Communication Breakdown

The mother of one of our patients poured out blame upon her husband for refusing for fifteen years to hand over control of the family finances to her.

The father of the patient said, "I admit that it was a great mistake of me not to let you handle it, I admit that. I have corrected that. My reasons for thinking it was a mistake are entirely different from yours, but I admit that it was a very serious error on my part."

Mother: Now, you're just being facetious.

Father: No, I am not being facetious.

Mother: Well, anyway I don't care because when you come right down to it the debts were incurred, still there is no reason why a person would not be told of them. I think the woman should be told.

Father: It may be the same reason why when Joe (their psychotic son) comes home from school and he has trouble he doesn't tell you.

Mother: Well, that's a good dodge.

The pattern of such a sequence is simply the successive disqualification of each of the father's contributions to the relationship.

He is continuously being told that the messages are not valid. They are received as if they were in some way different from that which he thought he intended.

But, per contra, from her viewpoint, it seems that he is endlessly misinterpreting her, and this is one of the most peculiar characteristics of the dynamic system which surrounds - or is schizophrenia.

The bind becomes mutual. A stage is reached in the relationship in which neither person can afford to receive or emit metacommunicative messages without distortion.

There is, however, usually, an asymmetry in such relationships. This mutual doublebinding is a type of struggle and commonly one or the other has the upper hand. [In cases of families with a psychotic offspring] the asymmetry takes the curious form that the identified patient sacrifices himself to maintain the sacred illusion that what the parent says makes sense.

To be close to that parent, he must sacrifice his right to indicate that he sees any metacommunicative incongruities, even when his perception of these incongruities is correct.

The patient is an accomplice in the parent's unconscious hypocrisy. 

 The result may be very great unhappiness and very gross, but always systematic, distortions of communication [...] these distortions are always precisely those which would seem appropriate when the victims are faced with a trap to avoid which would be to destroy the very nature of the self.

If somebody attacks the habits and immanent states which characterize me at the given moment of dealing with that somebody [...] they are negating me. If I care deeply about that person, the negation of me will be still more painful.

From theory we may predict that every participant member of such an institution must be defensive of his or her own immanent states of action and enduring adaptive habits; protective, that is, of the self.

I believe that this is the essence of the matter, that the schizophrenic family is an organization with great ongoing stability whose dynamics and inner workings are such that each member is continually undergoing the experience of negation of self.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.236-7, 242-3

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They are playing a game.

They are playing at not playing a game.

If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

[R.D. Laing]
Knots

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Related posts:-
What's Your Phantasy?
Watch the way you're acting

Full Spectrum

In a society at any one time, if there is x quantity of individuals who show their lack of sense of society by developing an antisocial tendency, there is z quantity of individuals reacting to inner insecurity by the alternate tendency - identification with authority.

This is unhealthy, immature, because it is not an identification with authority that arises out of self-discovery.

It is a sense of frame without sense of picture, a sense of form without retention of spontaneity.

This is a prosociety tendency that is anti-individual. People who develop in this way can be called 'hidden antisocials'.

Hidden antisocials are not 'whole persons' any more than are manifest antisocials, since each needs to find and to control the conflicting force in the external world outside the self.

By contrast, the healthy person, who is capable of becoming depressed, is able to find the whole conflict within the self as well as being able to see the whole conflict outside the self, in external (shared) reality.

When healthy persons come together, they each contribute a whole world, because each brings a whole person.

Hidden antisocials provide material for a type of leadership which is sociologically immature [...] Once in such positions, these immature leaders immediately gather to themselves the obvious antisocials, who welcome them as their natural masters (false resolution of splitting).

The election of a person implies that the electors believe in themselves as persons, and therefore believe in the person they nominate or vote for.

As a whole (healthy) person he has the total conflict within, which enables him to get a view, albeit a personal one, of total external situation.

The election of a party or a group tendency is relatively less mature. It does not require of the electors a trust in a human being.

For immature persons, nevertheless, it is the only logical procedure, precisely because an immature person cannot conceive of, or believe in, a truly mature individual.

[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From ('The Meaning of the Word 'Democracy''), p.243-4, 249

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The Mature Character
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Go Your Own Way
The Colour Wheel
This, Not That 
Sentencing Circles  
 

Everything and Nothing



Nothing                    Something                    Everything
Rest                            Motion                        Rest




0
'The Sea'
'Metaxy' (Plato/Hillman)
'The Real' (Freud/Lacan)  
'Emptiness' (Buddhism)
'Wuji/Wu chi' (Taoism)
'The zone of no-thing' (R.D. Laing)
'O' (Wilfred Bion)
'Creative Indifference' (Salomo Friedlaender)
'The fertile void' (Fritz Perls)
The womb





The Chinese word Wuji (pinyin) or Wu Chi (Wade-Giles) refers to the unmanifest aspect of Tao: Tao-in-stillness, in other words.

Wuji is the undifferentiated timelessness which, in the Taijitu Shuo (a traditional Taoist diagram) is represented by an empty circle. In Taoist cosmology, Wuji refers to a state of non-distinction prior to the differentiation into the Yin and Yang that give birth to the ten-thousand-things-- all the phenomena of the manifest world, with their various qualities and behaviors.

