echoes of chicago
"The myth is the authoritative version, the debated, disbuted, filter product of generations of narrative interchange about reality. In conquering a rival society, the first act of the conquerors is to impose their myth on the conquered. And the strongest instinct of the conquered is to resist this pressure; the loss of one’s own myth involves a profoundly disorienting loss of identity. The myth stands at the top of the cognitive pyramid in such a society; it not only regulates behavior and enshrines knowledge, but it also constrains the perception of reality and channels the thought skill of its adherents. And those who preserve and regulate myth—priests and shamans—hold positions of great power in collective cognitive hierarchy." Merlin Donald
"By cooperating with you, I gain only from my immediate self interest and by the benefits that you return to me in due course. In traditional communities, that benefit reverberates around the community in a series of overlapping waves as you pass on the benefit you received from me to your aunt, who in turn passes it on to her cousin, who passes it on to his friend – who eventually passes it back to me." - Dunbar
"The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it." John Dewey 1934
"A one-sided psychology, a reflect of eighteenth-century “individualism,†treated knowledge as an accomplishment of a lonely mind. We should now be aware that it is a product of the cooperative and communicative operations of human beings living together. Its communal origin is an indication of its rightful communal use. The unification of what is know at any given time, not upon an impossible eternal and abstract basis but upon that of its bearing upon the unification of human desire and purpose, furnishes a sufficient creed for human acceptance, one that would provide… reinforcement of knowledge." John Dewey .
"In terms of identity, the Passion of exotic others confirms the shape of Imperialist One, but it overflows the borders of the one’s Desire; conversely, Imieral Desire legitimates the passionateness of the other and naturalizes the Others’ rebelliousness. Hence in a neocolonial framing, the others are “primitive†and “barbarian,†condemned to a second-class identity, and uncivilized,†incomplete identity in the process of “development†compared to the bold, superior, fully shaped Identity of the One. Note that the One is never an Other, even from the point of view of colonized others." Marta E. Savigliano
"I have had bad experiences with methods and theories. Simply states, these so called tools tend to alienate methodical works from their work, from their creative pleasures, from their complex positions of race, gender, class, and culture, from their honesty, and from their power for insurgency. Intellectuals produce their own tools, as do other works, and all workers, including intellectuals, become alienated from their tools. The fact is that these research tools, like most means of production in this capitalist world, do not belong to the reasearchers/workers but to those who control academic capital." Marta E. Savigliano .
"Instead of asking how things are in fact, and how one could possibly find out, one wonders mostly whether one has got the author’s point; and if one thinks one has, one may even feel superior to those who have not." Buber, I and Thou 1970
IM ME @ SDS KREW
