Critical theory – mashup

Just exploring a few rethinks I don’t understand…

Mimetics

http://www.mimetics.com/theory.html

“By answering the question concerning technology with a sensuous mimetic account of presubjective embodied agency, Benjamin opens a path that can help technocultural critics dispel their residual (and, as I have argued, largely unthematized) commitment to representationalism.

Pre-subjective

From the Wikipedia page on Tonino Griffero

Whereas Heidegger’s moods always presuppose a subjective response, we see atmospheres (in this provocative, anti-subjective sense) not as internal feelings of an individual or metaphors but as pre-subjective feelings, as spatially extended emotions.

I can’t yet make sense of that.

Mimetics seems to relate to Dawkins memes – see Wikipedia but the idea I’m pursuing here is more related to…

Mimesis

Wikipedia.

In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society, and its use has changed and been re-interpreted many times since then.

This is interesting too…

The Frankfurt school critical theorist T.W. Adorno made use of mimesis as a central philosophical term, interpreting it as a way in which works of art embodied a form of reason that was non-repressive and non-violent.[2]

Benjamin was of that school, was he not? Makes me think the opening quote really should read Mimesis.

This exploration stems from reading an interview in Mousse magazine 34 with Amy Balkin

atp: Are you also interested in the pre-subjective and in rendering it transparent?

ab: Yes, I’m influenced by how Philip K. Dick’s characters build models or prefigurative spaces. These can be nostalgic, like Dick’s “babylands” of the super-rich, who build and curate satellite demesnes to mimic a specific lost place and time of their childhood (e.g. Washington, D.C. in 1935), or the miniaturized “layouts” of off-world settlers forcibly evicted to colonize Mars, where a proxy experience of a day out in pre-climate change San Francisco is accessed through drug-enhanced “translation,” but experientially structured by the interior decor of a miniature home layout.

“A model provides a vision to inhabit, whether for a desired political future or a nostalgic past, or some combination of these—a form of continuity. So the pre-subjective could be about the possible experience of a future loss of the familiar via climate change—familiar birds and plants,
landscapes or food, or the familiar in terms of ideas of shared spaces or notions of experiential commonality, whether as a park or some formulation for an equitably shared space. So perhaps the question for me would be about a commons as a way forward versus nostalgia for a kind of shared land and resource use that was historically situation-specific.

This makes more sense, but I’m still not really a member of this discourse domain.

Was that story by Philip K Dick the basis for True Lies? No, I think the reference is to Now wait for last year but is could have been, seems like they pinched a few ideas. And they did use a Philip K Dick story for the other Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall. Perhaps the novel and the short story have a similar theme.

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The following serendipitously found its way here…

Part of recent explorations in In this moment… my art blog

13 Tobey Crystallizations obraz do artykułu

Therapy and the world

Just as I completed the last post I saw this post in GroupTalk:

Edward Schreiber edwschreiber@earthlink.net via grouptalkweb.org
21:01 (4 hours ago)

to Grouptalk
Here’s how I see it. Moreno started it with this:

“A truly therapeutic procedure cannot have less an objective than the whole of mankind. But no adequate therapy can be prescribed as long as mankind is not a unity in some fashion and as long as its organization remains unknown. It helped us to think, although we had no definite proof, that mankind is a social and organic unit.”

That opening from Who Shall Survive by Moreno is exactly the philosophy that underlies Jim Rough’s Wisdom councils, though he may not know it. This another example of how some other philosophy amplifies how I see Moreno’s work more clearly.

Later: Sunday, 26 December 2021

I must have written this in a time I really lost my Marxist perspective. This unity approach is annoying.

Dynamic Facilitation

As if the modalities in the last post were not enough!

Another form of practice that I keep my eye on is Dynamic Facilitation. This is another mode that is not radically different from Moreno, but takes one aspect forward. How to operationalise small group process to work with whole communities using the principle of isomorphism of systems.

I stumbled on this site today, I recall Rosa Zubizarreta as the author of an excellent manual on Dynamic Facilitation — her site looks good, and maybe I’ll do one of her workshops one day. Or one with Jim Rough.

http://diapraxis.com/home

Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali on the Julian Assange show.

Noam Chomsky: that the April 6 movement in Egypt began as a group of tech savvy people working with workers on strike. They were squashed by the regime.

A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.

If you’ve missed the previous episodes, you can always watch them online athttp://assange.RT.com

Subscribe to RT! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=RussiaToday

Another phenomena that struck me is the speed of the spread of the consciousness of change tips from hidden to visible.

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Note industrialization that traditional Marxism addresses is perhaps more prevalent in China than in the USA.  Design, IT development is separated from the material production.  Perhaps the real motivation is that if all forms of creativity are integrated and work together the capitalist control can’t be maintained.

Chomsky:  China is the assembly plant for the advanced state capitalist counties.

Assange:  Internet radicalised youth.

 

 

 

 

One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse – Ali Abunimah

I’ve downloaded the sample. As a New Zealander this option makes sense. Nothing is perfect, but two states for New Zealand would not make sense, no matter how unfair the history.

Amazon.com: One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse eBook:: Kindle Store

This review makes it clear what the book is about.

Intelligent writing and vision make this a must-read, November 30, 2006
By Lora Gordon

This review is from: One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Hardcover)
Rather than rehashing the same dead arguments on Palestine/Israel or relying on ‘blame game’ rhetoric, this book offers a refreshing vision of the future: one democratic state for Palestinians and Israeli Jews, living side by side with equal rights. Certainly not a new vision, as the author duly notes, but rarely argued so cogently and with such sound vision for the future. Abunimah draws on successful examples of multi-ethnic states (Belgium, Ireland, South Africa) to shape his argument for a multi-ethnic Palestine-Israel, and to envision how two peoples locked into conflict by decades of oppression might come together.

The C.G. Jung Page: Too Important to Leave to the Experts by Dolores E. Brien

Too Important to Leave to the Experts

by Dolores E. Brien

via The C.G. Jung Page: Too Important to Leave to the Experts by Dolores E. Brien.

Wonderful work, only in the Internet Archive – I won’t paste the whole lot here, just a teaser. I trust the Archive will be there as long as my site…

Continue reading “The C.G. Jung Page: Too Important to Leave to the Experts by Dolores E. Brien”

Hand signals

Hand signals have come into their own more than ever before, thanks to the prohibition of megaphones.  Human megaphones must have been in use in ancient times, but they are back!  Its wonderful how every act of the old system is back firing right now.  Police brutality is bringing more people into the movement.  Creating a puppet like Obama is driving class consciousness forward, banning megaphones creates simpler and more effective communication, just whats needed to augment mobile phones!

The Most Popular Hand Signal at Occupy Wall Street

Oct 12, 2011 J. Webster

Sure, at Occupy Wall Street, protesters are forced to use some complicated hand signals and tricky ways of getting their message across since they’re not allowed to use mics, but there’s one simple gesture that seems to be the most popular: the middle finger aimed at the financial elite. Yes, it’s a very good gesture, since everyone understands it right away and there’s no need for a megaphone.

Why does the occupy movement work?

Various reasons have been put forward for the success of the occupy movement around the world, and one in this article seems to be on the mark. Essentially Obama’s slogans of change and message of hope, though coming from the mouth of someone bought by Wall Street, are bigger than the man. He did not invent the lines, “Yes we can!” “Be the change” and while those words were effectively stolen, the sentiment was not.

The article also reports some interesting material on a survey of attiude towards capitalism.

Naked Capitalism

David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet

Continue reading “Why does the occupy movement work?”