I've already posted this for Andrew, but it occurs to me that you might possibly find it useful, too:
In 'Rückblicke', Kandinsky linked his pursuit of new artistic modes, not to mention a fundamental change of personal philosophy, to the impact of the discovery of radioactivity, which he recalled as:
'In my soul, the disintegration of the atom equaled the disintegration of the whole world. Suddenly the stoutest walls came tumbling down. Everything became uncertain, unsteady, fragile. It seemed to me that science was shattered...'
It's possible that exploring this tension between what is considered stable, what is considered volatile, and what's involved in this shift between categories, might be of some interest to you.
Think about considering volatile in a mirror sense. That is, a volatile object could be an object that provokes aggression. Or perhaps an object whose purpose is to absorb aggression. Examples being stress balls and even the Bobo Doll, on which the psychologist Bandura based his famous experiment on observational learning.
I was looking on JSTOR and I found this: Notes on the Thing # Elizabeth Grosz # Perspecta, Vol. 33, Mining Autonomy (2002), pp. 78-79
She also published a book called Volatile Bodies.
Another little something on JSTOR was that volatile was used everywhere in economic literature. I wonder if any inferences can be made from this. It seems as though 'volatile markets,' a phrase I came a cross a lot, contradicts the logic of capitalism, but economists and people who seem to believe in the logic of capitalism use it all the time. I thought it was strange. -George
Recent events in the financial world notwithstanding, have you considered the volatile in terms of the market? Of course the market is "meant" to be volatile, so when does variability and responsiveness pass into volatility?
Commodities, fetishes, souvenirs, relics, rubbish. What theories help us think about things? In this course we will read Victorian travelers on West African "fetish," Michael Taussig on his imagined cocaine museum, Susan Stewart on longing and souvenirs, Freud on shiny noses, Marx on tables, Annette Weiner on the similarities between gift and commodity exchange, Mary Douglas on dirt, D.W. Winnicott on string, and Arjun Appadurai on the idea of the social lives of things. The singularization of things, the ways in which history and memory are stored in real and imagined objects, the commodification of the human body, the animation of the inanimate, utopian recycling, gleaning, found objects as art and craft: we will consider a broad range of theoretical issues in our readings and in projects that put them to quirky use.
5 comments:
There are so many ways you could interpret the word volatile:
1. something that takes to air easily, can fly about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5S47aSlezs
2. a substance that readily evaporates: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Smelling-Salts
Nupur
I've already posted this for Andrew, but it occurs to me that you might possibly find it useful, too:
In 'Rückblicke', Kandinsky linked his pursuit of new artistic modes, not to mention a fundamental change of personal philosophy, to the impact of the discovery of radioactivity, which he recalled as:
'In my soul, the disintegration of the atom equaled the disintegration of the whole world. Suddenly the stoutest walls came tumbling down. Everything became uncertain, unsteady, fragile. It seemed to me that science was shattered...'
It's possible that exploring this tension between what is considered stable, what is considered volatile, and what's involved in this shift between categories, might be of some interest to you.
--Ryan
Think about considering volatile in a mirror sense. That is, a volatile object could be an object that provokes aggression. Or perhaps an object whose purpose is to absorb aggression. Examples being stress balls and even the Bobo Doll, on which the psychologist Bandura based his famous experiment on observational learning.
~Jordan Carter~
I was looking on JSTOR and I found this:
Notes on the Thing
# Elizabeth Grosz
# Perspecta, Vol. 33, Mining Autonomy (2002), pp. 78-79
She also published a book called Volatile Bodies.
Another little something on JSTOR was that volatile was used everywhere in economic literature. I wonder if any inferences can be made from this. It seems as though 'volatile markets,' a phrase I came a cross a lot, contradicts the logic of capitalism, but economists and people who seem to believe in the logic of capitalism use it all the time. I thought it was strange.
-George
Recent events in the financial world notwithstanding, have you considered the volatile in terms of the market? Of course the market is "meant" to be volatile, so when does variability and responsiveness pass into volatility?
--Andrew
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