What are you reading right now?

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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Oct 09, 2020 6:53 pm

Been casually re-reading random parts of Rigorous Intuition (the book) lately and it has been honestly blowing my mind. I forget just how much I owe to the insights expressed in those blog posts... Really worth another look.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby PufPuf93 » Sat Oct 10, 2020 7:01 pm

cptmarginal » Fri Oct 09, 2020 3:53 pm wrote:Been casually re-reading random parts of Rigorous Intuition (the book) lately and it has been honestly blowing my mind. I forget just how much I owe to the insights expressed in those blog posts... Really worth another look.


Just inspired me to order Jeff Well's Rigorous Intuition. :coolshades
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Oct 10, 2020 7:35 pm

Victor Steffensen - Fire Country.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Tue Mar 16, 2021 5:35 pm

Python: A Study of Delphic Myth. Found the first half of the book here
https://cupdf.com/document/fontenrose-python-a-study-of-delphic-myth.html

Tracing the myth of "combat with the dragon" through Greece, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India. Doesn't get into pre-Islamic Iran and points northeast, but for the areas of space and time that it covers, it is very comprehensive, exhaustive research.

For studies of myth, religion and magic I gravitate towards this kind of dry historical research. These historians make it very clear when they are opinionating, they don't get all mystical preachy. E.A.Waite's Hidden Church of the Holy Graal gives this treatment to the history of grail literature. Frances Yates's work does a good study of renaissance magic this way. For Jewish mysticism, Gershom Sholem is the way to go.

The book costs a hundred bucks. I can't justify a hundred dollars for a book. Thirty to fifty is my limit, and that only if it's something I need really bad. I think this one is on scribd, but I've used up my free trial, so I can't say for sure. Could be this same half a book I just posted a link to.

For some reason, in the lines of research I'm on the books are all super expensive, and the academic papers are all behind paywalls. And that's just the stuff I can find. Just as often I follow up on a footnote, and the book is out of print, or never been translated into English. Old manuscripts in personal collections. So yes, there is absolutely an end of the Internet. I spend like half my time out on the edge of it, it seems.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Mar 16, 2021 7:20 pm

Wish had a way to make my library available to you dada.

Have lots of magic and mysticism. Have over 1000 volumes in that area, hundreds are collectables. IIRC the last purchase was Chumley's Satyr's Sermon circa 2010. Assembled and read most of these books between 1990 and 2010. Like to read bios of magicians. Don't read that much any more as my eyesight and brain and ability to concentrate has diminished. Spend too much time on internet.

Some favorite bios of this sort:

Yates on Bruno
Scholem on Sabbatai Sevi
Deveney on Paschal Beverly Randolph
Starr's the Unknown God on WT Smith and the early days of the California Thelemites
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby LolaB » Tue Mar 16, 2021 8:44 pm

Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
Large Print, from the LA county library
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby DrEvil » Wed Mar 17, 2021 8:14 am

Currently reading 'The Star Fraction' by Ken MacLeod. Socialist hard scifi goodness.

Just finished 'The Once and Future Witches' by Alix E. Harrow, about three sisters who join the Suffragettes and try to bring back witchcraft. Like her previous novel 'The Ten Thousand Doors of January' it was fantastic.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Mar 18, 2021 9:42 am

cptmarginal » Fri Oct 09, 2020 5:53 pm wrote:Been casually re-reading random parts of Rigorous Intuition (the book) lately and it has been honestly blowing my mind. I forget just how much I owe to the insights expressed in those blog posts... Really worth another look.


Indeed, I would say I never stopped reading it. Probably given away two dozen copies at this point.

Via: http://www.brainsturbator.com/posts/446 ... in-history

2020 Reading List: Old Man on a Mountain

I have been more cautious than usual this year. As I contemplate the time I have left here, I've come to accept that for many subjects I will only read one or two books on the matter ... and for most subjects, I shall read none at all.

This is something of a new policy for me. When it comes to subjects like BCCI, for instance, I have acquired and devoured every extant hardcover in print. I regret nothing: there is a great deal to be learned from such cross-referencing about the structural limitations of narrative history and the motivations of those who write it. Such ambition requires the energy and hubris of youth, or the autist monomania of the specialist scholar, and in recent years my interests have continued to expand even as my available free time contracts.

As with last year's list, all of these titles are islands upon an ocean of constant reading around small-scale agriculture, ecosystem regeneration and animal husbandry. (I will mention a few standouts at the end, but there will be a separate list coming along re-capping my past few years of study in those fields.) This, though, is a broader survey: the best of the best from a long year spent reading on the porch.

