Restarting to blog

To my regular readers "welcome back" and to new readers "welcome".


Recapitulation

Since I stopped blogging over a year ago let me start with a recapitulation of my past blogging activity.



Between 2002 and 2004 I wrote about “what is art” and “What has been art’s societal functionality along human history”. This writing appeared in installments on my blog "Crucial Talk" that were reformatted into a book titled “Artsense” that was published in 2004. In 2014 I started writing a second book titled “From Modernity to After-Modernity” that delves into how societal evolution unfolded historically and how art fits in that evolution. I published the first draft of this 2nd book as a series of posts on the blog "painting & thinking". You can reach them from its archive page. These posts total some 60 installments to this day. These posts have also partially been published on Crucial Talk.

 I then formatted these posts in book form and discovered that the subject of these posts would gain in clarity by being re-ordered in 3 separate books addressing the common theme of the passage “From Modernity to After-Modernity” seen from 3 different angles.

This gives the following:

1. Book 1. Societal Evolution: 2 volumes, of approximately 300 pages each, address the history of societal evolution. It forms indeed the societal context of Late-Modernity. What I mean to say is that there is no way of understanding Late-Modernity out of its historical context. So this first book focuses on the mechanisms that have shaped societal evolution along the path of human history.

• Volume 1: History shapes the present
• Volume 2: Today in Late-Modernity

 2. Book 2. Theoretical considerations: 5 volumes, of roughly 300 pages each, address theoretical considerations that emerged from the historical approach of book 1. In other words this book 2 is about analyzing the mechanisms of societal evolution that have shaped the entry of humanity in Modernity and then its evolution into Late-Modernity that points to the emergence of a new evolutionary era that I call After-Modernity.

• Volume 1: The formation of human knowledge
• Volume 2: About the formation of consciousness
• Volume 3: Culture, Worldviews, Civilizations
• Volume 4: Governance and Societal Evolution
• Volume 5: About the arts 

3. Book 3. Divination. Sub-title: the future emerges out of the present context: 1 volume, of roughly 300 pages, addresses the future of humanity and how the roots of this future are starting to emerge out of the present context.

 I’m afraid that editing this massive first draft will take a few more years…  


Blogging I started blogging since 2004.
Blog “Crucial Talk”: first draft of the book “Artsense”
Blog “Thinking and painting”: first draft of “From Modernity to After-Modernity” Book 1. History
Book 2. Theory
Book 3. Divination  


Artsense Book published in 2006.
Click here for a free download  



Future blogging

In my next two posts I'll try to give a conclusion to my last posts of 2017:

1. A growing disconnect between Chinese and Westerners 
2. Our present mood shapes our reading of the future Imaginings of the future. 
3. Abstractions reached by the thinking mind… 
4. America First? Hum... but China Is already starting to Dominate Global Technology! 
5. Is America still a nation?

After that I'll come back to my series "From Modernity to After-Modernity" that I had interrupted abruptly in May of 2017. I need indeed to terminate the first draft of the 3th and last book in this series called "Divination".

In the future I'll try to publish one post every Friday. The length of earlier posts, at the rhythm of one a week, was exhausting me so future posts shall be shorter than in the past.

Future posts will be published on both "painting & thinking" (light color background) and "Crucial Talk" (black background).


One last note

 I worked on a visual presentation of "Art through societal evolution" that is available on Pinterest. It totals 25 sections starting with tribal art and concluding with organic art today in Late-Modernity. As I wrote in the introduction to this visual presentation: "Art goes back to the dawn of societies. Tribal man of knowledge used visual signs to imprint a common narrative, about what reality is all about, in the minds of their fellow tribesmen. Shared signs give a common meaning & societal cohesion is increased! The European Renaissance called such signs “Art”. Later Modernism tasked Art to “illustrate” a new & deeper vision of reality but the artists failed to deliver and so the societal role of art was soon lost but it comes back in After-Modernity..."

Finally a selection of my favorite contemporary visual art works is available on my Tumblr blog called "surfing of the waves of reality". This selection is updated irregularly following the stream of my discoveries.