Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority By Emmanuel Levinas

Read this and let me know what you think. I couldnt find the full excerpt but here's the google books link: http://books.google.com/books?id=Rbu8w7Pz8ggC&amp...

Great post andrew, very fitting! Ill keep my comment short. What our educational system fails to consider is that it is our cultural, ethical, and philosophical values (some of which are intertwined) that give science value--that ground science on some ontology of use. After all science is supposed to enhance our lives in order for us to engage in the things we like to do. Tecnics are merely accessories of science; means of collective enhancement not ends in themselves. A conspicious lack of ethics contributed to this economic mess in the first place...remember? once again, good post.

Great post by both of you guys! Although technics have always been part of the human condition, it seems strange to me that the rise of science has somewhat made this relationship a bit skewed. I recall standing in front of a sky scraper in manhattan and wondering to myself, i an absolutely impotent in the shadow of this edifice. Our growing dependency on technology (more so, I would argue than in part eras, insofar as these eras can be demarcated) does present the problem of an age of imaginary needs, or illusory necessities. Throw your phone in the toilet and see how naked you feel. Strange phenomenon. Just a thought.

I would argue that modern capitalism has made mass production and, to be precise, efficient mass production as the end of all labor. It seems odd to me that although machines have taken over a fair amount of jobs, incomes have yet to rise at a rate comparable to the loss of jobs due to machine-innovations. Just a thought.

Great post (as usual, no surprise there)! Definitly a more astute exposition of the essay than mine haha. I was wondering though, what do you think about the possibility of culture without the mark of barbarism? Are these innate qualities of being, and thus ineluctably tied to the systemic forces that hold history together? Is redemption possible without the risk of a worse form of violence?

Hahaha the illusory sentiments of a brilliant philosopher opting, instead of nihilism, for an artificial hope: maniupulating the manipulators. Hahaha, sorry but Adorno and company have calcified my view that any attempt to "redeem" the structures of oppression will ultimately precipitate a new form of oppression. I still wanna drive a lamborghini before i hit 30 though :)

Its absolutely tragic that even within the grandiose walls of academia we cannot escape the strangehold of Marx's "use-value", formally literalized in the handing out of honorary degrees and so forth. The material worth of a sharp intellect seems to subsume its emancipatory properties. In other words, instead of smart graduates being pushed to change soceity for the better by identifying deep rooted problems in our world and solving them, we try to commoditize them so others can associate that mind with that institution. Marketing 101. Tragic.

I sent a professor from my old school this post because he's well versed on the philosophy of architecture and he responded

"Thinking about architecture has long been an enterprise of philosophers and architects alike, but in recent years there has been a growing divergence between them over terminological and methodological issues. Philosophers charge architects with mishandling texts and architects charge philosophers with mishandling buildings.But there are also other divisions among contemporary architectural theorists themselves. Some theorists concern themselves with the human experience, with ethical and poetical questions, and with sensory and aesthetic explorations of architecture and its environment. Other theorists are bent on treating architecture as a form of knowledge that takes shape as a formal and socio-political practice through tools such as language, algorithms, and diagrams. Still other theorists see their task as navigating among these sometimes quite distinct approaches."

Great post andrea! I harken back to a rhyme made by the great philosopher jay-z (haha i'm being facetious in case ppl lost their sense of humor in last weeks turkey dinner) on the song "moment of clarity":
" If skills sold / Truth be told / I'd probably be / Lyricly / Talib Kweli / Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / (But i did five Mil) / I ain't been rhymin like Common since -- When your sense got that much in common / And you been hustlin since / Your inception / Fuck perception / Go with what makes sense / Since / I know what I'm up against / We as rappers must decide what's most impor-tant." To contextualize the rhyme, he references Talib Kweli and Common Sense (both well-known "artistic" and socially conscious rappers; that is, rappers who don't simply manufacture derivative pop-culture fodder in order to sell an album) as artistic paragons in an ideal world divorced from the demands of market success. Ultimately this suggests that artistic sincerity and aesthetic excellence are impossible to reconcile with the economic demands of high album sales--in essence that they are tradeoffs. .
It sounds like im rambling but my point is this: Adorno devotes many of the passages in minima moralia to the notion that modern consumption culture exerts a slow but tireless brutality against one, preventing one from engaging in a simple humanity, or in sincere acts of artistic ingenuity that don't fit well with prevailing aesthetic tastes. Consumption is cyclical nothingness. Black friday is a yet another example of this.

Interesting point. My contention to the thesis advanced by Habermas, specifically the iimplication that the literary public sphere was somehow immune from the systemic forces of domination, is that even within the literary public sphere there has always been a tendency to follow the status quo insofar as it perserves the social status of the participants in question. Many monarchies have been headed by bright fellows and many have been just as ruthless and exploitative as the commercial republics of post-modern ilk. The only difference are the agents of exploitationm and the mechanistic way in which they shape "public opinion" through market research and sensationalism.