What Is the Process of Appreciating

I'm getting ready to head back to Saas-Fee, Switzerland for another round of classes at the European Graduate School and I'm doing a little cleaning of house.

Even on the ol' blog. Which lead me to this: a post I began in January of this year and just didn't quite put my hand to it further.

Of course, now I'm no longer struck with whatever it was that got me thinking about this. It's probably, actually, now that I think of it, been cut form one of my popOp posts at the avant guardian. Anyways, here's what I found:

To appreciate (which is a process that requires apprehending the appropriateness of what is at hand, and in so doing raising the value of the thing transformed)

Benjamin's flâneur overcomes this dandy problem by way of memory. Benjamin, building on the works of Marx and Weber, saw the ultimate goal of modernity as the dissolution of all community, and this was being achieved by the gradual erosion of the framework of experience itself. The term is Erfahrung, experience, but it is the shared memory, the interpenetration of experiences, a sharing of the personal in the private and vice versa; in the countryside Erfahrung was possible and the lack of this is the feeling of alienation felt in the City. In the urban centers and in the factories, all human relations were intensely personal and incommunicable, Erlebnis, but paradoxically also available as simply information, a statistic. The modern era meant that there could be the Public space, a space everyone owns (say a city park), but no one belongs in (nobody is allowed to live in the park). In response to this intense feeling of dehumanization came many nihilistic responses, this is the danger of dandyism and hedonism, or art for art's sake.