#ontology recapitulates phylogeny

[chicago-geniza]

Taking four naproxens and a Benadryl and texting everyone on my contacts list "Ernst Haeckel's Die Welträthsel was assigned reading for natural sciences students at the Humboldt Institute in Berlin in the 1900s-possibly 1910s" as though this will be meaningful information to anyone except my friend who studies German literature and my friend who studies artists from the fin-de-siecle Habsburg empire

[ub-sessed]

Portuguese has two words for the verb "to be", estar which corresponds etymologically to our word "stand" (temporary), and ser which corresponds etymologically to our word "sit" (permanent).*

Feelings, for instance, are expressed with estar, because they are temporary. I find this super interesting, because in the meditation I've done, we're always discouraged from using the verb "to be" with feelings (e.g. "I am sad") because it implies identification with the feeling, as though your feeling is an essential part of your being instead of just a temporary state of mind. And I always thought that was weird, because in my mind, the present tense just implied the present. "I am" to me meant "I am right now," and didn't imply anything about the future. How could it?

It turns out that Old English also had two words for "to be": beon, which implied permanence, and wesan, which was used for temporary states.** They got mashed together to create our highly irregular modern verb "to be", which has some forms taken from beon and forms taken from wesan. "Am" descends from wesan, i.e. the temporary one. I am right now.***

*This is a gross oversimplification but I liked the imagery.

**Again, gross oversimplification.

***Except of course that etymology does not actually determine the current meaning of a word. "Decimate" does not actually mean "kill one out of every ten". Words change in meaning; that's how language works. We need a catchy phrase for this, like "Phylogeny does not recapitulate ontology."

[kontextmaschine]

Strikes me that a lot of elements of elementary school

the yearly rhythm – "it's fall so we're tracing our hand out as turkeys", the random petty holidays – "everyone is wearing yellow tomorrow!" and community pageantry – "and now, everyone goes to the auditorium to watch the fifth grade perform The Wizard of Oz", even the subjects – "HERE'S what sound a sheep makes, THIS kinda cloud means it's gonna rain, LOOK at this egg growing into a chicken"

are really some kinda ontology-recapitulates-phylogeny reenactment of village agrarianism

[footnotestoplato]

What does 'Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny' mean? by the way i'm so in love with your new theme

okay buddy so lets break this down. its the typical phrase used to discuss the Recapitulation Theory a (widely discredited) biological notion, as originated with german philosopher/biologist ernest haeckel. however it has actually nothing to do with philosophy, but ill answer it anyway. else it’d be ontology, not ontogeny. so lets break down the words in particular. ontogeny: development of an animal from fertilisation to birth. recapitulates: returns to the head of, or through. phylogeny: the ancestry of a creature in its previous successive states of evolution. it expresses the belief (that if you look through the google image results youll understand way better) that in an animal’s gestation it essentially goes through all of its ancestors in terms of form. but its p much entirely pseudoscience. it just sounds smart. love conor xo

[chicago-geniza]

About a third of this planned book is going to be an attempt at synthesis re: Stefania's aesthetic theory before 1939 but the goblin-homunculus in my brain possessed by the ghost of Jacques Derrida keeps making me generate chapter titles like "Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny" and "Zeitgeist Unemployed"

[chicago-geniza]

Anyway my Fake Thesis that attempts a portrait of Lost Generation interwar Polish but especially Galician assimilated Jewish intelligentsia through the exemplary figure of Stefania Zahorska, also sort of a biography. Called Assimilation and its Discontents. Each section uses intellectual history, close reading, lots of primary sources, discourse analysis, new imperial history, historical context, biography, intertext, hypertext, sociology/philosophy/aesthetic theory/art history/psychology/history of ideas/history and theory of architecture. Novella-length chapter on Korzenie called Stefania, Granddaughter of Queen Esther. Novel-length chapter contextualizing the landscape of avant-garde art criticism, Symbolism, constructivism, the schools of thought from which Stefania emerged and with which she was in dialogue, also the books that everyone had read and was reading at the time. Curriculum vitae, intellectual genealogy. Called "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" and found an extraordinary review by this one French critic Stefania knew, of Soutine, that 1) is perfectly in keeping with her own theory re: abstract art, form, content, and the unconscious; 2) her remark about Jungian archetypes being the psychological equivalent of bioessentialism when the symbol is taken as absolute Meaning rather than a point of departure for interpretive reflection; 3) her comment on the Blue Bird about form overwhelming content, & her description of color usage; 4) this French critic describing Soutine's "violent" use of color and how it indicates something about the Jewish psyche, wholly unlike the symbolism and application of color and form in French art. People get so Bergsonpilled they look at a bunch of shapes and go "the Jewish unconscious is Diseased"

