Image and Vision [Book review]

[para. 1]: " Maybe it is human nature to want to solve problems. There is a sense of the dialectic working in history, however, that suggests our good intentions often are misdirected somehow. We contribute to some transformation unknowingly that is called history and that does not usually have the intended good result we desire. Somehow the forces-that-be refuse to acknowledge our intent, and so the result of the mess is offered for our ongoing instruction. At least this is my feeling of something Hegel may have said. I don’t claim to even half understand anything he writes, but I do like this sense of history. Or perhaps this is closer to Walter Benjamin’s perceptions of how words and symbols operate in the world, and you can feel this tension in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, where our own compromise in modernity is made through the failed agency of the self to adequately feel its own displacement even as its arguments are asserted. The genetic urgency of preservation comes into conflict with the ameliorating social values to which we are to pay lip service. The lovely old Enlightenment notions have been flushed now, and Iraq is the symbolic registration of the sewage that remains. Katrina, too, instructed its television audience on the ways of the future."