PODCAST · society
Dilettantery
by Sean Zabashi
reading books and talking about them //a podcast about exploration, not conclusion
Episodes
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3.12 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 3: Learning to See Nggwalndu and Paintings with the Abelam of Papua New Guinea
“The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for anything...
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3.11 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 2: Ludwik Fleck, Thought Styles and Thought Collectives
“Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.” -Protagoras, fragment 80 (the Homo Mensura fragment) “Through logos humanity truly is the measure of everything. Only that which can be experienced as something is, and…
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3.10 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 1: Protagoras vs Plato, Episteme vs Doxa
"Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. what we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we...
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3.9 David Lewis-Williams Part 3: A Temporary Death or A Foreign Life?
“Sometimes I have entered this world of darkness alone, or remained behind alone to finish taking notes or measurements. It is hard to admit, but such occasions are always accompanied by flashes of indefinable apprehension. The comfort you may find in the ray of light from the headlamp is…
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3.8 David Lewis-Williams Part 2: North American Shamanic Rock Art and Other Ways to Conclude Homo Sapiens is Homo Aestheticus
(episode 3.7 is part 1) “People did not ‘invent’ two-dimensional images; nor did they discover them in natural marks. On the contrary, their world was already invested with two-dimensional images...The first two-dimensional images were thus not two dimensional representations of three-dimensional...
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3.7 How 19th Century Shamans Gave the 21st Century a New Theory of Rock Art (With the Help of 20th Century Science)
"The /Xam San spoke of the rain as an animal. A rain-bull the thunderstorm that roared and destroyed the people’s huts; a raincow the gentle, soaking rain; columns of rain falling beneath a thunderstorm were called the ‘rain’s legs’—the rain was said to walk across the land." (discussed at 59:36:...
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3.6 Two Beginnings: A Standard History of Modern Cave Wall Art Studies
"Deep in the timecrevasse, in the honeycomb-ice, waits a breathcrystal, your unalterable testimony." -Paul Celan “When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish—it seems like a message, we can feel a...
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4.1 To Think, We Must Split up the World: A History of 20th Century Theories of Categorization
"Some of our most common and comforting groups no longer exist if classifications must be based on cladograms [evolutionary branching diagrams] .... I regret to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish.” -“What, If Anything, is a Zebra?” by Stephen Jay Gould, 1983 "To change the…
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3.5 Deleuze and Guattari and Cave Art Part 2: Beyond Abstraction and Representation There Is a Cave, I’ll Meet You There
https://twitter.com/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641 [The Northern Line or the Gothic Line] “is a line that passes between things and, in the process, imbues the figures of people, animals, plants, etc. with a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its movement gives birth to a dynamic and...
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3.4 Deleuze and Guattari and Cave Art Part 1: Primeval Magma of Life and "Another history which is still ours [that operates like] fires answering one another in the night."
How My Poetry Comes To Me by Gary Snyder, 1992 "It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light" Warning: This episode is me trying to figure out complicated philosophy. If that's not your…
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3.3 The Origin of Art or Homo Aestheticus? Part 2: A Japanese Mirror, The Aesthetic Mode of Consciousness, Homo faber, and Ochre
"Amédée Ozenfant wrote of the art in the Les Eyzies caves, 'Ah, those hands! Those silhouettes of hands, spread out and stencilled on an ochre ground! Go and see them. I promise you the most intense emotion you have ever experienced.' He credited the Paleolithic artists with inspiring modern art,...
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3.2 The Origin of Art or Homo Aestheticus? Part 1: Pareidolia, Hunter-Gatherer Mimicry, and the Assumptions Hiding in the Word "Art"
“The modern system of art is not an essence or fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old. It was proceeded by a broader, more utilitarian system of art that lasted over two thousand years, and it is likely to be...
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2.3 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 3: Kant and Scientific Personae, Structural Objectivity and Trained Judgement
"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" -William James “Ways of scientific seeing are where body and mind, pedagogy and research, knower and known intersect…once internalized by a scientific...
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3.1 Prehistoric Animation and Proto-Cinema, The Archaeology of Light and Darkness, and the Thirty-Thousand-Year-Old Holy Movie Theatre
Chapter One: Wachtel and Superposition 0:00:00 Chapter Two: Azéma and Thaumatropes 0:22:13 Chapter Three: Gatton and Camera Obscura 0:43:48 Chapter Four: Archaeo-optics 2:16:14 Epilogue: Chauvet Cave 3:19:19 "…the shadows of man and beast flickered huge like ancestral ghosts, which since the days...
