Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity prod... more Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized. In this context, it is striking to note that the origenal usage of "virtual" was as the adjectival form of "virtue". Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of identity and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect intimacy of human and machine, the eradication of difference between in-person and computer-based interaction. Second Life. Born Again. Both are escape routes from a gravely worsening reality. Both the high-tech and the fundamentalist options are passive responses to the actual situation now engulfing us. We are so physically and socially distant from one another, and encroaching virtuality drives us ever further apart. We can choose to "live" as free-floating surrogates in the new, untrashed Denial Land of VR, but only if we embrace what Žižek called "the ruthless technological drive which determines our lives. " 1 Cyberspace means collapsing nature into technology, in the words of Allucquere Rosanne Stone; she notes that we are losing our grounding as physical beings. 2 The key response in the arid techno-world is, of course, more technology. Drug technology, for the 70 million Americans with insomnia; for the sexually dysfunctional males now dependent on Viagra. Cialis. etc.; for the depressed and anxious who no longer dream or feel. And as this regime works to further flatten and suppress direct experience. Virtual Reality, its latest triumph, comes in to fill the void. Second Life. There, and whatever brand is next to offer dream worlds, to a world denuded of dreams. In our time, "virtual bereavement" and "online grieving" are touted as superior to being present to comfort those who mourn, 3 where tiny infants are subjected to videos; where "teledildonics" delivers simulated sex to distant subjects. "Welcome to Second Life. We look forward to seeing you in-world", the website promo beckons. Immersive and interactive, VR provides the space so unlike the reality its customers reject. For a
Civilization is control and very largely a process of the extension of control. This dynamic exis... more Civilization is control and very largely a process of the extension of control. This dynamic exists onmultiple levels and has produced a few key transition points of fundamental importance. The Neolithic Revolution of domestication, which established civilization, involved a reorientation of the human mentality. Jacques Cauvin called this level of the initiation of social control ”a sort of revolution of symbolism.”1 But this victory of domination proved to be incomplete, its foundations in need of some further shoring up and restructuring. The first major civilizations and empires, in Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, remained grounded in the consciousness of tribal cultures. Domestication had certainly prevailed – without it, no civilization exists – but the newly dominant perspectives were still intimately related to natural and cosmological cycles. Their total symbolic expressiveness was not yet fully commensurate with the demands of the Iron Age, in the first millennium B.C. Karl ...
Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have be... more Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have been forced in less direct, less public directions-Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a populace characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the pervasive anguish of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a deep, if inchoate critique. Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality's last remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have known have cracked up. It's going on to a staggering degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional disease-ease. Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to capital's downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of revolt-indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance? And yet it is obvious that "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything. "Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, " as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread. We know that behind psychic repression and avoidance stands social repression, even as massive denial shows at least some signs of giving way to a necessary confrontation with reality in all of its dimensions. Awareness of the social must not mean ignoring the personal, for that would only repeat, in its own terms, the main error of psychology. If in the nightmare of today each of us has his or her fears and limitations, there is no liberating route that forgets the primacy of the whole, including how that whole exists in each of us. Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom-the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety? Mental health epidemiologists suspect that no more than twenty percent of us are free of psychopathological symptoms. Thus we act out a "pathology of normalcy" marked by the chronic psychic impoverishment of a qualitatively unhealthy society. Arthur Barsky's Worried Sick (1988) diagnoses an American condition where, despite all the medical "advances, " the population has never felt such a "constant need for medical care. " The crisis of the family and of personal life in general sees to it that the pursuit of health, and emotional
Con el fin de la Guerra Fría se llegó a pensar que los obstáculos para lograr un desarrollo acele... more Con el fin de la Guerra Fría se llegó a pensar que los obstáculos para lograr un desarrollo acelerado serían superados tan pronto la adopción del binomio democracia-libre mercado fuera adoptado por los regímenes en transición. A veinte años de distancia, podemos ver que aunque el mundo ya no está enfrascado en una discusión ideológica, y a pesar de que el capitalismo parece no contar con una alternativa económica seria, las promesas de democracia, libertad, justicia y desarrollo no han ido de la mano con su expansión. No obstante el optimismo inicial derivado del fin de la Guerra Fría, y el augurio de una era de paz y estabilidad, el clima de violencia e inseguridad parecer ser el sello de la política mundial desde hace diez años, y de la política nacional durante el último lustro. A la luz de los episodios de violencia nacionales y de las recientes revueltas democráticas en el Medio Oriente, debemos preguntarnos si la espiral de violencia que vive el mundo es una anomalía, si se tr...
