Author: Patricia Oxley

bbc infinite monkey cage what is music

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36506949

Spain election: Podemos’ Ikea-style appeal to young voters
By Manuel Arias-Maldonado
Associate Professor, University of Malaga
11 June 2016
From the section Europe
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Podemos Ikea-style manifesto, 8 Jun 16Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
Podemos has an eyecatching Ikea-style manifesto
In a famous piece written in 1936, the German intellectual Walter Benjamin warned about the ‘aestheticisation of politics’, as seen in Nazi and Fascist mass propaganda rallies of the time.
Now, almost a century later, his observation is truer than ever. In fact, politics seem to be entering into a post-modern age of irony and self-reflection.
The final goal, however, remains the same: capturing power. Not seducing the masses, but appealing to a fragmented electorate that oscillates between apathy and indignation.
In today’s saturated media environment, new ways of catching public attention are called for.
So how about presenting your economic manifesto in the form of an Ikea catalogue?
That is just what Podemos, the insurgent Spanish party that came from nowhere to third position in last December’s general election, has just done.
To the delight of Spanish media outlets and social media, Podemos (meaning ‘We Can’ in Spanish) delivered an economic programme that mimics the Ikea catalogue, a familiar item in many Western households.
In it, prominent members of the party are featured in Ikea-decorated rooms – seemingly with the approval of the firm, which has refused so far to comment – while presenting a rather traditional tax-and-spend list of economic proposals.
Although most commentators have pointed out that the numbers do not add up, this does not seem to bother either the party or voters.
A few days ago, Inigo Errejon, usually pictured as the most brainy member of the party, said frankly that campaigns must be sexy. Voters seem to agree, as the polls suggest Podemos will be the most voted for party among people under 40.
Podemos gains in new Spain poll battle
Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, speaks in Barcelona on 11 June 2016Image copyrightAFP
Image caption
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias is trying to soften his party’s hard-left image
Using Ikea as an inspiration brings to mind the practice of ‘cultural jamming’ – giving capitalist icons and messages a subversive meaning by placing them in different contexts or using them for unexpected ends.
After all, Podemos blends traditional Socialist ideas with modern populism. And if candidates are sold as brands in our times, why not use brands themselves to sell the candidates?
Ikea seems like the natural choice: the firm is full of meaning for young voters who have led unstable lives in our fluid age.
At the same time, Podemos is trying to dispel the impression that it is a hard-left party, after forming a coalition ahead of the election with the former Communist Party; Ikea stands for the success of Nordic social democracy.
Tellingly, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has just claimed that Marx and Engels were Social Democrats, enraging a weakened Socialist Party for which Podemos represents an existential threat.
A lecturer in politics, Mr Iglesias made no mistake – he was forcing others to talk about him, thus dominating the stage. In that, he recalls another successful populist: US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
After all, populism is a political style rather than an ideology. And in matters of style, the Ikea trick confirms that Podemos is way ahead of its rivals.

put here for later consideration

The plot ranges across the CIA, hallucinogenic drugs, humpback whales, Nazis and the death of Michael Jackson. But just as mysterious and intriguing is the way in which what is being dubbed ‘The Interface Series’ is emerging into the world.
If you watched the TV-series Lost, you’ll probably be familiar with that feeling of confused anticipation as you hope for several threads of narrative to tie together. Over the course of this month, a new kind of mystery, for a new kind of audience, has been unfolding on Reddit – the online bulletin board where people post articles and comments on threads about a bewildering range of subjects.
It all began about a month ago when anonymous Redditor _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 began commenting on seemingly random Reddit posts with elaborate, even creepy, descriptive posts.
Reddit user commenting on threadImage copyrightREDDIT
The posts appeared in threads about a bizarre range of seemingly unconnected topics including: a debate about whether pirates really did have parrots, the responses to somebody seeking advice about how to help a relative with a drugs problem and the comments under a video of a cat sliding down stairs.
Still from cat videoImage copyrightIMGUR
But these weren’t just random nonsensical rants. There is a theme that ties them all together; ‘The Flesh Interfaces’ which seem to be “portals of some kind, made of thousands of dead bodies, which transport biological matter to some unknown place and returns it inside a fleshy sack, heavily dosed with LSD.”
The Flesh InterfaceImage copyrightREDDIT
So who is the author behind all this?
Trending contacted _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 and he agreed to be interviewed via email. He told us he was male, in his thirties, lives in the United States, works as a freelance translator and was once a heavy user of LSD.
And what is ‘The Interface Series’ about? “At the distinct risk of sounding like a grandiose crackpot, I would sum up my story as a warning to humanity. I believe we are rushing headlong toward a focal point at which the future of our species will be decided,” he replied.
But it’s a warning that seems to be peppered with references to popular culture.
Michael Jackson postImage copyrightREDDIT
Some readers also thought that in another post the author was referencing ‘Becky with the good hair’, a much-quoted phrase from Beyonce’s recent album Lemonade.
Jesus with the good hairImage copyrightREDDIT
The writer told us: “I don’t know exactly where the story is going, but I do know the information I want to convey, which guides the story.”
As for the unorthodox way in which the story is appearing, _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 clearly feels Reddit is the perfect platform for his narrative.
“I realized that on the internet, and especially on Reddit, it is possible to intrude on people’s realities in a very unexpected way. If you have a bit of a knack for storytelling, you can redirect the thread of a conversation in any direction. With a single, strategically designed comment, a simple debate about cookware can become Klingon erotica. A discussion on urban planning can morph into an Edwardian romance with gay seagulls. The sky is the limit, really.”
The story is certainly distinctive and has already gathered thousands of followers. It is now easier to track down as one admirer has collected all the posts in one place in chronological order in a subreddit page called r/9M9H9E9.

