painting acting as both mirror and medium, where perception, gesture, and material presence converge. The body emerges through interaction with space, light, and paint, enacting a subtle phenomenology in which flesh and vision co-arise. Portraiture becomes a site of inquiry, where artist, subject, and viewer intersect, and where the conditions of appearance are examined as rigorously as the forms themselves.


Books consulted in this analysis:

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Watching Shadows: A Fan’s Take on Splinter Cell: Deathwatch

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is an adult animated espionage action television series that premiered on Netflix on October 14, 2025. The series consists of eight episodes, each with a runtime of 20–27 minutes. The episodes were directed by Guillaume Dousse. In terms of reception, it holds an 83% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 12 reviews, and a Metacritic score of 70 out of 100, indicating "generally favourable" reviews.

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is an interesting, if uneven, expansion of the Splinter Cell world for longtime fans of the games. Sam Fisher feels familiar, and Liev Schreiber’s voice brings a sense of weariness and experience that suits the character perfectly, evoking the gravelly intensity of Michael Ironside from the original games while giving the character a slightly older, more reflective edge. The series hits key notes from the original trilogy, especially Chaos Theory, so players who remember sneaking through shadows and planning each move will recognize and enjoy the references.

Visually, the show is striking in some ways. The muted colours and heavy use of shadow give it a film noir feel, and the way spaces are framed, such as corridors, rooftops, and interiors, creates tension even though the viewer isn’t controlling the action. The animation has a careful, almost architectural sense of space, which mirrors the strategic thinking the games demanded, but it sometimes feels too static; the action isn’t as kinetic or gripping as it could be. For a franchise that originally impressed with inventive gameplay, the series’ visual style can feel conservative. Key sequences rely on cuts and camera angles rather than dynamic movement, and while the staging evokes a sense of spatial awareness, it rarely surprises the eye or pushes stylistic boundaries in the way the games once did.

The story and characters are a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Fisher remains compelling, with his inner conflicts and moral calculus giving the narrative weight, but the villains are underdeveloped and occasionally feel more like obstacles than fully realized threats. In translating a game built on interactivity to a passive medium, the tension of stealth loses some immediacy; we observe Fisher planning and executing rather than experiencing the suspense ourselves. At times the plot leans on familiar espionage tropes, and moments that could provide emotional resonance or ethical complexity pass by too quickly.

Where the series excels is in its atmosphere and attention to detail. The lighting, composition, and sound design all contribute to an immersive espionage world, while small touches, such as technology interfaces, mission callbacks, and environmental cues, reward those familiar with the games. In this sense, Deathwatch functions as a thoughtful companion piece: it provides insight into Fisher’s psychology and ethical world, it celebrates the franchise’s aesthetic, and it evokes nostalgia for longtime players. It may not replicate the thrill and ingenuity of the original games, but for fans, it offers a stylish and contemplative look at the life of Sam Fisher beyond the controller.

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Fragments in Conversation: Imagining Twombly and Guston in Rome

In a quiet courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, the colossal hand of Constantine rests on its plinth, a fragment of imperial ambition and human scale. Here, Guston and Twombly meet, observing and responding to the same ruin through their very different artistic sensibilities; the hypothetical encounter becomes a meditation on gesture, history, and the ethical weight of mark-making, allowing the past to speak while their own practices converse across time.

The afternoon sun warmed the stones of the Capitoline Museum’s courtyard, its light striking the marble façades with a soft, diffuse glow. The colossal right hand of Constantine rested on a low plinth, isolated from other objects, a fragment of a once-magnificent imperial statue. Its scale was imposing even as a fragment, and the careful carving of the fingers and veins conveyed both power and a subtle human vulnerability.

A collage that I created from a photograph of Twombly (perhaps taken by Robert Rauschenberg) and Philip Guston at the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

The colossal right hand of Constantine, displayed on a plinth in the Capitoline courtyard, is a surviving fragment of a seated statue created between 313 and 324 AD for the Basilica of Maxentius. Originally part of an acrolithic composition, the emperor’s head and exposed body were carved from Parian marble, while the draped cloak was rendered in gilded bronze foil; this suggested both divine authority and imperial grandeur. The statue, which once rose approximately 10 metres, assimilated Constantine to Jupiter, portraying him as a god on earth; the raised index finger, now partially restored, likely held a sceptre, reinforcing the gesture’s symbolic assertion of power.

