BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//CalDiscovery//caldiscovery//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH DESCRIPTION:Victoria: literary\, Thursday (Thu Sep 17\, America/Vancouver) . Rolling: the window moves forward every day\, so subscribe rather than d ownload. Discovered and maintained by CalDiscovery (https://caldiscovery.c om). Event details belong to their publishers. Contains information from C alDiscovery\, which is made available under the ODbL 1.0. SOURCE:https://caldiscovery.com/victoria-bc/thursday-literary.ics X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT12H REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT12H X-WR-CALDESC:Victoria: literary\, Thursday (Thu Sep 17\, America/Vancouver ). Rolling: the window moves forward every day\, so subscribe rather than download. Discovered and maintained by CalDiscovery (https://caldiscovery. com). Event details belong to their publishers. Contains information from CalDiscovery\, which is made available under the ODbL 1.0. X-WR-CALNAME:Victoria · literary · Thursday · CalDiscovery BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Modernism Ep07 ⟩ “Culture as Nature” DTSTART:20260918T010000Z DTEND:20260918T030000Z DTSTAMP:20260914T064953Z UID:event_315129606@meetup.com CATEGORIES:literary DESCRIPTION:Scott & Dave’s High Ontology\n**Culture as Nature: When Capi tal Becomes the Environment**\n\nThis week Hughes turns from the artist fo rmerly known as “Nature” to what he calls the “forest of media”: c ities\, commodities\, advertising\, television\, celebrity\, electronic no ise\, shopping malls.\n\nYeah\, yeah—human beings have always lived insi de culture. The people who scoffed at the previous announcement of six hou rs ago are right. There was never some Indigenous-Australian **Deep Time** when human sentience tasted matter (and its animated blobs) directly. As Yoda said in Episode Zero\, “Never a time when consciousness encountered raw Nature—unmediated by language\, tools\, institutions\, and signs— has there been.”\n\nWhat changes under “late” capitalism is the *sca le and character* of the mediation. The human-made world becomes industria lly produced\, endlessly reproduced\, commercially administered\, and fina lly dense enough to confront us as a kind of **second nature**. So that’ s a real change! Capitalism used to just fill the environment with things\ , but now it manufactures both the [Heidegger term for field of arising]\, the perceptual tongs that grok it\, and even our very minds. Which is why Rick Roderick always glossed Adorno’s “the culture industry” as the *MIND* industry.\n\nArt now competes with signs engineered to seize the e ye instantly. So Hughes whips out this nice distinction: **“Pictures edu cate\; signs discipline.”** Well! Let’s see how long that antithesis s urvives.\n\nPop Art happened when painters stopped avoiding marketing garb age and starting eating it: **Rauschenberg**’s junk and image-glut\, **J ohns**’s flags and targets\, **Warhol**’s repetition and celebrity\, * *Lichtenstein**’s comics\, **Rosenquist**’s billboards\, **Oldenburg** ’s swollen consumer objects. In music\, back in the 80s\, this was calle d “sampling”\; today it’s called “composing.”\n\nAnyway\, all yo ur favorites from Postmodernism 101 are here but Hughes is by our side to help us penetrate them. Check *this* out —\n\n*Other and earlier artists had painted in series: Monet\, for instance. But when Monet painted his h aystacks and lily- ponds\, his specific aim was to show\, in the most resp lendent detail of nuances\, that phenomena are not standardized. His “re petitions” were done to glorify the eye\, to show how it could discern t iny differences\, and how these differences added up to a continuous alter ation of reality. Discrimination within abundance was the essence of such painting. Today\, we have sameness within glut\, and that was what Warhol painted (plate 230). The difference between these approaches is like the d ifference between high bourgeois French cooking at the end of the nineteen th century\, with its strict formats enclosing a continuous variation and metamorphosis of the ingredients\, and what one sees in a modern American supermarket.