The Plenitude

The Plenitude PDF Author: Rich Gold
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262072890
Category : Consumption (Economics).
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Lessons from and for the creative professions of art, science, design, and engineering: how to live in and with the Plenitude, that dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff that creates the need for more of itself. We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound--composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the "Plenitude." And in this book--at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy--he tells us how to understand and live with it. Gold writes about the Plenitude from the seemingly contradictory (but in his view, complementary) perspectives of artist, scientist, designer, and engineer--all professions pursued by him, sometimes simultaneously, in the course of his career. "I have spent my life making more stuff for the Plenitude," he writes, acknowledging that the Plenitude grows not only because it creates a desire for more of itself but also because it is extraordinary and pleasurable to create. Gold illustrates these creative expressions with witty cartoons. He describes "seven patterns of innovation"--including "The Big Kahuna," "Colonization" (which is illustrated by a drawing of "The real history of baseball," beginning with "Play for free in the backyard" and ending with "Pay to play interactive baseball at home"), and "Stuff Desires to Be Better Stuff" (and its corollary, "Technology Desires to Be Product"). Finally, he meditates on the Plenitude itself and its moral contradictions. How can we in good conscience accept the pleasures of creating stuff that only creates the need for more stuff? He quotes a friend: "We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in."

The Plenitude

The Plenitude PDF Author: Rich Gold
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262072890
Category : Consumption (Economics).
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lessons from and for the creative professions of art, science, design, and engineering: how to live in and with the Plenitude, that dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff that creates the need for more of itself. We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound--composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the "Plenitude." And in this book--at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy--he tells us how to understand and live with it. Gold writes about the Plenitude from the seemingly contradictory (but in his view, complementary) perspectives of artist, scientist, designer, and engineer--all professions pursued by him, sometimes simultaneously, in the course of his career. "I have spent my life making more stuff for the Plenitude," he writes, acknowledging that the Plenitude grows not only because it creates a desire for more of itself but also because it is extraordinary and pleasurable to create. Gold illustrates these creative expressions with witty cartoons. He describes "seven patterns of innovation"--including "The Big Kahuna," "Colonization" (which is illustrated by a drawing of "The real history of baseball," beginning with "Play for free in the backyard" and ending with "Pay to play interactive baseball at home"), and "Stuff Desires to Be Better Stuff" (and its corollary, "Technology Desires to Be Product"). Finally, he meditates on the Plenitude itself and its moral contradictions. How can we in good conscience accept the pleasures of creating stuff that only creates the need for more stuff? He quotes a friend: "We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in."

The Digital Plenitude

The Digital Plenitude PDF Author: Jay David Bolter
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262039737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
How the creative abundance of today's media culture was made possible by the decline of elitism in the arts and the rise of digital media. Media culture today encompasses a universe of forms—websites, video games, blogs, books, films, television and radio programs, magazines, and more—and a multitude of practices that include making, remixing, sharing, and critiquing. This multiplicity is so vast that it cannot be comprehended as a whole. In this book, Jay David Bolter traces the roots of our media multiverse to two developments in the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of elite art and the rise of digital media. Bolter explains that we no longer have a collective belief in “Culture with a capital C.” The hierarchies that ranked, for example, classical music as more important than pop, literary novels as more worthy than comic books, and television and movies as unserious have broken down. The art formerly known as high takes its place in the media plenitude. The elite culture of the twentieth century has left its mark on our current media landscape in the form of what Bolter calls “popular modernism.” Meanwhile, new forms of digital media have emerged and magnified these changes, offering new platforms for communication and expression. Bolter outlines a series of dichotomies that characterize our current media culture: catharsis and flow, the continuous rhythm of digital experience; remix (fueled by the internet's vast resources for sampling and mixing) and originality; history (not replayable) and simulation (endlessly replayable); and social media and coherent politics.

The Plenitude of Distraction

The Plenitude of Distraction PDF Author: Marina Van Zuylen
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0997567449
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. This short book takes a second look at distraction, extracting untold pleasures from its alleged dangers, defending and celebrating the unfocused life for the small and great wonders it can deliver. It tracks the paths of writers that built their works around non-linear thinking. Bergson called on distraction to sharpen our perceptions; Proust's greatest epiphany came from stumbling, not walking in a straight line; Nietzsche never trusted a thought that didn't come from perambulation. The wanderings documented in these pages carry none of the stigma of attention deficit. Quite the opposite. In Montaigne's words, there is a marvelous grace in letting thoughts be carried away at the pleasure of the wind. It is time to side with some of the great propagandists of so-called wasted time and cultivate controlled mental mayhem. Come join the ranks of the great hedonists of meandering thought.