Today, the hand conveys a mixture of monumental force and fragile humanity. The work’s fragmentary state, seen alongside other preserved sections of the colossal statue, including the head and central arm, reveals the sculpture as a ruin that still communicates its historical and political ambition. As isolated fragments, these remnants encourage reflection on the passage of time; the vulnerability of even the most imposing symbols; and the ethical and aesthetic weight of human representation, themes that resonate profoundly with both Guston’s and Twombly’s concerns in painting.

τῷ σωτηριώδει σημείῳ, τῷ ἀληθεῖ ἐλέγχῳ τῆς ἀνδρείας τὴν πόλιν ὑμῶν ἀπὸ ζυγοῦ τοῦ τυράννου διασωθεῖσαν ἠλευθέρωσα, ἔτι μὴν καὶ τὴν σύγκλητον καὶ τὸν δῆμον Ῥωμαίων τῇ ἀρχαίᾳ ἐπιφανείᾳ καὶ λαμπρότητι ἐλευθερώσας ἀποκατέστησα. -- Eusebius 

Under this singular sign (singularius signum), which is the mark (insigne) of true excellence, I restored (restituo) the city of Rome, the senate, and the Roman people, torn away by the yoke (iugo) of tyrannical rule (tyrannicus dominatio), to their former freedom (libertas) and nobility (nobilitas). -- tr. Rufinus

Guston leaned against a nearby column, sketchbook resting loosely in his hands, eyes fixed on the hand with an intensity that seemed to challenge the world to respond. “Even as a fragment,” he said, tapping his fingers against the page, “this hand carries a grotesque weight. It’s absurd, monumental, human. Every mark here insists on being read as a statement of power and presence. It reminds me of the hooded figures or the shoes in my later paintings: blunt witnesses to human absurdity and moral consequence.”

Guston shifted slightly, letting the weight of the fragment press on him as he traced an invisible line from the marble back to his sketchbook. “Even fractured, it asserts authority; even incomplete, it demands a response. The hand is absurdly large, but it is human; its veins, its fingers, its tension—all of it insists that someone, somewhere, bore responsibility for the act. There is a moral weight in these gestures, whether carved in stone or brushed on canvas.”

Twombly stood a few paces away, tilting his head sideways as he traced the subtle fractures in the marble. “I understand,” he said, voice calm, almost lyrical, “but for me the incompleteness is essential. The gesture does not exist merely to confront; it exists to be felt, to be remembered. The cracks, the missing pieces, the space around it—all of that creates a dialogue between past and present. My marks are like that; they do not dominate the surface; they listen to what is already there, extending the story rather than imposing it. Even in ruin, the hand speaks, but it allows us to speak back.” His words echoed the improvisatory gestures and calligraphic lines of Fifty Days at Iliam, where each mark floated between presence and absence, between history and recollection.

Guston drew a blunt, quick line across his sketchbook, a gesture almost corporeal in its insistence. “I grant you that,” he said, “but there is an ethics in confrontation as well. The past presses on us, and the fragments of history demand recognition; silence or mediation is not always sufficient. When I paint, I confront moral and historical weight directly. This hand, monumental though incomplete, insists that someone accounted for every gesture, every line, every mark. There is responsibility in scale and in execution; the fragment reminds us that grandeur is inseparable from human intention and consequence.”

Twombly’s gaze lingered, following the curvature of the knuckles and the subtle slope of the wrist. “And yet there is also an ethics of receptivity,” he said. “Not every gesture must dominate; some exist to be extended or echoed. In its incompleteness, the hand allows us to inhabit the space it leaves, to feel the gestures that preceded us. The hand already exists. Our gestures extend it, converse with it, but do not dominate it. In its incompleteness, it teaches humility. Every mark we make can be a response rather than a statement. Painting is similar; we mark, we trace, we respond, but we do not always impose. The ruins speak to us precisely because they permit reflection as well as recognition.”

For a long moment, the courtyard fell into silence, the distant shuffle of tourists paling against the quiet gravity of the fragment. Guston’s gaze remained intense and corporeal, measuring the hand as if willing it to yield its secrets, while Twombly’s eyes drifted over the fractures, absorbing the residue of centuries. The colossal hand became a mediator between them, embodying the convergence of human ambition, ethical responsibility, and historical fragility. In that shared attention, both understood the stakes of gesture and mark; one through confrontation, the other through evocation, and both through fidelity to what remains.

Finally, Guston nodded toward the fragment. “They wanted to make power eternal,” he said, “but what survives is fragmentary, grotesque, human. That is the lesson for us: every action, every word, every figure, every mark carries weight.” Twombly turned back, eyes following the line of the fingers. “And in that fragment, in the silence between gestures, I feel history breathing. Painting is its echo—not the hand itself, but the trace it leaves, its shadow.”

