Natural Beauty chap. in "Aesthetic Theory".
Critical Theory is without an ontology and a re-evaluation of western philosophical tradition for the sake of practice and not theory in itself. (Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno).
- The catastrophe of 20th century is to be true to the victims of history, i.e., Holocaust as rationality "gone wild."
Heidegger's "Technological Age"---> the categories within layers of Communication.
Outer vs. Inner nature.
Rationality which produces catastrophes, i.e., "Natural Disasters" in USA in a controlled mediated environment.
Adorno's trinity: Mass Culture. Mass Media. Culture Industry.
Communication is a standardized language, of pre-formed life in products.
Critical Theory is a distrust in public communication.
The concrete experience & phenomena in Media. Theory changes according to the media climate.
Ques. What kind of practice follows from Critical Theory?
Critical Theory is a an oeuvre of work within the utopia of master narratives.
Heidegger: To step into the circle and work through the given language as they are provided through the structures. Everything is already mediated.
Adorno thought Heidegger pretended to have contact with The Other.
[A conversation this afternoon with Sean Smith in Saas-Fee about poetics and interfaces. I suggested to use the "other" as a temporary marker to designate that which is on the other side of the "skin" of the screen/Internet suggesting the possibilities of an other to be contacted through the Internet which got me thinking about Edison's attempt to telephone the dead and the late 19th century glass apparatus to catch spirits in the aether (developed by some Scottish physicist also a member of the Society for Psychic Research at Cambridge) which then became instrumental for the invention of Television.]
To work oneself through language for the Non-Identical.
Concepts make sense through identification---> to identify with a concept/event/non-event.
Adorno identifies a Language of Categories (also experienced in mass media): organization/differentiation/destruction.
State--> Public-->Acceptance of Public imposition of the state.
What can we do with the sollipsism of a material existence?
The body as a fixed criteria.
The body as Non-Identical= process in time.
Aesthetic Experience:
- To get out of the "given"; to reject the falsehoods and sleep paralysis of society as expressed through Entertainment and Culture Industry.
Ques. How can the aesthetic experience infiltrate the so-called culture industry? Can the authentic aesthetic experience ever withstand the demands and forces of the culture industry without being swallowed whole?!
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Art is where Truth presents itself; follows a language; a commentary within the social product.
A Poetics of Objects is at hand.
True authentic art is a promise.
(They say postmodernism abandoned utopian thinking. A growing emergence of Multiple Utopias breaking out of the universities. Of course we know Utopia is never possible except only its process-oriented attempts. It can only work without the paradigm of absolutes, but use the absolute as a wall to pit itself against.)
(All philosophies are master narratives. This shit is one long story in the mouth of reason.)
Mass Communication destroys Art.
Public Communication destroys Philosophy.
The artist is the medium for truth to reveal itself.
The work itself will tell you if its true.
Art exists for the logic of its own inherent process.
Ques. What if art brought capitalism to and end, instead of working to survive within/because of capitalism?
Adorno's prescription drug is Happiness. (Minima Memoralia) Happiness as defined as passive, letting go, floating on the water. Happiness is without fear of weakness.
No matter where we find ourselves, we must endure the conflict and stay true to suffering; to look at the circumstances that prevent us from living a life worth living.
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The Poet is always a mythical creature within the myth of capitalism.
The Poet must show us how to snap out of the capitalist myth.
What is Contemporary remains contemporary.
Space produces excesses. The excess is that which confuses the hell out of meaning. To love natural beauty without naming it. Beauty rests in the unknowable.
Benjamin states we can never escape mediation.
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