On Sun, 2003-05-11 at 04:42, Dominic Fox wrote:
> The trouble with the "synthesizing imagination", in the terminology I was
> trying out, is that its products are synthetic. This isn't necessarily a
> problem from an aesthetic point of view: the confection of new forms through
> synthesis is an at least potentially valid aesthetic move. In politics,
> however, such syntheses are often implicated in the "manufacturing of
> consensus", which entails the production of a considerable amount of
> artificial emotion: swells of patriotism, rivers of pathos, shock and awe.
Shock and awe was an old Nazi slogan... so I recently read.
This is beginning to sound like Kantian common sense and good sense, to
me. Quite an interesting area which needs more critique, since sense is
artificially created. Also the question of artifice against so-called
nature. Iian Hamilton Grant has a book being published, On an Artificial
Earth: Philosophy since Schelling_ or some title like that, due out in
April, 1994, so I am told. I have some of his essays. (Grant translated
L _Lib Economy_ .)
Also, Marvin Minsky _The emotion machine_ at MIT, has drafts of this
book on his website. And then there is Silvan Tomkins cybernetic theory
of emotion (or complexity in the technical language). Emotion as an
artifice, again, which transforms and changes.
It all ties into my interest in gothic as a sort of challenge to the
notion "The Natural" if you get the sense, too. Landscape is artifice,
not natural, also. Although the axiomatic struggle over this question
and Kant's notion of imagination... have too many questions about this,
so won't go there, for now.
Anyway, I could go on about this too much.... also want to know if I can
send a second email in the same day! (I think the problem is a bug in
Ximian Evolution... or I am doing something wrong... feel like firing up
emacs.)
The need for software engineering to form some sort of common or good
sense synthesis was an interesting comment. This seems to be the
direction of graphic user interface design and lots of comments about
this need in GNU/Linux discussions of the desktop, I noticed quickly. I
liked more the old all over the place style, myself.
Best
Chris Jones.
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