A country of illiterates

Prejudice against reason weigh down the wings of education. A discipline which, if fed back to students in scientific guise, might inspire still greater study.

A country of illiterates

There is a great difference between an exclusive snobbery and an embracing, flattering elitism that strives to help people to raise their game and join the cultural elite. A calculated dumbing down is the worst: condescending and patronizing.

Don't worry be happy

If children are lured into science, or any other worthwhile occupation, by the promise of easy fun, what are they going to do when they finally have to confront the reality?

The new creationism

Purveyors of cultural relativism and the "higher superstition" are apt to pour scorn on the search for truth.

"Dumbing down" is a very different kind of threat to scientific sensibility. Larky voices proclaim that science is fun, fun, fun. The very word science is best avoided, we were told, because ordinary people see it as threatening.

A country of illiterates

There in Brazil an pernicious alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalist religious right and the institutional left. Not even the theory of evolution escapes this bizarre manifestation. A underdeveloped country that will never be modern.

On the Origin of Species

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with manyplants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin

1809 - 1882

To spring direct towards the galaxy

Poet and the city

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them, because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are, therefore, speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

W. H. Auden

1907 - 1973

Strange other world

A cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricately folded membranes. There are about 100 million million cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us works out at more than 200 acres. That's a respectable farm.

What are all these membranes doing? They seem to stuff the cell as wadding, but that isn't all they do. Much of the folded acreage is given over to chemical production lines, with moving conveyor belts, hundreds of stages in cascade, each leading to the next in precisely crafted sequences, the whole driven by fast-turning chemical cogwheels. The Krebs cycle, the 9-toothed cogwheel that is largely responsible for making energy available to us, turns over at up to 100 revolutions per second, duplicated thousands of times in every cell. Chemical cogwheels of this particular marque are housed inside mitochondria, tiny bodies that reproduce independently inside our cells like bacteria. As we shall see, it is now widely accepted that the mitochondria, along with other vitally necessary structures within cells, not only resemble bacteria but are directly descended from ancestral bacteria who, a billion years ago, gave up their freedom. Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Passion

Full of desire I lay, the sky wounding me, 

Each cloud a ship without me sailing, each tree 

Possessing what my soul lacked, tranquillity.

Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak 

Through the mute telephone, my body grew weak 

With the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.

The language I knew best, my human speech 

Forsook my fingers, and out of reach 

Were Homer’s ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear, 

familiar as the heart, than love more near. 

The sky said to my soul, "You have what you desire!

"Know now that you are born along with these 

clouds, winds, and stars, and ever-moving seas 

and forest dwellers. This your nature is.

"Lift up your heart again without fear, 

sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air, 

this world you with the flower and with the tiger share".

Kathleen Raine

1908 - 2003

The perversity in power

Brazil has increased rather than reduced the need for parasitical and alienated functions.

A country of illiterates

Future generations will be even more ignorant.

A country of illiterates

If the brazilians are satisfied to the point of "happiness" with the goods and poor quality services handed down to them by the local administration, why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods and services?

If the material and mental commodities offered be bad and the individuals are remain "happy", why should they wish to study, think, feel, and imagine for themselves?

The perversity in power

The decline of freedom and perpetuation of income inequality are a matter of moral and intellectual deterioration, and above all of corruption. Mainly in underdeveloped country like Brazil. It is rather an objective societal process insofar as the corruption it's a phenomenon in the political arena.

Glint chip eye

No bifocals or trifocals needed here

never closing

never sleeping

never requiring prosthetics like Oliver People glasses

an eye electronic without myopia or detached retinas

or glaucoma or hardened lenses

Finally liberated from the cosmetology

of eyelashes and eyebrows

the glint chip eye opens to a 3D world

of artificial life, animated memory, and digital optics

Maybe it needs some artifical tears.

Arthur Kroker

The anaesthetic of familiarity

What is the use of bringing a baby into the world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on living? If everything is judged by how "useful" it is - useful for staying alive, that is - we are left facing a futile circularity. There must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers' money on the arts. It is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians who think that wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved only if they "pay their way". And science is the same. Of course science pays its way; of course it is useful. But that is not all it is.

Unweaving the rainbow

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite.

