culture
Making Infinity Comprehensible – Eco
“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.”
other lists:
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We’ve been away and I have been keeping of the internet to a degree (it always catches up with you though) so I have drawings and things all backed up and out of sequence.
This still works thought, the assembly is automatic from my bookmarking and music listening so it just takes a bit of finessing and it’s ready to go.
This is working for me now in a way that Tumblr used to.
The image is of the railway line at Collumpton Services where we stopped on the way back from Cornwall.
Be warned there’s a lot of politics this time but it’s been difficult to avoid.
Some things have to be said.
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There’s building work occurring next door, they’ve dug a deep hole which we were hoping might be for a swimming pool but is probably just a basement.
Here’s this weeks big dup of links, hastily assembled. I’m keeping record of where I’ve been on the net. That’s my excuse this week.
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Here’s a round up of links and culture from the last week. As ever I’m always debating whether I should share links and finds one by one like a Tumblr or just put them all in one post in a more of a newsletter type format, like this, often coming to the conclusion that this way is less annoying for the reader, in that it’s more easy to ignore in one go.
I want to blog more. This is me blogging more.
The above moving image was auto-generated for me by Google Photos.
It begins after the break.
Theorie der Halbbildung
“At its highest, the philosophical idea of culture [Bildungsidee] sought to form and to preserve natural existence. It meant both the repression of the animalistic in humanity through their adaptation to one another, and the salvage of the natural in opposition to the pressure of the decrepit, man-made order over and against them. The philosophy of Schiller – that Kantian and critic of Kant – was the most pregnant expression of the tension between these moments, while in Hegel’s theory of culture – under the name of externalization [Entäußerung] – just as in late Goethe, it is the desideratum of adaptation, in the midst of their humanism, that triumphs. Where such tension dissolves, adaptation becomes all-triumphant, and its measure becomes the merely existent. It prohibits the positive from erecting itself over and against the given. By the power of the pressure that it exerts on people, adaptation perpetuates the amorphous which it was intended to form – aggression. Just this, according to Freud’s insight, is the source of civilization’s discontents.”
“Curating can take the lead in pointing us towards this crucial importance of choosing.”
“Lately, the word “curate” seems to be used in an greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from a exhibitions of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a concept store. The risk, of course, is that the definition may expand beyond functional usability. But I believe ‘curate’ finds ever-wider application because of a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the incredible proliferation of ideas, information, images, disciplinary knowledge, and material products that we all witnessing today. Such proliferation makes the activities of filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, and remembering more and more important as basic navigational tools for 21st century life. These are the tasks of the curator, who is no longer understood as simply the person who fills a space with objects but as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.”
(T)
– Report On The Construction Of Situations 1957
“A revolutionary action within culture must aim to enlarge life, not merely to express or explain it. It must attack misery on every front. Revolution is not limited to determining the level of industrial production, or even to determining who is to be the master of such production. It must abolish not only the exploitation of humanity, but also the passions, compensations and habits which that exploitation has engendered. We have to define new desires in relation to present possibilities. In the thick of the battle between the present society and the forces that are going to destroy it, we have to find the first elements of a more advanced construction of the environment and new conditions of behavior — both as experiences in themselves and as material for propaganda. Everything else belongs to the past, and serves it.”
Paul Greer 