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Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

June 24, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismLess Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What is “less than nothing” is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel’s dialectical project. But really, this nothing is also the “form” by which phenomenon is understood. That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world.

It’s actually pretty simple. The universal, the a priori, is the emptiness that is lost in understanding the Real. This is because we can’t apprehend understanding directly; we can only see it through the empirical world. The closest we get to understanding itself, so to speak, is the petit object a, the pure signifier that is its own lack necessarily: without this particle of necessary being we wouldn’t be able to see being in the world at all. As Zizek says, for Heidigger, we wouldn’t have Sein without Das Sein.

Zizek goes to great lengths to demonstrate the post-structural condition: that how we read comes before what we read. Borrowing from Karen Barad, we can separate how we read from what we read, because we can use how we read to discover what we read — or we can use what we read to discover how we read – but we cannot discover their entanglement, that is the border between the two. To paraphrase him, in order to find out how the two go together, we need to realign the objects so that we, the viewing apparatus and the object in question, are tested against a third thing…which is impossible. There is no third point of view, in the theory of relativity. Results always come from the position of the viewing apparatus, as it cannot be outside itself. Philosophically, there’s no third view either. We may try to step out of this understanding, out of the metaphysician’s realm, but all attempts to determine the root of discourse find themselves mired in the failure to fully explain the framing of that discourse. To put it another way, Zizek notes that antiphilosophy is at the heart of philosophy. With each failure to explain antiphilosophy, we get more philosophy. With this line of reasoning, Zizek, as usual, goes through a huge nest of thinkers to demonstrate how their different philosophies circumambulate various centers of discourse:

The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. [. . .] The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground (841).

Of course, Zizek wants to say that Hegel was the first to reach this irreducible ground, as the synthesis of consciousness – and he traces this through a variety of manners that is both entertaining and enlightening. But Barad’s point remains; whatever language Zizek adopts, we see the mysterious Presence continually being shuffled from point to point, which reduces all discourse to a manner of tautology:

The mistake resides in the fact that the limit pertaining to the form itself (to the categories used) is misperceived as a contingent empirical limitation. In the case of cognitivism: it is not that we already have the categorical apparatus necessary to explain consciousness (neuronal process, etc), and our failure to have yet done so pertains only to the empirical limitation of our knowing the relevant facts about the brain; the true limitation lies in the very form of our knowledge, in the very categorical apparatus we are using. In other words, the gap between the form of knowledge and its empirical limitation is inscribed in this form itself (284).

So while we understand the mysterious Real though our a priori categories, these categories give us an incomplete view. In order to mirror ourselves with the exterior, to be “appropriate” to reality, we create a standing social order, a consistency within discourses (or many discourses themselves) each of which approach the mystery of the world from another angle. These discourses are always defractions, which are in themselves incomplete, hinging on one another but only shuffling pure Presence about. Spoken through Fichte: this absence can be expressed as antoss, or as Lacan liked to say about the Self: “I think where I am not.” This can be unpacked to mean that the self is simply what mediates itself. In this way, Hegel remains for Zizek the genius that first notices how what we read is how we read:

In this sense, it is meaningless to call Hegel’s philosophy “absolute idealism”: his point is precisely that there is no need for a Third element, the medium or Ground beyond subject and object-substance. We start with objectivity, and the subject is nothing but the self-meditation of objectivity (144, original italics).

Unpacking this thought, lets realize that not only is the self “less than nothing” but “less than nothing” is also the pure Presence mediating the discourse itself. We get the symbolic reality through the loss of pure Presence. Its lack allows us to read through it to get discursive reality as a full blown immersive social environment of culture.

I rather enjoyed this lengthy and inspired book. To be brief, Zizek does philosophy to hide the fact that philosophy no longer works, that in Heidegger’s language, philosophy has been suspended while capitalism contemplates itself. In this sense, capitalism tries to say what reason cannot (in this sense, capitalism occupies the same position as Art for Kant, that of a second nature). No wonder then that Zizek says philosophy stopped with Hegel, that the many guises of Hegel are in fact not-Hegel or a stunted Hegel so that we can continue on with postmodernism, with the avant garde, because we haven’t learned Hegel yet… so we hide him away while we continue on in endless jouissance. So to cut to the chase:

