From “Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the ‘Berlin School’”: http://cineaste.com/articles/the-berlin-school.htm

Film critic Rüdiger Suchsland coined the term “Berlin School” to refer to Petzold, Schanelec, and Arslan. These three filmmakers graduated from the DFFB in the early 1990s, when legendary filmmakers Farocki and Bitomsky were still teaching (my short history of the DFFB here). The “Berlin School” was “the first significant (collective) attempt at advancing the esthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the New German Cinema,” e.g. Fassbinder and Herzog. This “advance” was not well received. Famous German director Oskar Roehler has called Berlin School films “recalcitrant and stern,” “slow and dreary, featuring hardly and dialogue,” and where “nothing much happens.” The Berlin School is often accused of “navel gazing” and is generally boring.

However, the Berlin School is an “a-representational realism: a film style that cinematically embraces, seeks out, and non-judgmentally welcomes reality.” Marco Abel claims that in Berlin School films, “the extraordinary at the heart of everydayness emerges.” What does this mean? Why do these films want to be a-representational? The problem with representational realism is that nothing can be represented entirely; to try to represent “everydayness” in a naive way will inevitably miss the way each day exceeds “everydayness.” So I might say that the Berlin School films attempt to show how there is no everydayness hidden in each day. This allows us to understand why famous German director Doris Dörrie admitted, “I secretly hold against them [the Berlin School]” that they “hide behind form. I don’t like this: to hide oneself behind form.” This claim vindicates itself by marking itself as a secret even as it is being disclosed, and the function of the claim is to accuse the Berlin School directors of hiding themselves, of not representing themselves, just like they refuse to attempt to represent “everydayness” even as they present the day-by-day. And indeed the Berlin School does not disclose itself, because the Berlin School filmmakers claim that there is no fully representable, single self that constitutes the Berlin School; each filmmaker exceeds the naïve label.

From Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction:
From Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation:

While many people have taken Foucault’s genealogy of psychoanalysis to be a good reason for not giving much credit to psychoanalysis (including Foucault himself), a number of feminists have argued that Foucault's genealogy of psychoanalysis reveals its value. Elizabeth Grosz writes in Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, “feminist theory has undergone a dramatic turn-about in attitude towards psychoanalysis… marked by the publication of Juliet Mitchell’s defense of Freud in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974)” (Grosz 1991: 19). Feminists began to notice that the charge against Freud may really have pointed out the critical potential of psychoanalysis; if psychoanalysis ‘only’ understands a bourgeois, patriarchal subject, then “psychoanalysis is essential to the understanding of the ways in which patriarchal ideology is internalized and lived by men and women,” Mitchell claims (Grosz 1991: 20). For example psychoanalysis lets us see that the totalitarianism/anarchism model of the gendered subject is not an ahistorical truth of gender, but an imposed gender binary that is lived by subjects who are alienated by patriarchy’s law of ‘total control by men’ and ‘no control by women.’

What are the limits of using psychoanalysis as a historical lens? Or, which history is most appropriately read using psychoanalytic language? Because Freud’s revolution in psychology decentered humanity (in a similar way to Kant’s revolutionary notion of transcendental illusion), we say that psychoanalysis is limited to understanding the decentered subject, or a split subject. And insofar as feminists use psychoanalytic theory as a sociological tool to analyze ideology, we then say that psychoanalysis is particularly appropriate for modern society, which has become decentered in so many ways. Copjec therefore declares that “psychoanalysis is the mother tongue of our modernity and… the important issues of our time are scarcely articulable outside the concepts it has forged.” (Copjec 2004: 10). So while modernity (or the decentered subject) acts as a limit for psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis acts as a limit for a modern social justice agenda.

From History of Sexuality vol. 1:

Foucault tells us that the very idea of sexuality comes on the heels of a spread in the practice of confession, which is a significant reorganization of bodies. What was the initial organization of bodies? Foucault explains that ars erotica societies like Ancient Greece handed down sexual knowledges from adult to child, such as in pederasty. This is the ‘top-down’ organization of bodies that models the ‘truth’ of sex as ‘from the adult above.’ So in terms of the content of the truth of sex, there are as many sexual truths as there are adults who make up sexual styles and pass them on. Confession, on the other hand, reverses this whole process to produce a single sexual truth that is formed before it is discursively styled, confessed ‘from the child below.’