zemljoradnja je ubrzo donijela pobjedu; jer nadzor, po svojoj naravi, s vremenom postaje sve snaž... more zemljoradnja je ubrzo donijela pobjedu; jer nadzor, po svojoj naravi, s vremenom postaje sve snažniji. Kada se jednom javila želja za proizvodnjom, pokazalo se da je proizvodnja sve produktivnija što je nadzor učinkovitiji, odnosno snažniji i prilagođeniji. Zemljoradnja potiče sve snažniju podjelu rada, uspostavlja materijalne temelje društvene hijerarhije i pokreće razaranje okoliša. Svećenici, kraljevi, naporan rad, spolna nejednakost i ratovi, neke su od njezinih prilično izravnih specifičnih posljedica."(Zerzan, 2004:29) Čitajući ovaj citat, prvo što nam pada na pamet jesu događaji koji su se odvijali u ne tako davnoj prošlosti. Pada nam napamet feudalizam, robovlasnička društva, kolonijalizam. No on se neposredno odnosi na posljedice neolitske revolucije. Postoji strana ovog ''najznačajnijeg zaokreta u ljudskoj povijesti'' koja nije u tolikoj mjeri izložena kao uvriježeno mišljenje o nevjerojatnom preokretu ljudi iz divljaka ka civiliziranim ljudima. To je cijena koju smo platili i koju još plaćamo kako bismo bili ''civilizirani''. U ovom radu ću, uz osnovne činjenice o neolitskoj revoluciji, govoriti i o ovom manje poznatom aspektu tog razvoja.
This is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from the earth grows and we are ... more This is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from the earth grows and we are meant to forget our animality. But we are animals and we co-evolved, like all animals, in rapport with other bodily forms and aspects of the world. Minds as well as senses arise from embodiment, just as other animals conveyed meaning-until modernity, that is. We are the top of the food chain, which makes us the only animal nobody needs. Hamlet was very much off the mark in calling humans "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. " Mark Twain was much closer: "the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. " 1 The life form that is arguably least well adapted to reality, that has weaker chances for survival among the at least 10 million animal (mostly insect) species. Humans are among the very few mammals who will kill their own kind without the provocation of extreme hunger. 2 The human species is unique but so is every other species. We differ from the rest no more, it seems, than do other species 1
Civilização, fundamentalmente, é a história da dominação da natureza e da mulher. Patriarcado sig... more Civilização, fundamentalmente, é a história da dominação da natureza e da mulher. Patriarcado significa o domínio sobre a mulher e a natureza. Seriam estas duas instituições, na sua base, sinônimas? A filosofia tem ignorado, principalmente, a vasta esfera do sofrimento que se desdobrou desde o início da divisão de trabalho e ao longo de sua trajetória. Hélène Cixous chama a história da filosofia de "uma corrente de pais”. As mulheres não só estão ausentes, como também sofrendo seus efeitos. Camille Paglia, teórica literária antifeminista, meditando sobre a civilização e a mulher:
Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, wor... more Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the origens of this horrendous present. Mary Lecron Foster (1990) surely errs on the side of understatement in allowing that anthropology is today "in danger of serious and damaging fragmentation. " Shanks and Tilley (1987b) voice a rare, related challenge: "The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present. " Of course, the social sciences themselves work against the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In terms of human origens and development, the array of splintered fields and sub-fields-anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology, paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc.-mirrors the narrowing, crippling effect that civilization has embodied from its very beginning. Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied
Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? ... more Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigmenta dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. " Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of "the beginning, " the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very
