Science on Boredom

"It cannot be helped: boredom is not simple. We do not escape boredom ... with a gesture of impatience or rejection" (Roland Barthes, 1973)

The rhetoric of boredom thus gives a critical edge to Hegel's writings on Dutch art. Indeed, Heidegger would later declare that boredom was the fundamental mood of modernity. Subsequent critical studies of boredom have argued that this mood is a variable and historically specific symptom. Goodstein defines boredom in terms of the democratisation of scepticism, a widespread loss of certainty about the transcendental meaningfulness of everyday existence. She emphasises the historicity of a mood that seems to defy the passing of time, and contends that discursive awareness of anomie as an endemic social experience first emerged in the seventeenth century. Expressing the alienation and estrangement of people in secular urban commercial centres, the rhetoric of boredom accompanies the freedoms brought about by the fragmentation of inherited systems of value and external social controls. The discourse of boredom, in other words exposes the limitations of new freedoms, especially the loss of transcendent meaning. Both Goodstein and Reinhard Kuhn have analysed writings on boredom from the17th to the early 20th Century.

[...] Heidegger describes these characteristics as: being left empty and being held limbo. For Heidegger, boredom is a threshold experience; it takes its victims temporally out of the world and holds them in an unsettling state of limbo in which being and time are suspended or drawn out and thus made conspicuous. Langeweile, the German term for boredom, conveys this sense of the lengthening of time and also connotes the sensation of homesickness or world alienation. Heidegger urges his interlocutors not to fight boredom by killing time, filling it with pastimes and diversions. Rather, boredom should be awakened and approached with a listening attitude, for its emptiness holds great potential, offering 'a space in which to play'. This indeterminate space, Heidegger contends, opens opportunities for introspective reflection on everyday subjective experience. Suspending the flow of secular time, the experience of profound boredom prompts awareness of time itself, potentially allowing the bored subject to situate the narrow subjective time of mundane existence within the whole of time.

p.1012 in Boredom's Threshold: Dutch Realism by Angela Vanhalen. Association of Art Historians 2012. 

Creative class

The quote from "The Rise of the Creative city: Culture and Creativity in Copenhagen" Darrin Bayliss, 2006)

It is lifestyle rather then occupation though that seems to distinguish Creative Class. As Baris (2003) notes, this is a "group of people whose creativity permeates every aspect of their lives, who thrive on diversity and change, who collect experiments rather then posessions, and for whom the ability to express individuality and find an outlet for creativity is more important than any material gain".

Factors that attract and retain the Creative Class appears to offer a remarkably simple formula for economic development, which reflects their lifestyle choices and revolves around the three T's - technology, talent, and tolerance. Firstly, talent is attracted to tolerant and open regions where people "from any background, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation can easily plug in" (Florida, 2002c, p.750). Bohemian cities, for instance, are viewed as open and attractive to talented and creative individuals, "including those who are likely to establish high-technology firms and work in high-technology industries" (Florida, 2002a, p.56). Secondly, "the creative class want to have interesting and challenging activities available to them. ... They want to live in a place that has a good buzz" (Florida, 2002b, p.283). Highly educated, talented, high human capital individuals, especially younger employees and those in knowledge industry labour markets "ixhibit a strong preference for cultural amenities" and "are drawn to places with vibrant music scenes, street-level culture, active nightlife, and other signifiers of being 'cool'"(Florida, 2002c, pp.749-750). Rather than shopping malls and sports stadia, the Creative Class seeks out authentic, historic districts; "street level innovation comes out of these 'marginal' neighborhoods, making them vital to nurturing a healthy Creative Class" (Baris,2003)

Education and university

Interesting quote from
'Public Value of the Humanities' Bloomsbury Publishing.