The Chinese character for Wuji (Wu Chi) is composed of two radicals: Wu and Ji (Chi).

“Wu” includes the meanings: without/ no/ none/ non- / [where there are] no.

“Ji (Chi)” includes the meanings: limits/ extreme/ end/ ultimate/ extreme boundary.

Wuji (Wu Chi) can, then, be translated as: infinite, unlimited, boundless or limitless.

[Elizabeth Reninger]
'Wuji (Wu Chi): The Unmanifest Aspect of the Tao'




If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succour out of nothing. He is a magician.

Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us.

The zone, the zone of no-thing, of the silence of silences, is the source. We forget that we are all there all the time.

[R.D. Laing]
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.37, 38




In nothingness there's nothing at all, while 'emptiness' is in fact the opposite of nothingness - it's a universal potential, the universe, beings, movement, consciousness.

No phenomena at all could ever be manifested if their ultimate nature wasn't emptiness.

In rather the same way, though this is only an image, the visible world would not be able to unfold without space to unfold in. If space was intrinsically substantial and permanent, no manifestation, no transformation, would be possible. That's why the texts say, 'Since there is emptiness, everything can exist.'

Emptiness thus contains all possibilities, and those possibilities are interdependent.

The analogy of space allowing worlds to be formed is only an image, to show that nothing in the phenomenal world is substantial, permanent, or intrinsically existing [...]

The idea of emptiness is to combat the innate tendency we have to reify the self, consciousness, and phenomena.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.137, 142




When I flowed out from God, all things declared, "God is!"

Now this cannot make me blessed, for thereby I acknowledge myself a creature. But in the breakthrough I stand empty in the will of God, and empty also of God's will, and of all his works, even of God himself -

then I am more than all creatures, then I am neither God nor creature: I am what I was, and that I shall remain, now and ever more!

Then I receive a thrust which carries me above angels. By this thrust I become so rich that God cannot suffice me, despite all that he is as God and all his godly works; for in this breakthrough I receive what God and I have in common.

I am what I was, I neither increase not diminish, for I am the unmoved mover that moves all things.  

Here God can find no more place in man, for man by his emptiness has won back that which he was eternally and ever shall remain.

[Meister Eckhart]
Meister Eckhart, p.221
Found in 'Psychology and the East' by Carl Gustav Jung, p.158-9




[The Garland Sutra] calls the world of ordinary life "the Dharmic World of Phenomena."

Its condition is such as we ordinarily experience when there are two separate things, A and B.

A has its own particular characteristics, as does B; A and B thus are clearly distinguished from one another, and there is no question of confusing the two.

If the boundaries between phenomena are removed, however, we see the world differently.

This dissolution of boundaries is characteristic [...] of Buddhism in general and other Eastern philosophies. "The minute and infinite differences of actual existence instantly disappear in a vast space of nondiscrimination.

Here, the differences between objects disappear, and so self-nature is negated. This state Zen Buddhism calls "nothingness or emptiness" [...]

Such terms as "nothingness" and "emptiness" do not signify an empty world of no things, but rather a world that contains infinite possibilities for "being." "Emptiness" in the Dharmic World of Principle is pregnant with the dual meaning of nothingness and being.

[...] in order to have such "emptying" of existence [...] it is necessary to empty our ordinary consciousness, our "discriminating mind," which discriminates things one from another, always wanting to see the differences.

The world of phenomena embodies various kinds of discrimination. Each and every thing can be seen separately. But once a person acknowledges their Emptiness before or beneath such discrimination, one can see the world entirely nondiscriminately.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.99-101




The ubiquitous absence of 'God' in ordinary life is this sense of non-existing, of mystery, of incalculable potentiality; this eternal doubt that hovers between the thing in itself and our perception of it; this dimension in and by which all other dimensions exist.

The white paper that contains a drawing; the space that contains a building; the silence that contains a sonata; the passage of time that prevents a sensation or object continuing for ever; all these are 'God'.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p. 27




"'You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friendliness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph.'

As if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to stop. He spoke the words with some effort, as though he had not used his lips for speaking for a long time.

And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm - it was light as a butterfly - looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled.  At that moment I was conquered.

Something of his cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me;  

and suddenly I understood the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity.

I understood what I was privileged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance. A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour; and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into a conversation.

Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and wonderful experience I have ever had."

[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 257
 




Wolfert (2000) describes the Gestalt principles of refraining from preconceptions, and openness of the self to what emerges, as rooted in and parallel to Taoist traditions.

Through this attitude of openness, a flexibility is present that allows for creativity and sacred experience to emerge. This practice of open attention within Gestalt therapy is similar to many forms of meditation (Naranjo, 1970).

A Gestalt approach also challenges us to sit in openness with feelings of not knowing, lack of meaning, or emptness. These feelings are often associated with the feeling of “a void.” Sitting in “a void” is a familiar aspect of Taoist and Zen Buddhist traditions (Van Dusen, 1977). This is often called a “fertile void” by Perls or place of “creative indifference” by Friedlaender in Gestalt psychology (Frambach, 2003).

