reflections on the first session

apologies in advance for the relatively disjointed nature of what I've written here- it reflects a thought in the process of development, and not a finished idea. i'd really appreciate any input because i'm very much not quite clear about how I think about these things...

i've been thinking about the theme claire brought up about repetition. the postminimalist artist eva hesse said 'endless repetition can be considered erotic,' in this way i think referring to eroticism as 'play,'with a set of variables that are changed and new. this also follows claire's points about how disaster allows us to reconceptualize our situations and make the new- for example the city planner recreating lisbon, or contemporary reconstructions (lets remember that actually while they were around NYers hated the twin towers, famously an ugly blot on the skyline- and though the subsequent quest for a 9-11 memorial has been basically fruitless, it has for better or worse symbolized a concept of rethinking the city, a sort of regeneration, as when forest fires create an area of emptiness that are actually crucial for the long term health of forests). Or as harry lime says in the third man, ''in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.'' basically this simplistic idea is at the core of many more specific and complicated works- i'm thinking of 'radical reconstruction,' by lebbeus woods, which gives specific situations (sarajevo) and how destruction allowed for subsequent modification to the city. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Reconstruction-Lebbeus-Woods/dp/1568982860)

so if repetition is play, a constant alteration of a cultural continuum, then is the catastrophe itself repetitive?
Even though it seems bracing and unprecedented, we are used to our cities being destroyed- to the extent that most major metropoli have many imagined catastrophes (those imagined for los angeles, for example, written about in 'the ecology of fear' by mike davis; but paris has banlieue 13, new york has escape from new york (not to mention actually dozens of movies that imagine a destroyed new york, etc)
i got a sense from what claire was saying about how maybe, catastrophe can offer a relief from monotony, even if terrifying. it can offer us central narratives to build around perhaps?
well, thats a lot of details that seem disorderly. but I guess the real question is, is disaster a catalyst for modernism, and actually is modernism a catastrophe?
modernity has
-destroyed dialects, family links, traditional ways of life, religious practices, etc

I guess i'm trying mainly to work my mind around the idea of catastrophe as repetition- even though it seems that unprecedentedness and shock is built into the concept, it does seem that perhaps it is repetitious or serial in nature.