"Art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept, admonition and administration." John Dewey "In their { Horkheimer & Adorno's } account of western modernity, enlightenment and progressive rationalization become myth and ideology legitimating social irrationality and injustice, as natural and human relations are increasingly reduced to means through instrumental rationality, fetishized in consumerist culture industries through the often unconscious hegemony of symbolically reproduced values, styles, and practices, and reified and compulsively fixated in a media-driven society." Eric S. … [Read more...]
Fear of Fairy Tales
March 31, 2021 by 6 Comments
"Fear lurks in everyone. The one who always asserts to not know fear is mentally damaged or a fool." Max Horkheimer (Psalm 91, Collected Writings vol 7) “Fear, accompanying such an extraordinary state, also plays a role in enchantment. The thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus described wonder as “ ‘shocked surprise’ … before the sensible appearance of a great prodigy, so that the heart experinces systole. Thus wonder is somewhat similar to fear….” Jane Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life) “Adults live in fear of one kind or another—fear of failure, poverty, isolation, fear of loss of soul in the destruction of the earth. Those fears create a mood of “being lost in the … [Read more...]
The Immunity Bath
March 12, 2021 by 10 Comments
"We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing." Charles Bukowski (Post Office) "Life and death. Already no physiology is thought scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life, life’s negation as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this…Living means dying." Freidrich Engels (Dialectic of Nature) "Fear of crime does not correlate with actual … [Read more...]
Privatizing Emotions
February 27, 2021 by 3 Comments
"But habitual identification with the aggressor also frequently occurs in people who have not suffered severe trauma, which raises the possibility that certain events not generally considered to constitute trauma are often experienced as traumatic." Jay Frankel (Identification with the Aggressor) "These children feel physically and morally helpless...for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their senses. The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they … [Read more...]
Wish You Were Here
February 10, 2021 by 3 Comments
“There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” Ecclesiastes 1:11 "At the 1889 ParisExhibition, and in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower,the centenary of the French Revolution, and consequently of the French Empire, was commemorated. This was the first exhibition to include a true colonial section for the history of France and the one that would mark the beginning of a model for colonial representations that would last during the final quarter of the 19th century and for the whole of the 20th century. In fact, the area in Paris reserved for showing the colonies was located in the Champs de Mars and … [Read more...]
The Ironic Little Nazis
January 25, 2021 by 2 Comments
"As states have hastily emulated measures adopted elsewhere, in particular through the imposition of curfews, nationwide lockdowns and travel bans, and escalation of citizen surveillance, a wave of authoritarian governance has swept the globe with profound, worldwide implications for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, dignity, and autonomy. Reinforced by threats of criminal sanction, from fines to imprisonment, states have exerted tremendous vertical, paternalist power on citizens, despite serious questions as to the efficacy, sustainability, and proportionality of adopted measures. Day-to-day life was essentially suspended worldwide, with borders closed, social gatherings banned, … [Read more...]
The Woke Freikorps
December 29, 2020 by 7 Comments
"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century) "Because something is happening here But you don't know what it is Do you, Mister Jones?" Bob Dylan (Ballad of a Thin Man) "I'm not in the business, I AM the business." Spoken by Rachel the cyborg, or replicant, in Blade Runner (dr. Ridley Scott, 1982) There are mass regressions, psychologically and emotionally, taking place against the backdrop of the 'lockdowns' (sic). One sees this in an increasingly incoherent political spectacle, in the train wreck of unscripted extemporaneous comments from government leaders, and … [Read more...]
Infinite Spiders
December 7, 2020 by 8 Comments
“I realized then that the difference between what can happen to a human and to a naked mole rat family is mainly one of terminology.” Bernd Heinrich (The Homing Instinct) "We don’t utter sentences, but rather tokens of sentences. Since communication depends on what we make of the tokens of others, and communication often succeeds, we can normally assume that others mean what we would mean if we uttered those sentences." Donald Davidson (Truth and Prediction) “But the most characteristic feature of the Odyssey is the way in which its personages ascribe all sorts of mental (as well as physical) events to the intervention of a nameless and indeterminate daemon or "god" or "gods.” E. … [Read more...]
