MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

[Dave Monroe]

>From Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology,
Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
2002), "Introduction: Orpheus and the Machine," pp.
1-24 ...

   "I began this book with a hunch.  My original
intention was to explore how, in the modernist period,
the human sensorium came to be invoked as a touchstone
for aesthetic gratification and experiential
authenticity.  In the process, it became clear that
the machine invariably appeared in the same thematic
cluster as the corporeal, the sensory, and the
aesthetic, a complex of problems which offered an
infinitely more interesting object of study.  I
decided to explore the thesis that the specific
aesthetics of perception on which so much of classical
modernism turns is tightly bound up with modern
machine culture, and nowhere so strikingly as in those
contexts where the technological has commonly been
seen as irrelevant or as having no aesthetic raison
d'etre ..." (pp. 1-2)

--- Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> From Igor Aleksander, How to Build a Mind: Toward
> Machines with Imagination (New York, NY: Columbia
> UP, 2001), "Liberating Philosophy: The Empiricists,"
> p.72...
> 
> "There is no doubt that an increasing number of
> people know what they know from television and
> radio. That's no bad thing, but it has positive and
> negative effects... Had there been television in the
> seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how could the
> views of the great thinkers of the time have
> survived the ambitions of the pushy producers? ...

My guess is, for example, Webster would have been the
Steven Bochco of his day, whilst Shakespeare would be
what you watched between PBS pledge drives.  Plus ca
change ... but thanks for the reference, very glad to
see some activity as we approach, and perhaps not so
asymptotically, the end of Mason & Dixon.  Not with a
whimper but a ...

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