( Precursor to some Agamben posts, probably. )

From Burns’ “Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf - a melo Brechtian drama”:

Brecht intended to remove emotional investments (qua familiarity) from theatrical performances because he wanted to keep the audience in a critical state of mind about the things they are watching. The filmmaker Fassbinder, on the other hand, introduced emotions precisely as the object of critique, for he aimed to “give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analysing what he is feeling” (65). In order to make the audience reflect on a wide variety of feelings, Fassbinder drew from Hollywood melodramas while retaining a Brechtian element of alienation in the service of critique, “representing a politicization of Hollywood material” (58). Thus I argue that while Brecht gives us uncanny objects (the alienation of familiar objects) Fassbinder gives us uncanny subjects (the alienation of familiar feelings), which amounts to an alienation of representation itself.

From “A Short Organum for Theater” (1947) and Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” (1949):

Bertolt Brecht created a form of theater based in “dialectical materialism” that sought “to evolve an art fit for the times,” our “scientific age” (§45, §23). This “epic” form of theater intentionally alienates the audience from the performance in order “to free socially-conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today” (§43). That is to say, by including familiar things in the performance and alienating the audience from them (e.g. through exposing the backstage and production elements, not acting with full commitment), the audience can be made to think critically about things that usually go unexamined. Now since in this argument Brecht seems to be assuming that modern science ‘familiarizes’ things in such a way that we need to guard against this ‘modern science’ effect, I argue that Brecht actually has a common ground with Heidegger, who would later call the essence of modern technology the “Enframing [Gestell]” claim, or the categorizing-off, domestication, and exploitation of the world.

( Ethics of Modernity )

“The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become” (Heidegger, QCT).

From “Traffic in Democracy”:

“The body itself is not what it once was.” In order to avoid biologizing the body, think also of the body politic and the student body. In our modernity bodies became tools under capitalism, or the uninhibited drive to profit. The corporate influence on the government and the university is no secret. Because capitalism reduces bodies to their ahistorical economic substance, the commodification of bodies changes their relationship to the other bodies from which they’ve come. In particular the ahistorical approach to others, e.g. denying the (e.g. imperial) abuse of one social group by another social group in the past, erases the differences in power dynamics between those people, e.g. as seen in the belief that there is a single positive attribute that is both necessary and sufficient for humanity, e.g. reason.

( Even More Philosophy of Modernity! )

We see this especially in Kant, who called the body “reason” because it makes more sense to say that reason contains the principles that both make possible and limit experience; this terminology guards against biologizing and psychologizing principles of experience like causality. This character of reason is seen in Kant’s affirmation of things-in-themselves while denying that they could ever be known (“Refutation of Idealism”). Thus in Kant’s philosophical anthropology we see that all humans share reason, or the body, not as a positive attribute (as the ahistorical Plato thought when placing reason as one contingently functioning part of the psyche) but which all humans share as a negative attribute, i.e. the inability to experience with an unlimited, neutral view despite all tendencies to try. Against the Cartesian quantification or universalization of everything, Kant does not try to de-quantify the world but tries to re-qualify the world (quite literally in his “First Antinomy” on the cosmological idea of reason). So ultimately Kantian philosophy is hinged on the immutable concealment of nevertheless existing things-in-themselves (e.g. God, the free subject). This establishes that Kant is a modern, but not ahistorical figure with respect to the concealed, for he does not place fundamental contradictions between one reason and another, nor does he deny these contradictions, but Kant places them in reason’s conflict with itself.

In Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Fred Dretske sets out to provide a systemic, information-theoretic account of semantic content, concepts, and knowledge.

In this book, he raises the topic of 'absolute concepts'. These are concepts that are NOT vague concepts. He's drawing from Peter Unger here. Take "flat" for example. "Flat" means without bumps. We might say that a road or piece of land is flat. But looked at with the same granularity with which we would inspect a mirror for flatness, we would not say a road is flat. Similarly, a flat mirror may, at a higher level of granularity, have irregularities that we would say discount its flatness.

Unger would say that nothing is flat. He would extend a similar argument to the concept of "knowledge", ultimately embracing unpalatable skepticism.

