Hear him! "Authoritarians are never more intolerant than when forced to endure normative confusion. . . . Choice chokes. A center may not hold, but the edges do. Most changes travel from the edges to the center, as seen in world religions and movements for justice. The death of God and the world's end are more easily imagined than the complex paths that actually lead to what comes next." I love the distinction between the center and the edges, between the world's end and the complex paths to, like, tomorrow afternoon.
Walter Benjamin (a Jew hunted by Nazis) concurs, I think, but puts it in terms of the whole versus the fragment. In his preface to Benjamin's "One Way Street," Greil Marcus says Benjamin knew that what would be called totalitarianism "had to be resisted, even chipped away, even defeated, by the fragment: the street, the sign, the name, the face, the aphorism, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the worthless, the unimportant, the meaningless."
Whoa! I hope others catch your comment, too. Thanks for sharing this thought. So well said!
Hear him! "Authoritarians are never more intolerant than when forced to endure normative confusion. . . . Choice chokes. A center may not hold, but the edges do. Most changes travel from the edges to the center, as seen in world religions and movements for justice. The death of God and the world's end are more easily imagined than the complex paths that actually lead to what comes next." I love the distinction between the center and the edges, between the world's end and the complex paths to, like, tomorrow afternoon.
Walter Benjamin (a Jew hunted by Nazis) concurs, I think, but puts it in terms of the whole versus the fragment. In his preface to Benjamin's "One Way Street," Greil Marcus says Benjamin knew that what would be called totalitarianism "had to be resisted, even chipped away, even defeated, by the fragment: the street, the sign, the name, the face, the aphorism, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the worthless, the unimportant, the meaningless."