In every discourse, in every sense-making, we either sacrifice completeness or we sacrifice contingency. Master discourses (like that of Gods) generally sacrifice contingency to create completeness, to wrap us in universals, to guarantee the universe be stable for us to live in. But in all of these cases (and you can go on ad infinitum), you will end up asking, why is there necessity? As in is there a “necessity particle” that makes existence be (as existence itself is without cause)? Why are things even necessary? Is there pure being somewhere? Zizek’s answer is to locate the split of symbolic reality (necessity) and the Real together within the subject, that only through a split subject do we get contingency as the only necessity. Our ability to understand is then only supplemented through both Reason and an encounter with the Real that stands in to verify the completeness of discursive truth. For Zizek the subject’s being split is another way of saying that necessary to subjectivity is the provision of what needs to be included within its view, of what cannot be compromised. Zizek provides the example where some Christians replied to Darwinism by insisting that the world was 4,000 years old, that fossils were placed in the Earth to test faith. Zizek doesn’t believe this to be true but he cites this example to show that the “grain of truth” in the Christian example is their

impossible-Real objectal counter-part which never positively existed in reality – it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil. [T]he exclusion of this object is consistitutive of the appearance of reality: since reality (not the Real) is correlative to the subject, it can only constitute itself through the withdrawal from it of the object which “is” the subject [. . .] What breaks up the self-closure of transcendental correlation is thus not the transcendent reality that eludes the subject’s grasp, but the inaccessibility of the object that “is” the subject itself. This is the true “fossil,” the bone that is the spirit, to paraphrase Hegel, and this object is not simply the full objective reality of the subject [. . .] but the non-corporeal, fantasmatic lamella. (645).

This is another way of encountering the symbolic Real, the meaningless floating signifier that would guarantee completeness, that is the subject in its actualization. Be this ontology, money, or joy, fear, anxiety, love, mana or luck, such signifiers often allow discourse to hinge on these terms in order for that discourse to continue to be relevant, a kind of antiphilosophy in the heart of philosophy or antilaw at the heart of law. Zizek writes

Every signifying field thus has to be “sutured” by a supplementary zero-signifier, a “zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains.” This signifier is “a symbol in its pure state”: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning and such in contrast to its absence, in a further dialectical twist, the mode of appearance of this supplementary signifier which stands for meaning as such is non-sense [. . .]. Notions like mana thus “represent nothing more or less that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought. (585, original italics).

So is there any way to get out? The only meaningful answer is no, as to escape pure Presence is to fall into non-sense, or at least a difference sense that is non-sense from where we current are. Even attempt to transgress the limits of the law end up invoking the law in its transgressed form, simply because those forms are how we understand. This is how the Real becomes mirrored within the symbolic as the pure form of the symbolic. The symbolic Real, which is what Zizek would call meaningless encodings necessary to moor our consistency (our discourse, so to speak), operates through the contingencies qua Real, a maneuver of the subject to mediate itself and actualize.

At this point, to recognize a new thing, like a new world order, or a solution from our capitalist dilemma, means coming to new coordinates, a new phenomenon, a new axis. Zizek locates this between drive and reason, to have the two come together. You can read this like the unification of money with language, but he leaves it open, because after all, these are metaphysical terms. Directly speaking, such terms are always beyond our understanding, lacking substance, even as they are always within the area delineated by our pure understanding, but completely impotent to interrupt our world and realign it. All we need is the right content to come along, the right void to allow us to rename it, and recognize it as the new event, in the language of Nietzsche, “the eternal return.” With that, we could have a new epoch, a new pure Presence emerging from nothingness itself, and that new Presence would be a new world order, a new symbolic Real to realign our world, to remake our world. Compared to anything in or current state it would be more than anything, a new nothing from which there would never be any possibility of return as we would irreparably be someone else.

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A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market

June 11, 2014 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Mathematician Plays The Stock MarketA Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What’s really interesting about other people’s reviews of this book is that they seem to expect a book on the stock market from a mathematician to be somehow be based in finance.

There are plenty of books on the stock market out there… that do so from a finance point of view.

This book is pretty brilliant although at first glance, it appears to be pretty straight forward… you think a mathematician would use his knowledge about math to somehow find some brilliant trick about the stock market. But that’s not how this plays out.

Math is a game of numbers. It’s a field of study that looks at patterns. But ultimately the numbers are a measurement, some kind of metric. What’s faulty about using the stock market from a pure numbers point of view is that the numbers in stock prices need to measure the a consistent value for any math relation to work. What I mean is simply that stock prices are based on what people do in terms of trading volume of a stock. Abstract all you like, but the immediate particular reason why anyone does what they do with stock is anyone’s guess.