The article argues the need and importance of humanities taught in universities. Sometimes, when money is an issue, humanities are one of the first departments to feel the financial pressure and significant cuts in financing. This article helps to see a bigger picture and opens our eyes towards humanitarian subject that hopefully will make others realize its importance in societal and global context.

p.21
"The idea of the university was promised upon a god: the university was a 'place of teaching universal knowledge' (Newman 1852:v)

p.22
University was to provide:
-Training in the art of argument
-The platonic university is a place where young people learn to think. Their starting point must be the art of thinking disinterestedly, not instrumentally.

p.26
Work in the humanities includes what Matthew Arnold called 'disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that has been known and thought in the world'. Are we to deprive future generations of that learning and propagation? But the humanities do not end there. They include understanding ourselves and other peoples through the language, literature, art, music history, religion, philosophy, sense of identity, politics, desires, fears and ambitions, all of which animate ourselves and others, whether these are the best or not. We are asked whether this understanding is a public good, deserving public support, or merely a private hobby. The answer is that if you believe knowledge is too expensive, try ignorance. The human world is one in which we move and act, just as much as the natural world, which is the object of science. Misunderstanding either is the road to catastrophe; understanding each of them is our only salvation".

Art in theory

And so I began my art classes and I must say, they are the best classes I have been enrolled onto in a long time (at University of Oslo). We have best lecturers here with their philosophy and their thoughts that I can definitely relate to. Through art, we are given a possibility to get a better perspective on this world' events, and life in general. How does art relate to the sociatal structure of our world, even to political events perhaps. I can greatly appreciate it especially, taken all my previous experiences with people who had more materialistic view of art. I do not deny that art can be also materialistic and practical.

But I am more interested in its cultural aspect, how it unites people, ideas, how it can change our perspective on things, and, most importantly, the power of it, how it helped and helps to shape and change history. And these are topics that are being discussed!

Couple of further posts will be extracts from my current readings, and notes from lectures and seminars, so stay tuned if you are interested in the topic!

Art in Theory

Habermas, Jürgen: “Modernity” - An Incomplete Project” (1980) in Art in Theory 1900-1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishers 1992, pp. 1000-1008

p.1004

Max Weber characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are: science, morality, and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18C, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalised. [...]

Enlightenment thinkers of the cast of mind of Condorcet still had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings. The 20C has shattered this optimism. The differentiation of science, morality and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and their separation from the hermeneutics of everyday communication. This  splitting off is the problem that has given rise to efforts to 'negate' the culture of expertise. But the problem won't go away: should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause? I now want to return to the problem of artistic culture [...]  

The importance of going abroad to study/work

The students who travel abroad to learn a new language and new culture, this deprivation and/or alteration of the self comes as with the shock of using the second language. The learner’s self becomes trapped behind the communication barrier that results, and only an altered picture of the self, one filtered through this new, incomplete language, is projected by the learner. Moreover, the cultural frame of the new environment causes the presented self to be reinterpreted through yet another filter of meaning. Learners become disadvantaged in their ability to assimilate new information, develop their social networks and present their self, when their own frame of reference becomes marginalized by the prominent frame of the new culture.

From Pellegrino Aveni, V (2005) Study Abroad and Second language Use Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 9-16

In Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.121

Are we all in pursue to acquire high statuses, to impress people around ourselves and to self advertising when we travel through cultures and religions of the world?

"Despite these structures, there is often the effort to bring into one's social world what Pierre Bourdieu terms 'cultural capital': knowledge from the cultural supermarket that one can display to one's social credit, justifying and bolstering one's social position. One's interest, at least within some segments of American society, in Indian ragas as apposed to top 40 hits, or in Tibetian Buddhist writings as opposed to evangelical Christian tracts, is a way of advertising cosmopolitan discernment: my far-flung tastes may well be the servant of my local strategy of impressing the people around me. The matter of what from the cultural supermarket can provide status in a given social milieu is highly complex. Each social milieu has its rating system for information and identities from the cultural supermarket; individuals seek to attain maximum credit and credibility, not only through consumption within the existing cultural rating system, but also through bringing in new information and identities, whose high status they seek to establish. The criteria for the establishment of such status are thus highly specific and flexible. Individuals play the game with an extraordinary acute sense of its implicit rules and strategies.

