Cameron: hedonism question; apocalypticism question. Transition towns turn apocalypticism into self-organizing communities. Clay Shirky enabling shifts to occur. Ted talks.
(Some talk by me. Mostly on the problem of teleology.)
Designers work with secondary qualities. It works though it doesn't stand up. Rough categorizations.
Another questioner: “Sacrifice” and “gift” can be black hole words in anthropology that mean everything and nothing. We don't know if potlatch really was potlatch.
Marcel Mauss is a mutualist who generates “gift” as a poisoned category.
Bookchin as a low-theory guy who is not authorized by a Harvard.
Cameron: the best example of a gift would be design. A crude example would be wooden chairs. They just sit there offering respite. They have no recoverable value economically. All they do is give. They have no other purpose.
(This is not an OOO position...)
Design in its materiality short circuits the possibility. Sacrifice is a gift you presuppose there's something other. It's a term that is now universalized.
Daemian: sacrifice is a manifestation of Christian discourse.
Vaneigem uses sacrifice as one of the terms.
Stoekl: the cyclist is pretending he's doing it for ecological reasons, but there is also a kind of pleasure in the pain. Affirmation that another world isn't necessary.
We assume we're destroying something to gain credit in another world. If there is no hors-texte then you're not going to another thing entirely.
Cameron: we are caught in hypocrisy.
Daemian: sledgehammer critique is the default mode of left cynicism. We can't do reconstructive critique. We find it difficult to engage with social processes without pulverizing them.
It was painful for D and his friends to read it: he was on to something.
Within the market there's lot of creativity going on, lots of experiments. Let's accept that there is failure.
1 comment:
Cameron: hedonism question; apocalypticism question. Transition towns turn apocalypticism into self-organizing communities. Clay Shirky enabling shifts to occur. Ted talks.
Would like to have heard those remarks as I'm currently involved in an effort to bootstrap Transition Town energies into a national party that draws on disaffected energies swimming around the that strange and chaotic political attractor that draws on both Tea Partiers and Progressives.
The whole TED phenomenon is intersting. It's in this odd nich of Big Corporate Hippie-Tech Progressive. Originally it was just one very exclusive and rather expensive event in late winter. But now that Chris Anderson has taken it over it's various events at various times all over the place. I believe, for example, that the are five different TEDx events taking place in New York City. And some of them are weekly.
So perhaps the deal is to somehow connect TED energy with Transition energy and see if we can come up with something.
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