We can assume that a change in stock prices has to do with an anecdote on the news about a company, or something happening somewhere related to a company. But that’s not always true. Sometimes things happen for seemingly no reason. Much of this, Paulos tries to explain has as much to do with how people perceive the market as much as it has to do with actual values. The later chapters are particularly brilliant on this account. The earlier chapters which seemed to promise this or that mathematical model, or this or that economic model… don’t pan out because as Paulos convincingly tells us, any model that we use to predict the stock market can be outdated unless the model itself anticipates how others will use it, made predictions and how those predictions will affect the market. In other words, any stock market model needs to also be self reflexive in how it’s applied — not just when it’s applied.

Paulo makes some pretty complex abstractions to do this; for instance, applying how the “Efficient Market Hypothesis” is either always correct (when people believe it to be wrong, thus playing the stock market off of information in the news, or about a company’s state) or it is always incorrect (when other people believe the information on the news is invalid as the stock prices already reflect the current value of the stock)… that is to say that particular hypothesis doesn’t work as it should because it takes for its model an absolute system of values based on how other people act. People don’t do things as mechanisms do; people evaluate based off of what they believe others will do as well.

This twist of self reflexivity makes it particularly difficult to formulate any theory that is both consistent (non-contradictory) and complete… in essence, we need to formulate a model that can predict how its predictions are taken into account and then provide us with “a few steps ahead” so that profit can be captured. That would be a pretty sophisticated theory; and in fact be impossible because that theory could only work in the case of the one individual who has it. By definition the same theory could not with all the other individuals who also have it, otherwise there would be no profit!

So a quick conclusion is that the market can at times reflect real values, but often it doesn’t because there’s too much white noise as meanings, theories, trends and news all impact the same metric. So how can we make any consistent model on the stock market if all this information flies under the same metric as the very metric a stock price is supposed to represent?

This is all of course, extracted from the book. What I found really interesting, if one read between the lines from the get go, was that one can always take the meaning of a stock’s movement anyway one likes. That is to say, we have an abundance of narratives that can fit the model of “what really happens”. We simply pick the one we like the best, and go forth as if that were true. As Paulo points out, even through random chance a few individuals are bound to hit it big. And once people notice that, they will follow that person’s movements, ensuring that they will always be right.

Thus, the modeling of stocks, properly considered, must also model how we think as well. But that’s nothing new. Paulo is of course, writing this book as a lament of his own failed investments…and in the process of doing so, he’s also somewhat justifying the bubble bursting was inevitable, a kind of normal market behavior. But he’s correct; the uncertainty in the stock market is not just an uncertainty as to what the price means, but similarly that its certainty is also a reflection of what we all would also believe it to mean.

All in all, I found the book to be really entertaining and interesting. I would have liked a little more direction midway through the book… with each theory or direction Paulo brought up, he quickly shot it down at the end of the chapter. Of course, he was setting this bed of failed theories for the self reflexive analysises… but I didn’t see it coming. So it felt much like wandering, and that’s not a good way to treat your reader as it throws your reader out of the process of reading.

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The Fountainhead

May 10, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The FountainheadThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to Ayn Rand about ten years ago. I found her works distasteful and naive… but I was largely also responding to what many of her fans were saying about her works, to support capitalism and conservativism. So imagine my surprise when I read this book, and found out that it was amazing.

Like Rand’s aesthetic, this book follows one over arching arc to explore as many facets of her philosophy as possible. To this end, her narrative is thick in order to create a world… though it is presented as a tour de force, an unstoppable motion.

The basic idea is that most people only acquire a sense of self through the creation of an ego, which is really the image that one maintains in order to position oneself among others. For Rand, this ego in most people, only exists through the validation of others. That is, most people are selfless in the sense that they can only find values mirroring and parroting one another. This externally based validation of the ego is similar to a cognitive psychology theory about the development of the ego. This theory is called spiral dynamics.

Rand’s exposition of ego and spiral dynamics share many things in common, although they aren’t the same. For example, Rand doesn’t explain how ego develops, or how it grows from nothing since infancy. (Spiral dynamics splits into two sets of stages, conventional and post-conventional.) While Rand does cover both sets of stages, this book feels stunted philosophically, in not covering how the ego develops. Still, Rand’s purpose is more illustrative and this book is great at exploring how people of different stages interact. Although Rand takes this idea literally, that some people are nothing more than their open attempt to pull validation from people by appeasing people, this book is still nonetheless interesting.

Validation from others comes from fitting in an image, being admired, being kind, being pleasant, being the complete image of status, success and sophistication. Often in real life, you do find people who lack some sense of self, and thus need to prove themselves. People who set out to prove themselves in all the conventional ways sometimes become successful, and it is those people who often become the leaders of our communities. This is why leadership is often conservative, because it needs the crowd it leads in order to define itself as leader. This is where Rand and political conservatives start to part, as for Rand, the internal image of a leader, as he sees himself, defines who he is, not the people he leads.