Well little glimmers but few posts.

Here’s one

If the question is:  “What kind of activity is art”

Then you need a set of questions that you might apply to any activity in order to get anything useful out of asking the question of art

So one could take an activity like the one I am doing now = sitting typing and composing (is that the right word) drafting/ or whatever a spiel about a topic.  What would/could the questions about this activity be?

And would there be a central core of questions which could be applied to any actvity

would we learn something about what questions could be applied to one activity and not to another?

and how would we define ‘activity”?

Those questions aside

what kind of activity is this spiel-making?

main thing is it gives me satisfaction – the satisfaction of following a trail of thought (one thing after another)

Is that it?

almost as if the pleasure(?) lies not in the end result but in the following of the train of thought – that’s a bit like doing sudoku

and that puts it in schillers spielraum (notice the spiel! was the previous spiel my unconscious ahead of me – am I merely the vocal outlet for my unconscious when it finally fights its way up

Thank God for the internet and my laptop because they are the best spielraum so far in the world as the toys are all there for the searching and you don’t even know what the toys are before you search.

A note of caution – so many people regard me as confused, batty or whatever nasty word feeds them.

It takes an amount of courage?  to let that go and to continue with the trail following. even if I am one of those whose trail following leads nowhere but who keeps faith with the adaptive gene that works towards finding stuff.

I will not stop being confused and batty but possibly might be a bit more discerning about people and become more able to assess people from my intuitions rather than giving people the benefit of the doubt.

memo to self – be more protective of yourself and at least value yourself as at least of the same value as the other person.

back to thinking!

podcast discussing enjoyment in culture – argument is that enjoyment of culture is one way in which we are et up as members of society

candy crush

Alfie Brown says

he is talking about distraction and how Adorno was tconcretelysure that this ws a bad thing

but benjamin was aware of ambiguities in things

he says enjoyment is a ey way in which we are controlled.  It’s also a moment in which things  can come unhinged

I hae not posted here for ages becasue Ihave been busy developing a tutoring project and another blog: tutorpat.wordpress.com

but this article feel v interesting to me.

I cam across terro management theory  and it feels as if it will explain a lot abou the way I feel  the theory purports to explain much of human behaviour including irrational teleigious belief and  bonding together in social groups and exlcuding others as not of the one social group.  It seems that social groups and group beliegfs fend off the terror that ariss from the knowledge that we will all die.

I think that it is worth while understanding this theory so I will go some way to take notes from this article

879 to 890

okay theu did four studies that tried to establish the reactions of peopleto art that did not have ameaning

the people characteristics looked at were – their level of mortality salience and the need for personal structure

they were looking to see if these two traits : mortality salience and need for personal structure has any effect on dislike of modern art

………………..

people dislike art they consider meaningless

art cognoscenti can often derive meaning from their prior knowledge

but naive observers rely on the representational and expressive content

modern abtract art is unique in its explicit abandonment of any repreenttion aintentions

eg Kandinsky

Ortega y Gasset and C Greenberg sais that ‘modern art alientates the average person by defying prepackaged meaning and rerquiring special sensibilities to decode, without whch the naive viewer is ‘lost in a chaos of sounds and rhtythms colours and lines without rhyme or reason (Boudieu 1984 p 2

empirical stufes of art appreciateion says meaningless ness detracts from aesthetic enjoyment

and

content is more important that sensory properties of the artwork

and

as content becomes impoverished then abaluation becoes less favourable.

the writers pose the question ‘what undrlies this aversion to perceived meaninglessness and posit that TMT gives an answer.

