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the Disheartening Metonymy in Facebook

July 28, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

In the midst of the ontic we look for ontology. I started at 15 or so, with excerpts from Plato’s Republic, Carl Sagan and Nietzsche which I did not understand at all and did not get past the first few pages.

It is in this search for ontology that one will digest, and read, and seek for a center.

I think most will do this, perhaps, when things are bad or chaotic.

Beyond ontology however, we slip into a regime of mirrors, a hall of confusion by which we must choose that which has Being, a contest between beings which ends either in nihilism, a rejection of ontology or a dogmatic stand that this arbitrary figure is not at all arbitrary and in fact has the real deal. The stand most often occurs with what feels certain, what gives the subject certainty and what the subject likes most naturally.

Many of us don’t share any given subject’s appraisal of Being. Pointing out that this reliance on a figurehead is arbitrary gives rise to relativism and humor which is most prevalent on the underbelly of the internet.

It is in this reliance of values and the questioning of values which I take to be central to any question, something I like to point that Heidegger ended his career with.

The problem now, that I see it, stems from a collapse of long term and short term, personal and public spaces. I don’t believe that what’s good for an individual is good for society and vis versa. But how our legal and political system runs most effectively collapses all these different regimes such that we are slipping into a slow paralysis. We are choking ourselves with the weight of not only ourselves but those before and after us for whom we represent and stand in for. In the interest of American Brotherhood (of equals) each us has access to the universal but it is that access which gives rise to the oppression of living fragmented, dual lives. We can’t deal with each other as individuals but each interaction becomes of political and social significance. Talking to an Other on the bus becomes a gesture of political multicultural relativism. Dealing with your boss or employee becomes not just a negotiation of your individual and professional interests, but also a meter between how any boss or employee should/not interact (Thank you for pointing this out, Walter Olsen). Judges today sometimes cannot pass verdicts they may see as appropriate because they may set precedence for future situations which are undesirable.

We live not just in the present but in the past and the future simultaneously.

This happens as every instance of a category becomes a stand-in for the relations inherent in the category.  In otherwords, any employee becomes synonymous with the legitimate boundaries allowable (or not) by every employee.

Of course, some measure of categorization must be appropriate — we must classify in order to better deal with the extraordinary difference out there on the street. But it is the centrality of categorization and classification qua primary that gives rise to the proliferation ontic-value confusion. In the quest of ontological signifiance, we skew via a set of values qua necessary and that proliferation of values generates multiple ontologies which are a priori incompossible (cannot coexist in the same world) leading to nihilism or, that proliferation produces a heady multiculturalist categorization which is inherently racist and Other — threatening both to make each us of into one of five or seven power rangers (of different color and manner but of “equal” ability and status) while obscurating what the purpose of ontological centered-ness is (the actual people in the suits).

So to get out of this skew, we might seek the beyond of values as Nietzsche had suggested.  In doing so, we establish for ourselves our own primary motion, that which cannot be but imitated. This is the wet dream of the Uberman, something I do not believe in as it sounds nice on paper but in real life gives rise to dickish, assholish pieces of garbage which often are shadows of what might be an original.  (Their lack of originality stems from a production of signs meant to signify originality — insufficient for the condition of Uberman status anyhow).

So my response?

I think my humor has moved into the inappropriate for the most part — as any movement to ontologize values is laughable. So I laugh, and that’s what’s ridiculous (my response). But when you think about it, it’s really the ontologization of values which is something laughable, not the people who seek ontology! Doing something like ontologizing values gives rise to a constant checking of behavior — which in some sense is better than living however you like while preaching the gospel — but it’s a losing battle. We don’t need more special cases — we don’t need more “races” of humans.  We exist on Earth, we don’t need the attempt at radical proliferation like it’s Star Trek.

We simply need more application of the generic instance and a refusal to insist on “common sense”.

What I mean by that is that we cannot be beholden to a race of Others for fear of offending them — that’s not the point (since we offend ppl who are like us anyway).  For each of us live within the fuzzy range of probable acceptability where we coexist (peaceably, hopefully). For it is in that semi-conscious realm that the foundations for our human interaction are generated and contested and it is because this generation and judgement is in some sense only by partial choice that we cannot solely have nihilism, multiculturalism or Ontology. We cannot lose our values but we cannot ontologize them either, for they these are only metonymetic towards a singular Being — they are not condusive to point to a Way as while there may be Being, there is no universal.

What Facebook has taught me is that I find myself somewhat affronted by individuals’ reliance on signifiers of what’s Real in everyday life, whether they be carriers of “Stuff” or lessons in “Values”. In both, these statuses attempt to point the Way but in fact fail because those statuses are both generated by particular instances only the subject is privy to, and/or it relies on the particularity of the subject while deeming to be of something beyond the subject.

Oddly enough, if anything, I find this to be a real life example of Descartes’ problem of multiple mental realms.  Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am, but where I think there are no others.  So while I think therefore I am is also Others are where I do not think and I am where Others are not.

(Don’t worry, no Lacan today) but this is the parable of the modern horror movie — they jump out unexpectedly.

So to wrap it up, these thoughts, as perpetrated by others, signify, despite intent, the values they hold within their actual lifeworld and in some sense act as a kind of encompassing meta-physics of presence. That expression qua status updates in social media like Facebook and Twitter are projections of the )(in)compossible universals pointing not only to specific manifestations but also entire universes coexisting simultaneously on one’s update stream.  Any one with access can see it, and each are a statement about the nature of everything around it.

I don’t portent that each person who updates their status seeks to establish their creditability as an Ontology — as I extend this blog, it may very well be that Ontology is an outdated model.   But as a expression of our here and now Ontology is still something sought by individuals to be established — many of the status updates are in fact an attempts to codify what should be, be it in the form of “THIS IS EPIC” or “PEOPLE SHOULD NOT”.

When we speak of the personal, often these expressions are placed with a deleted subject.  We know that someone may be sad, or that someone is angry but the “FUCK &^@%” is not in fact carrying with it a hidden “(In my honest opinion FUCK &^@%)”.  And even if it was, the rejection for a place in this universe is still present against “&^@%”.

This kind of sentiment is what makes it political and ontological at the same time.

Even in broader circles, as it is, in political speak in either public broadcast media like NPR or Cable News, people still seek manifestations of the true American spirit to vote or be a particular way, or hold certain views (like ours and other someone else’s).  Many liberals who are heterosexual would not engage in a non-heterosexual activity personally, but nonetheless embrace it as being allowed to be.  To be an American in this sense is structurally as intolerant (of intolerants) as those who would be intolerant.  THat kind of structure, found in abundance throughout political discourse seems unavoidable.

If this isn’t a throwback to a false Ontology found in pre-WW2 Heidegger, then I really have no idea what I am pointing out.

But even today as Nationalists or culturalists or multiculturalists, it is very much the establishment of Ontology(s) meant to be the inclusive bulwark against all kinds of deformations and confusions.

Why am I pointing this out?  I find this kind of structuration to be abhorrent.  While I do not possess any kind of “solution” to be readily expressed, to do believe that a people obsesses with Ontological establishment, even should they be unaware of doing so, is a people courting a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality — and all the ensuing pitfalls that come with thinking that only people like themselves* should be.

 

*In this case, people like themselves extends far beyond simply being of a race or even a set of values… but of fitting the very categories which we take to be the case.  This is where I agree with Zizek (even though I am not a Lacanian) — the distance we need to have from these categories is itself a necessity to living a more complete life of being who we actually are… fragmented and split subjects — allowing us better to come to peace with that, as it were, “outside” of discourse….

Can we function with an outside on the inside?

July 9, 2011 / posted in art, dialectics, images of being-human, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Recently, the reaction of one homosexual individual who was hurt by the hateful remark surprised me. Her response was simply that gays are common decent folk — upstanding people too — who deserve basic respect like anyone else.  What’s surprising to me was that she failed to incorporate the point of view of the bigot.  But then why should she?  This post doesn’t explore whether or not tolerance is an issue (because it shouldn’t be), but that there are different standards of acceptability.  Granted, standards are due to valuations that individuals generate — that is what makes us individuals — but is it possible that fundamental valuations be generated from a contextual position based off of the larger whole and NOT individual feelings?