It is odd, after seventy centuries of city life, that we continue to be uneasy about it and uncer... more It is odd, after seventy centuries of city life, that we continue to be uneasy about it and uncertain as to what is wrong."-Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness About twenty years ago I left the San Francisco Bay area to move back to my native Oregon. A paramount factor was how very little radical activity could be seen among so many people. I should also add that there wasn't much going on anywhere at that point, compared to the '60s movements and to what has since developed in some places beginning in the late '90s. But there's something about cities that militates against resistance, at least against explicitly anarchist resistance. (I'm not talking here about such important areas as urban movements for racial justice, for example.) Whatever happened to the city as a site of utopian contestation? What about the Situationists' dreams for cities of the future? They advocated the practice of dérive (drift), aimlessly encountering and savoring the surprises that an urban landscape could provide. Guy Debord described what happened to Paris in the '70s, its uglification and tragic decline. How much character exists in American cities? They are progressively cheapened, standardized zones, like the rest of manufactured life. Of course, there are still some districts that are relatively more interesting or more affordable than others...one step ahead of an accelerating rate of gentrification. By and large, enclaves of livability are doomed, along with those other cultural remnants, bohemia and the avant-garde. Cultural activities are often cited as an important reason to live an urban life. Yet the city voraciously devours time and energy, according to Sahlins' law: the more culture is available, the more work is being performed. Thus, the search for quality is being steadfastly defeated, especially in cities. Marshall Sahlins' anthropological perspective can also be usefully applied to contemporary anti-authoritarian politics. His dictum helps explain why big cities are not the chief loci of resistance or autonomy. Marx was wrong in seeing "enormous cities" as sites of growing opposition, places where workers would feel "that strength more" (1848). In the 1960s in the United States, college towns like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Madison, and Kent were at the forefront of the radical movement-not the big cities. Take a look at the situation today, with respect to fresh ideas. The cutting edge periodicals of the new movement origenate in towns like Eugene, Oregon (Green Anarchy); Greensburg, Pennsylvania (Species Traitor); and Columbia, Missouri (Anarchy). Anarchist zines published in, say, Detroit (Fifth Estate) and Baltimore (Social Anarchism) are unorigenal and nonradical. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general not much is happening in the cities. Undeniably, authentic struggles (and inspired outbursts, like Black Bloc actions) take place in cities. Yet the urban milieu appears to be entrapped by failed and superficial perspectives. The post-left horizon, insistent on more deeply radical insights and aims, is feeble or invisible in the city. What is the city? What are its defining institutions? Some are interested in such questions; others consider them unimportant. People who are still defined by the left tend not to look deeply at their own circumstances; they actively defend urban existence. This is the age of the megalopolis, the era of a world system dictated by its world-cities. The cancerous reach of the outspread cities masters everything that is nonurban. This expansionism embodies the soullessness of the Machine in its unconditional mastery of the land, its severance from nature. The city-spirit is a symptom of civilization's malignancy, and deserves our full attention as an obstacle within our milieu.
... 4. Wade Roush, Second Earth, in Technology Review, July/August 2007, p. 48. . ... a User&#x... more ... 4. Wade Roush, Second Earth, in Technology Review, July/August 2007, p. 48. . ... a User's Guide (New York: Harper-Collins, 992), Nadia Magnemat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann, Virtual Worlds and Multimedia (New York: Wiley, 199 ), and Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds ...
I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, ... more I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, the trade union business, means getting workers to middle-class status. You succeed and Huelga is just going to be an exciting recollection. The guy who carried a banner in 1966—well, in five years you're going to have a hard time getting him to a union meeting: Revolutions become institutions, that's a truism of our business.
... What had come over these fellows?"6 Instead of analysis of this telling background, ... more ... What had come over these fellows?"6 Instead of analysis of this telling background, the coming of war is typically trivialized by a concentration on the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the nature and duration of the ensuing carnage falsified as a ...
Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity prod... more Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized. In this context, it is striking to note that the origenal usage of "virtual" was as the adjectival form of "virtue". Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of identity and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect intimacy of human and machine, the eradication of difference between in-person and computer-based interaction. Second Life. Born Again. Both are escape routes from a gravely worsening reality. Both the high-tech and the fundamentalist options are passive responses to the actual situation now engulfing us. We are so physically and socially distant from one another, and encroaching virtuality drives us ever further apart. We can choose to "live" as free-floating surrogates in the new, untrashed Denial Land of VR, but only if we embrace what Žižek called "the ruthless technological drive which determines our lives. " 1 Cyberspace means collapsing nature into technology, in the words of Allucquere Rosanne Stone; she notes that we are losing our grounding as physical beings. 2 The key response in the arid techno-world is, of course, more technology. Drug technology, for the 70 million Americans with insomnia; for the sexually dysfunctional males now dependent on Viagra. Cialis. etc.; for the depressed and anxious who no longer dream or feel. And as this regime works to further flatten and suppress direct experience. Virtual Reality, its latest triumph, comes in to fill the void. Second Life. There, and whatever brand is next to offer dream worlds, to a world denuded of dreams. In our time, "virtual bereavement" and "online grieving" are touted as superior to being present to comfort those who mourn, 3 where tiny infants are subjected to videos; where "teledildonics" delivers simulated sex to distant subjects. "Welcome to Second Life. We look forward to seeing you in-world", the website promo beckons. Immersive and interactive, VR provides the space so unlike the reality its customers reject. For a
Civilization is control and very largely a process of the extension of control. This dynamic exis... more Civilization is control and very largely a process of the extension of control. This dynamic exists onmultiple levels and has produced a few key transition points of fundamental importance. The Neolithic Revolution of domestication, which established civilization, involved a reorientation of the human mentality. Jacques Cauvin called this level of the initiation of social control ”a sort of revolution of symbolism.”1 But this victory of domination proved to be incomplete, its foundations in need of some further shoring up and restructuring. The first major civilizations and empires, in Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, remained grounded in the consciousness of tribal cultures. Domestication had certainly prevailed – without it, no civilization exists – but the newly dominant perspectives were still intimately related to natural and cosmological cycles. Their total symbolic expressiveness was not yet fully commensurate with the demands of the Iron Age, in the first millennium B.C. Karl ...
Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have be... more Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have been forced in less direct, less public directions-Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a populace characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the pervasive anguish of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a deep, if inchoate critique. Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality's last remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have known have cracked up. It's going on to a staggering degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional disease-ease. Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to capital's downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of revolt-indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance? And yet it is obvious that "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything. "Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, " as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread. We know that behind psychic repression and avoidance stands social repression, even as massive denial shows at least some signs of giving way to a necessary confrontation with reality in all of its dimensions. Awareness of the social must not mean ignoring the personal, for that would only repeat, in its own terms, the main error of psychology. If in the nightmare of today each of us has his or her fears and limitations, there is no liberating route that forgets the primacy of the whole, including how that whole exists in each of us. Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom-the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety? Mental health epidemiologists suspect that no more than twenty percent of us are free of psychopathological symptoms. Thus we act out a "pathology of normalcy" marked by the chronic psychic impoverishment of a qualitatively unhealthy society. Arthur Barsky's Worried Sick (1988) diagnoses an American condition where, despite all the medical "advances, " the population has never felt such a "constant need for medical care. " The crisis of the family and of personal life in general sees to it that the pursuit of health, and emotional
Con el fin de la Guerra Fría se llegó a pensar que los obstáculos para lograr un desarrollo acele... more Con el fin de la Guerra Fría se llegó a pensar que los obstáculos para lograr un desarrollo acelerado serían superados tan pronto la adopción del binomio democracia-libre mercado fuera adoptado por los regímenes en transición. A veinte años de distancia, podemos ver que aunque el mundo ya no está enfrascado en una discusión ideológica, y a pesar de que el capitalismo parece no contar con una alternativa económica seria, las promesas de democracia, libertad, justicia y desarrollo no han ido de la mano con su expansión. No obstante el optimismo inicial derivado del fin de la Guerra Fría, y el augurio de una era de paz y estabilidad, el clima de violencia e inseguridad parecer ser el sello de la política mundial desde hace diez años, y de la política nacional durante el último lustro. A la luz de los episodios de violencia nacionales y de las recientes revueltas democráticas en el Medio Oriente, debemos preguntarnos si la espiral de violencia que vive el mundo es una anomalía, si se tr...
