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Releasing the imagination by Greene
Teaching for openings..
The alternative may be what Milan Kundera (1984) describes as an “unbearable lightness of being,” a feeling of living among chance happenings and fortuitous encounters, without clear possibilities.
Standards, common learning’s, and diversity.
Or they speculate about what would happen in their particular academic lives if they were to make the move of reaching out and were to extend their subject matters to include (and perhaps absorb) “the moving image” (“moving image,”1985) or the culture of rock. (p.171)
The third image I have in mind comes from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). It is the polarity of two kinds of life: a restless, uncommitted, decontextualized, “light” way of life and life under a weight. (p.175)
p.177 is the key….Kundera + Dewey..
Lightness and weight – value-free and dogma-heavy
Freedom is an achievement in the midst of life and with other human beings. People achieve whatever freedom they can achieve through increasingly conscious and mindful transaction with what surrounds and impinges, not simply by breaking out of context and acting in response to impulse or desire. And it seems clear that most people find out who they are only when they have developed some power to act and to choose in engagements with a determinate world. (p.178)
Art and imagination
P.124
Finding a threat in “the universal of technological communication” and in situations where “the medium is the message,” he calls for a return to serious individual resistance to messages: “To the anonymous divinity of Technological communication, our answer could be: ‘not they, but our will be done” (Kearney, 1988, p.382).
As I view it, such resistance can best be evoked when imagination is released; but, as we well know, the bombardment of images from the divinity of Technological Communication frequently has the effect of freezing people’s imaginative thinking. Instead of freeing audience members to take the initiative in reaching beyond their own actualities, in looking at things as if they could be otherwise, today’s media present audiences with predigested concepts and images in fixed frameworks.
P.156
It makes people uneasy because it appears to subvert authority; it eats away at what is conceived as objectively real. “If thought is so much out in the world as this,” Geertz asks, as the uneasy might ask, “ what is to guarantee its generality, its objectivity, its efficacy, or its truth?” (1983, p.153).
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