Chapter on education reform, girls' education in Galicia, Stefania's school, Jelonka's school, the granting of government certifications under Piłsudski, all the pedagogical theories and theories of "wychowanie" during the interwar period. The WWP, FUNDING (Skoczylas, Akademia Sztuk Pięknych); Radlińska; etc.

Chapter on Politics & her emigre period called In Search of Lost Ideology

Chapter on the Renaissance (her thesis, her work on it and reference to it, its role in her self-construction), her Renaissance thought, i.e., her "indisciplinary" education and its extension into her criticism--like Cubists borrowed from mathematicians, Stefania borrows her language from physics. The story of Tadeusz Oryng is a segue; he was executed by the NKVD. He's also part of this assimilated Jewish generation, Communist kids of bourgeois parents, graduates of UJ and Warsaw University. Write about the 1922 Przegląd warszawski issue where her thesis and his article on color theory are published. He's the guy who proposed that everybody sees colors differently, or one of them. His descriptions are incredibly important in Stefania's work. Also Juliusz Ż., who built the Atlantic Cinema; his archetectonics stuff.

More later but brain just crashed

Of course the chapter on Stefania and Debora Vogel. Stef says she doesn't know anyone in Lwów, so this indicates they were somehow not acquainted even though they attended and reviewed some of the same events and published in several of the same papers. [Utopian landscape] The World of Polish Art Criticism If Stefania Zahorska and Debora Vogel Had Met & Talked About Cubo-Constructivism

[chicago-geniza]

According to The Slavic Review there is a "[post]colonial" turn in Polish studies/Polish history and works that discuss the Second Republic in terms of...colonial frameworks have only been published for the last couple of years like. This rhetoric dominated public discourse! My go-to example is Wanda Melcer's "Czarny ląd" reportage series for Wiadomości in 1932 and Debora Vogel's rebuttal that compares her POV to a British or French--will need to double check--colonial administrator-cum-anthropologist who published a book about the Primitive Natives. It's telling that Stefania says "we in Western Europe," implicitly including Poland in that cultural construct as a contrast to the East, when recording her impressions of the USSR. Do you know how widely Haeckel was read in the Habsburg empire. I joked that Stefania's review of Green Pastures, where she made a great chain of being re: civilizations remark, as "ontology recapitulates phylogeny," but I wasn't wrong! Those ideas actually informed her reading of the film! And let's not even get into the Jewish Uganda project!!! Or the multiple semantic facets of the word "murzyn"!!! Or the 393948484875 colonial projects Poland was developing re: the Baltic Sea, or the fact that UJ added courses on tropical medicine etc. for future colonial doctors to its curriculum in the late 30s, at the Ministry of Education's behest, overseen by a doctor-bureaucrat who trained in France and did his practicum in FRENCH ALGERIA. I just. New imperial history that accounts for the three partitions, for the fact that while the November and January uprisings can be integrated into national mythology, the uprisings associated with the Spring of Nations can't, because they're too regionally fractured and too specific to each empire, these tensions spill over in the Second Republic, you can't study interwar Poland for more than 30 seconds without these frameworks, how is this NEW or NOVEL

[chicago-geniza]

my brain's favorite echolalic malapropism is "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" because it's a nonsense phrase but depending on how you interpret it, it could also be a bizarrely bioessentialist take on the sapir-whorf hypothesis or something else entirely