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Ritual, Myth, and Mediation: Dharmoo and Strauss at the NAC

The National Arts Centre’s pairing of Gabriel Dharmoo’s Wanmansho with Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben stages a compelling conversation across time about how music constructs identity and narrative. In Wanmansho, Dharmoo transforms the orchestra into a site of ritual and mythmaking, performing as both composer and soloist through voice, breathwork, gesture, and silence. The work invents a fully imagined cultural ceremony, blending satire, myth, and expressive theatricality. It interrogates the mediation of culture itself, foregrounding how performance and media shape perception and engagement, turning the audience into active participants in a constructed reality.

Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, by contrast, deploys orchestral scale and rhetoric to monumentalize the heroic self. The NAC Orchestra captures every nuance of Strauss’s narrative, from the intimate lyricism of the companion episode to the overwhelming force of battle and triumph. Where Strauss asserts identity through epic musical spectacle, Dharmoo experiments with multiplicity, hybridity, and performative mediation. Together, these works illuminate how orchestral media can construct, challenge, and transform notions of culture, heroism, and presence, revealing music as both narrative and immersive, a space where identity is performed, mediated, and refracted across generations.

The program was made all the more memorable under the direction of conductor Alexander Shelley, whose time as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra comes to an end this season. Shelley brought clarity and energy to both works, balancing the bold theatricality of Dharmoo’s Wanmansho with the sweeping grandeur of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. His final performances with the NAC Orchestra make this concert a powerful close to his leadership, leaving a lasting legacy of innovation and artistry.

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Where Landscape Dances: An Afternoon with Les Scénographies‑Paysages

Attending Danièle Desnoyers’s Les Scénographies-Paysages yesterday at the Mackenzie King Estate on a clear autumn afternoon was like stepping into a dialogue between movement, memory, and place. The red and golden hues of the trees seemed almost choreographed; it was as though the season had joined Desnoyers’s company in performance. What was striking about this work was how it resisted the conventional frame of the stage. The dancers’ movements did not merely unfold against a backdrop of ruins, gardens, and forest trails; they seemed to emerge from them, as if the estate itself were teaching the body how to move.

Danièle Desnoyers has long been interested in how choreography can be porous to its environment according to her biography; at the Mackenzie King Estate this openness finds a particularly rich counterpart. The site itself is a paradox: a cultivated wilderness, curated ruins, and gardens intended to feel both timeless and fragile. William Lyon Mackenzie King’s decision to import fragments of European stonework and arrange them as “ruins” in the Gatineau forest was an attempt to graft layers of history onto Canadian soil; it was as if to accelerate the presence of a past that otherwise was not there. These Romantic follies are at once artificial and poignant; they express both personal vision and a longing for timelessness. Desnoyers’s choreography responds to this temporal play, adding yet another “ruin,” although one made of moving bodies and fleeting gestures. Dance becomes an ephemeral architecture built within and against these fabricated stones.

The performance’s wandering form transforms the audience into fellow-travellers. Unlike a stage that fixes the audience in a frontal relation, here you follow the dancers through shifting landscapes. Attending with friends underscored this collectivity. You witnessed not only the dancers but also one another, framed by trees and ruins, in the act of being present together. The nearness of bodies; performers and public alike; generates the “points of curiosity” Desnoyers describes, moments where the boundary between art and daily life thins. A shaft of light, the rustle of leaves, the sound of water; these details become part of the choreography, revealing how nature composes alongside the dancers.

What lingers after such an afternoon is not a single image or sequence but an impression of layered time. I saw the forest as both immediate and historical, natural and curated. I felt the ruins as both false and strangely resonant. Through the dance, I experienced how the ephemeral; steps, gestures, breath; can temporarily inscribe itself into this landscape of stone and tree. The joy of simply being outdoors on a beautiful fall day became part of the work’s poetic resonance. In this way, Les Scénographies-Paysages reminds us that choreography is not confined to the studio or the theatre but can exist wherever bodies, histories, and landscapes intersect. It does not impose spectacle but gently reveals how movement; human, seasonal, architectural, vegetal; can be understood as a shared composition.

Pizza and wonderful conversation at Roberto Pizza Romano in Chelsea after the show was the perfect ending!

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Seeing, Hearing, Speaking: From Buddhist Ethics to Moral Blindness in Contemporary Media

The three wise monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—have travelled from 17th-century Japanese shrines to contemporary streaming television. This post traces their journey, exploring how a moral maxim rooted in Buddhist ethics has become a symbol of complicity, selective perception, and critique of power in shows like Alien: Earth, The White Lotus, and Only Murders in the Building.