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2.2 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 2: Arthur Worthington's Tragedy, Photography, and Mechanical Objectivity
“…the atlas maker’s plight: nature is full of diversity, but science cannot be.” -Daston and Galison “…a race of eunuchs…neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but always and only neuters or, to speak more cultivatedly, the eternally objective.” -Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations…
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2.1 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 1: Intro/Contextalization and Truth to Nature
Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know -John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1819 “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” -Thomas Huxley, 1870 "My work has always tried to unite the true with the…
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1.31 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 5: "Retribalization" and The Art of the Electronic Age
“We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space…The medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age.” -Jean Baudrillard “The natural world is a spiritual house, where the pillars, that are...
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1.30 Formal Cause Part 2: Chairs, Memes, Graham Harman, and Emergence
“Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns” -Marshall McLuhan “There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the parts creating the whole), and...
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1.29 Formal Cause Part 1: Technological Determinism, Aristotle, Environments and Atmospheres, The Syrian Civil War, and T.S. Eliot
“Without an understanding of formal causality, there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have all the character of formal...
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1.28 The Tetrad, Cliches, Archetypes, and...the Fifth Law of Media?
"Human bodies are words, myriads of words..." -Walt Whitman, Song of the Rolling Earth, 1856 "What Western philosophers, right, left, and center, have continued to ignore is that matching the old excludes making the new. Concepts always follow percepts. In fact they are a kind of ossification of...
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1.27 Mcluhan's Later Life, Three of the Four Laws of Media, and Photographs and Motion Pictures
"The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and...
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1.26 The Electronic Age Part 2: A Brief History of Electronic Technologies and Mcluhan's Thoughts
“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness...we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.” -Marshall Mcluhan "This is a marvel…
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1.25 The Electronic Age Part 1: A Brief History of Electricity and Mcluhan's Thoughts
"Then there is electricity! — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence...Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the…
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1.24 Windows and the Body Part 2: The Anatomical, Abandoned Body and its Shadows
"Man is himself, is man, only at the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here begin the machines. It is then you lose yourself in an inexplicable substance, something alien to everything you know, and which is nonetheless the essential." -Paul Valéry, Notebook B “‘The monsters we create by way of an...
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1.23 Windows and the Body Part 1: Homo Punto di Fuga to Homo Astronauticus
“They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last...
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1.22 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 4: The Development of Linear Perspective, Medieval Simultaneity, and the Zulus
"May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep." -William Blake "When a man has seen a [linear perspective] picture for the first time, his book education has begun." -Robert Laws (1851–1934) "My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed…
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1.21 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 3: An Unsystematic, Anecdotal Anthropology of Linear Perspective
"The Waorani [people]...were not peacefully contacted until 1958, though their homeland is scarcely 150 kms from Quito, the national capital of Ecuador and a city settled for well over 400 years. In 1957, five missionaries attempted to contact the Waorani and made a critical mistake. They dropped...
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1.20 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 2: A Return to Ancient Mesopotamia
"The evolution from evocation to narrative in seal and pottery decoration denotes different cognitive skills—preliterate topsy-turvy glyptic compositions and repetitious pottery paintings were apprehended globally, but literate linear compositions were 'read’ analytically. Art, a unique mirror of...
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1.19 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 1: Caveman Proto-Movies, Aivilik Carvers, and Spaces
“From paleolithic times to the present, all painters have been challenged by a fundamental problem: how to express the four dimensions of experience on a two-dimensional surface.” -Edward Wachtel "According to Andrea Stone: In Maya thought caves were a conduit into the bowels of the earth, a...
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1.18 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 4: Printing and Science (Mostly Astronomy)
“One wrong word may now kill thousands of men”. -Rabelais “If science helped give birth to the printed book, it was clearly the printed book that sent science from its medieval habits straight into the boiling scientific revolution.” -Derek J. de Solla Price, 1967 “By seeming paradox, their most...
