Category: Quotation

The future is here.

They took their scientific knowledge to the point where they could harness the heat in the atmosphere and concentrate it on frozen lands.

“They took their scientific knowledge to the point where they could harness the heat in the atmosphere and concentrate it on frozen lands.”

“A heatwave in Russia this summer has destroyed a third of its vast grain crop. A similar devastating heatwave in 2010 has been directly linked to global warming by scientists, who showed the chances of it happening had been tripled by our fossil fuel burning. Another study predicted that “mega-heatwaves” in Europe will become five to 10 times more likely over the next 40 years.”

Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville, The Last Man, 1805.
Damian Carrington in The Guardian 11/10/2012

Is it still possible to dream of McDonald’s?

The dreams contained in kitsch are always a check to an overly condescending attitude toward mass consumption and popular culture.

“I think that Benjamin’s focus on dream kitsch is still valuable. If you rub them against the grain, kitsch objects betray a yearning for a better world. So it’s important to keep one’s mind open about the way in which the seemingly manipulative dimensions of popular culture produced entirely for commercial or cynical ends may also harbor at least the potential for an alternative understanding. The dreams contained in kitsch are always a check to an overly condescending attitude toward mass consumption and popular culture.”

Martin Jay

Kitsch in a way is a sign of mourning for the loss that is entailed by adulthood. The child is not scared by kitsch objects, it revels in colours, textures, patterns. The sensibility of the ego denigrates pretty things as kitsch, so we are not allowed to like them.

Childen also like unsavoury things. As I child I dreamt about the many-coloured balls of McDonald’s playgrounds.

The “utopian power of the vulgar desire to consume”is arguably equivalent to the utopian power of the vulgar desire to pray for one’s salvation; the hope for a better world to come.

 

“In consuming, you are already engaged in a pre-reflexive experience.”

And yet reflection is the basis of experience.

Quotes from Dream kitsch and the debris of history: An interview with Martin Jay Douglas J. Goodman Journal of Consumer Culture 2003 3:109

No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower.

Whoever awakens as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept.

According to Benjamin “Dreaming has a share in history.”

But this share circumscribes the limits of dreaming.

Kitsch is that superfluous desire for the splendour of all things, thoughts, on the other hand, take place below the surface of what is seen in the ordinary.

The whole world is dreamt because there are waking thoughts stirring beneath its glossy sheen. This is what should be explored.