The motif of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is one of the most recognizable symbolic triads in global visual culture. Its origins are usually traced to early modern Japan, where in 1617 the sculptor Hidari Jingorō carved the three wise monkeys at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō. The phrase in Japanese—mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru—literally means “do not see, do not hear, do not speak.” The pun arises because the suffix -zaru indicates negation while saru also means monkey. The monkeys therefore embody the maxim in a visual and linguistic fusion. The religious background is both Buddhist and Confucian. In Indian sources that travelled along Buddhist transmission routes, there are injunctions to avoid corrupting the senses by guarding sight, hearing, and speech. These were absorbed into Chinese and then Japanese traditions where self-regulation of perception and conduct became moral instruction. The monkeys therefore originally symbolised virtue, discipline, and the refusal to indulge in evil by policing the senses.

At Nikkō Tōshōgū, a UNESCO World Heritage site dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, a famed carving of three monkeys adorns the stable for sacred horses. Known in Japanese as “sanzaru” and in English as the “three wise monkeys,” it remains the shrine’s most celebrated image.

Once the motif left its shrine context, its meaning began to migrate and transform. When European travellers encountered the monkeys and reproduced them in prints and decorative arts, they became part of the broader art movement of Japonisme, which captivated Western artists and collectors in the mid-19th century with Japanese aesthetics and symbolism. The monkeys, admired for their compositional clarity and triadic structure, were often reinterpreted to suit European tastes; in Victorian England and later in North America, to “see no evil” no longer signified virtuous self-restraint but deliberate blindness. The phrase became a critique of those who ignored corruption, injustice, or cruelty by pretending not to notice. Detached from their Buddhist ethical origins, the monkeys were recast as symbols of hypocrisy, complicity, and self-preservation—a critical lens on human evasions that persists today.

In contemporary streaming media, the three monkeys have shed any quaint or exotic connotation to become a living, adaptive symbol of denial and selective perception. Science fiction, satire, and crime comedy all engage the motif because these genres are preoccupied with what is seen, heard, and spoken, and with the consequences of turning away. The monkeys now function as a lens through which audiences can examine not only character behaviour but also the structural mechanics of power, privilege, and moral evasion that shape modern narrative worlds.

In Alien: Earth, the narrative stages a civilization dominated by corporate elites whose decisions exert life-or-death consequences with near-total impunity. The refusal to see, hear, or speak operates as a cultivated strategy of wilful ignorance; executives and powerful actors turn away from the human costs of their ambition, masking exploitation and ethical transgression behind layers of procedure and profit. The three monkeys emerge as an ironic emblem of this structural blindness, highlighting how moral abdication is embedded in systems of power. Knowledge and warning exist, yet they are ignored, deferred, or commodified, producing a world in which suffering is visible but systematically unacknowledged. By invoking this ancient motif, the series critiques not only individual denial but also the political and technological mechanisms that enable it, offering a cynical meditation on complicity, control, and the ethics of corporate governance.

The three monkeys on the wall of Slightly’s Room.

In The White Lotus, the satirical lens exposes how privilege enforces selective perception as a form of social power. The wealthy guests and resort operators deliberately ignore the labour, inequality, and suffering that sustain their comfort; to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” becomes a strategy of moral insulation. The three monkeys here serve as an ironic emblem of systemic blindness, illustrating how performative innocence masks structural exploitation. What began as a religious maxim for ethical self-discipline is transformed into a critique of entitlement and complicity, showing how social and economic hierarchies institutionalize ignorance while allowing moral corruption to proliferate under the guise of civility and leisure.

White Lotus Season Three

Comedy offers yet another transformation of the motif in Only Murders in the Building. The trio of amateur detectives should in principle be the antithesis of the monkeys; their task is to observe, listen, and speak. Yet their eccentricity and missteps mean that they often fail to see what is in plain sight, to hear crucial truths, or to articulate findings coherently. The irony lies in the fact that the very structure of the series invites viewers to identify with these failures, to enjoy complicity in the gaps between evidence and interpretation. The comic inflection therefore reveals how the motif can be mobilised not only as critique of blindness but also as a mirror of the audience’s own desire for mediated narratives of crime and justice.

Only Murders in the Building, Season Five.

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that the three monkeys remain a powerful semiotic device, capable of registering complicity, denial, and ethical abdication across cultures and media. In Japan they disciplined perception; in the West they became shorthand for deliberate blindness and hypocrisy; in contemporary streaming television they expose the mechanics of privilege, power, and selective attention, showing how systems of wealth, authority, and narrative control facilitate moral evasion. The migration of the motif illustrates how a Buddhist ethical maxim has been transformed into a critical instrument, tracing the enduring intersections of ignorance, responsibility, and spectacle in human society. Perhaps its most urgent lesson today is a return to its original purpose: guarding our senses against the constant onslaught of information, opinion, and moral distraction in the age of social media.

