McLuhan is a relevant reference here. My primary influence was an attempt to channel Adorno and his negative dialectics as an update of Hegel, where the development of a notion occurs by way of contradiction, the failure of each thing to become itself, its change into its own opposite in the striving after fully realizing itself
"Two equally obnoxious tendencies: the centering of the self and the pious regard for the other. I don’t want to be someone else’s other, to be accepted or loved as part of a 12-step program or graduate seminar or an ad campaign. Celebration of difference flatters the one who celebrates and establishes a more subtle method of control over the strange, reinforces the smothering creep of inclusion and turns on the hidden hinge of contempt for those smaller splintering differences smoothed over into a false image of the same."
I simply can't make anything of this. What is any of that? What are the obnoxious tendencies, what really, actually, are they? All I see is abstractions with no concrete reference.
Why don't you want to be someone else's other, an inevitability given that others exist and you are one of those others *to* those others? Don't want to be an other? Then retreat fully into solipsism, see where that gets you.
If celebration of difference is a sinister controlling force, then why is the smothering creep of inclusion also to be perceived as negative? All I see here is rhetorical emptiness, the piling up of vaguely bad abstractions, bereft of any reference I can get my teeth into.
Maybe this is a failure on my part, but I don't do abstraction very well (the same reason I've never engaged with the tendencies you identify as so negative but without really tackling on their terms, or indeed on any terms).
I could go on (and on) but honestly, I don't really feel I have the energy. It would be like trying to grapple with a fluffy marshmallow, apparently impressive, but squidgy in whatever way you pressed on him.
My point is that, if being an other is an inevitability, than why does it need to be promoted or celebrated. I’m averse to being accepted as part of a program, as part of an educational campaign to bring people together. And the push for difference and inclusion at the same time is a collectively driven contradiction, not something I’ve come up with on my own. Try to see it as more of a mockery of feel good abstractions actually operative in how people and institutions act, but like it or not, at least I’ve kept things mercifully short. No need to wrestle marshmallows if you’re not inclined to it
Marshall McLuhan for the Tech Age. Love it.
McLuhan is a relevant reference here. My primary influence was an attempt to channel Adorno and his negative dialectics as an update of Hegel, where the development of a notion occurs by way of contradiction, the failure of each thing to become itself, its change into its own opposite in the striving after fully realizing itself
"Two equally obnoxious tendencies: the centering of the self and the pious regard for the other. I don’t want to be someone else’s other, to be accepted or loved as part of a 12-step program or graduate seminar or an ad campaign. Celebration of difference flatters the one who celebrates and establishes a more subtle method of control over the strange, reinforces the smothering creep of inclusion and turns on the hidden hinge of contempt for those smaller splintering differences smoothed over into a false image of the same."
I simply can't make anything of this. What is any of that? What are the obnoxious tendencies, what really, actually, are they? All I see is abstractions with no concrete reference.
Why don't you want to be someone else's other, an inevitability given that others exist and you are one of those others *to* those others? Don't want to be an other? Then retreat fully into solipsism, see where that gets you.
If celebration of difference is a sinister controlling force, then why is the smothering creep of inclusion also to be perceived as negative? All I see here is rhetorical emptiness, the piling up of vaguely bad abstractions, bereft of any reference I can get my teeth into.
Maybe this is a failure on my part, but I don't do abstraction very well (the same reason I've never engaged with the tendencies you identify as so negative but without really tackling on their terms, or indeed on any terms).
I could go on (and on) but honestly, I don't really feel I have the energy. It would be like trying to grapple with a fluffy marshmallow, apparently impressive, but squidgy in whatever way you pressed on him.
My point is that, if being an other is an inevitability, than why does it need to be promoted or celebrated. I’m averse to being accepted as part of a program, as part of an educational campaign to bring people together. And the push for difference and inclusion at the same time is a collectively driven contradiction, not something I’ve come up with on my own. Try to see it as more of a mockery of feel good abstractions actually operative in how people and institutions act, but like it or not, at least I’ve kept things mercifully short. No need to wrestle marshmallows if you’re not inclined to it