Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“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,…
“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…
“All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it… The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity.” –Paul Virilio, Pure War. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Semiotext(e), 1983. p. 18 We normally don’t think about Paul Virilio while…
This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted. Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…
“As an occupation, policing necessarily involves people in a violent institution, demands they forfeit their freedom to a hierarchical chain of command and constraints imposed by their oath of office, and asks them to participate in an idolatrous view of the nation-state as the place where God’s action in history is primarily to be experienced…
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“By studying records of Scottish soldiers, he [Adolphe Quetelet] was able to make averages of height, weight, and so forth to understand and predict the nature of the typical Scotsman. Based on this, Quetlet argued that the concept of the average man would be helpful for understanding the ‘normal state’ of health. This is perhaps…
“The normalization of hierarchy starts right away in our lives, with adults ruling over children (or minors as the state defines them). In the patriarchal bourgeois family, imposed as the norm over the last couple of hundred years of colonial conquest and industrial development, the father reins over the mother and the children. This model…
“Our word “reason” goes back to the Greek verb lego, the verbal noun of which is the famous word logos, which was translated as the Latin ratio. Lego has two principal meanings: “to say” (hence the Word of John’s logos) and “to put together” (related to lechos as the marital couch). (As Whitehead states: “Logic…
“All too many atomized Americans have taken up arms and carried out shocking acts of violence over the past decades, usually without anything more than the desire to harm and kill for their own sake. Mangione might be a sign of something new: a political moderate with no movement behind him, no history of activism,…