Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,” things made in the socialist East will actively promote egalitarian socialist culture. They will replace the pleasure of…
“This creates the series of questions Pluribus forces us to confront in every episode: Is our freedom—our autonomy—really too high a price to pay in exchange for global happiness and organized, respectful survival on our planet? If we accept the implied thesis that a free human will inevitably destroy the planet and themselves, is the alternative…
“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…
“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” –Whitehead, Process and Reality “An exemplar can exemplify only some of its properties. It brings those properties to the fore by marginalizing, downplaying, or ignoring other…
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The basic outline of Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory is the first task…The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter…
“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…
“Evil is not eliminated by a destructive retributive judgment, but by an aesthetic synthesis of intensity, order, and harmony. Whitehead’s God is not a cosmic judge; rather, God is a cosmic artist. The many poor paintings of individual lives and events are transformed in a continuous aesthetic process of harmonizing the parts with an ideal…
“Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop…They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to…
“In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself…A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled…