Category: history

eco-liberation studies by Fragile Dignity
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Beyond Bigfoot’s Banality

All of our thoughts and lore of Bigfoot center on a basic question – but is it real?  This is the key concern here.  Not Sasquatch, but Reality.  The key concern is a test of science.  The questions we ask are more in line with forensics.  Hair. Footprints.  DNA.  Fossils.  Carbon dating.    As the 17th Century Enlightenment philosopher Sir Francis Bacon said the ambitions of science, “My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”  

film studies by Fragile Dignity
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History, A Pain: Unlikely Cases for Keeping Racist Statues

History is a pile of bones, and even if offensive, should perhaps provoke us and shake us from the amnestic waters of late capitalism, which by its own design wishes to maintain the façade of reason, order, and omnipotence making us all feel the helpless consumerist torpor. Shoppers don’t want to be bothered by statues of Puritans restraining the mohawked red menace. It’s a historical fissure breaking through the postmodern simulacrum revealing the truth of our world. Racist statues pierce the veil of McWorld, exposing its menace. One cannot understand the history of his nation without understanding that its history can be measured in red, brown and black bodies. Both in flesh and wood.

film studies by Fragile Dignity
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Prisoners of Time: John Hughes and the Cultural Unconscious

At the same time it leaves open the question that perhaps we ourselves are not the bastions of enlightenment that we think we are, but are much the product of our cultural time.  I suspect every generation believes that they are the ones who have it all figured out.  Until they start to be replaced by a new generation and start to long for the good old days.  But the acceptance of this mutability and ambiguity leaves open the consciousness  possible directions for the future striving for the wokeness of self-knowledge.  A future in which, inevitably, future generations will look back at us as prisoners of this time and see us for the barbarians we are.

film studies by Fragile Dignity
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The Prophesy of Tyler Durden in Five Acts

The Geist, the specter, of Tyler Durden, fueled by the restless spirit of the office park dystopia, is a force personifying much of the malcontents in this age of anger. It’s interesting to place Fight Club not as fiction, but as prophetic documentary evidence of a time and place, a metaphor of the historical present, a world trapped between McWorld and Jihad, between globalism and it’s blowback.

psychology by Fragile Dignity
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The Gospels of a Mickey Mouse Kachina Doll

Here I endeavor to explore the kachina cult, and how the influence of the West impacted Hopi Pueblo society. It begins as a simple story of a self-contained culture and its traditions, but soon winds through turns of critical theory and art history, arriving at unexpected places. I effort to explore ways and forms in which cultures have continued transformation in postmodern technoculture by using the Mickey Mouse kachina as a paradigm for cultural syncretism. It is a story which advances through narratives at first familiar, then stranger, and familiar again, arriving at an original move, and final speculation on the future of cultural theory.