eras

December 18, 2010

Zeitgeist

Have been listening to the audios and thinking about the sociodrama workshop I will be conducting at the Auckland Psychodrama Conference 2011 on the Zeitgeist. “Listening to the Spirit of the Times.”

Who shall survive and all of JL Moreno’s work looks to a future. Sociometry is the science of the future.

As I became socially and politically conscious, the future loomed large. “We shall overcome”, “Times are a changing” the counter-culture loomed large and it drove me forward (in the ’70s) into a utopian future that crashed both psychologically and socially.

Psychodrama arrived just at that moment in my life in in 1979. It filled my “me generation” needs as well as the counter-cultural needs. It was able to offer repair needed from the pain of the 70s but hooured the visions of the 60s.

And psychodrama did indeed flourish in the eighties in Australia and NZ. I think because Max and Lynnette Clayton of course but also because of the zeitgeist.

Psychodrama offered better social tools than yuppies and better psychological ones than traditional therapy.

December 15, 2007October 23, 2010

Zeitgeist – a swing to art, beauty & truth?

Zeitgeist. Time ghost. Spirit of the times. What is going on?

I was in tune with the Zeitgeist while going on marches in 1968-9. I was in tune with the Zeitgeist in 1969-70 when I was going into communal living and alternative schools. And again with personal growth all through the 80s. Psychodrama groups, and psychotherapy. And in the very early 90s setting up Psybernet as an online enterprise, I could see the dot.com era looming, (sadly I was out of sync with monetising my insight) I have loved being experientially involved in a world changing era.

I am curious about my current interested in art & creativity?

Am I sniffing something that is in the air?

I am curious… what do you think, is it time for a reaction against the pragmatic, quick, efficient, functional business like era we have been in? Is there a swing to art, beauty & truth?

They say that the … genius is always ahead of his time. True, but
only because he’s so thoroughly of his time.

Henry Miller, Preface to The Subterraneans,
by Jack kerouac, 1959

We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti-social; rarely “well-adjusted”, he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

Marshall McLuhan

October 9, 2000November 6, 2010

Postmodern Virtualities

Postmodern Virtualities
Mark Poster

(This essay appears as Chapter 2 in my book The Second Media Age (Blackwell 1995)

…

“In the twentieth century electronic media are supporting an equally profound transformation of cultural identity. Telephone, radio, film, television, the computer and now their integration as “multimedia” reconfigure words, sounds and images so as to cultivate new configurations of individuality. If modern society may be said to foster an individual who is rational, autonomous, centered, and stable (the “reasonable man” of the law, the educated citizen of representative democracy, the calculating “economic man” of capitalism, the gradedefined student of public education), then perhaps a postmodern society is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic communications technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities. Discussions of these technologies, as w e shall see, tend often to miss precisely this crucial level of analysis, treating them as enhancements for already formed individuals to deploy to their advantage or disadvantage.”