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The Aesthetics of Technological Otherness: Hybrid Bodies, Horror, and Fear in Alien: Earth

I have been really enjoying Alien: Earth so far; the series blends suspense, striking visuals, and complex ethical dilemmas in ways that are both intriguing and thought-provoking, like the original movie and its sequels-some more than others. It situates horror at the intersection of technological, corporeal, and ecological systems. Fear arises not simply from alien lifeforms but from the networks that generate and contain them: corporate infrastructures, technological apparatuses, and ethical contingencies. The series presents alienness as simultaneously aesthetic, perceptual, and ethical; hybrid bodies, synthetic forms, and immersive environments create a field in which horror, reflection, and perception converge. Wendy, the synthetic-human protagonist, functions as both observer and observed, mediating the apprehension of systemic otherness in ways that are affective, philosophical, and ethical.

The series’ temporal structure transforms suspense into a layered and reflective experience. Horror extends beyond the story itself through multimedia storytelling, combining streaming episodes, podcasts, behind-the-scenes features, and immersive experiences; viewers navigate multiple layers of time simultaneously, moving between the immediate events on screen, anticipated developments, and knowledge of the franchise’s history. Familiarity with canonical moments from the original films intersects with the series’ present narrative, creating a suspended space in which ethical reflection and anticipation converge. Horror arises not only from the presence of alien lifeforms but from our awareness of systemic conditions: corporate ambition, technological experimentation, and ecological vulnerability. The opening sequence of the hibernation pods exemplifies this vividly; its cinematography recalls the original film and its sequels, framing enclosed bodies with high-contrast lighting and deep spatial perspective, linking Alien: Earth to its cinematic predecessors. Fear emerges as viewers recognize the continuity of containment, vulnerability, and technological mediation across decades of franchise design, transforming suspense into both ethical reflection and perceptual engagement.

Hibernation pods: Alien, 1979
Hibernation pods: Alien: Earth 2025

Spatial and visual configurations further mediate this apprehension. Enclosures—spaceships, research stations, and terrestrial landscapes—function as immersive topologies that simultaneously protect and threaten. Within these spaces, uncanny lifeforms such as the eye-octopus and the sheep operate as emblematic vectors of aesthetic and ethical reflection. The eye-octopus, with its multiplicity of eyes, renders vision itself alien; it confronts the human spectator with the limits of embodied understanding and the redistribution of agency. The sheep, serene and unassuming, functions as a locus of ethical contemplation; it makes visible the consequences of technological intervention and foregrounds the fragility of life within systems of control. Screenshots of critical sequences, such as the opening of hibernation pods or close-ups of Wendy navigating alien environments, underscore the deliberate continuity and evolution of franchise aesthetics. These motifs operate less as spectacle than as instruments for the apprehension of relational and systemic conditions; horror is inseparable from ethical reflection and perceptual calibration.

images upon enfolded images

Hybrid corporeality is central to the series’ treatment of otherness. Wendy’s body, like the eye-octopus, unsettles hierarchies of perception and agency; she occupies a liminal zone where human, synthetic, and alien attributes interpenetrate, at once vulnerable and empowered, observer and observed. The sheep, by contrast, anchors human action in an ethical frame, its vulnerability exposing the consequences of technological mediation. Together, these figures exemplify Technological Otherness, where fear and reflection arise from relational structures rather than from isolated monsters. The sheep, like their use in Severance, stand as markers of human experimentation and technological control; whether as literal subjects of manipulation, as in cloning or laboratory testing, or as symbolic witnesses to systemic intervention, they foreground ethical responsibility and the consequences of humans exercising power over life.

Horror in Alien: Earth is inseparable from its temporal, spatial, and corporeal registers. Alien lifeforms, corporate systems, and experimental technologies intersect to produce systemic contingency, while bodies and enclosures function as both protection and exposure. Visual motifs such as the eye-octopus, the sheep, and the hibernation pods crystallize these tensions, linking continuity of aesthetic form with ethical consequence. Horror becomes the recognition of vulnerability, agency, and systemic mediation.

The series thus develops a logic of horror that is perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical. Human, alien, and synthetic forms are mutually constitutive within environments structured by relational networks. Horror is not mere shock; it is the perception of contingency and the embodied awareness of survival within technological and corporate frameworks.

