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Asking the Wrong Questions
Jul. 9th, 2010 12:24 pmOne of Thomas Pynchon's proverbs for paranoids in Gravity's Rainbow goes "If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."
Ernst Bloch's stinging denunciation of the misery that makes escapism into dreams necessary, like Freud's recognition that escape into fantasy remains necessary even when all material wants have been satisfied, understates the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon. As Joseph Beuys said, every human being is an artist, though some are very pedestrian and unambitious artists. Our capacity to take delight in inventions that don't help us survive may be only the price that our species pays for being so good at inventing things that do help us survive, but it is still deucedly hard to make sense of all of the components: Otherwise there would not be so many books that try to reduce it all to this, that or the other—we want explanations of what makes us so transcendently functional and dismally dysfunctional all in the same activity. And the just-so stories the researchers make up always leave some element out of the picture.
I suppose I could go back to Susan Stewart's On Longing Yi-fu Tuan's Escapism, Farah Mendelsohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, throw them into the mix with Ernst Bloch, Richard Shweder, Paul Rbinow, Walter Benjamin, James Clifford, Jeffrey Kripal—my usual blend of historical and contemporary figures—and work my way forward to the research data by way the the theorists of mind and body.
But I need to focus on finishing up the exhibition proposal for an artists' collaborative I've co-founded.
Ernst Bloch's stinging denunciation of the misery that makes escapism into dreams necessary, like Freud's recognition that escape into fantasy remains necessary even when all material wants have been satisfied, understates the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon. As Joseph Beuys said, every human being is an artist, though some are very pedestrian and unambitious artists. Our capacity to take delight in inventions that don't help us survive may be only the price that our species pays for being so good at inventing things that do help us survive, but it is still deucedly hard to make sense of all of the components: Otherwise there would not be so many books that try to reduce it all to this, that or the other—we want explanations of what makes us so transcendently functional and dismally dysfunctional all in the same activity. And the just-so stories the researchers make up always leave some element out of the picture.
I suppose I could go back to Susan Stewart's On Longing Yi-fu Tuan's Escapism, Farah Mendelsohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, throw them into the mix with Ernst Bloch, Richard Shweder, Paul Rbinow, Walter Benjamin, James Clifford, Jeffrey Kripal—my usual blend of historical and contemporary figures—and work my way forward to the research data by way the the theorists of mind and body.
But I need to focus on finishing up the exhibition proposal for an artists' collaborative I've co-founded.