*\n\nAnd speaking of Warhol\, check out [this piece of crap](h ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/entertainment/andy-warhol-whit e-burning-car-iii/) that sold for **$71 million** at [Christie’s](https: //www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-4913707). Can you see the $71 million in it ? If not\, you have vision problems. Price is\, after all\, our civilizati on’s most rigorously quantitative theory of beauty.\n\nThen\, because he took a sociology class once\, Hughes gets Marxian. Television trains us t o experience the world as montage: **war** → **toothpaste** → **celebr ity** → **catastrophe** → **game show**. One of the old avant-garde dr eams actually comes true: ordinary consciousness is reorganized by montage \, simultaneity\, collision\, discontinuity.\n\nUnfortunately\, **capital owns the montage machine** and the machine runs under a certain imperative —i.e.\, M—C—M′.\n\nVery sadly\, Robert Hughes died before the real ly funny part\, which is that humans don’t exist anymore. Today the medi ation is no longer merely in the air\, like culture and space\, but *in th e thing*. The world reaches us today *already converted into information*: camera sensor → compression algorithm → platform → feed → OLED → eyeball. We photograph the sunset or Ace Frehley while looking at the phone screen. We navigate the physical city through Google Maps or the cra ppy Apple Maps\, which almost sent me over a cliff. Forest fires\, wars\, hurricanes\, friends\, presidents\, galaxies—all arrive flattened onto t he same glowing rectangle\, which now rests permanently in front of our ey es.\n\nSo Hughes’s title is really quaint these days. We didn’t leave Nature and enter Culture. Capital built a second nature\, and then also pu t a screen in front of it\, and then also trained the cognizer that interp rets it.\n\nBy the end of this\, the best art history episode of all time\ , Hughes tells us that Pop and McLuhanism both normalized the idea that ** what an image says no longer matters much because “the medium is the mes sage.”** Hughes rejects this outright! Human beings still ***judge***\; questions of taste\, truth\, choice\, and **moral responsibility for image s** remain unavoidable. Pop\, in his account\, helped strip art of its cla ims to seriousness just as mass media displaced art as the culture’s dom inant image-making power. And so …\n\n***The avant-garde died when art c eased to control society’s responsibility for images.***\n\n**METHOD**\n \n* Watch this week’s episode\, located [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/p laylist?list=PLhdmiJc-GBYWUxDkoBbekpSMoSii_6Rgn).\n* As always\, summaries \, notes\, event chatlogs\, episode transcripts\, timelines\, tables\, obs ervations\, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be fou nd here: [THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)](https://high-ontology.no tion.site/?pvs=4)\n\n**ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK**\n\nProfessor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC\, first [translator](https:// www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Philosophical-Sciences-Critical-Writings/dp/08 26403409/) of Hegel’s *Encyclopedia* into English\, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively\, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years\, and has worked and c ollaborated with Gadamer\, Derrida\, and Rorty.\n\nView all of our coming episodes [here](https://www.meetup.com/scott-and-daves-high-ontology/). LAST-MODIFIED:20260914T064953Z URL:https://www.meetup.com/scott-and-daves-high-ontology/events/315129606/ ?utm_source=caldiscovery&utm_medium=ics&utm_campaign=victoria-bc X-SOURCE-NAME:Scott & Dave’s High Ontology END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Book Launch & Discussion "Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother : The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jo nes." DTSTART:20260918T013000Z DTEND:20260918T040000Z DTSTAMP:20260908T001001Z UID:10011498-1789669800-1789678800@creativelyunited.org CATEGORIES:community,literary DESCRIPTION:Join Elder Bill Jones\, spiritual leader of the Rainforest Fly ing Squad and the Old-Growth Forest Protectors\, and co-author Karen Moe f or the launch of their book Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones ( Dundurn Press\, 2026) followed by a discussion and book-signing on Septemb er 17th\, 2026 at Russell Books\, 747 Fort Street\, Victoria\, BC. \nTicke ts: $10 or VIP $30\, including a signed copy of the book\, go to:\nhttps:/ /www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-release-listening-once-again-to-our-great-mother -tickets-1997795537231?aff=oddtdtcreator \n* \n“With the masterful insig ht and skill of Karen Moe\, Elder Bill Jones breaks our hearts open with h is deeply personal expose of the ongoing trauma inflicted on Indigenous pe ople and their beautiful ancestral forests by colonial capitalism in Canad a.”