This aesthetic design resonates with art-historical traditions, where spatial construction, light, and corporeal orientation mediate intellectual and ethical reflection. Hybrid figures like the eye-octopus evoke post-humanist questions of embodiment and agency, while the sheep embodies the fragility of life under systemic intervention. Horror emerges from negotiating these registers, where immersion, perception, and ethics converge.

Alien: Earth demonstrates that contemporary horror is inseparable from the conditions that produce it. Narrative, visual, and temporal design collaborate to construct systemic fear, implicating audiences within networks of surveillance, hybridity, and containment. In this sense, the series synthesizes aesthetic spectacle with ethical inquiry and philosophical meditation.

The sheep with the octopus eye embodies uncanny, ethically charged otherness.

Its achievement lies in rendering horror both perceptual and reflective. Temporal distribution, spatialized aesthetics, and hybrid corporeality create an immersive sphere where fear is experienced as systemic and ethical encounter. Figures such as the eye-octopus and the sheep, alongside the hibernation pods echoing the 1979 film and its sequels, make visible the interrelation of agency, vulnerability, and consequence. Horror becomes not only spectacle but also a medium for apprehending how otherness is constituted, observed, and experienced. It compels recognition that fear is shaped by technological infrastructures and corporate power, exposing how otherness is managed, exploited, and contained within systems of control.

I note that there are still two episodes left in this season and I, for one, look forward to this each week although I sometimes wonder why they make such secure facilities but leave man/alien sized crawl spaces available throughout the complex?

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From Flight to Belonging: Refugee Testimony and the Canadian Imagination

Hearts of Freedom: Stories of Southeast Asian Refugees.
Peter Duschinsky, Colleen Lundy, Michael J. Molloy, Allan Moscovitch, and Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe. Foreword by Joe Clark. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025. Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, no. 20.

Northrop Frye observed that Canadian sensibility is less perplexed by “Who am I?” than by “Where is here?” (The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination). Hearts of Freedom resonates with this insight, as the refugees’ narratives reveal not only their own journeys but also who Canadians wanted to be, showing a nation aspiring to generosity, inclusion, and humanitarian engagement.

Hearts of Freedom is both a book and a wider public history initiative dedicated to preserving the voices of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who arrived in Canada between 1975 and 1997. Drawing on 173 oral history interviews, the final one conducted with former Prime Minister Joe Clark, the editors have created an invaluable archive of lived experience that complements existing institutional accounts of the Indochinese resettlement program. Whereas earlier works such as Michael Molloy and Peter Duschinsky’s Running on Empty (2017) traced the diplomatic and bureaucratic machinery of resettlement, this volume turns deliberately to the refugees themselves; it foregrounds their voices and memories as the central historical evidence.

The book is organized thematically and by national origin, with chapters devoted to the experiences of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees. Early sections recount the violence, persecution, and dislocation that prompted flight—civil war, invasions, genocide, and perilous journeys by land and sea. Many of the interviewees tell their stories of being refugees through temporary camps in Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, before tracing their arrival in Canada. The narratives detail first impressions of climate, language, and cultural difference, alongside encounters with both the generosity of sponsors and the challenges of prejudice. The editors preserve the cadence of testimony, allowing survivors’ voices to remain central, while photographs, maps, and timelines situate these stories in their historical and geographic contexts.

The central contribution of Hearts of Freedom is to the social history of immigration and refugee settlement in Canada. The oral histories reveal not only personal trauma and resilience but also the crucial role of private citizens and community organizations in facilitating integration. Frequent mentions of “church ladies” highlight how ordinary Canadians, particularly women in faith communities, provided everyday care and advocacy that were essential to the refugees’ resettlement and sense of welcome. Readers are reminded of the transformative significance of Canada’s private sponsorship program, recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees with the 1986 Nansen Medal. These accounts reveal the program’s practical challenges and occasional failures; they also show its capacity to foster belonging and to reshape Canadian multiculturalism in the late twentieth century.

The volume’s strength lies in its breadth of testimony and the affective immediacy of the narratives. The stories convey in intimate detail what was at stake for families who risked everything to flee; they also reveal how newcomers encountered both welcome and exclusion in their new country. If there is a limitation, it lies in the difficulty of sustaining analytical coherence across such a wide range of experiences; the oral history format necessarily fragments, and at times readers may wish for more interpretive synthesis. Yet this very openness is also a virtue; it resists the tendency to impose a single, homogenizing narrative on a diverse refugee population.

