MY BLOG

 

This blog is devoted to a study of modern cultural phenomena such as contemporary art, movies, books, plays, politics, news, social media, science, etc. My essays are a little different from the ordinary style of most reviews. For me, cultural phenomena can open up and become psychological phenomena, windows to the unknown future, thereby presenting hints of implicit background movements as yet unborn. I give voice or form to these movements in the service of welcoming the unknown future. In this way we can begin to see how potential futures are unfolding into the present through the manifold faces of our traditional cultural practices.

I wrote this introduction  around 2010. And now in 2024 I want to enrich its meaning by the following quotes:

 [I]f we can learn to adopt an appropriately open and responsive phenomenological approach to things, then the works that remain capable of helping us come to understand being in a postmodern way can be found all around us – yes, even in popular songs and comic books. [H]umble things and great artworks that can teach us about meaning are already beginning to coalesce into another way of understanding what it means to be, one in which we no longer reduce everything we encounter, including ourselves, to either objects to be controlled or resources to be optimized. In such moments, I think I can see sparks in the darkness, hints large and small …

Iain Thomson

Does reason have to shrink back from the turmoil of an emergency, or is there a traumatic logic—a logic of coming to be an issue for oneself? Can reason be flexible enough to build bridges of discourse across paradigms, to understand transitions, to avoid speaking only from within a constituted identity?

Richard Polt