Here is a follow on post to an earlier one Homo faber
What makes us human – what is the one thing?
Humans are creators: Homo faber. Continue reading “The relations of creativity. Moreno & Marx”
Homo Faber
One of my favourite posts in this blog is called Whole Earth Catalog – 50 Years. Read through to the end of it to find the gem, in my opinion, which is to understand the sad contortion of humanity’s destiny with the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog. That subtitle, Access to Tools, is so significant, more significant than Stuart Brand realised or that any of us realised at the time.
Lessons on Rousseau — Althusser
Testing WordPress to Twitter
I hope this turns up in Twitter, and you like the sketch I found.
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Later: Yes it did! Now, do I really want that?
Maybe, but nothing automatic.
My reflections on this go way back:
Tagging Marx
Loyalties by Raymond Williams – Novel
Dialectics
Recently I the podcasts I listened to all came up with discussions about dialectics.
Hari Kunzru, Into the Zone .
You will get introduced to ‘Teddy’ i.e. Theodor Adorno.
Its always sunny in the dialectic
Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.
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Revolutionary Left Radio
for some political clout.
The Principal Contradiction: Applying Dialectical Materialism
Torkil Lauesen joins Breht to discuss his newest book “The Principal Contradiction”. In this discussion, Torkil and Breht discuss dialectical materialism, how it is applied in real world situations, and the role that contradiction plays in it all. In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. While incarcerated, he was involved in prison activism and received a Masters degree in political science. He is currently a member of International Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark.
Find more of his writings HERE
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The Partially Examined Life.
For a through philosophical analysis by people who can’t make up their minds about anything.
Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry
On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to lull us into being submissive workers.
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OK, listen to the lot and makes some comments!!
Spontaneity-creativity
For Moreno spontaneity was “a new response to an old situation or an adequate response to a new situation” (1953, p. 336), with creativity adding the element of inventiveness.
Moreno, Zerka T. (1987) “Psychodrama, Role Theory, and
the Concept of the Social Atom.” in Zeig, Jeffrey K., Evolution Of Psychotherapy, first Conference. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Zerka is quoting from the definition that is on the same page in the 1978 edition, 366.
Here is another quote from “Who Shall Survive?” 1978 edition, Page 42:
Spontaneity operates in the present, now and here; it propels the individual towards an adequate response to a new situation or a new response to an old situation. It is… the least developed among the factors operating in our world; it is most frequently discouraged and restrained by cultural devices.
So is spontaneity the response, or that which propels the response?
Marx and Engels on Human Nature
Useful simple short article.
https://www.sfr-21.org/human-nature.html
Marx:
“Estranged labour, therefore, turns man’s species-being – both nature and his intellectual species-power – into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence.”
Working for money and not for love changes our nature. We become alien to ourselves, to our bodies and minds. We become alien to to our nature and the world around us. When we are strangers to our creativity we become strangers our own bodies, to nature as it exists outside us, to our spiritual essence and our human existence.
Slavoj Žižek, Quantum and Dialectics
“The idea that knowing changes reality is what quantum physics shares with both psychoanalysis (for which interpretation has effects in the real) and historical materialism”.
Slavoj Žižek – quoted on Redit
That is a great little paragraph!
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From
Medium article by Paul Austin Murphy
A useful read!!
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I wish they had an inkling of Moreno in these discussions — psychodrama fits in more tightly than “psychoanalysis.”
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Interesting the extent to which Bohm was influenced by dialectical materialism:
“In this way Bohm understood it as idealistic. In Bohm’s interpretation, however, the particle possesses at all times a well-defined position and momentum regardless of observation or associating ideas. So, in Bohm’s view, matter came before mind in his theory. Thus he called his interpretation a materialistic one.4 With this materialist interpretation, Bohm wanted to expel mysticism from physics.”
Christian Forstner
Dialectical Materialism and the Construction of a New Quantum Theory: David Joseph Bohm, 1917–1992
✔ July 2021