For historians, Hearts of Freedom is indispensable as both a research source and a teaching text; it exemplifies the methodological rigour and interpretive nuance that oral history can bring to the study of migration. By centring refugee memory, the book extends the historiography of Canadian immigration beyond policy and institution centred narratives; it shows how first‑person testimony captures the lived experience of liminality, displacement, and adaptation, revealing social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of migration that conventional archival sources often overlook. For scholars of migration and liminal studies, the collection offers a model for integrating oral history with broader historical, sociopolitical, and cultural analysis, demonstrating how voices at the margins convey both individual agency and structural forces. For policymakers and community practitioners, it provides hard earned lessons about the critical importance of listening to those most affected by refugee regimes; the book shows how human experiences can shape program design, foster empathetic engagement, and deepen understanding of the complex dynamics of resettlement.

Crucially, Hearts of Freedom also prompts reflection on Canada itself. The resettlement of people from Southeast Asia was never only about those who arrived; it was also about those who received them. The unprecedented scale of private sponsorship, the debates in Parliament, and the work of immigration officials who designed and implemented new programs were matched by the readiness of thousands of Canadians to open their homes. Together, these efforts marked a political moment in which the country tested its aspirations as a humanitarian actor on the world stage. As the book notes, “[i]n Canada, we can live with and celebrate fluid identities” (p. 75). The refugees’ narratives reveal not only their own journeys but also who Canadians wanted to be; they show a nation striving toward generosity, inclusion, and global responsibility. It is this dual legacy; of refugees remaking their lives and of Canadians aspiring to embody their highest ideals; that gives Hearts of Freedom its enduring political and historical resonance.

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The Teeth of Time: Density, Data, and the Devouring Present

This essay reflects on François Hartog’s Chronos: The West Confronts Time and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume to examine how contemporary experience is structured by the density and intensity of the immediate; it considers how algorithms and data operate as instruments of presentism, shaping perception, attention, and ethical judgment, while also exploring the volumetric, spatial, and political dimensions of time that persist as gaps and openings for reflection, action, and the possibility of the event. In practice, this means that even in a world dominated by algorithmic notifications, taking a moment to focus on one’s breath can disrupt the cycle of immediacy, creating space for reflection and ethical choice. This small act of resistance becomes a political statement in an age of temporal commodification

Time no longer flows linearly but weighs, stretches, and bends. François Hartog’s concept of presentism captures this phenomenon with precision: the present thickens into an all-consuming immediacy, while the past is relegated to archives and the future collapses into anticipation and calculation. The now devours perception, enfolds thought, and dictates the very possibility of cognition. Each breath, pause, or glance becomes saturated with urgency, bending attention toward the immediate and away from slow, reflective human thought.

Data and algorithms amplify this temporal pressure. Data provides the raw substrate, capturing traces of action, movement, and behaviour, while algorithms translate these traces into legible, manipulable units. Dashboards, predictive models, and streams of metrics condense the world into fragments of the now, folding them into recursive feedback loops. Algorithms, in this sense, are the teeth of a temporal monster: they bite into the raw presence of data, structuring and presenting the present as both comprehensible and overwhelming. Immediacy thickens, intensifies, and hollows out slow time, leaving human rhythms—the time of the breath—fragmented and compromised. The phenomenology of data is enacted through algorithmic mediation; it is only through algorithms that data becomes perceptible, shaping attention, memory, and perception itself.

📸 by me
📸 by me

The seduction of this system is both perceptual and political. Predictive algorithms, real-time analytics, and constant monitoring promise mastery, optimization, and control. Yet their scale, complexity, and opacity render such mastery provisional. Governments, corporations, and institutions deploy these tools to regulate behaviour, anticipate risk, and shape populations. The temporal density of the present becomes a political instrument, codifying attention, compressing reflection, and normalizing immediacy. Here, density refers to the accumulation of temporal moments, the layered presence of events, while intensity captures the pressure and urgency that these moments exert on perception and cognition; algorithms manipulate both, structuring the present to maximize immediacy while hollowing out slow, reflective time. Data flows through algorithms, structuring perception while reinforcing power, embedding the devouring present into everyday experience. This is more than capitalism; it is the monetization of time itself, a system where every moment, every breath, every micro-attention is reduced to a measurable increment, stripped of meaning except as a unit to be processed and consumed. Beyond the standing reserve of things, this is a standing reserve of the present, where experience, reflection, and ethical possibility are harvested, quantified, and compressed, leaving only the illusion of control.

To inhabit this mediated present requires rhythm, attention, and awareness lest you get lost in the Heraclitean torrent of the now. Notice the cadence of notifications, alerts, and feeds—the pulse of algorithmic time pressing on thought. Feel the compression of attention into micro-increments, the folding of past traces, projected futures, and quantified nows into each gesture. Presentism is enacted in every swipe, every calculated anticipation. Yet spaces remain for reflection, ethical judgment, and bodily presence. Awareness of the structures governing perception allows one to inhabit the present without surrendering entirely, tracing micro-rhythms and perceiving folds, gaps, and intensities that slip beyond measurement, beyond data, beyond algorithms.