Plenitude of Power

Plenitude of Power PDF Author: Professor Robert C Figueira
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409479471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
'I study power' – so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests – ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, political ideology, and historiography. The justification and exercise of political power is considered in two chapters that look at how the hagiography of a late Roman military saint, Maurice, was harnessed in the 11th century to the discussion of the power exercised by both emperor and pope, and how both pious purpose and political pretext animated the Hohenstaufen emperors' suppression of heresy. Three subsequent chapters focus on the Church: a study of the legal commentaries that taught that the 'authority to bind and loose' in a specific ecclesiastical matter could be determined by the opinions of 'the elders of the province'; an argument that Innocent III's administration of the Roman church represented a model for the ordering of all Christian society; and an inquiry into the doctrinal formation of the 'territorial principle' in the exercise of jurisdiction by papal legates. The late Middle Ages provides the focus for two additional studies, namely an exploration of the issues of power and authority in the charitable institutions of Cologne in the 13th–14th centuries, and the argument that the current desire for universal standards of governmental conduct in the area of basic human rights hearkens back to natural law theory as outlined in the 15th century by Nicholas of Cusa. Two historiographical studies round out the volume: an estimation of modern research regarding the political theology of late antiquity, and a reflection on Benson's own contribution to historical scholarship. Together, these papers both epitomize and further develop Benson's distinctive approach to the study of the Middle Ages, while themselves making their own important contribution.

Plenitude

Plenitude PDF Author: Daniel Sarah Karasik
Publisher: Book*hug Press
ISBN: 9781771667357
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
A non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state's boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto. Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik's experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world--and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future and work towards building it without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way? Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.

Pebble Swing

Pebble Swing PDF Author: Isabella Wang
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 088971407X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures. The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection—with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd—the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form.

Tom Stoppard’s Plays

Tom Stoppard’s Plays PDF Author: Nigel Purse
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004319654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 686

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Book Description
In Tom Stoppard’s Plays: Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony Nigel Purse assesses the complete canon of Tom Stoppard’s works on a thematic basis. He explains that, amongst the plenitude of chaotic comedy, wordplay and intellectual ping-pong of Stoppard’s plays, the principle of parsimony that is Occam’s razor lies at the heart of his works. He identifies key patterns in theme – ethics and duality - and method – Stoppard’s stage debates and his dramatic vehicles - as well as in theatrical devices. Quoting extensively from all Stoppard’s published works, many of his interviews and also unpublished material Nigel Purse arrives at a comprehensive and unique appraisal of Stoppard’s plays.

The Ecological Self

The Ecological Self PDF Author: Freya Mathews
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000385833
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Environmental disasters, from wildfires and vanishing species to flooding and drought, have increased dramatically in recent years and debates about the environment are rarely far from the headlines. There is growing awareness that these disasters are connected – indeed, that in the fabric of nature everything is interconnected. However, until the publication of Freya Mathews' The Ecological Self, there had been remarkably few attempts to provide a conceptual foundation for such interconnectedness that brought together philosophy and science. In this acclaimed book, Mathews skilfully weaves together a thought-provoking metaphysics of the environment. She connects the ideas of the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza with twentieth-century systems theory and Einstein’s physics to argue that the atomistic cosmology inherited from Newton gave credence to a picture of the universe as fragmented, rather than as whole. Furthermore, it is such faulty thinking that presents human beings as similarly disconnected and individualistic, with the dire consequence that they regard nature as of purely instrumental rather than intrinsic value. She concludes by arguing for an ethics of ecological interdependence and for a basic egalitarianism among living species. A compelling and fascinating account of how we must change our thinking about the environment, The Ecological Self is a classic of ecological and environmental thinking. This Routledge Classics edition includes a substantial new Introduction by the author.

The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation

The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation PDF Author: Balázs M. Mezei
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192514660
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 716

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation offers a systemic approach to the notion of revelation in its various theoretical contexts. It provides in-depth coverage of the theoretical and historical fields in which the notion of revelation is discussed. It does not reflect the views of a certain school; under the horizon of contemporary discussions it offers the broadest understanding of the notion. Its main parts include biblical, theological, philosophical, historical, comparative, and scientific-cultural approaches. The contributors discuss the most important contemporary questions in theology, philosophy, and science. The Handbook offers a unique overview of the key problems of revelation, an overview missing from scholarly literature. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, the collection opens up further possibilities of scholarly work and spiritual vistas concerning the notion and the fact of divine revelation.

Land, Conflict, and Justice

Land, Conflict, and Justice PDF Author: Avery Kolers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521516773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
in territory and justice." --Book Jacket.