No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #subjectivity
Subjectivity as a governing law of the human sphere offers us the talent to cope with many of life’s great stressors. It allows us to balance some of the most complex of social equations, like belief systems and spiritual predispositions. It also, and most importantly, shelters us from the independent indifference of objective reality, which in turn, threatens to challenge our egotistical, self perceived image as the centre of the universe and of all experience. ↗
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart? ↗
There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation. ↗
Even in the act of fleeing modern ideologies, however, literary theory reveals its often unconscious complicity with them, betraying its elitism, sexism or individualism in the very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘unpolitical’ language it finds natural to use of the literary text. It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history or tradition. Other things matter too, of course — this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers — but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else. The further we move from the rich inwardness of the personal life, of which literature is the supreme exemplar, the more drab, mechanical and impersonal existence becomes. It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm, much as the former attitude may shudder at the latter: it reflects the values of a political system which subordinates the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise. ↗
#capitalist-subjectivity #ideology #individualism #literary-theory #social
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. ↗
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . . ↗
This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated. ↗
#collaborative #contemporary #modernism #practice #subjectivity
In this society, or rather our social construct, where almost all is left up to the individual’s interpretation, the line between virtue and vice seems less perceptible than ever before. At least in my experience, of something I have noted repeatedly and in my observation of people’s communication regarding the issue, I have come to my own conclusions. Albeit arrogantly, and with a sense of disdain for the tales that have been “made-up” in support of human hypocrisy, I am convinced that most people cannot discern between right and wrong, good and evil and least of all, true or false. ↗
#hypocrisy #right-and-wrong #subjectivity #truth #communication
