"... de ocasião para a 'reflexão' do espectador, a obra torna-se um simples reflexo da subjectividade deste. Não é mais o espectador que se deixa afectar na sua sensibilidade (como no período clássico grego) ou no exercício do seu juízo crítico (característico do advento da época moderna); não: é o próprio espectador que vê na obra aquilo que deseja ver, e o que ele deseja ver é o que lhe foi social e culturalmente negado. O espectador das mercadorias culturais resume-se ao consumidor dos seus próprios desejos ilusoriamente realizados."
"One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame."
From here.
O que tenho para dizer,
permanece pairando no espaço subcutâneo,
aguardando a folga de um poro.
O que tenho para dizer,
paira como loucas folhas redemoinhando no ar,
sem eira nem beira,
como que aguardando um forte sopro de vento,
que as guie numa direcção qualquer.
O que tenho para dizer,
carece de organização.
Espera no limbo do reino do tácito,
como um significado que ainda não encontrou o seu significado.
O que tenho para dizer,
flutua num caldo visceral que,
intermitentemente e sistematicamente,
insiste em forçar caminho,
na forma de ondas de ansiedade.
O que tenho para dizer,
aguarda uma boleia.
27 Março 2022
"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of beauty we have come to understand — that is art."
[...] "but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry. "
A prática da religião católica tem permitido aos seus mais fervorosos devotos e aficionados, ao longo dos tempos, elaborar sobre aquilo que seria o Inferno, esse ‘todo-devorador lago de chamas’.
"These mythological personae [Hephaestus and Pandora] suggest the ambivalence about material culture that marked out our civilization from its origins. Western civilization has not chosen between these personae so much as fused them into ambivalence about man-made physical experience. Both Hephaestus and Pandora are artificers. Each of these artificers contains a contrary: a virtuous god who makes worthwhile everyday things yet whose person is ugly and inglorious; a goddess whose things are as beautiful, as desirable, as her body, and as malign. The fusion of these two personae was why Plato could celebrate the virtue of archaic, domesticating technologies yet assert the superior beauty of the immaterial soul; why early Christians could see virtue in acts of carpentering, sewing, or gardening yet scorn the love of material things themselves; why the Enlightenment at once embraced and feared the perfection of machines; why Wittgenstein could call his desire to realize a beautiful, perfect building a sickness. The man-made material object is not a neutral fact; it is a source of unease because it is man-made. "
"Schools and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers oftendon't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the Animal laborans of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve. "
"Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elaborated in long term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 247]
"On the steps of the tenements, the improvisers observe and experiment with stoops in relation to their own bodies. Like a jazz musician, a tenement dweller who improvises follows rules. The physical materials at hand in the street are givens, like the written melody of fundamental harmonies spelled out for each number in a jazz musician's "cheat book" (cheating because many of these songs are lifted illegally out of copyright). Good jazz improvisation follows rules of economy; variations pick out an element to explore, otherwise they lose focus; the harmonic reversals are disciplined by what came before. [...] Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas "renewal" projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 236/237]
