I'm kinda liking this Lerner dude's take on the evolution of subjectivity through modernization. Seems to me like a way of describing factors that go into the construction of a post-structural self - one that is adaptable to both deep structure (say, culture) and structure more palpable to perception (such as microsocial interaction).
Briankle assigned us a terrific book: Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, by Darian Leader. (Another pro and a con critique are posted here, scroll down.)
I'm interested in the way Leader describes the difference between looking and seeing. One may look and not see. Simply, this is perceptually similar to hearing but not listening, however Leader is really dealing with consciousness and what it means to know that one is being looked at without ever knowing for sure what (who?) is being seen.
"I was really impressed with your latest blog posting. Lots of self
discovery going on there."
"How do admissions of psychological/emotional vulnerability contribute to getting people to move to action? It's very easy for people to say, "Ah ha! I knew it wasn't about the department; she's having personal problems and using the department as a scapegoat."
Probably this is what Stephen's been on my case about - does acknowledging the personal (what he has been defining as "private" and labeling "psychological") move people to action? ? Perhaps not, but maybe it depends on what kind of ìactionî is desiredÖ
I am so jealous of anyone who's already done with Paula's paper! And, I'm kinda....having fun (!) re-reading Mumford (1963) after Chris made more of it legible to me with his presentation yesterday. :-)
I'm just over half done with the paper. I'm enjoying what I now see as a merger in Mumford of the material and the ideological, to wit:
"...instantaneous personal communication over long distances...is the mechanical symbol of those world-wide cooperations of thought and feeling which must emerge, finally, if our whole civilization is not to sink into ruin" (241).
The recordability of such instantaneous personal communication is one example of "the new permanent record" which "suggest[s] a new relationship between deed and record, between the movement of life and its collective enregistration: above all, they demand a nicer sensitiveness and a higher intelligence. If these inventions have so far made monkeys of us, it is because we are still monkeys" (245).
;-) Gimme a banana!
I looked up some of the things Enoch either shared info from and/or suggested we read:
The Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio seems like an intriguing read. The author, Antonio Damasio, has been interviewed by The Harvard Brain and for some publicity from his publisher.
Roland Barthes may be beyond me, but his critique of myth is fascinating.
Physis "was the Greek word for the material cosmos we sense and measure and attempt to predict."
Here's the quote in question: "[I]n the contemporary bourgeois society, the passage from the real to the ideological is defined as that from an anti-physis to a pseudo-physis." From The Bourgeoisie As A Joint-Stock Company. "Antiphysis" is linked to "the real"; and pseudophysis is linked to "ideology." I get the latter, but not the former. :-(
My buddy Carole is a gem. This afternoon she told me she'd never met anyone like me and wonders how my life will turn out. So do I! We were talking about the things I do. I keep trying to figure out what it is, actually, that I "do." :-) And why! Since what I do often results in distress (for me and for others, to varying degrees and intensities, situationally). Is there something I bring that is actually an "asset", and if so, what is it? Am I misusing or misapplying it? Are there other ways to "use" it than the ways I currently know?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've actually had a few wild perceptions of being potentially able to alter reality - especially time - (and no, I wasn't under any influence), but they always seem ... out of ken. Not real. But here I am reading Mattelart for Paula's class, and he quotes McLuhan...
Participants and actors ìseek to program events rather than to watch themÖthese ëeffectsí appear before their ëcauses.í At instant speeds the cause and effect are at least simultaneousÖ.this dimensionÖ naturally suggests Ö the need to anticipate events hopefully rather than to participate in them fatalisticallyî (1974, in Mattelart p. 125-126).
"Until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts." Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 13.
between the Ancients and the Moderns is described by Joseph M. Levine as, "how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate."
However, another view, by Rosen, argues that "the quarrel that is significant is not between ancients and moderns but between philosophy and sophistry, for the continuous attempt of Western civilization to prevent playfulness from degenerating into frivolity constitutes the unity of historical experience."
Here are some additional links to authors with an online paragraph or so of commentary on the Quarrel, including Schiller: "Antique poetry now is equated with the naive mode of perception (naive Empfindungsweise). Naive poets live in inner harmony and unity with nature, and their works of art are produced spontaneously and in the absence of poetic self-consciousness. The poetry of modernity, on the other hand, is sentimental in outlook (Schiller's German term is sentimentalisch rather than sentimental). Sentimental poets are self-reflective and skeptical of inspiration, they are apprehensive of the psychological abyss that dissociates their own age from antiquity, and they feel their cultural and moral self cut off from the harmony of senses and from the union with nature that they ascribe to the writers of antiquity."
Vico defines philology as "the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice; for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of peoples in war and peace" (in Labio, p. 47).
The academy is an institution; rhetorical discourse is an institution. War is an institution. Peace is not. How does one exercise choice that invokes an institutionalizing of peace without negating half the human experience (aggression, desire, passion....in short, sensation itself)?
This may be one of my new guys. The blogpost cited before (The Pinocchio Theory is a great summary of Tarde that winds up exactly where I've been trying to be, believe it or not! (I loved Ripley's as a kid.)
This article by Bruno Latour about Tarde is about interrupting repetitions - think problematic moments! (and Latour looks interesting in his own right: Making Things Public).
Wikipedia shows his work turned to unsavory purposes (Le Bon) but also taken up by others who may be less scary....I'm not sure yet, because Mattelart lumps him in with the psychopathologists and (despite dysfunctionality) I really don't think humanity is hopelessly pathological, but more investigation is on the horizon. I wonder if I can get the Encyclopedia Brittanica article on him from school?
I'm thinking, only on p. 30, that it makes sense to me why so many intellectuals commit suicide. The quote by historian Douglass McKie suggests a hands-off policy from government toward business until business goes bad, when a moral discourse is invoked. The blatancy of fear-based policy decisions in the relations between nations is no less today than it was then.
I'm puzzled by this though: "The tension between the logics of negotiation and those of security/insecurity was too tangible to render credible the first efforts to construct a system for regulating international relations" (30). Meaning it was so real that it couldn't be faced? Or accepted as requiring significant, deliberate, and direct mediation? I'm not disputing Mattelart's judgment, but wondering about the intensity of denial, and how that still plays out in so many ways and places.
Hunju prefers Merleau-Ponty and that would be nicely synergistic for me, since my first encounter with phenomenology was through a popular rendition based largely upon M-P's work.
Also, it's Max Scheler (not Schuyler), and this looks interesting: On Feeling, Knowing, Valuing.
Here's my thinking (finally) for the critical phenomenology with Briankle:
Problem 1: what's the difference between epistemology (ways of knowing) and phenomenology (consciousness)?
Problem 2: the role of perception. How is perception articulated/understood within these two fields?
This is how Enoch Page framed the course, Anthropology of Consciousness. His critique of academia is based upon a combination of personal experience and a theorizing informed by Gregory Bateson. I haven't read any Bateson, but his name has been mentioned occasionally in COM, and now I know I need to read him.