I am not debating the content of her remark, but I do find her reaction and surprise itself surprising — all the more because of the obvious evidence that her verbal assailant did not consider her (as a gay) deserving of tolerance or basic respect.  If there is a basic orientation to how one relates to others, it’s through the Lacanian filter of the Symbolic.  The Symbolic order holds for us subjects a variety of different and individual valuations but the main function of the Symbolic is to provide orientation.  The collective Symbolic regime is the resulted of a larger, abstracted social zeitgeist.  How we negotiate the perceived regimes’ changing nature and what we allow or disallow provides the vehicle for politics.  What we do on an individual level, such as towards our hurt friend, matters, however small.  This negotiation of perceived change in the Symbolic forces personal action to be becoming-political.  In a way, the hurtful remark made by the bigot is an indeterminate but discrete step.

Immaneul Wallerstein has provided a grand gesture through his World Systems Analysis which classifies a population’s attitude towards change which may be useful to our exploration: conservative, liberal and radical. Conservatives do not want change, liberals want small measured changes and radicals want a total re-orientation of the norms.  Wallerstein’s classification is useful but it’s only descriptive, not an examination of the production of meaning in relation to the Symbolic function.  To do that, we can turn towards Zizek’s explication of the Lacanian orders through the Gremasian square.

Gremasian Squares are one basic way of determining meaning.

The Gremasian square Zizek draws upon in For They Know Not What They Do, bounces the four positions of basic difference that create meaning surrounding the symbolic function. The four positions are:

  1. all are submitted (S1)
  2. only one is not submitted (~S2)
  3. none are submitted (S2)
  4. only one is submitted (~S1)

Zizek highlights these positions in order to explore different ‘species of judgement’ of a subject are

  1. necessary (S1)
  2. possible (~S2)
  3. impossible (S2)
  4. contingent (~S1)

The basic axis deals with the main difference of Symbolic (S1) and Real (S2).  The Symbolic acts as a universal signifying function, establishing a symbolic network of linguistic meaning (S1) that is necessary for us to organize our world. At the same time, within the Real order (S2), we struggle with the impossibility of such a function existing in the universe as part of the universe.  The outside Real (S2) remains indifferent and incoherent to our manifested meaning (S1).  It is this interplay between impossibility (S2) and necessity (S1) that gives rise to the complexity of the system. In order to facilitate the others who approach us from the untotalizable whole of the Real (S2), we rely on the Imaginary (~S2) to orient us to the Symbolic (S1). It is in the Imaginary that we maintain an interplay of ourselves with others, ultimately enabling us to live together (though Lacan claims this is always through a kind of cross-talking).  Keep in mind that the negated lower pair of ~S1 and ~S2 remain imaginary reflections of the actual complex pair, (S1) and (S2). What keeps us hinged in the necessary Symbolic edifice (S1) is a self-image which represents for us the kernel of our own subjectivity (~S1).  This self-image however, is not the same as who or what we are.  To this end, Lacan rewrites Descartes’ “Cogito Ergo Sum” as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think“.  Nonetheless, it is in our personal investment in (~S1) that makes us dependent on what others think of us.  This external dependence is how (~S1) is structurally contingent, although the actual content is personal and open to discourse. So within this square, it is the universal function’s failure to completely foreclose the Real and prevent distortions of others (or ourself) that highlights the three different reactions Wallerstien segments as a population’s willingness to adapt to or reject change.

So to return to that surprising reaction, I would have assumed that one who rejects some social norms would understand that with this rejection, their position may occupy an untenable difference within another’s Symbolic (S1). That is to say, a conservative who would be unwilling to accept in themself a difference of sexuality without losing that possibility of self (~S1) would definitely reject that difference of sexuality in another or at least locate the unacceptable difference wholly in another (~S2). Our poor friend however, is hurt by the verbal assailant’s remarks as her subjectivity (~S1) is questioned and she responds by reinstating her own position in the necessary order of things (S1) as a public declaration.  The way to read the Gremasian Square is to understand that subjectivity is contingent on both the Imaginary others (~S2) who reject or accept the subject as well as the appeal to the Symbolic (S1) against the Real (S2).  Without the Imaginary (~S2) acceptance of the subject (~S1), there is no subject.  Such a position is the horror that Zizek calls the space between two deaths, when one is biologically alive but ostrasized from the community, publically dead.

The rejection of that desire as considered by the other to be one’s own introduces an element of the Real (S2) into the fragile Symbolic (S1).  No wonder then, that slogans from those who oppose gay marriage include banners that equate one man to marrying another to one man to marrying a dog. The equation doesn’t mean to equate men with dogs but rather, to equate the feeling of beastality with homosexual marriage.  This absurd equation betrays their bend as conservative — a genuine fear that should the Symbolic (S1) be extended, that fragile absolute (another title of one of Zizek’s books) may give way. A recent expression of this comes from David Tyree’s equating New York City’s acceptance of gay marriage with anarchy. One wonders then, at how fragile some conservative’s hold on the Symbolic order may be and if we could ever relate to one another without this Symbolic (as it is a point of reference). For the function of the Symbolic, is it possible to include the Real as a space within the function while maintaining tolerance and social order?  In other words, how possible is it to locate within the Real a minimal relation to be Symbolic — to provide space in the Imaginary for tolerance and acceptance?

The function of the Symbolic order appears more robust than we might think, as it goes a long way in orienting ourselves to external events. South Park, the popular adult series created Matt Stone and Trey Parker, explores various positions people take in relation to Real, unaccountable events. These events, as a rule, come from media presentations and perverse positions, other (~S2) possibilities which must oriented to the Symbolic function (S1).  It is through this accounting that we get a dialectical backlash in South Park between possible configurations of acceptability as the characters attempt to orient themselves within a Symbolic order (usually unsuccessfully) to justify or explain the acceptability of actions. Contrary to most conservative commentary on South Park, the ending configurations of the characters are usually presented to be ridiculous or at least out of proportion to the issue at hand. Earlier episodes in the show’s run were more to the point as to what is a ‘rational’ position ought to be.  Some of the later satires reject an overt explanation and choose instead to settle on positions that maximize humor.  Even so, for humor to function, it must retain a monocum of the Symbolic as reference.  As Julia Kristeva wrote in Powers of Horror, what is humorous is usually only so as the exposure of different signifiers in a novel arrangement create jouissance.  In other words, what is humorous is usually only acceptable as humor because it’s not an acceptable arrangement except as humor. The pleasure of humor is the pleasure of play within the Symbolic (so long as it does not shatter that regime).

South Park, as a satire, functions by simplifying most of their character’s interest in maintaining their own contingency, preferring to underscore instead, our tumultuous relationships within the Imaginary.  (What makes South Park an examination of actual possibilities and not an examination of the Symbolic is the protagonists often not-listened-to appeals to a standard rationality.  The under-grid of Symbolic rationality remains ignored, not questioned.)  To give a real world example of this instability with the Symbolic we can turn to the avant gaarde’s push for new directions.  Such movements are often offensive to some, as such movements often rebuke representationalism.  Representationalism best deploys the Symbolic as over-coding the Real in a 1:1 relationship as though conservatives are less able to handle schisms in the Symbolic.  The more extreme the over-coding, the stronger violations of the Symbolic invokes a bodily reaction to events that reveal the Real’s incoherency. The adherence to such an over-coding is what establishes our societal ‘grand gesture’ which in the 20th century was known as Modernism.

Modernism philosophically started long before the 20th century, but as a social movement, Modernism came together in the late 19th century as a style of presentation and coherence that in some ways matched the singularity of world orders like the United Nations. Modernism as a whole, however, is best digested as a rejection of traditional aesthetics, an establishing of new parameters of how we are to experience and relate.  Modernism marks the single largest and far-reaching break in tradition.  For the life-world, Modernism became coherent as new human existence for a current Now. This emphasis on ahistorical values arises as an absolute order without an outside, the best example being Formalism.  In other words, if you are not within this absolute order, you are nowhere to be found.

