Friday, January 13, 2006

Quote for the day.

Norm's profile today is Slugger O'Toole. He comes up with a cracking quote:
in The Reinvention of Politics Ulrich Beck quotes Kandinsky's 19821 essay 'And'. Beck writes: 'While the nineteenth century was dominated by Either-or, the twentieth century was to be devoted to work on And. Formerly: separation, specialisation, efforts at clarity and the calculability of the world; now: simultaneity, multiplicity, uncertainty, the issue of connections, cohesion, experiments with exchange, the excluded middle, synthesis, ambivalence'. I'm not sure Kandinsky's timing is so clearly defined by history. But hints at the multiple richness of Joyce, a literary precursor of the internet interconnected age, and the black and white days of the cold war. The simple truth is also complex. Conversations are vital in clarifying, polarizing, connecting and ultimately moving on.
This quote also pops up here, an interesting essay on Beyond either/or: the politics of 'and' in ethno-nationalist conflicts by Robin Wilson published in Democratic Dialogue in September 1999. Another thing I need to read. That pile of things I need to/want to read is just gettign bigger and bigger. Surprisingly the pile of things I need to/don't want to read is very, very small.

1I think this must be a typo. Wassily (or Vasily) Kandinsky lived 1866 to 1944 so writing an essay in 1982 must have been some feat. Unless it's some other Kandinsky? In which case I've got totally the wrong end of something, the name of which escapes me, which reminds me of another point. For which you have to see another post, probably the post above this one.

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