“Reductionism envisages a universe of things - and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the 'things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; 'things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.”
As an academic raised in the Anishinaabe culture, Geniusz is particularly well suited to critically examine the Western scientific lens through which Indigenous botanical knowledge is often presented in the Academy. Genuisz, who got her undergraduate degree here at UWM, is the former director of the American Indian Studies program at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and currently teaches Ojibwe language there.
The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.
And the child is right.”
— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’” –Barbara Alice Mann
A monumental compilation of over 150 years of data accessed through a user-friendly map interface throws light on 2,500 prehistoric sites around the world, opening up the discoveries for all to absorb and use to further explore the human journey.
Even before I started doing architecture, I always regarded categorization as an impediment to knowledge. Breaking knowledge down into different disciplines and artistic spheres is useful for the purposes of specialization, but the world is not compartmentalized in such a way. In order to understand society, and even art, one must break the frontier of the discipline, break the scheme of the category. Architecture was a discipline very cloistered in its own logic. I wanted to open it up and confront my projects with these alternative approaches.
Ricardo Bofill, Ricardo Bofill: Beyond Brutalism, interview by Thomas Jeppe, SSENSE
What remains today of Newton’s fundamental breakthrough? Modern life, our system of education founded on the requirements of punctuality, scholastic exercises on the charts of train schedules, geographic maps—all this inculcates in us, from childhood, a very Newtonian idea of space and time. This is why we have such difficulty perceiving the absurdity of questions such as"What lies beyond the limits of the universe?“ or "What existed before the creation of the world—or before the Big Bang?” We marvel at the apparent modernness of Saint Augustine, who was already addressing similar questions fifteen centuries ago: “Time did not exist before heavens and earth.” But few among us know or have really assimilated the Kantian critique of the concepts of space and time. Kant constructed this critique specifically to chart the boundaries between knowledge and faith, to free science from metaphysical presuppositions, to deliver geometry from the shadow of theology to which Newton had in fact ascribed it. For Kant, space and time are not things in themselves but "forms of intuition”—in other words, they constitute a canvas that allows us to decipher the existence of the world. According to Kant, things "in themselves” are neither in space nor in time. It is the human mind that, in the very act of perception, superimposes these categories, which are its own and without which perception would be impossible. This does not exactly mean that space and time are illusions or pure inventions of the human mind. These frameworks are imposed on us through empirical contact with nature and are not, therefore, “arbitrary.” They no more belong to things in themselves than they belong to the mind alone; rather, they exist because of the dialogue between the mind and things. They are, in the final analysis, an unavoidable product of motion itself by means of which the mind searches to apprehend—to understand—the outside world.
Rémy Lestienne, The Children of Time: Causality, Entropy, Becoming
“Genius Loci: (n) In contemporary usage, genius loci usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or a ‘spirit of place,’ rather than necessarily a guardian spirit.”