In the larger picture, while Modernism can be connected with capitalism’s ever expanding market, market capitalism is but one expression of the ‘make it new’ of Modernism. Other expressions of Modernism include Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism. So while many philosophers such as Lyotard claim that Modernism is dead in favor of Postmodernism, Modernism continues as a grand narrative, under the guise of Postmodernism. Under Postmodernism, deployment of new expressions continues as an ahistorical re-framing of historical contexts.  As such, Postmodernism functions as a hyper-modernism, co-opting the small other to illicit a homogeneous world order.  Despite the many disavowals of the I and the kowtowing to small others when recognized as legitimate, any and all contacts with global capitalism usually means the destruction of alternate Symbolic configurations in favor of our global capitalism.  Any sensitivity of context is a sensitivity necessary in a Postmodern deployment.

I bring this up not because it has anything to do with the dignity that our homosexual couple insisted on, but rather because our current Symbolic order displays an absolutism — that relationships and transactions be concluded through a narrow regime of Symbolic association.  For instance, one of the main modes of our Symbolic relies on the filters of money and legal documentation, two contractual basises which form the bridge of our current Symbolic Regime. Fights over gay rights, or the slutwalk occur within capitalism because the market has not established a preference either way (unlike say, stealing). As time persists and capitalism benefits from the religious right and the spending power of the homosexual left so both will continue to contest one another in the public space at the expense of other policy decisions. Most likely though, capitalism is not incompatible with homosexuality and ultimately marriage will be expanded to include homosexual arrangements as this does not hurt global capitalism.

This brings us back to the original question — in terms of our current grand narrative of global capitalism — is the Symbolic completely mutually exclusive to the Real?  Is there a psychial configuration that would allow us to better tolerate instances of the Real? Why rely on the contingency of others as deal with ourselves and each other in the imaginary spaces of (~S2) and (~S1)?  In seeking to find a philosophical method to explain going beyond the Symbolic edifice, we run analogous to Buddhist thought on enlightenment.  Enlightenment serves as a psychial position that exceeds the worldly concerns that structure subjectivity.  Now as the order of the Symbolic operates more as a referent than a set content, so a re-centering the four positions can be best understood by retooling the Gremiasian Square through an analogous the structure in Buddhistm known as the Tetralemma.

The Tetralemma is a four fold step introduced as a logical exercise in Buddhist doctrine to expound the doctrines of two truths.   Put simply, the two truths at hand are conventional truth — the common place wisdom of existence having substance, and the sacred truth — the emptiness or non-existence of substance.  The four lemmas of the Tetralemma involves the precepts:

  1. x
  2. ~x
  3. both x & ~x
  4. neither x & ~x

In dealing with the concepts of existence (x) and emptiness (~x), through the exercise of the Tetralemma, we step beyond having just classifications of the conventional existence of substance and the philosophical existence of nothing.  In other words, the goal of the Tetralemma is to gain an understanding beyond the distinctions of ontology, of which emptiness is a exposition of the formal constraints of ontology.  This is different from the Gremasian square in the sense that the Tetralemma works as a delimiter rather than as a position.  The goal is to avoid all four positions, whereas in the Gremasian square it is the orientation of the positions that provide meaning.  Nonetheless, used in conjunction with the Gremasian square above, we can utilize two Tetralemmas of emptiness and substance with the two indexes from the Gremasian square as the actual (S1) and (S2) with substance and the reflective (~S1) and (~S2) with emptiness.  In the first Tetralemma:

  1. There is a Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S1)
  2. There is no Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S2)
  3. Both (S1) and (S2) apply
  4. Neither (S1) and (S2) apply

In other words, we are dealing with the grounding of both existents and nothingness.  Arguably, the social schism introduced by Modernism killed philosophy’s search for an ontological life leaving us with nihilism.  Nihilism, like early postmodernism, insists that the formal constraints of ontology are not applicable anywhere, leaving us with nothing (to fit the bill with).  Rather than a full blown rejection of the system itself, nihilism involves an adaptation of the system of meaning and its consequential failure to cohere meaning.  Nihilism does not mean that there are no systems, only that the metrics we use to find valid systems yields no content.  In this way, the third step and fourth step both appear to be alternative universalisations that happen when the symbolic function fails to yield an appropriate conclusion.  Nihilism occupies both positions such that we have the system but no ontology or we reject the system and still do not have the authenticity of ontology.

This position reflects the same underpinnings as dialectical nihilism by at first insisting on a universal position although it goes beyond dialectical nihilism by in fact not sublimating the structure of the Tetralemmas at the level of the Notion.  It is through the Tetralemma’s four precepts that we gain a richer understanding that unlike conservatives and our gay couple above, it’s not simply enough to be within the function and to desire collapse the Gremasian square to gain a tolerance of the Other so as to live with them (to insist that what I imagine to be the other’s position is in fact where I am as well, that (~S1) and (S1) and (~S2) and (S2) are in fact all super-imposed, without difference… the way to read this desire is that the conservative judges the homosexual to have a desire the homosexual then denies having).  The Tetralemma instead goes beyond this to reject both the system and its content reserving neither Notion nor internal distance to uphold this desire or its judgement.

A rejection of the distinction of both the Symbolic (S1) and the Real (S2) constitute, in traditional terms, a confusion between how we are to understand our role in the world and how to basically orient ourself in the world.  How can we make sense of what we could do vs how things happen to us and what we should make of them?  Both the Symbolic (S1) and the Real (S2) rely on specific instances in order to provide actual interactions.  It is in the application of the function in the imaginary spaces of (~S1) and (~S2) by which we run across the negative Tetralemma.  Without addressing the application of the orientations inherent in (S1) and (S2), we run into the profound difficulty of skirting the regime of madness:

  1. There is no self that is I (~S1).
  2. There are no other subjectivities (~S2).
  3. Both self (~S1) and others (~S2) do not exist.
  4. There is neither no subjectivity (~S1)  nor are there no other subjectivities (~S2).

The main difficulty in this Tetralemma lies in the lack of orientation a rejection of the application of possibility and contingency implies.  Within this regime of non-applicability, we run into pitfalls similiar to those who do not socialize properly.  I speak of some criminally insane who do not genuinely understand others, nor read on others the desire and pain, both reflective and independent of their own subjectivity.

What marks the difficulty in deploying an orientation of these concepts isn’t in their conceptual nature.  We should not assume that the proper position within the Tetralemma involves a rejection of their concepts as such, but rather a rejection of the desire that navigates these polemics and binds us in these orientations.  Movement within the Tetralemma isn’t accurately a dialectic, although I have used the term.  Dialectical movements within the Hegelian traditional involve a progression of positions within an order to explain their meaning.  The Tetralemma instead involves the limits of expatiation.  When we abut a lemma we encounter a failure to grasp the Tetralemma as a whole.  This is how the Tetralemma also is not a Gemasian Square — it does not rely on static positions from which we can garnish meaning from the other three positions.

So for applicability, let us return to our original example, it is not that the knee jerk response of our friend is in fact inappropriate.  She is correct to understand that her subjectivity is contingent on the external circumstances of others who accept her, legitimatizing her place in the Symbolic.  But the most the Symbolic can guarantee her or anyone else is a position of contingency and tolerance.  Acceptance within the Symbolic does not assure her of the dignity of her subjectivity, it only imprisons her within the confines of the possibility of authenticity when continually confronted with others.  This is the nature of contingency (~S1).

The ‘way out’ as espoused through the dialectical and radically transformative nature of the Tetralemma isn’t in the sublimation of the Tetralemma the way Hegel might want us to distance ourselves from the Notion in order to better find ourselves within it.  The key of the Tetralemmas is best expressed through the Real, as the Real remains the threat for all other positions.  What makes the position of the Real ‘Impossible’ (S2) is not only the ineffectual application of Symbolic order on a shifting and vague desire — but, from the point of view of the Real, the union between any of the other three relationships are impossible because of the shifting and vague nature of desire undergridding each.  When we seek to legitamize ourselves, that legitamcy is in fact never permanent, being contingent.  When we seek to understand the other on their terms, it is impossible because we must resort to imagination — we can never know their radical difference, only read on their difference a reflection of our own difference.

