Today I had my mind on people and motivation. After the last text I tried to form a couple of more discriptive, but in no way scientifically researched, analogies. What kind of people are there amongst us? Here comes:
Trains
These kind of people are the single-minded locomotives of the human universe. They do their thing steadily, formidably and they will always get there eventually (unless they're owned by VR). They might not be the fastest ones to achieve it, but they have a distinct sense of the direction - they really know how to get there. Of course, in itself this is a blessing and a curse. Someone with the tracks laid already can hardly change the direction very fast. A new destination will require new rails - and that means several rounds of complaints from the little inhabitants called your brain cells.
Pendulums
These people have usually more key areas of interest, between which they alternate periodically. (I'm thinking Foucault pendulum here, so more than two equilibria positions are allowed). Their life may be one consisting of projects, or at least something in the way of those. Characteristically, once they delve deeper into something they really get into it, but after a certain period of time the interest starts to wane, until it's time to change the direction again. I feel like a pendulum guy, personally.
Jets
These people really can motor. They're the fastest ones around. Before you've even formulated your approach regarding a problem they've already halfway to the library with 27 different solutions running in their heads. As a cheetah of intellect, however, jets usually need more time to rest and gather energy after a completed quest. I mean, have you ever seen trains idling for days? (again, excluding VR trains) Another problem for the jets can be either speed limits (working in groups where not everyone wants do dedicate their life to the project) or alternatively too long distances, causing them to run out of steam (projects with too distant goals and too long a span).
Quite obviously, this is hardly a comprehensive analysis of anyone's personality. But it might make a useful tool, help you think about yourself from a new perspective or just give you a few laughs. And every one of those reactions is a good one.
18 October, 2010
16 October, 2010
Driven interests
Okay, I've been very lazy the past weeks - sorry about that. There's just something that life in a foreign-spoken world with courses that make you have a 80-hour work week do to your writing. To remedy the situation, here's a piece I gathered from my backpack, finally typed in digital form now:
I admire people with drive. With passion. I admire those of you who can put in hour after hour for their cause. I would want to be one of you. I'd like to find that mental state, where you're prepared to go to hell and back just for the sake of it. Just for that small step forward.
On the other hand, I know that kind of single-mindedness isn't just for me. My problem is I want a piece of everything. Like no in Graz, I'm currently studying how to design railroad tracks, how much camber you need to have in a curve and why two single-track tunnels are better than one with two tracks.
So far my studies have sure been interesting, but for different reasons than usually. Sometimes I feel like a detective out of a Stieg Larsson novel as I weave, twist and google my way midst the course material, online dictionaries and every even remotely helpful website I come across. Sometimes a page of study material auf Deutsch feels like a two-mile crawl in mud, but once you make it through - oh, the euphoria sometimes resembles that of actual sports.
It sound like I'm a 6-year-old at a buffet table and frankly sometimes I feel like one too. But hell, I'd rather be an excited kid than a bored and depressed "grown-up", whatever that euphemism stands for.
But still the question remains. Something isn't everything, but can everything be something? Maybe you can be driven by variety as well? Maybe a piece of it all is as good as all of one piece.
I admire people with drive. With passion. I admire those of you who can put in hour after hour for their cause. I would want to be one of you. I'd like to find that mental state, where you're prepared to go to hell and back just for the sake of it. Just for that small step forward.
On the other hand, I know that kind of single-mindedness isn't just for me. My problem is I want a piece of everything. Like no in Graz, I'm currently studying how to design railroad tracks, how much camber you need to have in a curve and why two single-track tunnels are better than one with two tracks.
So far my studies have sure been interesting, but for different reasons than usually. Sometimes I feel like a detective out of a Stieg Larsson novel as I weave, twist and google my way midst the course material, online dictionaries and every even remotely helpful website I come across. Sometimes a page of study material auf Deutsch feels like a two-mile crawl in mud, but once you make it through - oh, the euphoria sometimes resembles that of actual sports.
It sound like I'm a 6-year-old at a buffet table and frankly sometimes I feel like one too. But hell, I'd rather be an excited kid than a bored and depressed "grown-up", whatever that euphemism stands for.
But still the question remains. Something isn't everything, but can everything be something? Maybe you can be driven by variety as well? Maybe a piece of it all is as good as all of one piece.
17 September, 2010
Postmodern society
Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected.
Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38). Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.). Graff sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed - but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.
The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" - not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.
Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes postmodernity's "moment of truth". The various other features of the postmodern that he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object". The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded. The "prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity". (Jameson 1993:54)
(text source: Wikipedia on Postmodernity, paragraph Postmodern society)
Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38). Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.). Graff sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed - but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.
The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" - not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.
Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes postmodernity's "moment of truth". The various other features of the postmodern that he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object". The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded. The "prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity". (Jameson 1993:54)
(text source: Wikipedia on Postmodernity, paragraph Postmodern society)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)