Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“[If] every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny.” –Sigmund…
“Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.” —Marshall McLuhan I finally got to read Andrew Sullivan’s latest article in NY Magazine about technology and distraction sickness. I remember Sullivan for notably becoming one of the first journalists…
“Too often the debate of economics and religion is reduced to issues of morality—for instance, when greed is identified as the culprit in economics. As a result, individual CEOs and business leaders are condemned as greedy. This approach is doubly problematic, as it neglects the real structures of the economy, and it sets up a…
“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment,…
“Libertarianism is perhaps the most toxic mixture of liberalism (ala Hobbes and Locke) and capitalism.” It should not be a huge surprise for anyone who reads this blog to learn that I am not a huge fan of the political philosophy known as libertarianism. One of the things I hate most about libertarianism is it’s…
“There is no fundamental, coherent, pre-given, exclusive formula or ontology to reality. Time isn’t fixed; identity is relational; matter is not a thing, it is an ongoing generativity. This disrupts the idea that all that is alive about the world is necessarily human to begin with. It suggests matter is mind, and mind is matter;…
“[Police:] A term which describes both individual officers and a system, or institution in society that exists only at the split between those who have and those who do not. Historically and currently, the police system has served/serves mostly as a tool for the powerful in racial and class conflict. There have not always been…
“Richard Hill, history professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, explains that New Zealand police were disarmed for routine work in 1886, following the principle of the British police that: “Constables are placed in authority to protect, not to oppress, the public.” For officers to carry guns would not just be unnecessary, he…
“Difference is endless, and so we are endlessly—infinitely—tangled in it.” –Catherine Keller It struck me recently that All Lives Matter, the defiant, pious, racist push-back to the very important Black Lives Matter movement, should also be filed under the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is one of my favorite Whiteheadian theories;…
“Violence is not only what black people do to white people as victims seek to change structure of their existence; it is also what white people did when they created a society for white people only, and what they do in order to maintain it. Violence in America did not begin with the black power…