Creatively Advancing into Novelty
I’ve decided to post my recent grad school paper in chunks since it is much longer than an average blog post. Below is the introduction. … Introduction Design is many things, but if we reflect on design as a trade or practice or vocation for a short time one might envision the people working as…
“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,…
“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives…
“’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…
“But how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan? […] To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone. Fortunately, the…
“The answer to bad speech, we are told, is more speech. The only way that tired bromide could be true, though, would be if it were possible for the bad speech to be definitively rejected through reasoned argument. That is to say, free speech can only be the solution if the result of the ongoing…
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“Like all misers he had a constant need to pit his wits against those of other men, to mulct them of their crowns by fair legal means. To get the better of others, was that not exercising power, giving oneself with each new victim the right to despise those weaklings of the earth who were…
“The ideology of modern capitalism is an expression of the deficient mental structure’s repression of the time element, of creative becoming. Instead of recognizing the importance of the dialectic of history and the ongoing and entangled processes of natural and social transformation, capitalist economic theory insists that the present arrangement represents the “end of history”…