Please forgive me for skipping the cute pictures this time around: as Heraclitus once observed, "fuck it."

The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry. This was a re-read for me, I first tore through Berry's corpus when I was still a teenager. Considering I've been quoting the man my entire adult life, I still managed to under-estimate what an influence he'd been on me. While I've gone through many of his major works this year, The Unsettling of America is surely the finest. Our adult citizens should be forced to read this prior to becoming eligible to vote.

National Security and Dual Government, Michael J. Glennon. I am an avowed evangelist of this short, necessary book. Most Americans are angry and confused by the failures and shortcomings of their government, despite being well-educated on how it should work. Most informed voters are merely conversant in current events, interpreting events in Washington DC through the lens of personalities in conflict, rather than systems in motion. Glennon's essay is a cure for most of the rhetorical questions that plague conversations about politics, and an undeniably objective brief on the reality of our unelected, untouchable permanent establishment.

Year of the Rat, Timperlake & Triplett. A timely and resonant slice of history, this is a sober & thorough indictment of Clinton administration corruption, specifically their proliferating debts to the Chinese Communist Party. The extent of the access they granted in exchange for that money is nothing short of treason, but of course, Washington DC isn't the sort of place where people face consequences for their actions. 2020 was, once again, the Year of the Rat, and saw yet another compromised Democrat shuffle into the Oval Office. All that has really changed is the extent of China's control: they essentially own both parties now, and many multinational corporations besides. The decade to come will be a reckoning.

Open to Suggestion, Robert Temple. This is often hard to find, and for good reason. There is a prolific body of work on the drugs component of MKULTRA, and that's very much by design. The Old Boys at Langley have always been able to write their own history and they never run out of eager authors willing to help them do that, led along by a carefully managed portfolio of bread crumbs, coming to conclusions that were worked out for them years before. What the bumbling incompetence of the acid narrative obscures is the fact that hypnosis was the core component of the mind control program, and the most effective. Temple pulls very few punches here. I also re-read Heller's Monsters and Magical Sticks this summer, a superb introduction to the concepts underlying therapeutic hypnosis work.

The Invisible Pyramid, Loren Eiseley. This is a wonderfully strange autobiography rendered as a mythopoetic allegory, the life journey of a scientist who is keenly aware of how fragile the Earth is. Eiseley is even more aware of how miraculous the human race is, for all the blood and cruelty, our accomplishments are without parallel and our visions shall always exceed our grasp. Framed around a fantastic series of woodcuts, this is a unique delight.

A Century of War, William Engdahl. Many of the books I recommend are unambiguous endorsements, but anyone should approach Engdahl with some skepticism. He is perhaps the foremost graduate of Lyndon Larouche's EIR research shop, his works are abundantly footnoted contrarian broadsides, but more than that, this entire book hinges upon his assertion that he found a secret Bilderberg document -- an absolutely explosive disclosure, no less -- in a used bookshop. Still, it's an engaging, fast-paced read, drawn from many obscure and essential histories, that outlines the intersection between energy, money and war. It covers so much, and differs so completely from the limited hangout horseshit of respectable academics & pundits, that it is guaranteed to fascinate. The perfect gateway drug to a contentious and critical area.

The Money Lenders, Anthony Sampson. I should have read this years ago. Sampson's The Sovereign State of ITT was a valuable revelation to me in my twenties, wasting time with basic bitch popular polemics, and worse still, mere blogs. The gap between the average bestseller and work like Sampson's is so vast there is no comparison. Earlier this year, I read The Seven Sisters, his history of the geopolitics of oil and the corporations that shaped it, and it's far superior to Yergin's The Prize. (Also an excellent companion piece to Engdahl's A Century of War.) Yet The Money Lenders is perhaps Sampson's best work. Those familiar with the subject will find surprises on every page, and those looking for an honest, informed introduction could do no better with a single purchase.

Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Michel Herman. One of those rare tomes that clearly lays out the subject matter and does it great justice. Much like Gilpin's The Politicial Economy of International Relations, this an equally demanding and rewarding read. Rooted squarely in Herman's extensive experience with both American and British intelligence, this is dry, technical and lucid stuff, focused throughout on the inherent limitations of the profession. Fittingly, my copy is a mint condition library discard from Quantico. It was only checked out twice.

The Vice of Kings, Jasun Horsley. Horsely is a gifted author and a divisive character; both attributes I appreciate. This is his most personal book by far, and a sharp divergence from his usual media deconstruction. It is a harrowing read, a reckoning with bleak family secrets, by turns meticulously researched and nakedly speculative. Those of you who made it through Michael Salter's Organized Sexual Abuse and Ross Cheit's The Witch Hunt Narrative will find this a valuable, thought-provoking contribution to a sparsely populated but urgently important literature.

Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli. Similar to de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, I can only resent how great this was, after decades of being told to read it by a cast of thousands. Discourses is far, far superior to Machiavelli's best-known work, but such is the fate of genius, I suppose: Jonathan Swift is remembered today only as an eloquent advocate for cannibalism. The common thread here is the bankruptcy of the modern McDonalds academy, full of educated men and women who lack wisdom and have built a canon that reflects their clever vanity. It is baffling to me that Plato's rambling and wooden The Republic is taught at all, but that it gets taught instead of Discourses on Livy is simply a sin. This is a timeless exploration of the tradeoffs and costs of governance, and how to limn the lessons of history.

Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook, David Werner. This came up during a discussion of "Ark Books," the titles that you'd take to either save civilization or just spend five years in a cabin. I cannot recall who nominated it to me but I am grateful for the advice. It's not just that the material here is important, or useful -- obviously it is both, if you place much value on being alive. What makes Werner's tome so remarkable is how engrossing and engaging it all is, a mix of low-tech ingenuity and cultural anthropology.

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners, Suzanne Ashworth. This wasn't new to me, I just happened to buy my ... fifth? sixth? ... copy over the summer, so I've been spending a lot of time with it. Although the writing here is lean and lovely, this is a far more straightforward manual than the Werner book I just ordered you to buy. It's equally essential, though, especially in 2021, with demand for seeds at an all-time high and supplies running out in the middle of the winter. Most of the discussions about 'sustainability' are just consumer indulgences and white guilt affluence, only resilience is actually sustainable.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Thu Mar 18, 2021 11:17 am

"Wish had a way to make my library available to you dada."

Thanks, PufPuf. Sounds like a great collection.

I have a copy of the corpus hermeticum with an introduction by Randolf. He's got a funny way about him, kind of like reading the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap.

Not sure everyone gets that reference. But that's what came to mind. My favorite Yates book so far, I haven't read all of hers yet, is Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare's Last Plays. There are of course endless tons of Shakespeare studies, but her research on the subject is still fresh and original.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby thrulookingglass » Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:01 pm

Does anyone have a copy of or have read Daniel Hopsicker's Bushfellas : When the Mob Went Republican, All Hell Broke Loose ? Its not easy to come by :shrug: and rather expensive when you do find an available copy. Just wondering if its worth all the $.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Tue Mar 23, 2021 8:49 pm

I say if you're wondering if a book is worth it, it probably isn't, don't buy it. When a book is worth it, you know it, and buy it immediately. That's my rule of thumb, to keep myself from spending all my money on books.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:42 pm

Multimodal Approaches to Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting
https://1lib.us/book/11316307/44c521

Translation between languages, also between texts and images. Each chapter begins by building the framework for structural analysis that the study will use. I find them to to be good thought-exercises. The topics are fun, too. Minutia, food for the flaneur. Table of contents:

1 Intersemiotic shifts in the translation of Chinese costume drama subtitles: a multimodal analysis approach

2 A multimodal study of paratexts in bilingual picturebooks on Mulan

3 Intersemiotic translation of rhetorical fgures: a case study
of the multimodal translation of The Art of War

4 Reshaping the heroic image of Monkey King via multimodality: a hero is back

5 “Dis”covering Hamlet in China: a case analysis of book covers of the Chinese Hamlet

6 Belt and Road Initiatives in texts and images: a critical perspective on intersemiotic translation of metaphors

7 A corpus-assisted multimodal approach to tourism promotional materials of Macao: a case study of three signature events

8 Effects of non-verbal paralanguage capturing on meaning transfer in consecutive interpreting

Here's the beginning of the seventh study. I'm reading it through my personal context as an employee of the mystical mountain tourism board.

"Corpus analysis, which refers to a methodology of identifying linguistic patterns of variation automatically generated by using interactive computer programs in a collection of texts of the target language variety, has been a fruitful research method in translation studies (see Baker 1993, 2000; Laviosa 1996, 2002; Tymoc- zko 1998). This study is a corpus-assisted study of offcial promotional materials of Macao tourism.