This insubstantiability of position that all eight lemmas deploy disallows one to fully invest in any position, opening the door to the Real as it were without casting one fully into it.  We acknowledge our own insubstantiality inasmuch as anyone else’s.  For instance, in neither accepting being submitted to the function or outside of the function, one rejects both the absolute madness of emptiness and the contingency one might always bear.  One can be oneself, as it were, all the while allowing others to be themselves without that reflexivity or demand that one be ‘with it’ or not ‘with it’.

LOAF

July 7, 2011 / posted in lyrical-narratives / No Comments
loaf
lo-
  af

luf

LOAF, the lovely oaf sat on his bed, smoking weed
drinking beer
tastes like beef spit and it was mostly,
because loaf was so much lazy he didnt chew his food much either
large man.  sagging couch.  young man.

loaf's mother went out to work telling him, go get a job! with much spite.

loaf waved one hand, the back of it serene and hairy.  crumb infested.  love you, mom he said.

the tv went out that day, because cable was broken.  loaf swore and got his phone
called up his stoner buddy.  dude the tv is not working.  yeah.  can you come and fix this? no
mine's broken too.  shit

loaf went up to his room and lay on his bed.  soggy with spilt bread bits, dripped cheese nasty
socks and who knows what.  he couldn't sleep.  wasn't sleepy.  he needed to get some weed. call
his friend and no answer. loaf watched the trees outside swaying.  a small bird sat on a branch
calling out, its hormonal frustrations in nasty high pitched rhythms.  loaf's little slutty sis
yelled that she was taking the car. no loaf said, hobbling out. i need it. (to get weed... beer
maybe?) but she was gone. he watched her skanky butt bob into the car and it drove off, speaker
pumping.

loaf went outside and put his hand up to his eye.  to hide eyes with his fat forearm.  some kid
and his buddies played soccer. the ball rolled to loaf and loaf picked it up, tossed it back to
them. he walked down the street, deciding to go to the park.  he played there younger

loaf passed by market street where loaves of bread sat in their heat.  he eyed some women strut
but didn't say anything.  if you don't have a sense of humor, loaf said...

the river went under a bridge. and he used to sit here, throw rocks. he had his first kiss here
and though the place looked the same, he didnt need to see his reflection to know things werent

the factory across the river had long stopped pumping black puffy smoke.  loaf felt nostaligic;
he reached for a stoogie and came up empty. he layed back in the humid grass to watch the blue.
before falling asleep, thinking that even if he was out of breath, without weed, without any tv
life could not get any better.

loaf
silly man
unabased with his somatic pleasures
sometimes yelling at his mom to go away when she pounds on the bathroom door
i know what you're doing in there
fuck you mom

loaf
full of love
his pudgy hands an old musty nintendo controller.  explaining the game to his bored
younger cousins. then beating them at their own fighting game on the newer psp3 and
they roll their eyes at him.  you're so boring, they tell him. his cue to toss back
another beer

loaf
let me show you how to get the secret item, he says
so stoned he forgets to eat.  and the carls jr his friend got him
sits by him, until tomorrow.  it's still good, he decides when he
wakes.  and he eats it

oh loaf
he would bunker at his friends house to try and learn to fix cars
when his mom throws him out.  and greasey under nails goes to the
diner down the street to laugh with the local ditz waitress later
on, to ask her to a date and she goes.  a month later, she breaks
his heart; she had so much fun.  but she realizes that she cannot
stay. she must go back to her husband and her son. they found her
and they want her back still; after all she's done...

loaf doesnt go to work for a while
and his friend threatens to throw him out of their place.  so he
shows up slow and still fixes cars.  rubbing his greasy hands on
a greasy rag, before eating lunch, or punching the cash register
as if that fixes anything. loaf stays late and so does his buddy
but the business goes down, his friend claims that loaf was rude
but the books say that his friend stole money for cocaine, maybe
loaf didnt care about cocaine, but look at that. and the day, it
comes.

loaf goes out of the apartment when the sherrif knocks.  even if
before he would just lay on the bed, with dirty sheets over head
and this time, when his friend was out, getting more coke, steal
if he had to.  loaf lets the sherrif enter, and he says, i don't
want any of this stuff. leaves his old video games, porn mags he
can't get the grease out from under the nails.  walks the street
wondering where to go. his sister long since arrested or perhaps
in another state (of being?)... he sits at that bridge once more
this time, looking into the water, but it's just green moss that
he sees.

remembers what he said watching women 
he lusted for, that he might approach
still feeling they wouldnt appreciate
his desire. about having a sense of humor... realizes he's just
gotten fatter, even when working more and more. watching trains
rumble by track
track
track
one after the other.  he doesnt even know his mom's number.  he
just throws a few rocks into the river. lays in the grass watch
the birds play.  sees the trees sway
thinks to himself before drifts away
could life get any better?

loaf.

  lo-
    af

loaf.
the name known to bums across wichita
they talk about him, between alleyways
rocking out to garage indie bands
sometimes out of tune
always out and aggressive

his teachings across the midwest
where the grass is so green
and the sky so blue.  you'd
think every horizon a postcard

little barn houses, small fences
every other street is a US highway

sprayed across concrete bricks in new york
in red yellow and blue

loaf was here
     the smiling faces in skidrow
where every other homeless is a child
skin so black. faces and bodies so thin
loaf now with a beard, like santa claus
maybe
only shabbier, with a dirty flannel blanket
some old lady gave him one morning when he stood shivering
the first person he touched
loaf
still clumsy, throwing soccer balls to children
throwing rocks into the river
watching the train go by

everything is deep.  everything is fine
loaf thinks he sees the long ghost of rumi
and schiller together in a late night 99 cents store
in brooklyn

he follows them, touching the products they touch
leaving behind a trail of finger prints
no one stops him
his expression estactic.  his feet are blistered
and bleeding a little.  he says to walk naked with the earth
you wouldn't wear gloves to hold your mother's hand, he says.

he thinks they part ways in the feminine hygeine section
but they do not
he follows them out and they are gone

once again in the snow he is shivering.
gives his blanket to a lost boy.  takes the boy to the police
the police keep him for questioning

when the tramuatized parents arrive the boy is grinning
shows his parents the dirty blanket proudly
the police show the parents an empty cell

they turn to the child, 
he astonished, has no blanket

who organizes the homeless to sing carols during xmas
who brings the runaways back home
    or leads the police to domestic disputes
who leaves a trail of flowers in snow
    a shape of foot prints
brings a distraught mother back home
finds his sister when she survived a car crash

my in dreams it's still the same
loaf breaks himself a piece off,
offers it as flesh
  but never himself so endless
  a name for bread
  of every language
  sustanence do we
  get it when we need it
  do we find it
  when we look?

  it is prevailent in all things
  an undercurrent always present
  buried too easily in loud trauma
  when we most easily lose equilibrium
  the imbalance of noise
  topsy turvy
  and when we need most the quietude 
  available if you are the utmost
  receptive to it
  always there
  like the sky
expansive, 
open
overcoating

On me watching Porky’s

June 19, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, universal nothing / No Comments

I wonder what its like to live a life where you want the world to end. Where you want to put a stop to all sadness or happiness. Every few years you hear rumors that everything will stop — that we are out of control and beyond all reason.

And what must that be like, to be so disappointed?

I’m sure the little things are alright. I am sure that you can still pet your dog, or glance out your side window while driving and see a beautiful bird in mid-flap, soaring by you. I am sure your lunch still tastes good. And that it’s nice to take your shoes off and lay in bed. Plus you can still look forward to orgasms… But to lose your belief, to lose some fundamental faith? What must that be like? And then, why even get up in the morning? Why even stay sober?