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, tells a salutary story of an occasion when he publicly debunked a famous television spiritualist. The man was doing ordinary conjuring tricks and duping people into thinking he was communicating with dead spirits. But instead of being hostile to the now-unmasked charlatan, the audience turned on the debunker and supported a woman who accused him of "inappropriate" behaviour because he destroyed people's illusions. You'd think she'd have been grateful for having the wool pulled off her eyes, but apparently she preferred it firmly over them. I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

Aldous Huxley and Utopia

We criticize mass culture not because it gives men too much or makes their life too secure that but rather because it contributes to a condition in which men get too little and what they get is bad, a condition in which whole strata inside and out live in frightful poverty, in which men come to terms with injustice, in which the world is kept in a condition where one must expect on the one hand gigantic catastrophes and on the other clever elites conspiring to bring about a dubious peace.

Theodor W. Adorno

1903 - 1969

Brain dead

He/she can't blink eye or cry
or even speak.

TV and commercial music colonized 

the body of the underdeveloped.

A country of illiterates

Retrogression by TV and commercial music is essential to the consistent development of domination and epistemicide.

Happycracy

A society which wants nothing but happiness, according to Huxley, moves inexorably into insanity, into mechanized bestiality. I prefer quality of life, which is unimaginable in Brazil.

A country of illiterates

The mass culture he has connection with the persistente of social injustice. The TV and the commercial music have their roots in the social function of reconciling people to bad conditions and this diverting them from criticism.

The perversity in power

The just society, which provides all human beings with the best possible living conditions and the final elimination of the evil of domination, it will not happen in Brazil. Never!

A country of illiterates

Look the underdeveloped consciousness from the social realization of Brazil.

A country of illiterates

The disgrace of the present is the preponderance of so called mass culture over the formation of consciousness.

A country of illiterates

The value of literate culture to the moral perception of the individual and society it must be evident to an pedagogue.

Grundrisse

Individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis a vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. Universally developed individuals are no product of nature, but of history.

Karl Marx 

1818 - 1883

Observations on language and literature

Edmund Wilson and Marshall Berman wrote the best prose in America.

A country of illiterates

Most of the novels produced in the past two decades in Brazil are simply not as well written, not as strongly felt, as are modes of classic writing. It is preferable to read and reread any book by Karl Marx rather than a contemporary brazilian author.

A country of illiterates

The sciences doesn't enrich brazilian language and the resources of feeling. The brazilian doesn't from sciences that we may reap the terms of your metaphors. He doesn't grow up.

A country of illiterates

We must countenance the possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique.

The perversity in power

The ultimate of political barbarism continue grew from the core of Brazil. Barbarism prevail on the very ground of christian.

A country of illiterates

We cannot pretend that vulgar, hunger and violence be are irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination. The corruption doesn't alter the quality of brazilian awareness. It doesn't change.

A country of illiterates

The criticism that makes the language live.

A country of illiterates

Brazil is the unprecedented ruin of humane values and hopes by the political bestiality of our age.

The future brazilian society never will assumes the contours foretold by Marxism. The gangs took control.

A country of illiterates

Less and less, the average brazilian man reads to various genres of graphic material. The word has no value for the underdeveloped.

A country of illiterates

The chauvinist (little poodle) will growl on the heels of the Marxists.

A country of illiterates

Brazil has no literary cities.

It doesn't have the same philosophical tradition as Europe.

A country of illiterates

The book fair what happens in Düsseldorf is unthinkable in Brazil.

Brazil has no literary cities. People don't read.

Aldous Huxley and Utopia

The novel, a fantasy of the future with a rudimentary plot, endeavours to comprehend the shocks through the principle of the disenchanted world, to heighten this principle to absurdity, and to derive the idea of human dignity from the comprehension of inhumanity. The point of departure seems to be the perception of the universal similarity of everything mass-produced, things as well as human beings. Schopenhauer's metaphor of nature as a manufactured article is taken literally. Teeming herds of twins are prepared in test tubes: a nightmare of endless doubles like that which the most recent phase of capitalism has spawned into everyday life, from regulated smiles, the grace instilled by charm schools, to the standardized consciousness of millions which revolves in the grooves cut by the communications industry. The here and now of spontaneous experience, long corroded, is stripped of its power; men are no longer merely purchasers of the concerns' mass-produced consumption goods but rather appear themselves to be the deindividualized products of the corporations' absolute power. To the panicked eye, observations that resist assimilation petrify into allegories of catastrophe; it sees through the illusion of the harmlessness of everyday life.

For it, the model's commercial smile becomes what it is, the contorted grin of the victim. The more than thirty years since the book's appearance have provided more than sufficient verification: small horrors such as the aptitude tests for elevator boys which detect the least intelligent, and visions of terror such as the rational utilization of corpses.

If, in accordance with a thesis of Freud's Group Psychology and Ego Analysis, panic is the condition in which powerful collective identifications disintegrate and the released instinctual energy is transformed into raw anxiety, then the person seized by panic is capable of innervating the dark basis of the collective identification the false consciousness of individuals who, without transparent solidarity and blindly subjected to images of power, believe themselves one with the whole whose ubiquity stifles them.

Huxley projects observations of the present state of civilization along the lines of its own teleology to the point where its monstrous nature becomes immediately evident. The emphasis is placed not so much on objective technological and institutional elements as on what becomes of human beings when they no longer know need.

The economic and political sphere as such recedes in importance. It is stipulated only that there is a thoroughly rationalized class system on a planetary scale and totally planned state capitalism, that total domination goes along with total collectivization, and that a money economy and the profit motive persist.

In Brave New World conditioning means the complete preformation of human beings through social intervention, from artificial breeding and technological direction of the conscious and unconscious mind in the earliest stages of life to "death conditioning", a training that purges children of the horror of death by parading the dying before their eyes while they are being fed candy, which they then forever after associate with death.

The ultimate effect of conditioning, which is in fact adjustment come into its own, is a degree of introjection and integration of social pressure and coercion far beyond that of the Protestant ethic; men resign themselves to loving what they have to do, without even being aware that they are resigned. Thus, their happiness is firmly established subjectively and order is maintained.

By depriving lowercaste embryos and infants of oxygen in the Hatching and Conditioning Centres of Brave New World, the directors create an artificial slum atmosphere. In the midst of unlimited possibility they organize degradation and regression.

Non-comprehension becomes a virtue.

Through an ingenious method of cell division, the common people are recruited from identical twins, whose physical and intellectual growth is stunted through an artificial addition of alcohol to the blood. That is, the reproduction of stupidity, which previously took place unconsciously under the dictates of material necessity, must be taken in hand by triumphant mass civilization.

The idiocy of mandatory small talk, conversation as chatter, is discretely pursued to the extreme. The virtual transformation of the world into commodities, the predetermination by the machinery of society of everything that is thought or done, renders speaking illusory. The ladies of Brave New World and in this case extrapolation is hardly required converse only as consumers.

Huxley is well acquainted with the latest-model average citizen who contemplates a bay as a tourist attraction while seated in his car listening to radio commercials.

Their inability to perceive or think anything unlike themselves, the inescapable self-sufficiency of their lives, the law of pure subjective functionalismall result in pure desubjectivization. Purged of all myths, the scientifically manufactured subject-objects of the anti-Weltgeist are infantile.

Pleasure itself degenerates to the misery of "fun" and to an occasion for the narcissistic satisfaction of having "had" this or that person. Through the institutionalization of promiscuity, sex becomes a matter of indifference, and even escape from society is relocated within its borders. Physiological release is desirable, as part of hygiene; accompanying feelings are dispensed with as a waste of energy without social utility. On no account is one to be moved.

Theodor Adorno 

1903 - 1969

Cultural criticism and society

In the open-air prison which the world is becoming, it is no longer so important to know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is one. All phenomena rigidify, become insignias of the absolute rule of that which is. There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie.

Prisms

Dialectics means intransigence towards all reification

The existence of cultural criticism, no matter what its content, depends on the economic system, it is involved in the fate of the system.

Its alienation from human affairs terminates in its absolute docility before a humanity which has been enchanted and transformed into clientele by the suppliers.

A dialectical theory which is uninterested in culture as a mere epiphenomenon, aids pseudo-culture to run rampant and collaborates in the reproduction of the evil.

Since the moment arrived when every advanced economic and political council agreed that what was important was to change the world and that to interpret it was allotria, it has become difficult simply to invoke the Theses against Feuerbach. Dialectics also includes the relation between action and contemplation.  In an epoch in which bourgeois social science has, in Scheler's words, 'plundered' the Marxian notion of ideology and diluted it to universal relativism, the danger involved in overlooking the function of ideologies has become less than that of judging intellectual phenomena ma subsunptive, uninformed and administrative manner and assimilating them into the prevailing constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose. As with many other elements of dialectical materialism, the notion of ideology has changed from an instrument of knowledge into its strait-jacket. In the name of the dependence of superstructure on base, all use of ideology is controlled instead of criticized. No one is concerned with the objective substance of an ideology as long as it is expedient.

