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Jeffrey Kripal, in his forthcoming Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, reproduces a comic book panel in which the character has a visionary experience of the cosmos that his mentor describes as being useful in its own way, but not doing much for you if you find yourself threatened by a lion or a V.A.T. inspector.
I have been thinking lately for accidental and immediately practical reasons about the different forms of competency and why they do not translate one to the other. Benjamin was not very good at finding jobs that earned anything like an adequate income, even though his Arcades Project effectively laid the groundwork for whole scholarly disciplines (while baffling the Institut für Sozialforschung that could validate the project), and even though he was very good at organizing the intellectual life of the internment camp in which France placed potential enemy aliens after the declaration of war (there was considerable latitude for such activity, possibly because some authorities recognized that most of the enemy aliens were actually enemies of the enemy). He also wasn't very good at hauling his heavy briefcase over the mountain roads to safety after the German occupation, and may actually have died of heart failure instead of committing suicide when his group was refused entry into Spain.
He was pretty good at writing children's radio programs, another one of those intermittent gigs that didn't earn him enough money to get by.
I have been thinking that Benjamin would have loved a book like Mutants and Mystics for its mix of the skeptical and the speculative, but that topic will have to wait since I can't quote the uncorrected page proofs.
Benjamin would also have loved, I suspect, David Adjaye's reconfiguration of the visual arts of Africa last year in Brussels, documented in the Geo-Graphics catalogue. In the article that concludes the volume, Okwui Enwezor and Adjaye converse about interconnected small networks of all sorts as a path forward for contemporary African society, and Enwezor cites as a model the "Aga Khan micro-hydroelectric plants," small power-generating centers that avoid the disruption caused by large dams.
And that set me to thinking about how strange it is that a mystical religious practice should be sponsoring innovative ways of putting together small inputs to achieve large effects. (A scholarly paper about the project is titled "Decentralized Rural Electrification by Means of Collective Action.")
There are those, of course, who believe that the larger version of the mystical practice in question is precisely a matter of putting together small inputs to achieve large effects. This is not necessarily mystical, since it is the sort of thing that interested Benjamin from a materialist perspective. It does feed back into my hypothesis that the psychologically tinged mystical practices of the world arose in locales where it was necessary to create and manage harmony among contending interests in situations where brute force was failing to maintain social peace. In the right circumstances, small inputs created larger effects among those inclined, or impelled by forces of social approval, to listen to the Masters of Wisdom. (This meant that those who knew how to game the system could accumulate the kind of power and influence disdained and sometimes deconstructed by the harmony-maintainers, but this is the case in any human enterprise.)
But I've said all that before, and need not repeat it here, even though I just did.
I ought to find a Walter Benjamin quote for the day, but I haven't time to do that at the moment. This is written, as you can tell, on the spur of the moment.
I have been thinking lately for accidental and immediately practical reasons about the different forms of competency and why they do not translate one to the other. Benjamin was not very good at finding jobs that earned anything like an adequate income, even though his Arcades Project effectively laid the groundwork for whole scholarly disciplines (while baffling the Institut für Sozialforschung that could validate the project), and even though he was very good at organizing the intellectual life of the internment camp in which France placed potential enemy aliens after the declaration of war (there was considerable latitude for such activity, possibly because some authorities recognized that most of the enemy aliens were actually enemies of the enemy). He also wasn't very good at hauling his heavy briefcase over the mountain roads to safety after the German occupation, and may actually have died of heart failure instead of committing suicide when his group was refused entry into Spain.
He was pretty good at writing children's radio programs, another one of those intermittent gigs that didn't earn him enough money to get by.
I have been thinking that Benjamin would have loved a book like Mutants and Mystics for its mix of the skeptical and the speculative, but that topic will have to wait since I can't quote the uncorrected page proofs.
Benjamin would also have loved, I suspect, David Adjaye's reconfiguration of the visual arts of Africa last year in Brussels, documented in the Geo-Graphics catalogue. In the article that concludes the volume, Okwui Enwezor and Adjaye converse about interconnected small networks of all sorts as a path forward for contemporary African society, and Enwezor cites as a model the "Aga Khan micro-hydroelectric plants," small power-generating centers that avoid the disruption caused by large dams.
And that set me to thinking about how strange it is that a mystical religious practice should be sponsoring innovative ways of putting together small inputs to achieve large effects. (A scholarly paper about the project is titled "Decentralized Rural Electrification by Means of Collective Action.")
There are those, of course, who believe that the larger version of the mystical practice in question is precisely a matter of putting together small inputs to achieve large effects. This is not necessarily mystical, since it is the sort of thing that interested Benjamin from a materialist perspective. It does feed back into my hypothesis that the psychologically tinged mystical practices of the world arose in locales where it was necessary to create and manage harmony among contending interests in situations where brute force was failing to maintain social peace. In the right circumstances, small inputs created larger effects among those inclined, or impelled by forces of social approval, to listen to the Masters of Wisdom. (This meant that those who knew how to game the system could accumulate the kind of power and influence disdained and sometimes deconstructed by the harmony-maintainers, but this is the case in any human enterprise.)
But I've said all that before, and need not repeat it here, even though I just did.
I ought to find a Walter Benjamin quote for the day, but I haven't time to do that at the moment. This is written, as you can tell, on the spur of the moment.
