Aesthetic Materialism

  Sometimes you will find textbooks, magazine articles, etc., that date postmodernism as having arisen in the 1960s.  I think this is a perfectly silly, stupid, and arbitrary way of dating it, which should be completely scrapped.  If, by postmodernism, we mean something that arose in the 1960s, then postmodernism is truly meaningless, a totally arbitrary non-concept.  (And even in the sources that cite 1960 as the beginning of postmodernism usually hedge their bets, by putting in disclaimers that say something along the lines of "but we can find precursors of postmodernism even earlier" yadda yadda.) If postmodernism is to be a meaningful division of cultural history, then the most reasonable way of sketching it would be to say that postmodernism gradually arose during the great crisis that spanned from 1914 to 1948, and that it had been fully established by 1945, with the development of nuclear weaponry and the defeat of that particular wave of fascism.  I woul...

If I could characterize Hegel with one word, it would be: unpredictable.  Hegel always has the hot take.  He is predictably unpredictable.  Just when you think you understand him, just when you think you know him, you read another sentence from his work that forces you to reconsider everything you thought you understood. I've said before that Hegel's entire project is the critique of romanticism, that critique for Hegel means immanent critique- thus, so to speak, romanticism's critique of romanticism- and that - brilliantly! - when he zeroes in on romanticism, the essence of Hegel's discussion of romanticism focuses on irony, the irony of the romantic.  Even here, Hegel is being a romantic, because what he seeks is, you might say, poetic justice.  He wants romanticism to be hoisted by its own petard, like the person who is punished in the afterlife in a brilliant, torturous way - the ironic twist that turns everything back on them - "contrapasso".  What mak...

  I am an unabashed egoist (or at least egoish ). I am an unabashed humanist.  I am an unabashed materialist.   I am unabashedly in favor of existence & being.  I unabashedly support science.  I unabashedly believe in nature, including human nature. I unabashedly believe in truth. I unabashedly believe in rights.  I unabashedly believe in progress.  I think all of these things matter, and that they're good. I want to maintain these, to make sure all of these keep existing.  I want to maintain the ego, maintain humanity, maintain the material world, maintain nature, maintain science, maintain rights, maintain progress, maintain existence, maintain being. I believe strongly in maintenance .  We have to learn to be custodians .  We must learn to be the janitors of being. "Another flaw in the human character is that everyone wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut  I want to maintain the modern, kee...

Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism. Thus, romanticism is opposed to science in so far as it sees science as a form of managerialism.  Question: but is science, itself, also a form of romanticism?

 Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism.

  Reverse Modernism  At a recent art event - a live video performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi of Signal Culture, at Visual Studies Workshop, using the software tools that they developed - renowned video artist Peer Bode (who had been their teacher) stood and spoke about how contemporary artists were not only making art, but also creating instruments for making art.  He also reminisced about a conversation with Nam June Paik in the 90s, in which Paik had said that he felt bad for painters, because painting was no longer the vanguard of art.   But what this leaves out is that nowadays, people are not only making art, and they are not only making instruments for making art - they are making artists.  The production of artificial artists - coupled with the rapid adoption and permeation of the new artificial culture into both the highest strata of commercial society and the broader public - undebatably signals a new moment in the history of art,...