today

My Christmas eve activities included rolling dolmades and preparing the stuffing for a lamb roast for lunch with the Orphans on Christmas day. I listened to an audio book of Plato's Republic while I was rolling, folding and stuffing. At this season of enforced and often uncomfortable togetherness, it seemed a luxury to be indulging in such productive and fruitful aloneness -

The Republic is something that I have been thinking I want to read, it is a representation of conversation as method, conversation as a means of instruction or learning, after all. Somehow though, I just don't think that we are meant to learn by reading slabs of text.

Labels: thesis

The inscription on the fountain reads:

Labels: field research, public amenities

The conversation I had with my friend H. on Sunday night about how the new practice of paying a "carbon offset" for travel or another kind of [green house gas producing] activity, paying to pollute (in the case of the coal industry), is similar to purchasing, from the Catholic Church, "indulgences" for sins committed instead performing penances — how dissatisfaction with this practice and the corruption generated in the church by this practice was a contributing factor for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century.

It is the sad hilarity of seeing one of those Greenfleet stickers on a car with the little tag of 'reducing my cars impact on the planet'. Is it possible to un-emit what you have emitted, in the same way that sin can be absolved through a little transaction, a little bit of penance?

I'm not the only one to think this, as a quick search on the World Wide Web will show. But I have been wondering, in the early mornings, how far this metaphor extends — how, in my mind, the line of thought extends to the problem of the economy, debit and credit, having replaced Christian morality, sin and repentance, as the dominant metaphor of our time. The economy has become the poetic structure of the world.

My saddest intuition is, I think, that this shift in our thinking is the result, directly or not, of the Protestant Reformation, and the subsequent secularization of our culture; and the most likely 'revolution' being a turning toward religiosity, and an emphasis on piety, rather than a process of bringing about a change, an alternative to the culture of credit and debit or heaven and hell.

Labels: field research

I'm just posting this here, now, as a kind of place marker. It is one the most resonant and remarkable things that I have read, although I can never tell whether I am impressed by the quality of the thought, or simply by the dizzying series of qualifications within qualifications, or the startling length of this fine 'american' sentence.

...Ambitious or new art, that which recognizes a break with what seems a continuous, developing history of artistic traditions and practice, now exists in two states, one I called the modernist (in which the present wishes to maintain the artistic quality, say the greatness, of the past, despite the differences the look and sound of the art, as it were, must discover precisely to preserve its status), and the other [...] I called the modernizing (in which the present would forget the past by, so to speak, by embracing the fact of the present, in its transience, its fashionableness, its distrust of, even contempt for, greatness); apparently ungrounded, the modern in the arts, in both its states, courts the charge of fraudulence; both states cause what may be called philosophy, the modernist by embodying its theory of itself (an origin of romanticism) the modernizing by inviting as a response to it an outpouring of theory and manifesto; and since I spoke of modernist art as assuming the condition of philosophy, bearing absolute responsibility for itself ("seriousness"), I was bound to ask what effect this assumption had on what is called philosophy, whether philosophy contained a counter move toward assuming the condition of art, a wish to bear some responsibility for its own literary conditions, something encouraged by my own growing fascination with the writing of Wittgenstein and of Heidegger, and later with that of Emerson and of Thoreau, given their difference in sound and look from what most of my profession of philosophy acknowledged as philosophy; and it seemed to me that the power of the profession to discourage this move to the literary, let's call it, came not alone from its formidable institutional power (unlike the arts or the sciences, philosophy essentially now finds its sole support in the university), but equally from its quality as philosophy: academic music or painting need not be recognized as a competitor of advanced art, but modern philosophy, in its power genuinely, all but exclusively to represent the present of the history of philosophy, is the scourge of the non-academic, let us say, the literary, in philosophical ambition; a way of putting this asymmetry between art and philosophy is to say that philosophy's struggle against what it perceives as fraudulence or charlatanry(it knows it's debasement under the name of sophistry) is as ancient as the establishing of philosophy in Plato, whereas the the struggle of the arts against their debasement is definitively new, say modern - a further mark of the arts assuming the condition of philosophy; is is part of Wittgenstein's originality to have internalized the issue of philosophy's enmity toward a kind of charlatanry (a test of its seriousness) by including forced or fixated or otherwise inauthentic responses to philosophical perplexities (through the medium of what is called his "interlocutor", voicing his or her insistances or disappointments or cravings in the face of Wittgenstein's corrections), as if we are, in striving to become the philosopher it is in us to become, meant to overcome the sophist it is equally in us to remain.

This drinking fountain is from Banksia Park, a little bit of neo-brutalist Japonoisserie from the Yarra Parks team.

Labels: field research, public amenities