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Quote by Michael Bassey Johnson

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The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

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Michael Bassey Johnson

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“Since participation is a way of experiencing the world in immediacy, and not a system of ideas about experience, or about the world, we obviously shall not find any contemporary description of it. When we come to contemporary philosophy and theories of knowledge, we shall indeed find explicit reference to participation, but for the moment we are concerned with the ordinary man's experience and not with what philosophers thought about that experience. Contemporary books were written, and contemporary science was expounded, for people assumed to share the collective representations of the writer, and accordingly our evidence must be sought more often in what is implied or assumed than in what is actually affirmed. We can only reconstruct the collective representations of another age obliquely.”

“Our knowing - even of the most unexceptional kind - is always too big, too rich, too an cient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually. At the same time, our knowing - even of the most elevated kind - is too en gaged, too precise, too tailored, too active, and too experiential for it to be just of a generic size. The experience of knowing is no less unique, no less creative, and no less extraordinary for being one of participa tion. As a matter of fact, on the face of it, it would probably not amount to much otherwise.”

“Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.”