So whereas the main character and protagonist Howard Roake, finds himself a companion, Gail Wynand who is a “Creator” like him, Wynand occupies the position in what spiral dynamics calls the 4th stage, the last stand of conventionalism. Here, Wynand dominates the entire social landscape, although he never realizes it, his quest for power still creates an ego in him. His sense of self worth is based off of the money and power he’s attained, and in the end this explodes in his face when he tries to make use of it. Wynand ultimately realizes his true position, exactly that of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (although Rand doesn’t use these terms), when he realizes that his leadership is based off of the crowd’s values, not his own. He is a mirror of other people’s values just like everyone else. The 4th stage is the stage when success itself is understood as still finding validation outside the self… Wynand at that moment transcends that stage and enters the post-conventional stages…in which the ego starts to break free of the undergrid of meaning which cages egos. Wynand faces the dissolution of the ego, which is inherent in the post-conventional stages.

What’s particularly interesting about reading the Fountainhead is how the characters navigate the social hierarchy within titles and dialogue. This is much like real life, in which people show their mettle through witty conversation. Being a novel though, the characters do understand one another directly in the language Rand has developed, and when they position themselves, there is much dialectical twisting, in the form of Hegelian dialectics, because the values in question are significant inasmuch as they are sometimes also absent. Rand realizes this same structure later on as in Atlas Shrugged when she names the sections of her book “non-contradiction”, “either/or” and “a=a” although, of course, the structure is loose (most likely as it comes from a text of fiction and not a purely philosophical text).

But I digress. The characters in the Fountainhead don’t change much. Most of what they do in change is self reflexive, much like real life. They realize what they are (like Peter Keating) and stay stagnant. Other than Wynand, the only other character to go through change is Dominique Falcon.

Falcon is a problematic character. She’s obviously supposed to be the female counterpart to Roake, but lacks herself any sense of being. In fact, for much of the novel she isn’t his equal, simply because she has an ego… one form or another, in most of the novel, she tries to kill it off. She does this by attempting to fit in the various roles she’s landed (through marriage mostly). And that’s basically her thing. Roake at least seems to have a thing that he is (architecture) but Falcon has nothing but her body and her image as a woman. In fact, as woman, she confines herself to being prosopopeia to her man, by erasing the self… which is to say, wholly to support her man’s ego. Perhaps this is why, in part, Rand decided to give her character Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged a thing of her own.

This brings us to Howard Roake, who is the protagonist. He has no ego, cares not for what other people think of him, or what they think of at all. His embodiment is his work, and that’s all he is. He is 100% self. And this is where spiral dynamics and Rand part, at the last stage of post-conventionalism. If the self is wholly informed as to who it is, via the image of an ego, and the ego can only be the social position of a self in language, then says the theory, Roake cannot be as selfish as he is. Roake’s sense of person should dissolve in a major way, and be integrated into the experience of the universe… which is also missing from Rand… that ego and worldview are intimately tied. The less developed the ego, the more black and white the world. By assuming that the self is in fact completely separate from the world, and the world is obvious in its materiality, Rand has failed to take her understanding of selfhood far enough. In other words, even though Rand can see how language and social reality are intertwined with the ego and how the ego forms itself from the fabric of social reality, Rand fails to understand that all objects are in part languaged-objects and the external world is rightly, exists as it is only in service of humankind’s ability to create meaning, and define things in the world in terms of who we are… So when the ego changes who it is, the meaning of the self and world, and the world as the self sees it changes too.

In fact, his person taken literally, Roake should be nearly outside of language, incomprehensible in totality to all others… although in the novel he often says exactly what he is. Two alternate models of a self outside of language come to mind: Herman Meville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”, or an enlightened guru who has retreated to the tops of mountains to contemplate the eternal Tao (or something like that).

Of course, neither would make for a compelling story about ego relations in Depression era New York, so Rand decided to make Roake a solid self, a self that was completely architect, so that the reader can see him. And seeing him is important, so that in order to stablize the relations of ego, Rand has a language and a world that is full of consistent objects, not dissolved objects or selves with blurry post-conventional “ontologies”. In other words, the language of the Fountainhead is consistent because Rand needs to show us clearly how her characters interrelate in terms of ego and self, to hierarchialize her characters… which of course, maintaining social hierarchy is all about what stable unchanging controlled language is about, but alas, again I digress.

