Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.
442 karma · joined February 16, 2013
Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.
(2) It is intriguing to consider commercial music as an industrial utilization of lyric poetry, but the point is that the individual activity of lyric poetry is not amenable to industrialization IN ITSELF, but it still exists. But perhaps this example doesn't work -- the really important argument is above, namely, that the cultivation of these practices -- astrology, dousing, etc, is individuated, and oriented around virtues directly opposed to their mass utilization.
(3) As other commentators have noticed, we also don't know that these sciences aren't used on a mass technological/industrial fashion --- it seems likely, for instance, that there are corporate entities that use i ching divination, and likely, too, that there are financial firms that utilize astrological methods -- but wouldn't reveal this because of the likely opprobrium from a still dominant (if clearly declining) orthodox materialism...
Excerpt From: Simone de Beauvoir. “The Ethics of Ambiguity.
-Ann Douglas "Terrible Honesty" (Study of artists, Black and nonblack in New York/Manhattan in the 20s)
-James W. Douglass "JFK & the Unspeakable"
-Walter Johnson "River of Dark Dreams"
-Gerald Horne "The Counterrevolution of 1776"
-J. Sakai, Settlers (readsettlers.org)
-Ida Wells "Lynch Law in America"
To the first comment: our world is changing. We are leaving the world system that was created around 1500. That said, we're still inside of it, and so social practices as manifestly illogical and inane as concentration camps ("prisons"), national borders, and the burning of carbon continue.
Here's a concept from 19th century music that seems connected to the question of thematic refactoring/development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_transformation