Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“…human retinas are hardwired to spot edges and differences. When we look around a room, our retinal ganglion cells fire more strongly when they see borders and contours than when they see the blank middle areas of uniform color. As the information gets bumped up through higher levels of brain cells, those edges yield more…
“We once had roots. We knew our ancestors and the cyclical line that was the future. But colonialism came and we were uprooted. We lost our past and had to invent a future that never existed. If we want to make an inventory of our time and understand ourselves in this timeless present, we must…
“Using Christianity to colonize usually backfires eventually because colonized peoples end up discovering that the God they were forced to worship is really on their side. They discover that the God of the Bible is a God who frees enslaved people and condemns those who exploit them. The colonized discover that the Christian story is…
“’Authorship’ – in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity – was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was nearly their own. They…
“If, for Marx and Weber, capitalism was the dynamo of secular modernity, for Ruskin, it embodied a metamorphosis of the sacred, a perverse enchantment of the world. Ruskin clearly feared that ‘secularization’ was really a capitalist form of idolatry —a rechristening of heavenly ecstasy in a cold baptismal font of money, a re-enchantment conducted under the…
“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I…
“Brightness and illumination are forces which can be equally as hostile to humankind as blinding darkness, under the correct circumstances. The fear and power of God’s Kingdom is revealed in hideous, brutal light, a ray of harshness which reveals ugliness, impurity, and dirt without concern for the results of such unkind exposure. Light, in Western…
Dorothy Wordsworth by Jennifer Chang The daffodils can go fuck themselves. I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings about the spastic sun that shines and shines and shines. How are they any different from me? I, too, have a big messy head on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. I flower and don’t…
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…
“At its core, Whitehead’s philosophy of education emphasizes the idea that a good life is most profitably thought of as an educated or civilized life, two terms which Whitehead often uses interchangeably. As we think, we live. Thus it is only as we improve our thoughts that we improve our lives. The result, says Whitehead,…