It must be disappointing when, like the day after your 10th birthday, you get up and life goes on. Mornings are still foggy. People still stop at starbucks on their way to work, and they don’t seem to care that the sky has fallen, and shown its skeleton — and that there’s nothing there. Only you see it. Nothing left at all. Nothing.

I don’t think that I have a problem with this. But I think some people do. In thirty years, where will I be? I’ve seen now that the super-geniuses can grasp and implement like nothing else. And while it’s magical when that happens, ITS FUCKING REAL. I suppose my fault was that I thought I would always make typos and have to test functions that I just wrote. But the fact of the matter is, everything is well within grasp and it seems the only thing stopping anyone is my own lack of focus. I must have wasted 3 hours just walking in circles imaginging lines of code that I was too tired to write. But it’s all right there, within grasp. The time taken to write anything is well less than the time taken to decide what it is you want to write.

one thing I don’t get is why anyone gets out of bed. about 7 or 8 years ago… I suppose I found my answer. I want to keep things going, keep things interesting… I want to do the things I do because that’s the best way to keep challenged. It’s a play-dough world. But what if you didn’t think it mattered, that nothing was worth doing or that your job was horrible and that was the best you could do?

I can’t imagine what that must be. I can’t imagine what it must be to be the downtrodden of the earth, to be the remnants of something else. To always be 5 minutes off. I mean, there isn’t any perfection. It’s all shit. We’re all lego pieces, stuff that we have lying around that we use as best we can. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about anything. We just have the morals we have because that’s part of the challenge. That’s part of the picture. And even if there isn’t a picture it’s just part of who you are.

Sometimes I don’t understand myself. I think I lost something within the last few months, or maybe a year or two ago, and I just didn’t notice. In a way though, once you touch upon it, there’s really nothing there. You’re standing on your own two feet. And while the mirror of other people’s faces is your own mirror — when they dance or wonder — you respond… so the puppetshow is alive and well, but that’s not what I had thought would be there. It’s like how in the process of learning chess the board will get so big, and other times get so small. It’s a matter of what’s in the box. And yet in the end, you need desire. I can’t account for that. Can you? Men and women greedy in different ways — and need to be greedy in different ways. You need to have unfathomable connections to things like volcanos, unicorns and the bottom of the ocean. And I guess that’s the only way to walk under a continually shattering sky.

Losing faith isn’t like anything actually changes, it’s more like finding yourself in the wrong parallel universe. We’re just sort of trapped in between slides of ourselves. And then when like at the end of a sonata we have the recapitulation, we return home and find out that it’s incomplete, and not right.

You know I hate Lord of the Rings. But that’s Frodo coming home. He’s left and returned to the physical location but unlike Dorothy he can’t go home.

Because there isn’t a home for him anymore.

At times like this, I suppose we need to be the brave travelers of the world. We have to be the sundry spirits of Xanadu or some kind of nonsense like that. the alchemist, whatever. Alchemy is a matter of spirit, a matter of individual transcendence… but that’s the same kind of psychotic misalignment those mediveal alchemists had — they mistook spirit for something physical. Iimagine Rene Descartes or some such philosopher digging through corpses looking for the seat of the soul. And yet all they find is more fibroblasts. Blood, collagen. What does this seat even look like? Madmen have searched through hundreds of dead bodies, eagerly cutting into the dead criminals looking for something they know not what.

That’s the wonder of Star Trek you know. They are messages in a bottle zipping around a deadly serious and completely apersonal universe being hysterical about themselves. I’m sure Herman Hesse’s Stepphenwolf is laughing Mozart right now. That sounds about right. So many directions I can go in! All of them amount to sand though. It’s your own trip. And beneath that, is more of your own trip. That you have a trip, or that you don’t have one. It’s so meta it’s the next Hipster Kitty.

But at the same time it’s like, you can do something about it. so why not “go green” or whatever. Save the Earth! Or fuck the Earth, the Earth can take care of itself lets just drive our cars around and be stupid, cuz that’s the most fun. I really look around and see nothing but that, and I despise it. All those commercials on tv, where everyone just parties and parties. Cuz I guess only so many of us sit in an office, so only so many of us get that — but everyone, and anyone can and should party.

Pointless.

but I guess I prefer to sit in my room and listen to music and stare at my navel. That’s what I did today. And oh, sometimes I crammed small bits of electronic material ushered carefully down fragile tubes to generate more fragile “documents” so as to appease people who were convinced by me (mostly) to pay us hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, to have.

It sounds kind of goofy but that’s only until you realize that it’s not like the money matters either.

This is what ppl do when they have too much time on their hands.

This is what i do.

See what happens when I watch 80s high school comedies about getting laid? I guess this is the same thing. Me laughing at some guy’s penis stuck in the wrong place.

On Entropy

May 28, 2011 / posted in Theory / No Comments

The failure of language is the interjection of reason as a substitute — a short hand for what actually happens IRL. IRL is not interested in values, desires or shoulds — only like water, going to the first lower, more stable point.

In other words, the reason why d&g don’t ask why. only how.

And it is through this how that we etch out the virtual which provides the basis for what is selected qua actual.

The Violence of Subjectivity complements our Lack of Negativity

May 5, 2011 / posted in dialectics, life as we know it, manifesto, Theory, Universal non-all / 2 Comments

There is an inherent violence in being a subject.

AS what Slavoj Zizek calls the universal exception, our subjectivity each, is an exception of the unbreakable rule of the universal.

This subjectivity must be “non-all” an untotalized whole which prevents the universal from foreclosing.

Part of why I think so much continental philosophy goes on and on about subjectivity and cannot bridge the gap between subjectivity and society remains in this gap between the “non-all” and the universal.

A great part of why modern philosophy starts with Kant is that Kant provides exegesis on subjectivity — but only does so at the expense of the noumenal.  Kant sacrifices the rest of the world, the external world in exchange for securing subjective phenomenal experience.

Hegel tries to fix Kant.  The genuis of Hegel is that he wrote on the extra subjectivity, the becoming-universal of particulars — he tried to bridge that gap with his dialectical absolutist system, to totalize the non-all and unproblematize the subjectivity by enfolding it back into the Notion.

Whether he succeeds or not is up to debate of course, but no other philosopher has come close to his achievement.  This is why Hegel remains for both Marx and Lacan (in fact even today), the godfather — Hegel provides the only comprehensive system of talking about the universal qua society with an eye on the particular.  He does so by nearly sacrificing the subjective, but saves it through a kind of transcendental rambling.

By comparison, Deleuze and Guattari don’t even talk about subjectivity; they make it irrelevant.  Graham Harman also side-steps this Cartesian mutualism by going via the Object with Merleau-Ponty and his notion of flesh.

But I’m not going to go in depth to examine others.

What’s so damning about Hegel is that through his particular becoming-universal he found the universal on the particular, through a kind of metaphysical “raising” of essence.  This is obviously what Deleuze and Guattari do with various meta-tools, like territorializations and refrains, the difference though is that Hegel does this raising through negation.

Negation eliminates what does not fit that form.  To emphaize my point, Kristeva attributes negation as a concept to Hegel — the specific making of a negative (something).  Contrast this with Kant and Kristeva points out that Kant only discovered negativity — the absence of what we are looking for.

The negation of Hegel allows us not only a radical de-subjectivising but also the clearing of room to make way for the *trumpet sounding* throne of one particular to rise up to the throne of universality. In contrast, Kant used negativity in order to make room.

Where violence comes into place is our rejection of the negation.  Our supposition as a subjectivity must come about through social effluence — we stand up to this symbolic universal by declaring our relevance against our own negation by this universal.

We tear out and subjectivise what would be an object.  We would do violence to universals and other would-be universal small-others through our radical Otherness qua subjectivity.  Think of the violence today perhaps in Libya and Egypt

Think of the French Revolution.

Think of all the expressions of free-self organization that the U.N. throughout the 20th century and up till today have stamped out, and how small-other Universals qua government seek to legitimize their claim on what would be a universal expression of their own brand of subjectivity… we return to State Democracy its own Jacobianian Excesses in the form of our own self-subjectivisation which then must always be violent.