In Latin, corpus means “body.” A corpus-assisted investigation of language could be understood as studying the body of language which refers to “the quantity and representativeness of data being of paramount importance in data collection” (Tuominen, Hurtado, and Ketola 2018). However, the approach focusing only on verbal resources may result in discounting codes from other semiotic resources in the meaning-making process (Rocío Baños 2013, 488). In this case, acknowledging the need for the analysis to consider both linguistic elements and other non-verbal aids, the study of “the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event,” termed multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 20), was hence developed.

After years of development, challenges remain in how to integrate multimodality into corpus investigations. A few research attempts to solve this problem by building up multimodal corpora and resources, such as Baldry and O’Halloran’s (2010) MCA Web Browser, Adolphs and Carter’s (2013) Nottingham Multi-Modal Corpus and Jimenez Hurtado and Soler Gallego’s (2013) multimodal annotation software Taggetti. Nevertheless, these multimodal resources are often unachievable due to their complex design and construction, which requires constant support from specialist technical expertise (Baños, Bruti, and Zanotti 2013).

Since multimodal corpora are not yet widespread, there are other ways of integrating multimodal analysis into corpus-linguistic research. For example, Salway and Graham (2003) and Salway (2007) used information presented in scripts, transcripts or audio descriptions for insights into the representation of gaze directions, locations, actions and so on.

Multimodality is considered a resource and meanwhile a challenge for translation scholars (O’Sullivan 2013). When incorporating multimodal analysis into translation studies, the notion is embraced by some scholars such as Pérez-González (2007), Borodo (2015) and Ketola (2018) in their researches. However, the interplay between verbal and non-verbal resources in translations still seem to be the area to awaiting exploration (Yu and Song 2016). Other scholars hesitate for the reasons that “multimodality oriented corpus- based translation research still has some open questions related to the alignment of modes, the segmentation of units of analysis and the need for a tagging system that takes account of the different modes” (Tuominen et al. 2018).

Recognizing the high threshold of the multimodal corpora and with reference to the existing alternative approaches to multimodal translated discourse studies, the present study hence attempts to present an applicable framework, which has the potential to make up for the aforementioned defciencies under the limitation of accessing multimodal corpora.

First, to ensure the alignment of modes, we draw on the same theoretical basis across different modes, that is, systematic functional grammar (SFG; Halliday 1985, 1994, 2000). Specifc steps include an initial corpus-assisted analysis of the verbal resources to offer insights into a subsequent multimodal analysis towards the visual resources and to uncover how the information of verbal resources is translated to different modes for creating meanings and to explore the interplay between modes. Secondly, to systemize the tagging system, types of processes from the SFG (based on Halliday 1985, 1994, 2000) are used in the analysis of the verbal mode, and the systemic transcriptions and analysis towards videos are based on Baldry and Thibault’s (2005) methodological tools and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996/2006) visual grammar, evolved from SFG.

With this chapter, we intend to elucidate our ideas with a case study to probe the representations of Macao’s tourism image created by the Macao SAR government with the aforementioned corpus-assisted multimodal approach. The current study is expected to answer the following questions: (1) What are the functions of linguistic and visual confgurations in creating meanings in the selected tourism promotional narratives? (2) How is the interplay between the verbal and visual modes carried out? (3) How do the verbal and non-verbal realizations contribute to the tourism image of Macao?"
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby PufPuf93 » Wed Mar 24, 2021 1:14 am

dada » Thu Mar 18, 2021 8:17 am wrote:"Wish had a way to make my library available to you dada."

Thanks, PufPuf. Sounds like a great collection.

I have a copy of the corpus hermeticum with an introduction by Randolf. He's got a funny way about him, kind of like reading the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap.

Not sure everyone gets that reference. But that's what came to mind. My favorite Yates book so far, I haven't read all of hers yet, is Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare's Last Plays. There are of course endless tons of Shakespeare studies, but her research on the subject is still fresh and original.


Do you mean word salad?

BPR went through several major changes and then suicided. He was a free black man, an abolitionist, and, for a time, a sex magician. Have the PBR book Eulis (1874) and scholarly treatment of The Brotherhood off Luxor (birthed from Brotherhood of Eulis) by Deveney and others and the Deveney BPR bio. Eulis was the seed. The Deveney books are scholarly in tone. Spent several years on an email list of serious academics (specifically not magicians, think anthropologists) and learned of PBR and the Deveney books.

I brushed my teeth with Dr. Bronner's back in late 60s.

Never have even considered being a practicing magician but met an OTO member socially in Berkeley back in the 70 and have been at OTO events in Berkeley (Rockridge temple), Santa Cruz (gnostic mass with RAW in wheel chair and Milo Lon DuQuette as Priest), and a Rites of Mercury performed by Portland OTO. Was a the book collector and casual scholar of the weirdness, more another topic to mine for paper. Skimmed much. My interest was in the history and personalities not working the metaphysics.