Dretske has an interesting response to this. He agrees that "flat" and "knowledge" (and in some uses, "information-that") are absolute concepts like this. And he agrees with the granularity argument. But he disagrees that this leads to skepticism.

Think of an empty warehouse. It is truly an empty warehouse, he says. It's empty because there isn't anything in it. A skeptic might argue that there's dust or cobwebs in the empty warehouse, and that therefore the warehouse is not empty. Dretske, though, says that for the warehouse, dust and cobwebs do not count. They just aren't something we're acknowledging in the space of possibilities we are talking about, when we are talking about whether or not a warehouse is empty. Another way to put it is that when we communicate to each other that warehouses are empty, we aren't talking about the dust and cobwebs. We're talking about the lack of crates.

For knowledge, then, we may want to say whether or not somebody has justified belief of something. What is the threshold for justification? What is, say, enough information to be justified in believing that x is F? Dretske wants to say that this is an absolute concept. The threshold is 1. The predicate is, effectively, binary. And though this appears to be a violation of psychophysical reality, Drestke wants to say it just isn't. Rather, whatever, say, errors there may be in the sensory communication channel between distal stimulus and proximate stimulate and perceptual response, those differences don't count when we are talking about knowledge that x is F justified through perception.

Totally different context...I read this today:

When parents see their newborn baby; they see perfection. Any conceivable blemish is overlooked, for they are seeing through the eyes of love.

From “In the Name of Transparency: Gender, Terrorism, and Masonic Conspiracies in Italy”:

The modern, liberal drive to progress contains a counter-movement within itself - related to the duress and stress of this injunction - that reproduces the status quo (30). An immoderate drive to Enlighten sends one from the ‘darkness’ to the blindness of an excess of 'light' (29). We experience this in neoliberalism (or consumer capitalism or late modernity or postwar period) wherein spectacles of even liberation discourses (including some conspiracy theories) operate as a kind of (re)production of particular, gendered inter alia power structures. These power structures hail and interpellate (produce) distinct ‘selves’, social constructs like ‘the terrorist.’ Like witch hunts, spectacles of exposure “reified the very subject they claimed merely to expose” (22).

( More Philosophy of Modernity )

In the end the “nothing” that is done and exposed is not simply a spectacle of failure of conspiracy, but the nothing is the success of spectacle itself, since the concentration of attention on certain features to make a certain identity allows for the process of identification to go obscured, and allows the status quo to continue. After all, Silvio Berlusconi (himself a spectacle) became Italian Prime Minister despite already having been outed as a member of the Freemasons.

From “Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America”:

We should differentiate between two modes of conspiracy theorizing, which is important for understanding our modernity because the phenomena of conspiracy theories coincides with the Enlightenment. Conspiracy theorizing and reason are two sides of the same “modern” coin. Hence modernity itself is characterized by anxiety, where anxiety is a feeling structured by a certain manifest conflict, i.e. in a subject whose drive (e.g. to know, to live, to enjoy) encounters its impasse (e.g. the unknowable, death). Conspiracy theories are “Enlightenment with a vengeance” and so may show us, negatively, the movements of modernity (282).

( Philosophy of Modernity )

Feel free to contribute more examples or counter-examples of this model of modernity wherein anxiety about some manifest conflict e.g. capitalism is displaced ‘externally’ into some figure e.g. a ‘demon’ and then, in a crisis of agency, displaced ‘internally’ into an image of the ‘self’.

The drive to be free itself bears the marks of being determined.

How many of you here are baptized Christians? What do you think of the following philosophical argument/situation? Forgive my bad grammar, I'm in a lot of stress! Alright! The most common sort of mistake people make is a category mistake. Jesus forgives sins, sins are errors committed not on purpose, the other sort of errors, errors committed on purpose are mistakes and other errors, when people try to pass off mistakes as sins through willful ignorance, that is the fundamental reason why there is a hell and a purgatory, any concerns with this sort of christian reasoning?
Thus, Jesus does not, and will not forgive mistakes, for those people go to Hell and purgatory, however, since many churches teach willful ignorance to create people that are very ignorant whose mistakes are actually sins, they go to purgatory and the preachers go to Hell?