Yes, Stuart; but isn’t that the point of the Public Journal? To have perfect license to pull words out of your ass (if you need to) until they begin to flow on their own.
Don’t tighten up on me now, brother!
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I realized today that one of the problems with the univocity of Being is that it could give license to those that would like to pass off such abstractions as beauty, truth, and morality as objective things. But I don’t think that is the point. I think the real point is that, given the equal ontological status of everything, nothing can be considered to be any more objective than anything else.
This goes back to Zizek’s point about the objectively subjective and the subjectively objective. To me, this ties into the intimate and entwined relationship between difference and repetition that Deleuze seems to be describing.
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On this run through Difference and Repetition , I may not completely “get it”. But, at least, it’s beginning to feel a little more accessible.
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Listening to a podcast of To the best of Our Knowledge today, concerning creativity, it was confirmed to me that, when it comes to creativity, you are what you take in. In other words, creativity is a matter of trying to recreate the experiences you admire until, through a unique mix, you find your own voice: briccolege.
However, as TS Eliot said: mediocre poets imitate; great poets steal.
My take on this is that culture is about a discourse. We steal from those we admire in the sense that they have stimulated something in us that we consider important. When we steal from the other, we are basically saying that we admire what they have said, but must say it in our own way.
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This brings me to one of the main issues I have with Baudrillard (or rather those who have taken what he said too seriously:
Baudrillard argued that there is nothing new left to be done under the sun, that all we can do is play with the fragments of history. And if you listen to much of the music being put out, lately (especially in the mainstream), you get the feeling that Baudrillard’s formula is the one they have succumbed to.
But I would argue that to do so, on the part of the creatively curious, is a cop-out. I would argue that the truly creatively curious, if they are truly creatively curious, can only prove it by being willing to ram up against the next creative hymen, to at least push up against that next elastic barrier no matter how futile or painful it feels.
To settle for Baudrillard’s formula is to succumb to fear and mediocrity.
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Now, more than ever, given that our culture has settled for Baudrillard’s formula in settling for the tried and true, we cannot be afraid of embarrassing ourselves.
In doing so, we succumb to pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed cues.
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?: are you unique; or the product of things you picked up in a department store….