index
I want to say more
click on images for full-size:
Content with its own resistance (Georgia O'Keefe's house at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico)
Social content has its own balances and tensions (sculpture at the School of Architecture, Lund University
Content (identities, forms, grammars, sets of possibilities, concepts, systems) has its own tendencies, tensions, and inertias. (The idea that social content is passive belongs to the myth of a purely active subjectivity.) Content is not infinitely malleable; it exists in contrasts and offers sets of future-oriented possibilities favoring some changes or directions and resisting others. The content also contains tensions that alter itself, in the process. Subjectivity finds itself always thrown or involved in already ongoing projects and values and tensions and inertias. Subjectivity too is not infinitely flexible. It too exists in contrasts and sets of future-oriented possibilities favoring some changes or directions and resisting others. Subjectivity too contains tensions that alter itself, in the process. We are defined and defining within the process of creating social grammars and norms; we are neither wholly active nor wholly product. Social content is not sufficiently distanced from us that we can manipulate it like counters on a table, and we are not set in motion so purely. We should be suspicious of claims for any purely self-critical or self-constitutive activity.Our interaction with social content takes place within a larger process that involves meaning tensions and movements that can be quite separate from Darwinian adaptive issues.