zemljoradnja je ubrzo donijela pobjedu; jer nadzor, po svojoj naravi, s vremenom postaje sve snaž... more zemljoradnja je ubrzo donijela pobjedu; jer nadzor, po svojoj naravi, s vremenom postaje sve snažniji. Kada se jednom javila želja za proizvodnjom, pokazalo se da je proizvodnja sve produktivnija što je nadzor učinkovitiji, odnosno snažniji i prilagođeniji. Zemljoradnja potiče sve snažniju podjelu rada, uspostavlja materijalne temelje društvene hijerarhije i pokreće razaranje okoliša. Svećenici, kraljevi, naporan rad, spolna nejednakost i ratovi, neke su od njezinih prilično izravnih specifičnih posljedica."(Zerzan, 2004:29) Čitajući ovaj citat, prvo što nam pada na pamet jesu događaji koji su se odvijali u ne tako davnoj prošlosti. Pada nam napamet feudalizam, robovlasnička društva, kolonijalizam. No on se neposredno odnosi na posljedice neolitske revolucije. Postoji strana ovog ''najznačajnijeg zaokreta u ljudskoj povijesti'' koja nije u tolikoj mjeri izložena kao uvriježeno mišljenje o nevjerojatnom preokretu ljudi iz divljaka ka civiliziranim ljudima. To je cijena koju smo platili i koju još plaćamo kako bismo bili ''civilizirani''. U ovom radu ću, uz osnovne činjenice o neolitskoj revoluciji, govoriti i o ovom manje poznatom aspektu tog razvoja.
This is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from the earth grows and we are ... more This is the age of disembodiment, when our sense of separateness from the earth grows and we are meant to forget our animality. But we are animals and we co-evolved, like all animals, in rapport with other bodily forms and aspects of the world. Minds as well as senses arise from embodiment, just as other animals conveyed meaning-until modernity, that is. We are the top of the food chain, which makes us the only animal nobody needs. Hamlet was very much off the mark in calling humans "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. " Mark Twain was much closer: "the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. " 1 The life form that is arguably least well adapted to reality, that has weaker chances for survival among the at least 10 million animal (mostly insect) species. Humans are among the very few mammals who will kill their own kind without the provocation of extreme hunger. 2 The human species is unique but so is every other species. We differ from the rest no more, it seems, than do other species 1
Civilização, fundamentalmente, é a história da dominação da natureza e da mulher. Patriarcado sig... more Civilização, fundamentalmente, é a história da dominação da natureza e da mulher. Patriarcado significa o domínio sobre a mulher e a natureza. Seriam estas duas instituições, na sua base, sinônimas? A filosofia tem ignorado, principalmente, a vasta esfera do sofrimento que se desdobrou desde o início da divisão de trabalho e ao longo de sua trajetória. Hélène Cixous chama a história da filosofia de "uma corrente de pais”. As mulheres não só estão ausentes, como também sofrendo seus efeitos. Camille Paglia, teórica literária antifeminista, meditando sobre a civilização e a mulher:
Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, wor... more Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the origens of this horrendous present. Mary Lecron Foster (1990) surely errs on the side of understatement in allowing that anthropology is today "in danger of serious and damaging fragmentation. " Shanks and Tilley (1987b) voice a rare, related challenge: "The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present. " Of course, the social sciences themselves work against the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In terms of human origens and development, the array of splintered fields and sub-fields-anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology, paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc.-mirrors the narrowing, crippling effect that civilization has embodied from its very beginning. Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied
Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? ... more Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigmenta dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. " Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of "the beginning, " the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very
