360º Head

Child with its mother in the panorama. The panorama is presenting the Battle of Sedan. The child finds it all very lovely: ‘Only, it’s too bad the sky is so dreary.’ –’That’s what the weather is like in war,’ answers the mother..

– Walter Benjamin, “D: Boredom, Eternal Return,” in The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. p 101.

Every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects … to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story.

Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instinct to be manipulated…. To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls….

I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past….

On the one hand there is a [present] world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups.

– Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918“.

… I am certain that the greatest evils we know are not due to him who has to face himself again and whose curse is that he cannot forget. The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back. For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.

– Hannah Arendt. Responsibility and Judgment. Jerome Kohn, ed. New York: Random House, 2003.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well as the slope of the road which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind, dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

– Jorge Luis Borges. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Trans. Donald A. Yates. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1964, p. 23.

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return — that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person, you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.

– Karl Marx. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844″. The Marx and Engels Reader. Robert Tucker (ed.) New York: Norton, 1978. p. 105.

… in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function …

– Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion.” In Ernst Bloch et al. Aesthetics and Politics. Ed. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 1986, p. 207.

As few scholars of European and American intellectual history … fully realize, one major ramification of recognizing nature’s presence within modernity is that it provides an intellectual framework for the decisive incorporation of the non-West, including Japan, within this global experience. Indeed, the restitution of nature to our historical understanding of modernity tears down one of the most resilient East-West divides. Universal histories (pace Hegel) have relied on the tension between nature and culture, read “East” and “West”, to propel the promise of humanity’s self-realization as the world moves from nature to culture, from emotion to reason, from necessity to freedom, from traiditon to modernity…. If nature is no longer positioned as something to conquer, overcome, or leave behind in order to attain modernity, this series of oppositions falters and Japan — indeed all the world — escapes from its designated place within modernity’s narrative.

– Julia Adeney Thomas. Reconfiguring Modernity. p. 27. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.