—————————————–

TMT nonspcific structure and PNS

what do they have in common – it seems to me to be a fundamental a priori (correct usage?)

that what is most important in something is that thing which it possesses and other things don’t possess

that what is of value in something is that thing which it possesses and other things don’t possess

Greenberg:

from modernist painting:

am listening to Jay Bernstein tapes and reading the transcript as well. specific tape is 3rd October 07.

• it is v difficult
• it is exciting me as there might be an answer here tantalisoing
• what does that mean in Lacanian terms its some kind of object either petit or a?
• but still exciting
• bernstein seems to be talking about the cognitive experience oflooking at a painting
• i can compare it too my exerience of looking at a Wols painting and an Otto Dix painting
• in berlin
• I am still trying to figure it out
• both involved that circular looking reflecting and looking round and round a time based process with (pat looking informing thinking and vice versa – preetenshus!)
• psbsks that the imagination apprehends
• andApprehension is a work of passive synthesis – preparing the intuition for conceptualization by seeking out both its unitary character and the crucial discriminating characteristics of that unitary presentation.
• so that when I look at a painting I am undertaking a mental process towards producing a concept and I do this by looking for unity and looking at the individual characteristics of…
• so eg looking at a pollock painting I am looking for a coherence  a unity if the many many marks
• looking for significant (Pat wy are they sgnificant?) pattternigs relations movement
• Pat yes that is certainly true
• bsks that this is what we do with any object inthe world anyway
• pat is he saying that looking at art is a kindo f practice for looking at non-art?
• bsks first we have to apprehend the object before we understand it
• is this what the child goes thorugh when it istarts looking at things in the world.
• maybe one can see the pleasure in aesthetic looking cos it would have evolved cos apprehending and unerstanding objects in the world would havehad an adaptive function
• bs that the 3rd critique is about the way the imagination and the understanding work together
• oh wow bsks it is a matter of taking in the manifold = complexity and beginning the process of finding it as one
• ps is there an element of the doing of this process being an adaptive trait and therefore pleasurable (look up)
• which explains why we put so much effort into it and why we prize it??
• bernstein says in his lecture that on looking at any object in the world we have to go through this imaginative synthetic work and that in doing this work we are preparing for the understanding of the object
• could this account explain the emperors new clothes ie in that it is a process which involves our apprehension of an pobjectover time before coming to an understanding of it .. if this was adaptively made rewarding then maybe we would go through the process even if the aesthetic object were in itself worth less 0 – or better that the worth of an aesthetic object lies in ithe length of tie it takes us to scan and try to reah understanding – this would account for the fact that art tends to be status related – ie who would have the time to put into this contemplation if they were not rich and leisured
• is it then complexity that matter – often thought so.
• also (pat) think about the act of making art rather than of contemplating it – it also is a process over time – it also is a series of contemplations and judgements would this explain the  pleasure involved in making art

I have now finished Fiona Hughes account of up to end of the second moment – she seems to find §9 the most important and it seems to me that the pleaseure we find in beauty stems from two things: that it links us to other people and that it make us aware of our responsivity to things in the world through feeling and aware of how we do this in a cycle of looking thinking and relooking.

thus we learn about ourselves

These two ideas are not at all what I would have predicted

still reading Kant  with help

fiona Hughes very helpful

most salient thing (for me atm) is the implications of coj for describing how humans relate to each other

kant says we  make aesthetic judgement and part of the mind makeup of such a judgement is an assumption an appeal to the agreement of others.

is this cos we need mechanisms to maintain social cohesion?

then an art object would just be an arbitrary thing serving that function?

I am reminded of descriptions of language that (funnily enough and like Gaul and coj divided into 3) of Halliday (possibly very out of date theory?) that gives 3 functions to language ideational cohesion and interpersonal.  so that questions tags asking for agreement are a linguistic realisation of what is implicit in an aesthetic statement.

Also note that I think an ‘have you seen” question is at same time a ideational question and also a request for an (aesthetic) opinion.  so that have you seen eg latest film will be responded to by an opinion

Also a main point for me from kant is that we are not only rational beings – our behaviour is also derived from non-rational sources (this is obvious I know but it may be a ‘help to think’ idea for me)

Last thing is that i have discovered on my laptop an article by Cath Ferguson about form ‘A Future for Formalism’

must incorporate ideas as seems pertinent to enquiry.

which also brings up the question that `kant talks about aesthrtic judgements entirely from the point of the judgemet making person.  Maybe it should be considered from the pov of the judgement receiving person.

Also need to consider the relational aesthetics that `i have heard of – something connected with this.