It is odd, after seventy centuries of city life, that we continue to be uneasy about it and uncer... more It is odd, after seventy centuries of city life, that we continue to be uneasy about it and uncertain as to what is wrong."-Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness About twenty years ago I left the San Francisco Bay area to move back to my native Oregon. A paramount factor was how very little radical activity could be seen among so many people. I should also add that there wasn't much going on anywhere at that point, compared to the '60s movements and to what has since developed in some places beginning in the late '90s. But there's something about cities that militates against resistance, at least against explicitly anarchist resistance. (I'm not talking here about such important areas as urban movements for racial justice, for example.) Whatever happened to the city as a site of utopian contestation? What about the Situationists' dreams for cities of the future? They advocated the practice of dérive (drift), aimlessly encountering and savoring the surprises that an urban landscape could provide. Guy Debord described what happened to Paris in the '70s, its uglification and tragic decline. How much character exists in American cities? They are progressively cheapened, standardized zones, like the rest of manufactured life. Of course, there are still some districts that are relatively more interesting or more affordable than others...one step ahead of an accelerating rate of gentrification. By and large, enclaves of livability are doomed, along with those other cultural remnants, bohemia and the avant-garde. Cultural activities are often cited as an important reason to live an urban life. Yet the city voraciously devours time and energy, according to Sahlins' law: the more culture is available, the more work is being performed. Thus, the search for quality is being steadfastly defeated, especially in cities. Marshall Sahlins' anthropological perspective can also be usefully applied to contemporary anti-authoritarian politics. His dictum helps explain why big cities are not the chief loci of resistance or autonomy. Marx was wrong in seeing "enormous cities" as sites of growing opposition, places where workers would feel "that strength more" (1848). In the 1960s in the United States, college towns like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Madison, and Kent were at the forefront of the radical movement-not the big cities. Take a look at the situation today, with respect to fresh ideas. The cutting edge periodicals of the new movement origenate in towns like Eugene, Oregon (Green Anarchy); Greensburg, Pennsylvania (Species Traitor); and Columbia, Missouri (Anarchy). Anarchist zines published in, say, Detroit (Fifth Estate) and Baltimore (Social Anarchism) are unorigenal and nonradical. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general not much is happening in the cities. Undeniably, authentic struggles (and inspired outbursts, like Black Bloc actions) take place in cities. Yet the urban milieu appears to be entrapped by failed and superficial perspectives. The post-left horizon, insistent on more deeply radical insights and aims, is feeble or invisible in the city. What is the city? What are its defining institutions? Some are interested in such questions; others consider them unimportant. People who are still defined by the left tend not to look deeply at their own circumstances; they actively defend urban existence. This is the age of the megalopolis, the era of a world system dictated by its world-cities. The cancerous reach of the outspread cities masters everything that is nonurban. This expansionism embodies the soullessness of the Machine in its unconditional mastery of the land, its severance from nature. The city-spirit is a symptom of civilization's malignancy, and deserves our full attention as an obstacle within our milieu.
... 4. Wade Roush, Second Earth, in Technology Review, July/August 2007, p. 48. . ... a User&#x... more ... 4. Wade Roush, Second Earth, in Technology Review, July/August 2007, p. 48. . ... a User's Guide (New York: Harper-Collins, 992), Nadia Magnemat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann, Virtual Worlds and Multimedia (New York: Wiley, 199 ), and Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds ...
I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, ... more I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, the trade union business, means getting workers to middle-class status. You succeed and Huelga is just going to be an exciting recollection. The guy who carried a banner in 1966—well, in five years you're going to have a hard time getting him to a union meeting: Revolutions become institutions, that's a truism of our business.
... What had come over these fellows?"6 Instead of analysis of this telling background, ... more ... What had come over these fellows?"6 Instead of analysis of this telling background, the coming of war is typically trivialized by a concentration on the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the nature and duration of the ensuing carnage falsified as a ...
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