It is the center from which all phenomena arise. 

Wolfert (2000) tells us that it is through dwelling in the fertile void that we can have deeper contact and allow spiritual experience to enter. This fertile emptiness also has been compared to the psychological openness of grace in Christianity.

[Lynn Williams]
'Spirituality and Gestalt: A Gestalt-Transpersonal Perspective'





The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

Everything in the universe comes out of Nothing.

Nothing - the nameless is the beginning;

While Heaven, the mother is the creatrix of all things.

Follow the nothingness of the Tao,
and you can be like it, not needing anything,
seeing the wonder and the root of everything.

And even if you cannot grasp this nothingness, you can still see something of the Tao in everything.

These two are the same only called by different names

- and both are mysterious and wonderful.

All mysteries are Tao, and Heaven is their mother:
She is the gateway and the womb-door.

[Lao Tzu]
Tao Te Ching, Chapter One




Kristeva's elaboration of the semiotic situates it at a point prior to the Lacanian imaginary, i.e., prior to the moment at which the infant identifies with its own ego and distinguishes itself from an object.

Still in porous relation to another body, without clear borders or limits, the infant is propelled by the anarchic, heterogenous, rhythmic flow of drive energy “which has no thesis and no position”. Mobile and provisional, moving through the body of the not-yet subject, the semiotic is a chaotic force anterior to language, unlocalizable because it courses through an as yet undifferentiated materiality in which the infantile body is not yet distinct from the maternal body.

Kristeva calls this stage pre-thetic since it is prior to the reign of propositions, judgments, positions, and theses, these being subsequent possibilities that might arrest or seize a movement that always exceeds them. Since the image is itself a kind of sign, a first representation, the advent of the imaginary demarcates the first thetic break, a break from nature and into the realm of convention.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy



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Empty Container
In-between 
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Everything is Connected
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Where language ends and art begins
Silence

Positive Space





Love means creating for another the kind of space in which he can flourish, at the same time as he does this for you.

It is to find one's happiness in being the reason for the happiness of another. It is not that you both find your fulfilment in the same goal, like hitting the open road clasped together on a motorcycle, but [...] that you each find your fulfilment in the other's.

The liberal model of society wants individuals to flourish in their own space, without mutual interference.

The political space in question is thus a neutral one: it is really there to wedge people apart, so that one person's self-realization should not thwart another's. Nobody here - to put the point in a different theoretical idiom - seems to receive themselves back as a subject from the Other, as opposed to attending with due sensitivity to what the other has to say.

This is an admirable ideal, nurtured by what is in many ways a deeply honourable political tradition. The 'negative' freedoms it cherishes have a vital place in any just society.

But the space involved in love is rather more positive. 

It is created by the act of relationship itself, rather than being given from the outset like a spare seat in a waiting room.

To be granted this kind of freedom is to be able to be at one's best without undue fear. It is thus the vital precondition of human flourishing. You are free to realize your nature, but not in the falsely naturalistic sense of simply expressing an impulse because it happens to be yours. That would not rule out torture and murder.

Rather, you realize your nature in a way which allows the other to do so too. 

 And that means that you realize your nature at its best - since if the other's self-sulfilment is the medium through which you flourish yourself, you are not at liberty to be violent, dominative or self-seeking.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.169-70




The cultural selection and communication of appropriate emotional states plays a vital role in the socialization of children into adults.

Essentially, such maturation depends upon the ability to recognize one's relatedness to others, and to subdue one's will in order to sustain relatedness. In Pintupi theory, this development is perceived as an increasing ability to "understand." […] implying that one learns what responses are held to be appropriate for various situations.

Young children are said to be "unaware," "oblivious," or "deaf" (patjarru or ramarama) and therefore not responsible for their actions. Children do not know; they understand neither events nor when to be ashamed […] What children learn, then, are […] the "basic orientations for the self provided by a culture" - a folk theory of motivation (how to understand others) and morality (how to place oneself in relation to these expectations).

An adult Pintupi should be aware of what is happening and who is present. There is constant evaluation of the state of the social and physical world.

Pintupi apply the term ramarama ("deaf," "oblivious'') to those whom they consider insane and to drunks. Such an individual does not hear or take note of relatives, possibly injuring close kin or failing to recognize them. In other words, such a person is not in touch with the reality upon which everyone else agrees. One who is unable to "think" in this way is, like a child, not held accountable for his or her actions.

Understanding thus constitutes the precondition for social maturity. The development of that maturity, however, results from an increasing elaboration of ties of shared identity with others.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.107-8

Taking the Rough with the Smooth



Rough                      -                    Smooth
Undefined                -                    Defined
Chaos                        -                   Logos
Dionysus                  -                    Apollo
Unsure                     -                     Sure
Liquid                       -                    Solid
Change                     -                    Permanence
Unknown                 -                    Known
Probability               -                    Certainty
Approximate            -                    Exact
Plurality                   -                    Unity
Decentrate                -                    Concentrate
Complex                  -                    Simple
Irregular                   -                    Regular
Impure                      -                    Pure
Heterogenous           -                    Homogenous
Immanent                 -                    Transcendent
Imperfect                  -                    Perfect
Earth                        -                    Heavens
Matter                       -                    Pattern
Mother                      -                    Father
Man                          -                    God




The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

[Wallace Stevens]
'The Poems of Our Climate'




The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

[Xenophanes]




The individual may strive after perfection [...] but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.

[C. G. Jung]
Aion, CW 9ii, par 123




Dr Von Franz: That is where we differ.

You think God has published general rules which He keeps Himself, and we think He is a living spirit appearing in man's psyche who can always create something new.

Remark: Within the framework of what He has already published.

Dr Von Franz: To a theologian God is bound to His own books and is incapable of further publications. That is where we lock horns.

[Marie-Louise von Franz]
Alchemy, p. 142




We must have the courage to live relatively, provisionally, without foundations. Or rather, we must have the candour to confess that this is how we live anyway, allowing our beliefs to catch up with our practices.

Fundamentalism is a textual affair. It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning.

Literalness of interpretation is of its essence. It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity.

Fundamentalists do not see that the phrase 'sacred text' is self-contradictory - that no text can be sacred because every piece of writing is profaned by a plurality of meanings. Writing just means meaning which can be handled by anyone, anywhere.

Yet if there is no clarity, if no meaning is free from metaphor and ambiguity, how are we to construct a solid enough basis for our lives in a world too swift and slippery for us to find a foothold?

This is not an anxiety to be scoffed at. There is nothing quaint or red-neck about searching for some terra firma in a world in which men and women are asked to reinvent themselves overnight, in which pensions are abruptly wiped out by corporate greed and deceit, or in which whole ways of life are tossed casually on the scrapheap.

Fundamentalism is a diseased version of this desire. It is a neurotic hunt for solid foundations to our existence, an inability to accept that human life is a matter not of treading on thin air, but of roughness.

The fundamentalist is adrift on the rough ground of social life, nostalgic for the pure ice of absolute certainty where you can think but not walk. He is really a more pathological version of the conservative - for the conservative, too, suspects that if there are not watertight rules and exact limits then there can only be chaos.

The problem for the conservative or fundamentalist is that as soon as you have said 'law' or 'rule', a certain chaos is not kept at bay but actually evoked. Applying a rule is a creative, open-ended affair, more like figuring out the instructions for building the Taj Mahal out of Lego then obeying a traffic signal.

As for law, nothing illustrates its slipperiness more than Portia's legalistic sophistry in The Merchant of Venice [...] Portia gets the doomed Antonio off by pointing out to the court that Shylock's bond for securing a pound of his flesh makes no mention of taking any of his blood along with it.

No actual court, however, would admit such a fatuous argument. No piece of writing can spell out all of its conceivable implications. You might as well claim that Shylock's bond makes no reference to the use of a knife either, or to whether Shylock's hair should be tied back in a rather fetching pony-tail at the moment of incision.

Portia's reading of the bond is false because too faithful: it is a fundamentalist reading, sticking pedantically to the letter of the text and thus flagrantly falsifying its meaning.

To be exact interpretation must be creative. It must draw upon tacit understandings of how life and language work, practical know-how which can never be precisely formulated, which is just what Portia refuses to do. If we want to be as clear as possible, a certain roughness is unavoidable.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.198, 202-6




Wabi-sabi  represents Japanese aesthetics and a Japanese world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. 

The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

For Richard Powell, "[w]abi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection."

Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object.  

Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.

In art books, it is typically defined as "flawed beauty."

'Wabi-sabi'
Wikipedia  




Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

It is not good either to forget the questions philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('Introduction'), p.2




We do not, any of us, achieve rigor. 

 In writing, sometimes, we can take time to check the looseness of thought; but in speaking, hardly ever [...]

I know that I personally, when speaking in conversation and even in lecturing, depart from the epistemology outlined in the previous chapter; and indeed the chapter itself was hard to write without continual lapses into other ways of thinking and may still contain such lapses.

I know that I would not like to be held scientifically responsible for many loose spoken sentences that I have uttered in conversation with scientific colleagues. But I also know that if another person had the task of studying my ways of thought, he would do well to study my loosely spoken words rather than my writing.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry'), p.230




To a much greater extent than men, women can be said to form their abstractions from personal experience. Interestingly enough, the same can be said of the Ladakhis and many traditional and non-Western cultures.

To understand the complexities of the natural world, theory must be grounded in experience.  

Experiential learning is based in messy reality, with all its paradox and untidiness, its ever-changing pattern, its refusal to conform to our expectations.  

As such, it inevitably leads to humility.

[Helena Norberg-Hodge]
Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, p.190




Often I never really heard what she said - I’d be staring at her legs. They were very comforting.

Because sometimes there’d be little bruises or marks around her ankles from the elastic in her socks. That’s how come I knew she was real.

['Danny Embling']
Dialogue from the film 'Flirting'




If we think of idealists in terms of Jung's speculations about the shadow, it's clear the idealist is a man or woman who does not want to go down. They plan to go to the grave with the shadow still repressed.

The idealists are shadow-haters.

By exclusive interest in "the truth," they exile the shadow, or keep it exiled ...

[Robert Bly]
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, p. 74




Repeatedly a woman may tell me how hurt she is by other people's boorish responses. Her battered sensibilities withdraw from the constant onslaught.

What she does not realise is that she is trying to make everything around her sacred and that other people may not understand that they are treading on her sacred space or moving in her sacred time, and so they are unwittingly desecrating her sacred temple.

[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 31




The core problem – as Goethe sees it – is this: Romantic love hopes to ‘freeze’ a beautiful moment. 

It’s a summer’s evening, after dinner, Werther is walking in the woods with his beloved. He wants it to be always like this: so he feel they should get married, have a house together, have children. Though, in reality, marriage will be nothing at all like the lovely June night.  

There’ll be exhaustion, bills to pay, squabbles and a sense of confinement. By comparison with the extreme hopes of Romanticism, real love is always necessarily a terrible disappointment. 

That’s why Goethe gradually moved away from Romanticism towards an ideology of love he termed Classicism – marked by a degree of pessimism, an acceptance of the troubles that afflict all couples over time, and of the need to abandon some of the heady hopes of the early days for the sake of tranquillity and administrative competence. 

Goethe was a critic of Romantic ideology not because he was cold hearted or lacking in imagination but because he so deeply and intimately understood its attractions – and therefore its dangers.

'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe




Cathy: Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.

Heathcliff: The moors and I will never change. Don't you, Cathy.

Cathy: I can't. I can't. No matter what I ever do or say, Heathcliff, this is me now; standing on this hill with you. This is me forever.

[Emily Brontë]
Wuthering Heights




We are doomed to formulate conceptual structures that are much simpler than the complex phenomena they are attempting to account for.

These simple conceptual structures shield us, pragmatically, from real-world complexity, but also fail, frequently, as some aspect of what we did not take into consideration makes itself manifest.

The failure of our concepts dysregulates our emotions and generates anxiety, necessarily, as the unconstrained world is challenging and dangerous. Such dysregulation can turn us into rigid, totalitarian dogmatists, as we strive to maintain the structure of our no longer valid beliefs.

Alternatively, we can face the underlying complexity of experience, voluntarily, gather new information, and recast and reconfigure the structures that underly our habitable worlds.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 429




What I call Platonicity, after the ideas (and personality) of the philoso­pher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like Utopias […], even nationalities.

When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do. 

But this does not happen everywhere. I am not saying that Platonic forms don’t exist. Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications.

The difficulty is that a) you do not know beforehand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, p. xxix, xxx




Play


If the cones are not screwed on far enough, the bearings will have "play" [unwanted movement]: the wheel will be able to shake back and forth on its bearings. This is an unpleasant sensation, and may cause control problems.

'Cone adjustment'


The more freedom, or play, in [the] chain, the more room for a reader to generate his or her own meanings from the text. This term 'play' was a key one for Barthes - he used it to refer to a flexibility or movement in the text, that allowed it to be interpreted in different ways.

He also used it to refer to the act of reading and interpretation, which was playful, like a game; and also creative, active, and virtuosic, like a musician playing a score.

'Animating poststructuralism'




[...] the real reason for discouraging dogma in the criticism of the arts isn’t distaste for elitism but the fact that it puts a stop to conversation. 

Take, for instance, F. R. Leavis’s dismissal of Sterne in his study of the English novel, The Great Tradition, where he refers to Sterne’s ‘irresponsible (and nasty) trifling’. Beyond that phrase, in which even the word ‘and’ sounds dogmatic, the case against Sterne is not made.

What is offensive in the phrase is that Leavis refuses even to discuss the matter: he refuses, by more than implication, the company of anyone who would want to.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 56-7




[...] the notion 'exactly six millimetres', or exactly any other measurement, is not something that can ever be met with in experience. It is a metaphysical notion.

But from this it does not follow that mankind cannot make invaluable and prodigious use of measurement; nor that accuracy in measurement, because it is absolutely unattainable, does not matter; nor that we cannot make progress through ever greater and greater degrees of accuracy.

Popper's notion of 'the truth' is very like this: our concern in the pursuit of knowledge is to get closer and closer to the truth, and we may even know that we have made an advance, but we can never know if we have reached our goal.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 27-8



The shapes of classical geometry are lines and planes, circles and spheres, triangles and cones. They represent a powerful abstraction of reality, and they inspired a powerful philosophy of Platonic harmony.

Euclid made of them a geometry that lasted two millennia, the only geometry still that most people ever learn. Artists found an ideal beauty in them. Ptolemaic astronomers built a theory of the universe out of them. But for understanding complexity, they turn out to be the wrong kind of abstraction.

Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined.

The understanding of nature's complexity awaited a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of a lightning bolt's path, for example, was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags.

Mandelbrot's work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.

[James Gleick]
Chaos, p. 94




Over the past twenty-five hundred years of recorded ideas, only fools and Platonists have believed in engineered utopias […] the idea is not to correct mistakes and eliminate randomness from social and economic life through monetary policy, subsidies, and so on.

We cannot make economists more scientific; we cannot make humans more rational (whatever that means); we cannot make fads disappear.

The idea is simply to let human mistakes and miscalculations remain confined, and to prevent their spreading through the system, as Mother Nature does. Reducing volatility and ordinary randomness increases exposure to Black Swans - it creates an artificial quiet. 

My dream is to have a true Epistemocracy - that is, a society robust to expert errors, forecasting errors, and hubris, one that can be resistant to the incompetence of politicians, regulators, economists, central bankers, bankers, policy wonks, and epidemiologists.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 322




We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything… by suppressing randomness and volatility.

Just as spending a month in bed […] leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions […] which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems.

Not only are we averse to stressors, and don't understand them, but we are committing crimes against life, the living, science, and wisdom, for the sake of eliminating volatility and variation.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 5, 61




[Touristification] is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses - and a detailed user’s manual.

It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smaller details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flaneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop - while providing them with the illusion of benefit.

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 62-3




To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to equate one's own will with that of another this may in a certain rough sense become good manners between individuals if the conditions for it are present (namely if their strength and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to one body). 

As soon as there is a desire to take this principle further, however, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. 

One has to think this matter thoroughly through to the bottom and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation - but why should one always have to employ precisely those words which have from of old been stamped with a slanderous intention? 

Even that body within which, as was previously assumed, individuals treat one another as equals - this happens in every healthy aristocracy - must, if it is a living and not a decaying body, itself do all that to other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendancy - not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is will to power. 

On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be ‘no more exploitation' - that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. 

'Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. - Granted this is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! -

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 259




The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on.

Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea.

True enough is as true as can be gotten.

[Rupert Sheldrake]




[…] if the lessons of complex dynamical systems apply to human beings, attempting to design fail-safe social systems (whether legal, educational, penal, or other type) that never go wrong is a hopeless task, for several reasons. 

First, since we carry our history on our backs we can never begin from scratch, either personally or as societies. Second, perfection allows no room for improvement. Plato was one of the few thinkers who understood that if a freshly minted utopia were ever to be successfully established, the only direction in which it could change would be downhill. 

Stasis and isolation are therefore essential to maintaining the alleged perfection, not only of Plato's Republic, but of most other utopias as well. The noumenal self that Kant postulates as the seat of moral choice and free will is likewise not part of this world. The possibility of perfection requires isolation and has nowhere to go but downward.

[Alicia Juarrero]
Dynamics in Action, p. 257




In Russian we have the saying, ‘the Đ¿Ñ€Đ°Đ²Đ´Đ° is not Đ¿Ñ€Đ°Đ²Đ¾.' It’s very difficult to say in English. ‘The law is not the truth.’

If you go directly the law way and accomplish all the demands, you can be not right, you can be evil, being completely strict in following the law, because the law and the truth are separate.

[Aleksandr Dugin]



Related posts:-
Land and Sea 
Solid Ground
Everything and Nothing 
All is Change 
You laugh at my back, and I'll laugh at yours
Where language ends and art begins
Playing the Art Game | Art as In-between
A Familiar Story | Post-script
Short Cuts
Frozen in time
Still Waters
Citizens of the Universe
Certain / Uncertain
Top Down / Bottom Up 
The Real Thing 
Inflation / Deflation
Rational / Irrational 
Only Playing
Collaborative Communication
Living in Hazard

Rights and Responsibilities





Rights                         -                    Responsibilities
Freedom                      -                    Bondage
Chaos                          -                    Order
Individual                    -                    Collective 





You must choose between making a man or a citizen, you cannot make both at once.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]
Émile, p.39




M. - The Dalai Lama [has] tried to introduce into the constitution not only the notion of individuals' rights but also the idea of individuals' responsibility toward society and the state's responsibility toward other states in the world.

J.F. - Yes, it's true that one aspect of what we could call the crisis of modern democracies is that in our own state of law the citizens feel that they have more and more rights and less and less responsibilities toward the community [...] people are a lot less interested in the question of citizens' responsibilities than in that of their rights. They're nevertheless two side of the very same thing.

M. - The East is more inclined than the West to think that society's harmony shouldn't be compromised by people using the notion of human rights to justify doing anything they like, at any time, however they want, as long as it's 'allowed'.

For indeed, such an attitude is really a form of anarchy. It leads to an imbalance between right and duties, between liberty for oneself and responsibilities toward others.

The individual is supreme in Western societies. The individual can do practically anything, as long as it's within the framework of the law.

The individual's responsibility is to consciously preserve the harmony of society. That's something that can only be done if individuals respect the law, not as an obligation, but in the light of an ethical sense, both spiritual and temporal.

The point is not to restrain individuals' freedom but to instill in them a sense of responsibility.

[...] the public's fascinated by violence and sex, and commercially it works very well. The producers only see money to be made, while the legislators are paralyzed by the fear of even touching people's freedom of expression.

The result is complete ignorance about responsibility and an inability to translate such a notion into either law or convention.

If human rights are considered on their own, without human responsibilities being taken into account, there's never going to be a solution to the problem.

In the end, a sense of responsibility has to come from the maturity of individuals, not from restrictive laws. And for individuals to attain such maturity, spiritual principles that make inner change possible have to be alive and well in society, instead of being cruelly missing.

[Matthieu Ricard]
and [Jean-Francois Revel]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.282, 284, 286-7




We must offer to a young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart can act, which expand and extend it to other beings, and which cause him everywhere to find himself again outside himself.

On the other hand, he must carefully avoid those objects which might restrain and repress his heart and stretch the mainspring of the human I or ego, etc.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]
Émile, p.115-20




In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

[Harold Pinter]
Nobel Lecture, 'Art, Truth & Politics'




Developing maturity is not, therefore, simply a slipping of the chains of constraint. It also involves learning to carry a heavier load with intelligence, to manage the complexities of social relations.

The other part of moving through the life cycle is the ever-increasing establishment of relations with others. Most of these new ties derive directly from participation in ritual: They include the people who went through initiation with a man, those who taught him, those he himself taught, and so on.

At each stage he reaches, a man experiences both a wider domain of autonomy and a greater responsibility. 

Not only is this sense of responsibility a psychological product of the periods of seclusion, ritual discipline, and subordination, it also derives from the very construction of a social identity that is increasingly related to other men through exchange and shared participation in events.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.245

Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

While Buddhism aims at freeing ourselves form the stagnation of thoughts like a bird taking off from the fumes of the city toward the pure mountain air, psychoanalysis, or so it seems, brings about an exacerbation of thoughts and dreams - thoughts that are completely centered on ourselves, in fact.

Patients try to reorganize their small world, and to control it as best they can. But they stay bogged down in it.

To put it in a nutshell, the problem with psychoanalysis is that it doesn't identify the basic causes of ignorance and inner enslavement.

Conflict with one's father or mother, and other traumatic experiences, aren't primary causes, they're circumstantial ones. The primary cause is attachment to the ego, which gives rise to attraction and repulsion, infatuation with and the desire to protect oneself.

Where Buddhism's approach and that of psychoanalysis diverge is the means used to attain liberation. Psychoanalysis is correct, and works within the framework of its own system, but that system is limited by the very goals it sets itself.

Take the problem of libido, for example. If you try to repress all the energy of desire, it's bound to come out via some roundabout route and be expressed in an abnormal way. So psychoanalysis tries to redirect it toward its proper object and give it back its normal expression.

But according to Buddhist contemplative science, you neither try to repress desire nor give it free reign in its ordinary state - you try to be completely liberated from it.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.299-300

Related posts:-
Step toward Madness
Forget Yourself

Neomania




Novel                                -                      New
Horizontal                         -                      Vertical
Surface                              -                      Depth
Playful                               -                      Serious





M. - If you're always looking for novelty, you're often depriving yourself of the most essential truths.

The antidote to suffering and to belief in a self consists of going to the very source of your thoughts and recognizing the ultimate nature of the mind. How could such a truth ever grow old?  

What novelty could 'outmode' a teaching that lays bare the very workings of the mind?

Very often, fascination with things that are new and different is a reflection of inner impoverishment. Unable to find happiness within ourselves, we desperately look for it outside, in objects, in experiences, in ever stranger ways of thinking and acting. In short, we get further away from happiness by looking for it where it simply isn't to be found.

It seems to me that the notion of novelty, the desire to keep on inventing things through a fear of copying the past, is an exaggeration of the importance given to the 'personality', to the individuality that's supposed to express itself in an original way at any price.

J.F. - [...] Do you think [that] Buddhism might provide a refuge for people who are fed up with the whole tyranny of novelty?

M. - [...] If you try to see where that thirst for novelty comes from, it seems to arise from neglect of the inner life.

We stop going back to the source of things, and the idea occurs to us that by trying all sorts of new things we might be able to compensate for that feeling of lacking something.

[Matthieu Ricard]
and [Jean-Francois Revel]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.313




[...] the idea that the artist should always be trying to give free rein to his imagination is clearly foreign to traditional sacred art, which exists to provide material for meditation and reflection.

Artists put all their heart and talent into what they do, but their personality vanishes completely behind their work.  

For that reason, Tibetan painting is essentially anonymous.

Western art often tries to create an imaginary world, while sacred art helps to penetrate to the nature of reality. Ordinary art's aimed at rousing the passions, sacred art at stilling them. Sacred dance, painting, and music try to establish a link with spiritual wisdom in the world of forms and sounds. They're arts whose goal is to link us through their symbolism with spiritual knowledge and practice.

The traditional artist puts all his skill into the quality of his art, but he'll never just give his imagination free rein to invent completely new symbols or forms.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.310




It is very easy to fall into the notion that if the new is viable, then there must have been something wrong with the old. This view, to which organisms already suffering the pathologies of over-rapid, frantic social change are inevitably prone, is, of course, mostly nonsense.

What is always important is to be sure that the new is not worse than the old.

It is still not certain that a society containing the internal combustion engine can be viable or that electronic communication devices such as television are compatible with the aggressive intraspecies competition generated by the Industrial Revolution. 

Other things being equal (which is not often the case), the old, which has been somewhat tested, is more likely to be viable than the new, which has not been tested at all.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 194-5




The left hemisphere ‘creates’ newness by recombining in a novel fashion what is already known, not as imagination does, by allowing something that we thought we knew to be truly revealed for the first time.

It is like those children's books with pages split into three, in which you can invent a new animal by putting together the head of a camel, the body of a seal and the legs of a goat.

It produced, by the reliable contrivances of inversion or random juxtaposition, the novelty of the artificial, the bizarre, the unnatural and the obscurely menacing: Gerard de Nerval, with his green hair, taking a lobster for a walk on a string; the perverse self-indulgent world of Huysman's Ă€ Rebours (‘Against Nature’); or de LautrĂ©amont in Les Chants de Maldoror (from ‘mal d'aurore’, an ‘evil dawn’) speaking of the ‘chance encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table’.

Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time – the patient process of Romanticism) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to ‘shock’ oneself into something that feels unfamiliar) are contrary concepts.

[...] one can make something that the explicit had deadened to total inauthenticity come to life again: as ‘perceived and not as … known’.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and His Emissary, p. 408, 412




[...] the reason for looking for new interpretations is always that they will be better than the readings (or some of the readings) we have produced so far, and not simply the fact that they are new.

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 63




Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves; that is what possession means. 

To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves. (One can also suffer of an excess—the lust to throw away or to distribute can also assume the honorary name of "love.") 

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 14




Humanity has not got the good out of its inventions; and by making more and more inventions, it is only leaving its own power of happiness further and further behind. 

[G. K. Chesterton]
The Outline of Sanity, p. 131




To see anticapitalist propaganda in a series like Dallas, however, requires a suspension not merely of critical judgement but of ordinary faculties of observation. Images of luxury, romance, and excitement dominate such programs, as they dominate the advertisements that surround and engulf them.

Dallas is itself an advertisement of the good life, like almost everything that comes over the media - for the good life, that is, conceived as endless novelty, change, and excitement, as the titillation of the senses by every available stimulant, as unlimited possibility.

“Make it new" is the message not just of modern art (the "adversary culture" deplored by neoconservatives) but of modern consumerism. The modern capitalist economy rests on the techniques of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford but also, no less solidly, on the principle of planned obsolescence introduced by Alfred Sloane when he instituted the annual model change. Relentless “improvement" of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising, and these imperatives are built into the mass media at every level.

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities—for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.

The very concept of news celebrates newness. The value of news, like that of any other commodity, consists primarily of its novelty, only secondarily of its informational value. As Waldo Frank pointed out many years ago, the news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a spoiled child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

As Frank also pointed out (in The Rediscovery of America, 1930), the social expectations that stimulate a child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions. “A fresh plaything renews the child's opportunity to say: this is mine." A child who seldom gets a new toy, Frank noted, "prizes it as part of himself.” But if "toys become more frequent, value is gradually transferred from the toy to the toy's novelty. ... The arrival of the toy, not the toy itself, becomes the event." The news, accordingly, has to be seen as the "plaything of a child whose hunger for toys has been stimulated shrewdly."

We can carry this analysis one step further by pointing out that the model of possession, in a society organized around mass consumption, is addiction. The need for novelty and fresh stimulation becomes more and more intense, intervening interludes of boredom increasingly intolerable.

Neoconservatives sense a link between drugs and television, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection any more than they grasp the important fact about news that it represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda. Propaganda in the usual sense of the word plays a less and less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Mass media themselves contribute to the prevailing skepticism; one of their main effects is to undermine heroism and charismatic leadership, to reduce everything to the same dimensions. The effect of the media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction. It is true that drug addiction is one of the things that undermine "traditional values," but the need for drugs - that is, for commodities that alleviate boredom and satisfy the socially stimulated desire for novelty and excitement - grows out of the very nature of a consumerist economy.

It is only in their capacity as quintessential consumers that young professionals dominate the airwaves and set the tone of American life. Their distinctive manner of living embodies the restless ambition, the nagging dissatisfaction with things as they are, that are fostered by a consumer economy.

Their careers require them to spend much of their time on the road and to accept transfers as the price of advancement. Though they complain about having to move so often, their willingness to travel long distances even in pursuit of pleasure suggests that they would find a more settled life unendurable.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.520-1




Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration.

Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception.

At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.

The neoliberal regime pushes serial perception, reinforces the serial habitus. It intentionally abolishes duration in order to drive more consumption.

The permanent process of updating, which has now extended to all areas of life, does not permit the development of any duration or allow for any completion. The ever-present compulsion of production leads to a de-housing [Enthausung], making life more contingent, transient and unstable. But dwelling requires duration.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.7



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Breakdown