\n-Suzanne Simard author of When the Forest Breathes. \n“The teachi ngs of Elder Bill are inspirational. This is myth\, legend\, theology and philosophy. It is the essential teaching for our time.”\n-Elizabeth May\ , O.C.\, M.P \n* \n“I was lost before I was born”: the starting point of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones’ lifelong journey of decolonization. “Y ou were all Indigenous once”: the starting point for ending a world base d on exploitation and greed. \nAt Port Renfrew\, British Columbia\, in 202 0\, both settlers and First Nations experienced a re-indigenization and be came reacquainted with our Great Mother during the fight to save some of t he last remaining old growth forest at the Fairy Creek Blockades. As Elder Bill sat in a tent during a West Coast storm at the height of the protest s\, he experienced the final phase of his personal decolonization\, his ab solute re-indigenization\, when he realized: “I know what happened!”\, a revelation that has informed his life ever since. \nCombining the story of Elder Bill’s personal life and ancestors\, elder wisdom\, settler fe minism\, and the inspirational story of the Fairy Creek Blockades — the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada — Listening Once Again to Ou r Great Mother is wisdom weaving to motivate those towards their own self- awakening\, even after Elder Bill is gone. \nJoin Elder Bill Jones\, spiri tual leader of the Rainforest Flying Squad and the Old-Growth Forest Prote ctors\, and co-author Karen Moe for the launch of their book Listening Onc e Again to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones (Dundurn Press\, 2026) followed by a discu ssion and book-signing on September 17th\, 2026 at Russell Books\, 747 For t Street\, Victoria\, BC. \n* \n“With the masterful insight and skill of Karen Moe\, Elder Bill Jones breaks our hearts open with his deeply perso nal expose of the ongoing trauma inflicted on Indigenous people and their beautiful ancestral forests by colonial capitalism in Canada.”\n-Suzanne Simard author of When the Forest Breathes. \n“The teachings of Elder Bi ll are inspirational. This is myth\, legend\, theology and philosophy. It is the essential teaching for our time.”\n-Elizabeth May\, O.C.\, M.P \n * \n“I was lost before I was born”: the starting point of Pacheedaht E lder Bill Jones’ lifelong journey of decolonization. “You were all Ind igenous once”: the starting point for ending a world based on exploitati on and greed. \nAt Port Renfrew\, British Columbia\, in 2020\, both settle rs and First Nations experienced a re-indigenization and became reacquaint ed with our Great Mother during the fight to save some of the last remaini ng old growth forest at the Fairy Creek Blockades. As Elder Bill sat in a tent during a West Coast storm at the height of the protests\, he experien ced the final phase of his personal decolonization\, his absolute re-indig enization\, when he realized: “I know what happened!”\, a revelation t hat has informed his life ever since. \nCombining the story of Elder Bill ’s personal life and ancestors\, elder wisdom\, settler feminism\, and t he inspirational story of the Fairy Creek Blockades — the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada — Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother is wisdom weaving to motivate those towards their own self-awakening\, ev en after Elder Bill is gone. LAST-MODIFIED:20260908T001001Z LOCATION:Russell Books\, Fort Street 747\, Victoria\, BC\, V8W 1H2\, Canad a URL:https://creativelyunited.org/event/book-launch-discussion-listening-on ce-again-to-our-great-mother-the-fairy-creek-blockades-and-the-life-story- of-pacheedaht-elder-bill-jones-3/?utm_source=caldiscovery&utm_medium=ics&u tm_campaign=victoria-bc X-SOURCE-NAME:Creatively United Community X-SOURCE-URL:https://creativelyunited.org/pair-up-directory END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR