Saturday, February 28, 2009

Wild Cattle: Modernity, Kant, Locke and Harbin

Modernity, Kant, Locke and Harbin ...

Locke (who was responding to Scholastics about certain forms of gaining knowledge) developed ideas that led to conceptions of the modern subject and modern subjectivity. Textuality was the enemy for Locke.

For Kant, we can only know things through ideas about the material world.

Locke, in a way, subscribed to the Doctrine of Arbitrariness (preceding Saussure) and was fundamentally wary of the ideological construction of materiality, especially to attachment to the notions of materiality that you've constructed.


For Locke, knowledge is placed within your body, - and also through which knowledge is placed within your body. He offers a material encounter in the world.



In terms of aesthetics, Kant was asking where does the category of the aesthetic emerge from and where does it get knowledge?

And Kant was mediating between empiricism and rationalism.


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Harbin Hot Springs is about the body. In its engagement with the 'now,' as well as the centralness of the pools, it significantly underemphasizes thinking {beginning from a very different starting place of ideas - New Age}, the rational, or philosophies that privilege ideas.

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