if man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human. Marx and Engels The Holy Family…
i stood on a hill and i saw the old approaching, but it came as the new.
it hobbled up on new crutches which no one had ever seen before
and stank of new smells of decay which no one had ever smelt before.
Bertolt Brecht (1939) from parade of the old new…
(Herakles).. Meanwhile the workers geared up for the day when he would rejoin them. During the inroads of the mercenaries, the workers remained calm and collected…. #Weiss
“…I usually don’t like correlating ontological positions with political ones. I usually hate it when people do that, when people assume that relationality means progressive left-wing politics and substance means oppressive reactionary politics…. i was a bit careless in the manuscript in equating ontological democracy with political democracy…”
Thinking I was not going to refer to Harman or Latour I hear Douglas Murray describing his conservatism “...British Conservatism is an anti-ideology ideology…”
Of course I am not a democrat, and I certainly do not believe that an argument can be made for a democracy of objects. But it is interesting that supporters of Harman’s area of thought believe that ontology shouldn’t be political, that the social is redefined into something that is not understandable external to the discourse… Perhaps I should dig out the ANT economics texts…
CP “I would like you to explain your concept of community(which can range all the way from the micro-community of lovers to the universal community of spirit in Christianity) How could the coming community go beyond this exclusivity?”
JLN “I want to stress that I don’t like to use the term ‘community’ without certain precautions. It has come to connote very much the ‘exclusive community’ you mention, and perhaps it may have always denoted that exclusivity. But what I have sought to works with is directed against any inferiority of community. That is why I prefer to speak of being-in-common or being-with. These are heavy expressions, I know. Their density avoids the seduction of the word ‘community’…”
Jean-Luc Nancy and Chantal Pontbriand (2000) from the Commonwealth catalogue in 2003.
Communities, of whatever type always drift towards exclusivity and to read the rest of the above text demonstrates the impossibility of philosophy in itself escaping from the exclusivity. And yet the commons as the phrase above suggests there is such a potential place, a commonwealth. I seem to be running into philosophical exclusivities quite a lot recently… I wish I could say I don’t understand why.
i have had this book since 2008 and have never been able to read it. because it contains early versions of a favorite novel.„ the sublime The Sailor From Gibraltar… one day perhaps…
It is not often that the real effectivity of artistic methods can be successfully tested. Most one experiences at best agreement (‘Yes you can show me the way it is with us’), or that one has given ‘initiative in some direction or other…. #Brecht
For someone with a background in a discipline which ascribes what is at times an excessively high value to proofs and testing Bertolt Brecht’s opening comment in the short text is informative. It is the notion that experiments can be tested, even artistic experiments… Even when the description of the successful test is a narrative with the censor, who as you know passed the film, the narrative is strangely recognizable and comparable across disciplines. I have in mind end of engineering project reviews, which whilst always being constructs also always contain moments of similar estrangement of the audience, the users.
1914 was ” the great turning point prior to which liberal democracies were becoming freer, but after which the necessary security measures cost them all the ground they had gained…” Bertrand Russell. All his life the philosopher and conscientious objector maintained this position, sadly few philosophers maintained such an ethical understanding. Is the date correct or to early ? The evidence does seem to support Russell’s proposition, whatever one may think of the idea of liberal democracy as such.
“… the sphere of glory… does not disappear in modern democracies, but simply shifts to another area, that of public opinion… the problem of the political function of the media in contemporary society that is so widely debated today acquires a new meaning. “#agamben (2011)
The #spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images… (#Debord 4) Normally I reference the #spectacle in its extended form which includes language, date and networks. However in the case of the Egypt’s naked blogger Aliaa Mahdy the image and proposition is so clearly of the #spectacle, as described in Debord’s early definition, that it’s almost impossible to better the understanding of the limitations of her approach once it escapes from Egypt and its clear challenge to Egyptian patriarchy. For as we look in the media it is merely another degraded and degrading image, her naked body fetishized in the same way that Gisele’s body is in the now infamous Brasilian underwear advertisements.
The network context is global…
“…Were politics a genre and were that genre to pretend to that supreme status, its vanity would be quickly revealed. Politics, however, is the threat of the differend. It is not a genre, it is the multiplicity of genres, the diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage. It plunges into the emptiness where “it happens that…” It is, if you will, the state of language, but it is not a language. Politics consists in the fact that language is not a language, but phrases, or that Being is not Being, but There is’s. It is tantamount to Being which is not. It is one of its names…” Lyotard Differend 138
