We find today everywhere examples of mass produced luxury. Sitting in a coffee house atop dark wood chairs, next to a floor to ceiling fireplace adorned with an exotic artwork, I am both everywhere and nowhere. Starbucks, or Second-Cup, even the new-look Macdonalds embrace an architecture of bare wood, rock and leather wingback chairs alongside [...]
Archive for the ‘Things’ Category
“Chic-ness” and Cheapness – the materiality of the modern aesthetic
Posted in Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, Food, Pragmatics, Pubs, Technology, Things, coffee, writing on November 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Hyperstylish Objects” and Things
Posted in Being, Ethics, Philosophy, Things on October 21, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Walking through Old Montreal with my Mother, popping into galleries filled with 5000$ paintings (and people buying them!), we came across the strangest store. Called “Hyper-Stylish Books and Objects”, it was superficially a book store. But, unlike any book store I’d ever seen before – all of the books were wrapped in plastic. So, you [...]
The arrival of the future. Part 3 of 3: BMW’s GINA project
Posted in Art, Capitalism, Pragmatics, Things, beginning on September 25, 2009 | 1 Comment »
You might be wondering how a concept car could signal that the future has already arrived. Concept vehicles, we normally think, project futures that may or may not arrive. For instance, the minivan was first shown by Lancia in 1978 – but it didn’t “arrive” until Chrysler’s great success in the 1980s.
However, what we can [...]
Bouncing Around B.C.
Posted in Pragmatics, Things, beginning on August 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In the last short while I’ve been to Victoria, Chemainus and Vancouver sleeping on couches all the way. Here were some of the highlights:
Driving furniture from North Vancouver to Victoria and nearly missing the last ferry.
Couch surfing in Victoria at Erin and Andrew’s flat when 3 other people had the same idea.
Visiting my grandmother in [...]
Summer Ponderings, Existential Crisis, Meaning and Purpose
Posted in Being, Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, God, Philosophy, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning, global warming on August 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Back in touch”
This summer I have not spent much time reading and writing. In other words, I have not done much philosophy. I’ve found myself wondering, “What is the point of philosophy?”, “What is philosophy for?”. Of course, easy and bad answers to these questions exist. The usual solution is to posit some principle which [...]
Serra’s Shift
Posted in Being, Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Photography, Picturesque, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning, global warming on June 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Yesterday morning my father, myself, and a few roomates and friends piled into my new one dollar van to drive north of Toronto to see Richard Serra’s early site-specific work, “Shift”. Although I first heard about the piece four years ago in a course on late Heidegger, a lack of private transportation meant this was [...]
Van Naming Contest
Posted in Pragmatics, Things, beginning on June 25, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I’ve always enjoyed the idea of naming things I own, inanimate things. It helps animate them, make them meaningful. Last summer the Taurus had the name “official place of fun”, or something along those lines, due to its involvement in various trips. That, however, is a descriptive and not a proper name. I’ve always been [...]
On Eating Alone, or Engagement and the Social Valuation of Food Consumption
Posted in Body Phenomenology, Capitalism, Pragmatics, Things on June 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I noticed after returning from Montreal that I was finding eating much less enjoyable than I did while I was there. Trying to find a reason for this, I went over several possibilities. One is that in Montreal I was free to purchase dairy products to consume at home – I certainly do value soft [...]
Heidegger’s Nietzsche Volume 1: The New Interpretation of the Sensuous. P212-213
Posted in Being, Philosophy, Things, beginning on May 14, 2009 | 7 Comments »
“The sensuous in itself is directed towards overview and order, toward what can be mastered and firmly fixed”
The sensuous is form engendering – it finds in itself a “direction” towards abstraction, idea, for the sake of getting a hold on, fixing. The sensuous grasps and calcifies, sediments. The direction is towards enhancement as an increase [...]
What is Representation?
Posted in Art, Being, Capitalism, Ethics, Philosophy, Picturesque, Pragmatics, Technology, Things, beginning on April 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
What is Representation, how does the WTP turn truth into a value, and how does the inadequacy of that value require another value, and what does this allow us to say about the essence of Art?
Representation is not, at least in its purest form, the determination of the manifold of intuition as an object, [...]
