Resistance Home

If you’ll allow me to stretch this metaphor, we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the stren...

 Directionality in Zero-G

Phrases like “things are looking up” and “look at the upside” once meant something like “consider the good in the situation,” but they went through an ironic shift in the solar system’s early spacecolonial culture, mutating in the microgravity of early tin-can stations to mean a variety of practically sarcastic sentiments, typically something like “be careful” or “let’s be realistic.” The joke (that is, that there is no “upside”) wore off in a hurry, but use it wit...

 Examples of How Language Affects Cognition

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tens...