This is also how Hegel is also the first modern philosopher-statesman inasmuch as the first and only true philosopher on modern Universality.

Unfortunately we seem stuck on this in Continental Philosophy and unable to articulate other forms of universality. We can’t articular a society let alone conceive of one. And no, ramblings of a disintegrated body of objectivity does not a society make.

So no: the radical pluralism of Deleuze and Guattari do not count simply because while they clear our the space for alternate forms they are too reactionary against Hegel to be useful in constructivism.  It’s also questionable as to whether or not we are at a point in which there is enough space for anything else to be constructed.

from Social to Universal, what comes after a Monetized Economy?

April 29, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rules, Uncategorized, utility / No Comments

I’ve written about the failure of our economic models to account for our happiness and welfare in the work place. I want to go into a little more detail about what an alternative view for our society might look like post-money, but first, some more general news about the failure of our economic models to register real value outside of the work place in terms of the Global Economy.

 

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

…expresses a criticism of the FED. At the Roosevelt Institute there recently was a panel on the Future of the Federal Reserve, a large debate surrounding the current actions and criticisms of the Federal Reserve as well as panel talks about the FED’s current program, the so called QE2 which is scheduled to be halted by June of this year without a clear date (or even plans) for a better and more effective QE3.

It seems that the general consensus agreed upon by everyone except the Fed and the government is that QE2 was in fact too conservative to be a success and was in fact a failure. QE2 did not generate the jobs people hoped for nor did it spark the economy with low interest rates.

The FED becomes an easy target in current debates as to why the economy is at risk as to why haven’t job growth happened and who is to blame. I am not an economist, so I will spare you the details, but I am very interested in the subject. If anything, we are plagued by a systematic failure of the existing financial infrastructure. The problem comes from huge debt. In order to handle many of the national and international debts that are due this year entire nations will have to get debt financing. The question, of course, is who do they get it from?

If the government that prints money has no money to pay for its debt, then who does it?

The current bailout situations and the burst of that financial bubble earlier in 2008-9 resulted in monetizing private debt as public debt. A short term solution seems to be simply to do the same thing again. If that happens, loser in these transactions will be individuals who have saved up money. It will eat away at the savings of the American public — in fact of the rest of the world since the US dollar is known as “reserve currency” meaning that people in other countries will use the US dollar to transact business because their own government’s money is not considered stable enough. In fact, China has the largest amount of US currency in reserve, totalling an astounding 3 trillion dollars.

But of course, decisions the FED stem directly from situations here in the U.S. and not of the rest of the world.

This might stave off the problem for another time, but the debt problem persists. Interest rates will mount and at some future point an even larger debt will be incurred, things time with our public economy and our private savings exhausted… our credit exhausted…

So what is the solution?

If you are not sure if you can trust the reserve currency, the idea is to switch to a currency you CAN trust. In this case, GOLD and SILVER. SO you see that the price of gold is to break $1,600 for a troy ounce by the end of 2011. Additionally companies that mine metals are a desired commodity as well as indicated by China’s repeated bids to buy foreign mining and farming companies. In fact there are rumored talks among some of China’s officials to reinvest their U.S. Currency into Gold.

So why aren’t U.S. officials fazed? Everyone’s doing the same dance right now — everyone’s still using U.S. currency. At some point there needs to be an exit strategy. According to Max Keiser, Goldman-Sachs officials have started sipon money from the stock market into commodities and alternative currencies. One such online company, Zynga, wildly successful for its which had made a move last year in Oct 2010 to create its own currency. With the investment of Goldman-Sachs officials, the Fed is investigating the matter. According to Keiser though, Goldman-Sachs is siphoning money from Wall Street all the while keeping the bubble of pricing up through the use of computers that trade. One of his evidences despite the Dow’s recent record high even in this bad economy stems from the drop in VOLUME even while the PRICE is high. The idea being that the unwitting American shareholder will be left holding the worthless shares when this new bubble bursts.

 

Holding the bag means holding… what?

So my judgmental sentiments aside, it seems that when the economy “downsizes” in value because of inflation — because the monetization of our economy creates excess value, value based on speculation of the future value of money — the system will implode. Much of this is doom and gloom. One fair indicator of when this will happen in the near future is the fall of the United States as an economic power — passing its economic torch to its largest landowner, China as soon as 2016 according to Chris Martenson.

This of course may not happen, 2016 still is over one presidential term away, and who knows maybe Bernanke will wisen up and the Financial overlords that bombed a 65 trillion dollar world economy to personally make for themselves a few million will find themselves in jail…

But if that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that we homo sapiens will have to reorganize into a new resource distribution system. Doubtlessly, this will involve money, as people have always had money, but it may not involve capital as the primary exchange for labor.

This is a little beyond the scope of this post, but it’s perhaps important to note that democratization of private industries is not the key to establishing a more free society.  The logic of freedom, as Zizek put it eloquently:

the key to actual freedom resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family. Here the change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production—which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other “political” measure in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.” In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital.

He continues on here, citing how violence is the inescapable and inevitable truth of the States’ impotence, and that extending the logic of the state into new regimes is a needless production of the same. So rather than dwell in violence and democracy, let us instead move back into the apolitical communities where most of us are heavily invested and are infact, as American sitcoms like to show us, largely apolitical.

There are perhaps an infinite number of possibilities but I will cover only one form, Peer to Peer Networks, which, instead of being an extension of state democracy, or state anything, rather is an extension of the communal commons “space” by which most of us interact anyway… (even if it’s not recognized by our current global the economy as such.)

 

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

The rosey scenario of so called Peer to Peer Networks comes from a computer analogy but it carries with it a sociological ideology of individuals interacting as individuals and not through the manifests of corporations. Peer to Peer interaction gets a great deal of exploration through P2P Foundation, a utopian organization that seeks to explore the very real possibility of a new form of distribution closer to the maxim ‘think global, act local’ in which interested individuals interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways. If you think this is radically different from Homo Economius, you’re absolutely right. This organization tends towards the touchy-feely-poetics but one article likens the difference between spiritual self-suifficiency vs interdependent interbeiningness via “spiritual collectives” vs “gurus” with the emphasis on collectives as being more wholesome since we are socially interconnected.

There is much to be said and in my opinion (not said) about how P2P is beneficial but as presented here, the impetus is to take a larger view of who we are as human beings and offer a human solution rather than one concocted through the confines of “Rational Choice Theory“. The thinker I would like to cite for this line of thought is Hazel Henderson.

Henderson is a grown-up hippie. Her main attack on the economy today stems from what she sees as two critiques:

  • Seeing monetary exchange as the only meaningful measurement of production
  • understanding human beings as theoritical economic creatures that seek only to maximize utility and reduce cost

    • She points out of course, that people are not so perfectly greedy, although greed is a part of who we are… and that over half of all the meaningful production occurs through the work of women. The PTA meetings, the cooking, the cleaning, even helping your neighbor paint their house on the weekend — these are meaningful acts of production that are not measured in any form of monetary exchange. Likewise, for her, financial instruments whose only purpose is to change a tax status or promote speculation is not a meaningful act of production, although it carries with it a monetary cost. Many of the ‘goods’ we enjoy, like the environment, likewise cannot be monetized, valued or taken into the consideration as a cost inherent in any kind of business plan. As such, the environment is generally worthless and meaningless according to economic theory. Also, our hanging onto the notion of GDP as a meaningful measurement of economic health makes no sense, especially since new cars may be exchanged between two countries and then counted as GDP for both countries.  Structurally her critique means a few things:

    • Money fails as an indicator of meaning since it fails to objectively capture what we value
    • On the producer side, a variety of interactions exist without any consideration of money (they are valueless, even if those behaviors maintain the quality of life for all)

    Our attempt to organize our society around economic theories of value is a terrible thing, resulting in incredible amounts of waste and human misery. We work too long to support those we love who we never see because we have to work.  An extensive video of hers can be found here: The Alternative Economy of Hazel Henderson.

