Lydia had always wanted to live in central Europe, but thought she might try Amsterdam first as many of the men wore small tight pants.

After seeing him with that blonde woman, G-girl gained some satisfaction from using her energy to burn the word ‘dick’ into his forehead.

Thoughts on Theory and Practice

What is the relationship between practice and theory, and can the two be separated? This question is more so directed at practice-led research where social, behavioural and political variables may have to be taken into account as the research progresses, rather than at the outset. In the Visual Arts for example, a research question may be philosophical in nature, and lend itself to an analysis and comparison of history and literature, but how is this investigation turned into practice-led research, allowing an organic creative exploration encompassing chance without a prescriptive ‘testing’ of material? What types of methodologies allow this?

What is theory? According to Marxist thought, theory is an ideal image of the material world corresponding to practice where every human being has and uses theory. The way they understand the world around them is structured by a theoretical framework reflecting their own times and activity in the world. Practice is active, rather than being a passive observation, and is directed at changing something. Practice differs from activity in general, because practice is connected with theory which gives it a means and an end. Practice is only enacted through theory and theory is formulated based on practice.

If the above is the case, where a theory is an understanding of the world about us reflecting our time and place, how can we discuss the relationship between practice and theory in the context of practice-led research? The forced separation and naming of these activities sets up an immediate opposition to one another, whereby the momentarily static theory is cancelled out by the actual action of the research. On the other hand, if theory is thought of within a framework of an ever-changing mutable form, then can all active ideas one has throughout life be classed as theory? In day-to-day life, is a multitude of theoretical concepts created that are interlinked with experience, thus rendering theory inseparable not only from practice but from the subconscious, the intuitive mind and tacit knowledge?

A list of things to add to

Covet

Shoes, handbags, a nice suit. A season ticket for Manchester United. A Playstation two or three, a Wi, a Nintendo, a Macbook Air. Good food each week, a rib-eye steak, fishing for fresh fish, avacados. Smooth hair, cool hair, any hair. A place to stay, a house, a home. Someone else who has a home. Ownership. A friend, a partner, a community. A car, a bike, a skateboard. Skis to go skiing, a sledge to go sledging, a board to go surfing. Conversation. Laughter. Work. Going to the coolest club, going to the uncoolest club, going to the bowling club. A walk on a windy day, green, grey, breathe. Television, Sky, cable. Internet banking. Fame, fortune, notoriety. Sex of any kind. Dresses, stockings, wigs, restraint. Good looks, slim thighs, flat tummies. A man with a good job, a woman with a good job, someone with a good job that is beneficial to our careers. Class, money, social standing. Family, fun, gardens. Greenhouses filled with grapes. Wine, women, song. Eccies, coke, bong. Auctions, old furniture, punk. Sun, sea, calm, tan. Learning, poetry, bargains, Kant. Religion, science, mythology, plants. Mirrors, Greece, Rome, architecture. Change, children, running, swimming. Open fires. Big boobs, blonde, big lips, tight. Quiet, sensual, touch, care. Winning. Succeeding. Being somebody. A soul. Books, air, sight, sound, taste. Experience. Clean teeth, clean body, bath. Humour. Music, beats, dub, dancing. Tomato ketchup, chips with vinegar, an old pier. Victorian wallpaper, art, culture, old people who can tell a tale. Love (whatever that is). George Clooney, Johnny Depp, films by the Coens, the theatre. Tennis, horses, smells. Intuition. Teaching, enabling, helping. Passports, European life, democracy. Communism, red, black, goulash. A better life. Free milk tokens. Water. Opportunity. Stability. Saturday night telly, Saturday night radio, Saturday night storms. Warmth, sharing, together. Marx, passion, intensity. Dark chocolate. Cardamon pods.

Status.

Does emotion have a capitalist intention?

Emotion has no jargon, only aura, which fluctuates according to circumstance and the intention of its surroundings.

Mass Culture

Mass culture refers to how culture gets produced, whereas popular culture refers to how culture gets consumed. Mass culture is culture which is mass produced, distributed, and marketed.
“Mass Culture” is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc.
Mass culture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media.
A mass culture is transmitted to individuals, rather than arising from people’s daily interactions, and therefore lacks the distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region.
Mass culture tends to reproduce the liberal value of individualism and to foster a view of the citizen as consumer.
Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. Adorno was among the radical critics of mass culture. Adorno developed a critical methodology to analyze the production, texts, and reception of the artifacts of what became known as “popular culture,” thus anticipating the approach of later forms of “cultural studies.” Along with Max Horkheimer, Adorno developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) the first critical theory which discerned the crucial roles of mass culture and communication in contemporary capitalist societies. 

Adorno and his colleagues, emigrants from Nazi Germany, observed the use of mass culture in German fascism and were shocked to see in the United States the same sort of ideological culture which reproduced the existing social relations and served as propaganda for the established socio-economic and political order.

From Sociology Index

The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences

by Michel Foucault
Synopsis (Amazon)
When one defines “order” as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things , possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault’s reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls “exotic charm”. Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

by Marc Auge

Synopsis (Amazon)
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ’supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle.
Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Theodor Adorno
Synopsis (Amazon)
Dialectic of Enlightenment is, quite justifiably, one of the most celebrated and often cited works of modern social philosophy. It has been identified as the keystone of the ‘Frankfurt School’, of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the leading members, and does not cease to impress in its wide-ranging ambition and panache. Adorno and Horkheimer addressees themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age, namely ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and an administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment. To seek an answer to the question of how such a condition could arise, Adorno and Horkheier subjected the whole history of Western catagories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche, to a searching philosophical and psychological critique. Drawing on psychoanalytical insights, their own work on the ‘culture industry’, deep knowledge of the key Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, as well as fascinating considerations on the relationship between reason and myth - the rational and the irrational - the authors exposed the domination and violence towards both nature and humanity that underpin the Enlightenment project.