Subtitled: On Becoming and Individual in an Age of Distraction
A broader scope than his exploration of work on work, Shop Class as Soul Craft.
A complex set of ideas.
He explores things like:
- the importance of connecting with the real world as opposed to the virtual world or the inner world
- the concept of freedom, not as 'freedom from' but freedom as mastery of areas of agency
- the importance of attention to the world and people out there
- the modern drift to interiority where encounters with the world and unmediated others is seen as a bother, as something risky
- touches on the culture of safety and the 'smooth society' (for lack of a better word) where there is no conflict, no jagged edges - essentially the tasteless, flavourless corporate culture and culture of school
- the longterm social and psychological effects of our current view that everyone is a self-made person
- how the concept of revolution in the arts in the early 20th century, by throwing out tradition and history of the arts, ended up killing the arts that were being revolutionized - acutally, no surprise when you consider the results of violent social revolutions in the 20th century in Russian and especially China; the very culture itself is destroyed and replaced by nothing, or by money and consumerism
Worth rereading, maybe even buying.
No comments:
Post a Comment