    If you are like me, then I apologize, because the only thing I find somewhat grating is that she calls it the “Love Economy”. All the same, her suggestion is not to remove money, but to de-center it.  Instead of money, we would find meaningful metrics in the healthiness of society through several different axises which are not tied to the market.  She cites thirteen separate axises of human need.  For instance, the quality of clean air will be measured by environmental engineers on a scale relevant to their industry, not to a dollar value which can then be compared to other monetized “goods” and found to be more or less valuable than other goods as an ‘objective’ dollar amount.

    The Love Economy however, is just one expression of P2P. In the larger picture, the Love Economy stems from a trying to arrange society in order to maximize it values, something which is largely impossible to maintain if you hold that the only value is the collection of money.

    This would mean the end of the cost-benefit analysis and ROI for decision making. (If you would like to glance a governmental body of text related to the work I do on a daily basis for businesses, take a peek: Cost Benefit Analysis for Americans with Disabilities Act 2010, in particular “side transfer for water closets 602.3”.) Even if this text puts you off, I am afraid most of us would not be able to function without these kinds of “objective” guidelines.  How would managers or committees decide any course of action without a financial basis to limit and define meaningful activity?

    It’s most likely too, that the destruction of money as the primary signifier/coupler/de-/re-territorialisating agent will signal the end of corporations. The injunction of corporations as legal entities that benefits key players in the corporate hierarchy must end.  Corporations as entities of ownership and resource control were seen by Marx as a form of communism and collective ownership, but modern corporations are concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few:  I forget where I heard this but something like the top 34 corporations in the world have more GDP than all but the top 8 countries, of which the corporations are “members of”, but you can imagine how long that would last, especially with a weakened US dollar.  As reported by Lenin’s Tomb this class struggle is comparable to what’s happening in other countries like the middle east because it’s a class struggle, even if the stakes are somewhat different.  If corporations throw their weight around, of course local governments that can’t follow them need to provide conditions for those corporations such that a corporation will understand that it makes monetary sense for them to stay.  This is perhaps ironic for those of us living in the United States, as our material wealth in the 50s – 90s had come from corporation’s exploitation and the oppression of other nations for the US’s material interests, as pointed out by Keith Hart.

    But now that the corporations have become increasingly powerful in a global economy, they have the option of forcing by design or accident local changes to their favor.  It’s not too far off then, that Corporations can be considered the dominant species on the planet.

     

    from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

    Given such a dramatic statement, for us individuals to understand our place in the world we cannot rely on simply being just a citizen of a nation or a worker inside another corporation.  We have to understand our role as producers and consumers, first and foremost (since that is how we meaningfully interact with a value-system of money).  This switch from citizen to consumer/producer fuels much of the current revolution in Search Engine Optimization.  Most of the industry is still mulling over how social networking influences online presence.

    Online presence includes all the online discussion in the 3rd dimension of consumer to consumer (the first being business to consumer and the second being consumer to business).  The freedom of information on the internet has eliminated the days when corporations had control over their timely product unveilings, or their press releases.  The internet has allowed companies to have a better feedback of what works for their customers and what doesn’t.  Since the speed of information is so much faster, companies need to release products that aren’t perfected in order to remain competitive or deal with informal press releases better.  Both Apple and Coke have proven adept at providing expression as their main marketing maneuver rather than the more traditional marketing which aims at offering consumers impressions.  The influx of twitters and facebook “likes” and “shares” have proven to have an increasingly huge but causally unclear influence on search engine ranking.  Already all the major SEO companies have begun to recognize that in good marketing relationships with customers online, your cusomters produce your best (and worse) content.  More often than not, relationship building online and instantaneous information flow has allowed each of us to become both consumer and producer.

    Which brings me to back to the original point, the producer-consumer dichotomy. One interesting point, among others, that came from an interview with Rachel Botsman came from her observation that we generally think of ourselves as citizens only, or first. That kind of view will need to change in the near future when we have to reorient ourselves as simply participants. In a peer to peer economy, we will be both consumer and producer, not just consumer. We will be directly responsible for our individual interaction and participation as to how resources are transacted. Her example is eBay, in which strangers can participate on equal footing for remote merchandise that is bought without examination.

    The philosophical implications of this are many.  The internet has provided a new objective, recordable voting mechanism for companies to be ranked even before consumers open their wallet to “vote” in economic transactions.  A blogger can collect a valuable audience which then becomes an asset to marketers.  Facebook is an extremely intelligent implementation of this kind of collection of information, perhaps one that rivals even Google, with it’s long term information hoarding.  This kind of objective interaction with the Other verges on an interaction with the Universal.

    Arguably this kind of dichotomy was marked by the first modern cosmopolitian philosopher, Hegel.  Hegel reverses the formalism of Kant by extending Kant beyond subjectivity and as Zizek says, Subjectivising substance devoid of content.  By the imposition of his dialectical process, Hegel reaches the notion of the Universal, garnishing a multitudinous rambling along the way.  Any contemporary philosopher who seeks to tackle the universal must address Hegel, even if it’s by avoiding the Hegelian Dialectic method.

    The most traditional conception of the universal is best expressed through Lacan’s (read Zizek’s) Real in which madness, phantasms and partial objects cannot cohere into a meaningful subject.  Is this rhetorically not the perfect analogy to describe the unlinked disorder of the internet where we reach 404 and partial hits on keywords — such as when I search for one word and get something completely different that I click on?  I don’t want to go into schizoanalysis or anything like that.  Rather I want to point out that our relationship with the universal, especially as monitored through the internet is mediated by a direct attempt by a corporatized other to impose universality on each of us small others through a medley of law (and other paranoiac applications).  Whether this be through the paranoid discourse of the state (legality) or through the internet’s opposing hysteria as expressed through Bing’s initial video campagin today we have the increased injunction from the Other Enjoy! and Obey! simultaneously.

    This is not a new injunction.  I won’t blame this on Hegel, but increasingly in an more ethnic world with global trade, everything becomes relevant for examination — starting with culture and human rights and ending with intellectual property and intangible costs.

    Overlawyered.com‘s author, Walter Olson has written extensively about how the legal system has developed into the political monstrosity it exists as today.   Apparently attorneys before law school were more pragmatic, trained on their job in apprenticeships.  After law school invoked a liberal agenda to use the legal system to argue for change, everything became a matter of litigation — what was perhaps previously a personal dispute between you and your boss now became a matter of employee and employer for all to bear witness to.  Increasingly individual concerns have become scrutinized, first through totalitarian states like Stalin and Maoist Communisms, but more recently in the overlawyered culture that exists today — anyone can sue anyone for anything, right or wrong.  The influx of attorneys qua politicians (up to 30% or 40% of politicians are attorneys, I believe) comes from the desire to use the court room as a place to change law, which it isn’t supposed to be.  Legislation is supposed to change laws.

    Anyway, in many ways, the injection of the internet into the intermix of what is accountable (accidential emails, even blogging about belly dancing can ruin a divorce settlement).  This kind of dissemination of all aspects of human life even a humorous but somewhat mostly true guide on how to live with your philosopher-relative or life-partner becomes fodder for the voracious paranoia (followed by aimless surfing/hysteria) leaving footprints of human desire and meaning objectified even if this wealth of information doesn’t lend itself directly to meaning.

    Don’t get me wrong, participation in the world is definitively more meaningful than retracting into rigid rationalism, i.e., Hegel is more relevant than Kant, who can’t even leave his house without a God as a universal-guideline.  After all, isn’t that what WW2 showed Sartre?  Young Sartre stopped writing so much and took his place as a public intellectual, held himself accountable for his actions and attempted to take his message of humanism and authenticity in the face of an ever-growing global economy of maginalization and monetization of human meaning.  After all, old Sartre knew that meaning was in social interaction not in transactions.

    Social interactions is something people complain about losing, in an environment with too many people, when we can be alone in a city of one or fifty million people.  Companies are finding out that we got choices — as with any sales person today has to answer to each of their clients: “Why should we buy from you?”