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1.17 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 3: Christianity, the Reformation, and the Bible
"Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic…
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1.16 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 2: Stereotypes and Clichés, Recovery and Discovery, Viewing the Past From a Fixed Distance, and Much More
“Medieval scholars did not see the classical past from a fixed distance as we do now. They did not regard it as a container of objects to be placed in glass cases and investigated by specialists in diverse scholarly fields.” -Elizabeth Eisenstein "Given drifting texts, migrating manuscripts,...
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1.15 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 1: The Printer's Workshop
"[Printing] is the most beautiful gift from heaven. It soon will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!” -Louis-Sebástien...
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1.14 Mcluhan on the Revolutionary Effects of Print
"Books are carefully folded forests" -Saul Williams “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life, In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios,...
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1.13 Printing Technologies in Asia and Europe
“What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . . .” -Mark Twain, 1900 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3ruco/113_printing_technologies_in_asia_and_europe/?
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1.12 The Manuscript Age Part 2: Renascences, Miscellaneousness, and Audiences as Fictions
Sorry for the delay, I had to relearn Garageband because it "updated." Also, this is a bit of a meat and potatoes episode, I promise things will get more interesting following this one. Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n0c12r/112_the_manuscript_age_part_2_renascences/?
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1.11 The Manuscript Age Part 1: Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Audile-Tactility of Pre-Print Europe
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” -Cicero (probably apocryphal) “The words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear.” -James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, paraphrased by Mcluhan Sources:...
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1.10 Jack Goody Part 3: The Vai, Scribner and Cole, The Mau Mau Uprising, and a Story
"The global village was modeled on colonial strategies intended to transform the semiotic, economic, and spatial fabric of the decolonizing world in such a way as to safeguard British economic and political interests in the aftermath of independence. Following the example of British strategy in...
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1.9 Jack Goody Part 2: The Gonja Kingdom and The LoDagaa
"He was an old man who had seen life. In his village he had prepared himself to live a full life. But the change came. It was not a sudden change. A white man with a book in his hand. Every evening this white man with the book had sat at the edge of the village and played with the children."…
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1.8 Jack Goody Part 1: Nuance and China
Continuing our divergence away from Mcluhan, I introduce the work of Jack Goody, the anthropologist, and look over his and some other people's criticisms of what's called the Alphabet Effect or the Alphabetic Literacy Theory. Sources and discussion:...
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1.7 Ong and Orality
"The strongest memory is weaker than the lightest ink." -Chinese proverb, (via Louis Lavelle, La Parole et I’ecriture, Paris, 1947) "...the Hebrew term 'dabar' means ‘word’ and ‘event’." -Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) "...when we speak...we also always express a mood. There are no words...
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1.6 The Greek Alphabet Part Two: Mcluhan's Thoughts and the Power and Magic of Words
“I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an...
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1.5 The Greek Alphabet Part One: Development
"The nature then of the dragon and of serpents Tauthus himself regarded as divine, and so again after him did the Phoenicians and Egyptians: for this animal was declared by him to be of all reptiles most full of breath, and fiery. In consequence of which it also exerts an unsurpassable swiftness…
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1.4 Other Origins of Writing and Other Scripts
“When signs are written with care they attest to an interest in proclamation and durability; when they are cursive they show that a society was familiar with writing. Then they are laid out without separations the remind us that our modern page layouts are recent acquisitions. When they are…
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1.3 The Origin of Writing and James Joyce
"Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba pattes some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay." — Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (~1800 BC) “For writing is a visual...
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1.2 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part Three
The final episode introducing Marshall Mcluhan's thought. “My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them ‘theories’ is to miss my satirical intent altogether […] You are in great need of some intense training in perception in the arts.” "Using a format borrowed from Pound, he combined seemingly...
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1.1 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part Two
A continued introduction. I start looking at how Mcluhan thinks and writes. sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/i8bmkl/episode_11_marshall_mcluhan_intro_biography_part/
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1.0 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part One
Part one of a series centred on Marshall Mcluhan. In this first episode, I go over some biographical details and Mcluhan's thesis. “He had a mind that could only think in metaphors.” -Norman Mailer, on Marshall Mcluhan “The great alchemists…were grammarians. From the time of the Neo-Platonists…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Dilettantery have?
Dilettantery currently has 48 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dilettantery about?
reading books and talking about them //a podcast about exploration, not conclusion
How often does Dilettantery release new episodes?
Dilettantery has 48 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Dilettantery?
You can listen to Dilettantery on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dilettantery?
Dilettantery is created and hosted by Sean Zabashi.
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