Had a few magic books and many anthropology books at the onset of the internet. One day in 1994 was skimming alt.magick on usenet and someone offered 60+ books for sale priced individually, about $1200 in total. While others argued about whether alt.magick should be used in a commercial sense, I offered $600 for the lot in an email and had a mega serious magic library.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Wed Mar 24, 2021 5:54 pm

"Do you mean word salad?"

More of an unbridled enthusiasm and excitement constantly bubbling up from beneath the words. Maybe a bit of the cadence of a baptist minister. Reading him is kind of like watching a musical, the dialogue might seamlessly turn into the lyrics of the next number, at any moment he might burst into song.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: What are you reading right now?

Postby dada » Sun Mar 28, 2021 12:55 pm

A section of "Life Against Nature: The Goldberg Circle and the Search for a Non- Catastrophic Politics"

https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_Life_Against_Nature.pdf

Hardly any of Erich Unger's work has been translated into English. It's too bad.

"[T]heir theories of the sublation of the metabolic relation to nature had little in common with, for instance, Kammerer and Goldscheid’s socialist Lamarckism which sought to usevaccines and similar technologies to defend the proletariat’s biological Meschenökonomie. For them, socialism had to be a biological technology used to free the working class from the barbarism that capitalism entailed for the life of the exploited. This was visible through war but also, Kammerer and Goldscheid argued more controversially, through the supposed low quality of life produced by an uncontrolled heredity.

In contrast, the work of the Goldberg circle did not move towards such eugenic fantasies, and neither did it entail the choice between socialism and barbarism with its implicit support for the rise of civilisation. Instead, in the last book published in the series edited by David Verlag in 1927, Caspary defended the need to locate the commonalities between socialism and capitalism in order to fnd a solution to the problem of capital somewhere else than in the progress of history.

In this book Die Maschinenutopie: das Übereinstimmungs- moment der bürgerlichen und sozialistischen Ökonomie [The Machine Utopia: The Point of Reconciliation between Bourgeois and Socialist Economies], Caspary argued that a proper reading of Marx had to come to the following conclusion: “without the machine the proletarian cannot live at all, and with it he can only live like a proletarian”. Socialism and capitalism are simply two sides of the same process of industrialisation with all it entails: wars, proletarianisation, and imperialism dueto itsneedto develop and reproduce its machine-based civilisation. It is this world that has to be abandoned if humanity is to be able to live as something other than a species diferentiated in classes, nations, and states.

In the same drastic manner, Camatte and Giorgio Cesarano later would argue, humanity stands before the choice between the withdrawal from the course of civilisation and the destruction of the species. At least in this sense, the work of the Goldberg circle pointed to a war cry later heard in the 1950’s and which in a sense mediated the Abrahamic primitivism of Goldberg’s group during the Weimar period and the hedonistic vitalisms of France 1968 and Italy 1977: “Onward barbarians!”79 But, it is important to note, if this cry was directed to the “rough, pagan race” of the working class, Goldberg and his friends thought that it was necessary to take a diferent route.

They did not heed the political romanticism of leftist circles who have been neither particularly efective in combating capitalism nor correct in their prophecies of its coming end. From the perspective of Goldberg, Unger, and Caspary these currents are stuck with the problem of predicting what cannot be predicted, and the feeble at- tempts of trying to control what cannot be controlled. Humanity has lapsed into the course of civilisation and every way out has been defeated.

Yet perhaps we can read the Goldberg circle as proposing that in such a situation their “transcendental research of reality”, that is the research of the general anthropological and not only economical characteristics of a society, could help those who seek to transform the scarcity of life into a material abundance in order to fnd “the building blocks for a new humanity”.80 A metaphysical investigation of the transcendental —  that is, general —conditions of human existence could help defne what Caspary described as “the given-ness character of society” [der Gegebenheits- charackter der Gesellschaft] in his rejection of both socialism and capitalism.81 His work indicated the need for a philosophical explanation of the structures that constitute the specifc metaphysical and anthropological form of a society. The machine is one such structure, which not only shapes capitalism but life and the human imagination itself. By examining the machine as part of constructing “the given” of capital, Caspary also hinted that a reconfguration of the machine world of capital would transform human life. Let us therefore see how for Goldberg, anthropology was not only a search for what humanity is today, but also how diferent segments of our species can separate themselves from the anthropological machine of capital."
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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