The body measures temporal density through breath, heartbeat, and subtle gestures—rhythms that defy calculation. A pause, a deep inhalation, or a moment of stillness expands the present and slows its intensity. Pranayama, an ancient yogic breathing practice, can be seen not just as a spiritual exercise but as a way to experience time itself—a ‘phenomenology of time’ that reveals its texture and rhythm; it transforms breath into a form of knowledge, where rhythm and pause disclose temporality as irreducible to data and uncapturable by the algorithm. In this sense it resonates with Hannah Arendt’s description of the “gap” between past and future, that interval where thinking becomes possible, and with Christine Ross’s exploration of the temporal event in contemporary art, wherein moments can rupture habitual patterns and open new possibilities for perception and action. By grounding the abstract concept of time in bodily experience, pranayama reveals how lived time—thick, slow, and attentive—resists the urgency imposed by data and algorithms. This somatic approach aligns with Arendt’s notion of the ‘gap’ between past and future, where ethical thinking becomes possible. Perceptual vigilance, ethical attention, and recognition of temporal folds become acts of resistance, ways of dwelling in a dense, intense now without being consumed by it.

On the Calculation of Volume offers a frame for this intensity. Each fragment of the present is volumetric, measurable yet interconnected, dense yet permeable. The now is a field of relational magnitudes, where every action, data trace, and algorithmic operation contributes to a totality in flux. Time’s volumetric density, akin to matter in space-time, exerts pressure on perception and ethics, accumulating yet remaining fluid.

Drawing on Sloterdijk’s philosophy of ‘spheres and foam,’ the present can be imagined as a bubble within a larger, porous network. Each bubble is a bounded yet interconnected space—individual yet inseparable from its surroundings, much like cells in a living organism. Algorithms carve into these spheres, structuring, intensifying, and documenting them, but the foam’s porosity ensures that no total mastery is possible. These spheres are inhabited spaces of reflection, political judgment, and ethical action; their relationality allows for rupture, contingency, and the emergence of events beyond calculation. In this sense, each volumetric present is both mediated and immediate, enclosed yet open, a site where density and intensity, pressure and accumulation, coexist and interact.

Breath, pause, perception—the present unfolds in thickness, intensity, and relationality. Yet within this density remain gaps, spaces of suspension, as Arendt reminds us, where attention and judgment can surface, where ethical and political choice can intervene. These gaps resist full capture by metrics, algorithms, or the teeth of the temporal monster. Christine Ross’s reflections on the possibility of the event extend this insight: even within a heavily mediated, algorithmically quantified present, occurrences can emerge that exceed calculation, rupture expectation, and open new temporal trajectories. The devouring now is not total with the space of Augmented Reality, for example; within its folds persist spaces for surprise, reflection, and action. One inhabits it not in mastery but in careful attentiveness, navigating between density and openness, intensity and gap, algorithmic imposition and the possibility of the event. Data flows through these structures, producing both pressure and opportunity.

Time presses, bites, enfolds, and in its volumetric density, in its temporality, there is room to dwell, act, and breathe. Hartog’s analysis illuminates the contemporary condition: data and algorithms codify, structure, and circulate the devouring present, giving it density, rhythm, and shape, while promising comprehension that is always provisional, only now. The political stakes are immediate; these instruments organize populations, regulate attention, shape behaviour, and mediate social norms, from predictive policing to real-time financial analytics. To dwell in this Age is to inhabit a temporal field that is both structured and wild, dense yet ephemeral, bounded yet permeable; density accumulates moments, intensity exerts pressure on perception and action. The teeth of the temporal monster bite, constrain, and create the illusion of control, yet within these imprints remain spaces to perceive, attend, act, and judge. The present is not a point to control but a dynamic, ethically charged field to inhabit. By navigating its intensity and density, we resist the illusion of total comprehension and reclaim time as a space for reflection, action, and freedom. It becomes a series of inhabited spheres, measurable, mediated, and experienced, where data and algorithms document, structure, and intensify pressure without exhausting the lived, political, or ethical possibilities of the moment.

See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961. "The gap between past and future, which is the space of thinking, is the space in which freedom can be experienced."

See Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 2013 - English translation."With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity–that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other." I will note his thinking is dense. It took me 2.5 years to finish his three part Magnus Opus: Spheres and I don't think I have even scratched the surface of it.