catalog

Well-known member
I read his essay 'the question concerning technology' when I was at uni and remember thinking it was really good, but I can't remember any of it. I assume he was suspicious in some way or other and talked about its alienating capacity or something.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Id like too, but I have to space out my hard metaphysics reads. They have a tendency to kill my reading habit.
 

luka

Well-known member
As a rule people want to understand things so they can dismiss them. Or they want to understand them to gain status,or to add ammunition to a debate club arsenal.

Those things are not very useful to me. But I do find it useful to create disjunctions and I find it useful to create decelerations, intensifications, various modulations of experience and consciousness. Ways to trip up, humble, awe, humiliate, that irritating relentlessly verbal part of the self that wants to understand things, defeat them, flatten them and move triumphantly onwards
 
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luka

Well-known member
all the literature students have moved into the equally abysmal Hannah Arendt now and are embarrassed about their Heidegger phase.

With more information and less time than ever thinkers get turned into trading cards. There's a social need to know about everything but no time to learn anything. It all becomes a question of knowing which names are names to drop at any given time. Keeping up with the trend-currents.

You can see the same effect in music. 30 years ago you were hip if you'd heard of Can and Lee Perry. Now those names are mainstream and anybody into music would claim to be a fan of things which were vanishingly obscure in the '90s but because of time constraints and the nature of consciousness and experience in the digital age, actual engagement has become almost impossible. The surface area is vastly expanded while, inevitably, depth is reduced to the thinnest possible veneer.
 

luka

Well-known member
Dissensus has been suffering from his recently. We all have got into the habit of skimming, delivering quick, glib responses. Harvesting laugh emojis and so on.

It's probably time to push consciously and deliberately against that process and find ways to deepen the engagement, be more thoughtful and be more pretentious, not across the board, but at particular points.

Kill the speed kill the information kill the opinions and take stock of what's going on.

One of things I like about Prynne is that he enforces that slowing down because the poems are not poems you can reduce to understanding. But Heidegger can do the same, any number of writers can do the same job. Giving you something which is too hard, a surface with no obvious footholds and fingerholds, where you really have to interrogate that cliff face till it exhausts you.

And yes, threads like oozey anthem help demonstrate that this can be done with artefacts which initially seem to offer everything at a single glance, but as always, the more you look, the more is there, all the way down to the atomic level and beyond. You'll never bottom out.

 
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luka

Well-known member
While Barty was here we managed to solve the problem of how to have an anti intellectual forum that's not dumb. To my satisfaction at least. But now we have to solve it again with a different set of people.
 
Dissensus has been suffering from his recently. We all have got into the habit of skimming, delivering quick, glib responses. Harvesting laugh emojis and so on.

It's probably time to push consciously and deliberately against that process and find ways to deepen the engagement, be more thoughtful and be more pretentious, not across the board, but at particular points.

i warned about the likes! I fear this may just be how i interpret the world, forever a skimmer, scan and poke til i get a gist and move on.
 

luka

Well-known member
We are all like that we've all been engineered to be like that so our task is to devise ways methods techniques practices to push against that.
 

luka

Well-known member
Your daily meditation is one way, one counter-force put into action against the prevailing current
 

luka

Well-known member
Lockdown gave us one of these disjunctions, these disruptions and subsequent reordering of the scanning pattern and we all learned a lot from the experience.

It's helped us to rediscover the necessity of resistance.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
While Barty was here we managed to solve the problem of how to have an anti intellectual forum that's not dumb. To my satisfaction at least. But now we have to solve it again with a different set of people.

nothing more bourgeois and conformist than anti-intellectualism though. might as well go full metalheadz. Nearly all conscious anti-intellectuals adopt that position from a lifestyle which allows them that luxury. 'I can be misogynist and sexist, fetishise the hammer because I have constructed the image of the idealised prole, which i am removed from.'

Incidentally that is what Mark's book does not get at. The most capitalist realists are not yer wall street execs but labourist leftists and people who think they have penetrated the veil of mysteries.
 

luka

Well-known member
Non sequiturs don't get us anywhere and I don't want to get sucked into an exchange of insults. Start a thread on a thinker you have found useful if you like.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Non sequiturs don't get us anywhere and I don't want to get sucked into an exchange of insults. Start a thread on a thinker you have found useful if you like.

It's not an insult. Anti-intellectualism is mostly a bourgeois trend, has been historically. You can ask @blissblogger if you need validation.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Or to put it in less marxist jargon, anti-intellectualism is the middlebrow.

Lowbrow art does not define itself in opposition to intellectualism, it operates on a different domain. Which is why you will have many lowbrow artists who have a fascination with the highbrow.
 
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