But all this is not to claim that there is absolutely no room for individual choice from the cultural supermarket. Why does one person thrill to Bach, another to juju? Why does one person become a Christian, another a Buddhist? Why does one person revel in their ethnicity, while another spurns that ethnicity? Why does one person travel the world while another stays at home? Much can be predicted about our choices by considering such factors as social class, educational level, income, gender, and age, as well as personal histories, but not everything can be predicted. We are not slaves to the world around us, but have (in a social if not philosophical sense) a certain degree of freedom in choosing who we are. This freedom may be highly limited, but it cannot be altogether denied.

From Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.99

Pictures, like words, are what we are made on.

"I am an inquisitive and chaotic traveler. I like discovering places haphazardly, through whatever images they might have to offer: landscapes and buildings, postcards and monuments, museums and galleries that house the iconographic memory of a place. Much as I love reading words, I love reading pictures, and I enjoy finding the stories explicitly or secretly woven into all kinds of works of art – without, however, having to resort to arcane or esoteric vocabularies. … I am guided not by any theory of art but merely by curiosity."

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved. Henry James, Guy de Maupassant

"Pictures, like stories, inform us. Aristotle suggested that every thought process required them. “Now, for the thinking soul, images take the place of direct perceptions; and when the soul asserts or denies that these images are good or bad, it either avoids or pursues them. Hence the soul never thinks without a mental image.” … existence takes place in an unfurling scroll of pictures captured by sight and enhanced or tempered by the other senses, pictures whose meaning (or presumption of meaning) varies constantly, building up a language made of pictures translated into words and words translated into pictures, through which we try to grasp and understand our very existence. The pictures that make up our world are symbols, signs, messages and allegories. Or perhaps they are merely empty presences that we fill with our desire, experience, questioning and regret. Whatever the case might be, pictures, like words, are the stuff we are made on."

From Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel

The power of cyberspace

"Community on a global scale.  Think of it: a cross-cultural, cross-functional,
globally dispersed team, linked by a continuity machine, driven by a common
enterprise vision, sharing in the common values of the emerging global culture,
and producing out of their cultural, organizational, and technical richness and
complexity a constant flow of wisdom.  A true global cosmopolis in cyberspace".

O'Hara-Devereaux & Johansen, 1994, p. 420 
Globalwork: Bridging Distance, Culture, and Time

Notes on Art Education

Cultural Sustainability, cultural engagement and visual culture plays a big role in development of values and the transferring of belief systems.

Visual art making acknowledges previous learning, personal meaning making, the real world and audience. It presents a platform for critical self reflection and a space to facilitate the ongoing mediation of society, cultural values and citizenship.

It would have been interesting to explore how art making affirms our consciousness about the world and self through creative engagement and communicative knowing. How can we develop students’ capacities to engage creatively with learning in environments that provide opportunities for thoughtful participatory understanding about self as a citizen of the world, or as a citizen of the world, or as a member of none’s national or local community. It is identifying and reflecting that an understanding of one’s world is dependant on knowing how contemporary society communicates its values and beliefs informed by economic, environmental, cultural and political forces. In a world dominated by the triumpth of the image, multi-modal practices and visual culture (Duncum, 2003), being visually literate is fundamental, and having the skills to creatively engage with communicative knowing within the dominant discourse is essential to the active construction of an individual’s values, beliefs and identities.

Source: Creative Engagements with Visual Culture, Communicative Knowing, Citizenship and ContemporaryVisual Art Education 
Kathryn Grushka, University of Newcastle

Three Dilemmas of Virtue

[...] Each of the three older Pendawas are commonly held to display a different sort of emotional-moral dilemma, centering one or another of the central Javanese virtues. Yudistira, the eldest, is too compassionate. He is unable to rule his country effectively because when asks him for his land, his wealth, his food, he simply gives it out of pity, leaving himself powerless, poor, or starving. His enemies continually take advantage of his mercifulness to deceive him and escape his justice.

Bima, on the other hand, is single-minded, steadfast. Once he forms and intention, he follows it out straight to its conclusion; he doesn’t look aside, doesn’t turn off or idle along the way – “he goes north”. As a result, he is often rash, and blunders into difficulties he could as well have avoided.

Arjuna, the third brother, is perfectly just. His goodness comes from the fact that he opposes evil, that he shelters people from injustice, that he is coolly courageous in fighting for the right. But he lacks a sense of mercy, of sympathy for wrong-doers. He applies a divine moral code to human activity, and so he is often cold, cruel, or brutal in the name of justice.

The resolution of these three dilemmas of virtue is the same: mystical insight. With a genuine comprehension of the realities of the human situation, a true perception of the ultimate rasa, comes the ability to combine Yudistira’s compassion, Bima’s will to action, and Arjuna’s sense of justice into a truly moral outlook, an outlook which brings an emotional detachment and an inner peace in the midst of the world of flux, yet permits and demands a struggle for order and justice within such a world. And it is such a unification that unshakable solidarity among the Pendawas in the play, continually rescuing one another from the defects of their virtues, clearly demonstrates.

Book: The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973

Author: Clifford Geertz

Chapter: Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols p. 139.

Fundamentals of intercultural communication

“The many factors that divide us are actually much more superficial then those we share. Despite all of the things that differentiate us – race, language, religion, gender, wealth and so on – we are all equal concerning our fundamental humanity”. Dalai Lama

It is more important to concentrate on what unites humanity rather then divides. All of the imagined customs, religion, language, cultures, were all invented by us, humans, to differentiate ourselves from each other, but also to make it easier for ourselves to make sense of our complex world. They are all models, artificial paradigms that direct people through life.

By studying intercultural communication, we can help reduce xenophobia that exists across cultures. We also share inter-nationally and inter-culturally our love for beauty and love.  By using our existing international language of love and beauty (i.e. art, music) it can provide us with a common ground to establish an understanding across cultures. Humans are incredible creatures. They share similar values everywhere, but name them differently.

Xenophobia is defined as “an unreasonable Fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange. It comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning “stranger,” “foreigner,” and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear.”

Comments from Paulo Coelho’s blog:

“Life means adventure, change, things that not everybody has the courage to face and accept. When one sees someone who is unfamiliar, a subconscious fear springs up” (Ruth)

“Xenophobia isn’t just the fear of strangers, it’s being afraid of what happens between different generations. Most people are afraid of today, they prefer to live in the past. My country (Russia) is an excellent example of this”. (Dasha)

“Here in Denmark we have a festival that lasts about a week and attracts 100,000 strangers to celebrate life, share common interests and learn from the differences. People embrace for no reason except being on the same path, they sing and get drunk together. When the festival is over, a strange atmosphere takes over the town again, and strangers are once more seen as a threat”. (Warrior of Running Water)

“People in my country (Poland) lived through the tyranny of Hitler and the Soviet oppression, and they don’t seem to have learned anything. It terrifies me to see people who experienced the horrors of Nazism behaving the same way today, avoiding everything that is unknown or different. The worst of it all is that they use religion to justify their acts, arguing that all those who aren’t Christians should be banished from society. This blind faith is worse than having no faith at all”. (Radek)

The importance of Art Education

Researching into Art and its importance of giving it a significant placement within our societies.

Personal perspective:

The more we travel the more capabilities we have to absorb and critically overlook our world with its people and surroundings. We grow, we learn, we get wiser, but it does not become easier, rather the opposite, to understand this world, humanity in general. Traveling the world and speaking several languages does not solve any problems and cannot contribute to the magic formula of gaining the control over the world structure. It raises even more questions instead, seeing all the complexities of human soul, you cannot but wonder about its similarities, as well is it predictabilities. You become overly self-critical as you recognize some of flaws in yourself, seeing yourself from many perspective sets you in a difficult position of occasional over analysis, which sometimes is critical to our happiness and careless existence. But as much as you would have wanted to turn the clocks backwards and go back to simplicity and childish view of the world, it is impossible. You want to climb more to fill in all the gaps, to get all your questions answered. The biggest challenge in this case is to start moving in the opposite direction: to learn how to stop, relax, embrace yourself in the moment and meditate. Another solution is to stop caring about your own fulfillment, which is very much propagandised by many western societies, but rather start caring about others, which might save yourself a soul and sanity. Such journey can be difficult and it easy to get lost among endless opportunities and ideas.

Here comes the importance of creativity and art. Vision of the world as something that is based on principles, grids and models is rather abstract and to be honest, rather depressing thought. Any creative act, be it traveling, attending an art exhibition, or having a stimulating and challenging conversation, let us start re-evaluating our personal ambitions, dreams, challenges acquired perspectives, values and principles. Art and ‘creative act’ keep our motivation on the high, without letting us to get bored by accepting our life routines. 

Art also challenges our materialistic values. The importance of family and love is evident and yet many people in the western world tend to forget this simple truth. What one might call ‘simple’ life, is one of the richest in reality. What can be more important that being in the company of people who you know care about you, love you in any way. What can be more valuable then a walk or a chat to a person whose words you know will stay with you and become part of your soul forever. All things material age, people die, but their souls, their love and their creations live on. So isn’t it the most valuable thing in the world? Art helps societies, communities and younger generations to find this spiritual connection through creative exercises. Some might argue that this is an overly simplistic, or maybe overly spiritualistic way of looking at things, that we need economic growth, we need stimuli to keep the humanity grow and develop and this is also very right. I believe that everyone chooses how to balance their lives, which consequently creates a balance on the bigger scale in this world between people of all kinds – sky walkers, dreamers, thinkers, painters, high climbers, money and power grabbers. In the ideal world everyone has this balance within one selves, where we have place for love, care, our children, our work, our passions and hobbies. But it is difficult to achieve in the society where arrogance and money serve as main stimuli. We need to rethink. We need to invest more in non-material things, such as education, art, sustainability and communities.  

Creative Engagements with Visual Culture, Communicative Knowing, Citizenship and

Contemporary Visual Art Education

Kathryn Grushka, University of Newcastle

Article discusses why it is important to develop students’ capacities to engage creatively with learning in environments that provide opportunities for thoughtful participatory understanding about self as a citizen of the world, or as a member of one’s national or local community.

Abstract

New learning in a global society gives attention to the need for learners to engage in constructive, meaningful and transformative processes which have communicative relevance to themselves. It acknowledges the need for cultural sustainability, and the vital role cultural engagement, particularly visual culture plays in development of values and the transferring of belief systems.

Visual art making acknowledges previous learning, personal meaningmaking, the real world and audience while providing authentic learning experiences. It presents as a platform for critical self-reflection and a space to facilitate the ongoing mediation of society, cultural values and citizenship. An examination of visual art curriculum, 5 years of Higher School Certificate art works in NSW and student reflections reveal a rich imagery of how student artists use their art making to affirm their consciousness about the world and self through creative engagement and communicative knowing and is presented as a legitimate site for the negotiation of ones subjectivities and life worlds

Where is Happiness these days?

Despite the fact that we are now healthier and grow to be older, despite the fact that even the least affluent among us are surrounded by material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago (there were few bathrooms in the palace of the Sun King, chairs were rare even in the richest medieval houses, and no Roman emperor could turn on a TV set when he was bored), and regardless of all the stupendous scietific knowledge we can summon at will, people often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom.

[...] Hapiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a conclusion that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

[...] One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for - rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires. He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires. [...] The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. It is no longer necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future, to end each boring day with the hope for tomorrow [...]. We must also become independent from the dictates of the body, and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there. As long as we obey the socially conditioned stimulus-response patterns that exploit our biological inclinations, we are controlled from the outside.

"Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them". Epictetus.

"If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is your power to wipe out that judgment now". Marcus Aurelius.

[...] If we do actually success in becoming richer, or more powerful, we believe, at least for a time, that life as a whole has improved. But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent. And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom like is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.



(From the book "Flow-Psycjology of optimal experience" by Michaly Csikszentmihalyi

The power of communication

Communication can act as a process of free and equal exchange of meaning, development of epistemic communities, and advancement of social solidarity, and hence of peace and harmony among individuals and nations. Conversely, however, communication can also systematically distort perceptions by creating phantom enemies, manufacturing consent for wars of aggression while stereotyping and targeting particular ethnic groups or nations into subhuman categories. Communication empowers, but it empowers more those with greater competence and access to the means of communication. The ethical choice in communication is therefore focused on whether the communicator is aiming towards power-free understanding or systematic distortions and powerful manipulations (Habermans 1983)