    Just like companies are discovering that collecting Facebook shares and re-tweets is the truest indicator of actual meaning.  And that meaningful relationship will lead to trust, reliance and transactions.  Given this article, that social networking produces the same chemicals falling in love, perhaps I should rescind my statement — that love economy isn’t so far off…. only perhaps “economy” is outdated.

    Perhaps we should call it the love network.

    How I am ME(aningless).

    April 11, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

    I have been called a nihilist before.

    That might be true, depending on your point of view. Personally, I don’t think it’s a meaningful description… so while most of what I write on here is ‘the big picture’ to the point where people do not exist, I am writing here now to bring it back to where I stand in all this.

    Metaphysically, I also subscribe to the notion of a metaphysical void in which we cannot know or even begin to organize ‘what is out there’. Furthermore, unlike many human beings I do not believe that what I do is important to the universe. I don’t think that my life matters to the universe, nor that human beings as a whole matter. I also don’t think that the ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ that I have in my head has any bearing whatsoever on any kind of universal synthesis. Sure, I hold political views, I have a sense of morals and justice, but in the face of the cosmos that’s quite irrelevant.

    So you might take it that I don’t mistake my/our human existence to have any meaning per se. We are as it were, mostly observers, often participants but following no script. I do not make the mistake of mistaking my sense for any kind of cosmological signification — in the sense of metaphor, truth, ruling, principle, or universality.

    I had been told a Mormon who was a very good friend at the time that this kind of world-view was untenable, depressing and burdensome. I do after all, believe in taking responsibility for my actions… even their unintended consequences as much as possible. But in as much as I rely on me, I also rely on the others around me. Family, friends, society at large… we are all in this together and if things are too much; no problem. We can take it one moment at a time. It’s just that there’s no going back… for anything.

    So what keeps me going? (one moment at a time…) As a personal note I believe that what I do makes the world a better place. (You can read all about how we help businesses comply with the requirements for disability access.) I also believe in social entrepreneurship — and I strongly believe that government should support people, rather than being a tool used for profit. I believe in supporting those who I love and cherish — although this isn’t without its conditions — I expect people around me to also try to be good and upstanding people as well (perhaps a bit old fashioned but whatever). I also believe in fair dealings and trying to be honest and open about as much as possible.

    In my daily routines, what keeps me going is the accumulation of meaningful activity, either through successful business dealings (in which businesses and institutions believe in our corporate vision) or through my own personal growth. I seek to understand more of how to navigate the universal void around me — even through there are no steady foundations as to what is truth.

    Yes, there is meaning in my life. I live a very meaningful life. I believe in love, and helping and doing good, although how each of these plays out is particular to me. (I don’t think people love, or help, or do good in the same ways.)

    So in case you can’t tell, yes, I am relatively young — a part of the first generation in the history of humankind to be part of a decentralized and mobile work force. We can still get jobs in huge corporations but more than ever while regulations on business have been steadily raised in the last 20 years to a dizzying point — the barriers to entry on services and marketing have been steadily eroded.

    So this in part may explain where I stand. I’m terribly introspective for a young 30 something. But I also don’t have a huge cloud over me telling me to get married, buy a house, or how to work in my everyday life. Well, yes I do, but I also have enough freedom to make my own way. This in part, explains a huge part of who I am and why I am philosophically; the two mutually support one another. I’m not a junior adjunct professor with a set semesterly schedule dreaming of being a bigshot in any kind of social circle. But I’m also not a junior C.P.A. wanting to decide the future of… whatever junior C.P.A.s dream of. My future is quite uncertain as is the company I am helping build.

    I am meaningless. Open. The biggest weights on me are taxes, monthly bills and my own lack of knowledge or confidence.

    I suppose in part, this is what it’s like to be young. To feel like I can do the things I set out to do, and to feel as though I can rely on nothing but myself.

    Quite an exciting time to be alive.

    Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

    March 27, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

    When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path.  It went something like this:

    1. Go to public school
    2. Go to College
    3. Get a job
    4. Get married and buy a house
    5. Have kids
    6. Work until your kids have left home
    7. Work until you retire
    8. ????

    I asked them, what’s the point of that?  They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us.  We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

    But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say.   I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate.  After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

    Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

    But that’s the catch isn’t, it?  I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

    If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy.  Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy.  So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism.  How does meaning fit in?

    After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning.  In particular:

     

    Meaning in the Workplace

    I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson.  You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs.  The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?)  To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job.  For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like.  What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself.  And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

    So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do.  What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy.  If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours.  That’s kind of a sad thought.  All those turn-key children.  Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

    No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters.  Here’s a compelling quote:

    My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

    Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

    Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about?  Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

    So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

    Sounds like managers also need to become teachers!  And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers!  So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

    Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be.  But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

    What happens when we lose meaning?

     

    The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

    Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit).  If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

    The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it.  If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

    From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis.  This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers.  I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful.  The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit.  The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit.  I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly).  When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

    So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s).  By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was.  I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

    But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression.  And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism.  If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us.  To quote Callinicos,

    The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

    Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

    While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

    But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

    This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

    The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

    It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

    But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

    That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

    So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.  That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary.  Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system.  Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

    Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further.  Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me!  What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

     

    Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

    Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone.  But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself.  People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well.  So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis.  We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change.  Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”.  So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”.  The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading.  Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”.  Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

    Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

    So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

    My evidence for this?  Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis.  This one is personal.  While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy.  Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy.  What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles?  It’s worth quoting:

    Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

    The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

    What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

    But then we knew this already.  Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp.  His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive.  He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

    I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up.  And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning.  For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us.  Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way.  Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

    Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning.  Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $.  The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

    Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time.  And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty.  I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

    And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

    So the takeaway?  If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day.  Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs.  I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe.  But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work.  This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering.  The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The main difference is that the world then was much bigger.  Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go.  We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

    If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence.  Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means.  Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table.  We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together.  I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

    So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory.   This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric.  Only one kind of meaningful metric exists:  MONEY.

    One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined.  But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission?  Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network?  Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

    Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

    But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings.  This article:  Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

    What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

    Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

    The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

    I am not familiar with the author of this article.  Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value.  That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

    But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

    It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment.  That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit.  Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way.  And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive.  What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

    Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing.  Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now.  Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility.  Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost.  Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

    After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff.  It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience.  Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

    So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination.  Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

    If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…

    Meaning in Art: Beyond Sentience

    March 14, 2011 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, universal nothing / No Comments

    Don Hertzfeldt has an interesting video called “The Meaning of Life”

    It’s a bit obscure, probably because it’s been taken down, but you can watch it here.

    On wikipedia, it’s been compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odessey, a movie which I do like. Actually most of the movie is too slow for me, and it’s the beginning and ends that make it up for me.

    You might find the ‘stories’ people tell interesting about it. And how he relates this against the narratives of evolution, death and universal chaos/order is particularly telling. One of the strengths of a visual and musical narrative is that you can’t quite argue with it. In effect he points at certain images, which are vaguely related to concepts. You can see what you want.

    What I mean is that the visual and acoustic connections are the links. In order to relate one part to the next in words… that’s room for argument. In effect then, it’s not really saying anything. Except look how visually stunning this can be.

    How people’s stories, the things they walk around with their heads full of, aliens or not, doesn’t seem to match up at all to anything that happens in the larger whole. That’s not to say that their stories are meaningless, it’s just meant for a more personable context, here.

    Our pettiness is where we are. And for our everyday lives, that is what we are. Just like our pets are what they are, which is part of where they are.

    Nonetheless, the 12 minute short is definitely worth watching. If the awe we get from us connects us to a larger whole, then I think the video has made it’s intended impact.

    That is, the point I think, a point in art. At least the ‘great’ art which is meant to be ‘universal’ To make that larger impact, so that for a moment we are beyond where we are, beyond being me or you, beyond our every day attention, beyond being human… and beyond sentience.

    Language is part of our every day negotiation with each other, and a natural extension of who we are where we are in the world. It’s one of the best tools that we have. Unfortunately, it’s not made very well to express something like the beyond…

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