Yet the very function of ideologies becomes increasingly abstract. The suspicion held by earlier cultural critics is confirmed: in a world which denies the mass of human beings the authentic experience of intellectual phenomena by making genuine education a privilege and by shackling consciousness, the specific ideological content of these phenomena is less important than the fact that there should be anything at all to fill the vacuum of the expropriated consciousness and to distract from the open secret. Within the context of its social effect, the particular ideological doctrine which a film imparts to its audience is presumably far less important than the interest of the homeward bound movie-goer in the names and marital affairs of the stars. Vulgar notions such as 'amusement' and 'diversion' are more appropriate than pretentious explanations which designate one writer as a representative of the lower-middle class, another of the upper-middle. Culture has become ideological not only as the quintessence of subjectively devised manifestations of the objective mind, but even more as the sphere of private life. The illusory importance and autonomy of private life conceals the fact that private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process. Life transforms itself into the ideology of reificationa death mask. Hence, the task of criticism must be not so much to search for the particular interest-groups to which cultural phenomena are to be assigned, but rather to decipher the general social tendencies which are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves. Cultural criticism must become social physiognomy. The more the whole divests itself of all spontaneous elements, is socially mediated and filtered, is 'consciousness', the more it becomes 'culture'. In addition to being the means of subsistence, the material process of production finally unveils itself as that which it always was, from its origins in the exchange-relationship as the false consciousness which the two contracting parties have of each other: ideology. Inversely, however, consciousness becomes at the same time increasingly a mere transitional moment in the functioning of the whole. Today, ideology means society as appearance. Although mediated by the totality behind which stands the rule of partiality, ideology is not simply reducible to a partial interest. It is, as it were, equally near the centre in all its pieces.

A country of illiterates

Culture is only true when implicitly critical.

Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Criticism is just when it destroy - its is greatest virtue.

A country of illiterates

Most brazilian children don't practice reading. Even at school.

History of reading

The history of reading could be as complex as the history of thinking.

Think how often reading has changed the course of history - Marx's Reading Hegel, Mao's reading of Marx. Man's unending effort to find meaning in the world arounf him and within himself.

Cultural trash

I don't think that the market is good and is fighting for quality. That would be a totally wave attitude. I mean the market with a capital can impose trash and there will be people poisoned by television and poisoned by advertisements ready to buy trash.

Carlo Ginzburg

History of reading

Every narrative pressuposed a reader, and every reading begins from a protocol inscribed within the text. The text may undercut itself, and the reader may work against the grain or wring new meaning from familiar words: hence the endless possibilities of interpretation proposed by the deconstructionits and the original readings that have shaped cultural history.

The time is ripe for making a juncture between literary theory and the history of books.

A country of illiterates

Some brazilian children - very high number - remain in school long enough but they don't learn to read and write.

A country of illiterates

Literacy estimates based on the ability to write are much too low, and the "reading public" may have included a great many people who could not recognized a marxist text.

A country of illiterates

 

What is the evolution of reading habits in Brazil?

What is the number or the percentual the common people of Brazil (salaried workers and domestic servants) which ownen books or familiarity with the written word?

By 1770, Swedish society was fully literate. 2026, Brazil, well...

A country of illiterates

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, its as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

The reader find that every mother tongue, in any developed society, turns into something called literature. Less in Brazil, off course, where bullshit is dominant.

A country of illiterates

Lack a national body for the development and implementation of a state policy for books and reading. This problem in brazilian society is far, far away from being solved.

History of reading

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had received a flood of letters from readers after the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse. It was the first tidal wave of fan mail in the history. The greatest best seller of the century, the most important single source of romantic sensibility. That sensibility is now extinct.

History of reading

Carlo Ginzburg demonstrated the possibility of studying reading as an activity among the common people four centuries ago. Reading and living run parallel as leitmotifs.

A country of illiterates

The middle class is to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - swindler, embezzler, thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and they like - and politically dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable and tendentially reactionary. The middle class is thought to be merely a residue of underdevelopment social forms a kind of historical refuse.

A country of illiterates

The closer I look at the lives and activity of the middle class, the more I see how she is depoliticized and ignorant. These are people who are unfamiliar with new ideas. They are and indeed and how much part of the circuits of social and biopolitical production of underdevelopment.

The power of money

That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless?

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:

1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.

2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.

The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

The perversity in power

The social production of underdeveloped Brazil includes: the poor, the unemployed, the unwaged, the homeless, and so forth. Numbers of the people are deprived of adequate income, food, shelter, quality education, health care.

A country of illiterates

Brazil is no place for an marxist: to be an intellectual is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer.

The perversity in power

The loss freedom in the absence of employment choice and in the tyrannical form of work itself be major deprivation.