Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Despite the proliferation of interest in the subjects of secrecy and esotericism throughout popular culture, media and entertainment, these phenomena have only recently begun to be treated seriously by historians of religions. In this essay, I suggest a new way of looking at esotericism by engaging in a comparative, cross-cultural analysis, and by looking in…
“During an evening walk with a close colleague of Bohr’s, Einstein once asked: “Do you really believe the Moon is not there if nobody looks?” From Barad’s perspective, it isn’t that the Moon isn’t there when we aren’t looking, it’s that when we do look, a new Moon, and a new me, emerge in the…
“Think of a brand new automobile on a rainy day. And it’s parked on the street and down at the street corner there’s a busy intersection and there’s a red light and it’s a green light. And now you look at your car sitting there and it’s red across it’s surface but it also has…
“If the mind is flat then our mental lives must exist purely at the ‘mental surface.’ Our brain is an improviser, and it bases it’s current improvisations on previous improvisations: It creates new momentary thoughts and experiences by drawing not on a hidden inner world of knowledge, beliefs and motives but on memory traces of…
“In discussions about plastic use it is common to blame mass consumerism and a throwaway culture for the environmental problem of plastic. However, rather than being demand led, the throwaway culture was created and driven by the corporations who profit from it. The amazing materials created from the waste products of the oil and gas…
“Thus [in Keynesian economics] there is no need for any change in the mode of production for profit; just take control of the money machine to ensure an infinite flow of money and all will be well […] Well, capitalism is a monetary economy but it is not a money economy (alone). Money cannot make…
“I worry a bit about the glorification of consciousness as the pinnacle of all Creation…there is…a seductive, but deceptive, seeming move away from anthropocentrism in the ascription of consciousness to all things, but what this really does, I think, is to say “oh right, all things are like us, or all things have this awesome…
“…we can no more bring to consciousness the operation of our brain than we can bring to consciousness other aspects of our own biology. We can invent stories about what the liver is trying to achieve, speak as if the immune system is confused by tissues from our own bodies, or talk of genes being…
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…
“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…