Also, don’t forget, that after all, architecture is the most resource intensive thing humans do, it’s also intersects political, economic and aesthetic interests… and has at its handle, all the range necessary for Rand to show off her ideas, which impact creation, industry, media, art, fashion, beauty, friendship and love.

So even while Rand doesn’t also show how the world changes with the self… her book still reads very well. Its driven, its clear and its engaging. After all, wasn’t it her goal in the first place to show how egos can change? Her goal is to show how most of humanity stumbles around on trying to please and placate itself while getting in the way of those few who seek progress. Having developed enough of a theory of ego, Rand does assume an external reality, one in which language is firmly what it is even if the ego isn’t, which is probably why all her characters and protagonists can exist as unchanging models on a never ending background. After all, if language changed depending on the strength of the ego, how would we understand who is winning? How would we understand what progress is, or what things mean? In this sense, Rand’s solid world, is a world that is the same no matter who is walking in it. Things will mean the same thing, because Rand means for us to see something in her novel greater than any of the characters independently.

It is by this measure of objectivity that a self unleashed by the bonds of society can be shown to be equal to the creative force of progress for the betterment of humanity… a triumph of human spirit… For if the background changes with the social tides it would be very easy to show that an individualist is simply the formation of a bad guy, which is the stance most socially free individuals tend to become… unless of course, society itself is ill… which in this case, society is in fact very very ill, making Howard Roake the hero and protagonist in extreme.

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Truth, bullshit, Identity(ego) and Bullshit

May 3, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

If you take words like Truth seriously, you’ll find yourself going into a beyond. Because Truth with a capital T is a place, not a specific content… it’s an empty position, which means only itself. The narrowest point of all, it is also the most distant, the axis around which discourses circulate as satellites.

This “north star” only operates as itself, without meaning because it is completely itself… (meaning is always the deferral of meaning, words leading to more words, thus when it is itself, it is without meaning, an irrational point standing in for nothing but itself). Truth, must remain outside of discourse to organize discourse.

Truth is the opposite of bullshit.

First, bullsit:

I spoke with one of best friends about this. Bullshit is machine language. It’s code. It’s a self-enclosed, self-referential discourse which does not connect well to outside discourses. Thus bullshit, which is always encased in a system (of bullshit) which generates bullshit is like Truth in that it does not refer to anything but itself, it is also equally irrational.

The difference though, is that when you participate in bullshit, when you have a stake in it as an identity in it, it is no longer bullshit, it is meaningful.

For example, you can think that as a college professor, your mission is to educate young minds. Educate them. But the colleges themselves operate on a different level. Colleges rank themselves, compete with each other for funding, create complex apparatuses which organize their departments in the form of hierarchies, ranking its employees and so on. So while a college professor can identify themself like dead poet’s society — through discourse and elucidation, a college will foist on its professors a different identity, one encoached in metrics of grading, ranking, preening and processes… all of which generally serve the college’s needs directly and only the students indirectly, if at all. Such a professor will protest this hijacking of his identity (“I am not a cog in your machine”) and thus the system and its output will be seen as “bullshit”. If you were a college administrator, or a teacher heavily invested with the system and the college’s needs, you may see yourself as both elucidator AND a position within a rank in file within the college — also a representative of the college, befitting the needs of the college. In that case, you won’t see such output as “bullshit” because your identity will be wrapped up within the logic of that hierarchical discourse.

So, other forms of bullshit also depend on identity positionings. If your identity does not fit an imposed external discourse, you will see that discourse as bullshit. You might as well be a mechanic looking at a doctor’s chart, or a doctor looking at a mechanic’s documentation of a ship’s engine. Both discourses are separate from each other, self referential with its own semiotic chains, its own indexical peculiarities, its own bullshit.

In a way, bullshit is the system itself, seen from the outside. No bullshit is bullshit unless you don’t identify within its meanings at an unconscious level. But Truth, is the standin axis for all discourses… in a way, an attempt to contain discourses within one rubric. In our fragmented postmodern world, we generate many self referential codes. Law codes, building codes, computer codes, academic codes, bureaucratic codes, administrative codes, tax codes, stock codes, logic codes, mathemes… all of which are only meaningful within their own self reference. How many tv shows create their own jokes, create their own meanings by referring to an encyclopedia of history? Comic book wikis, Star Trek wikis, Star Wars wikis, Doctor Who wikis, Lost wikis… the list goes on and on.

In the age of information, we create nestings of code in an attempt to attract people to join our languages, our plateaus of sense and reason, and thus invested they exist in a 2nd Life, Sim, fanbased community for which there can be nearly no beyond because self referentiality forecloses interaction between outside discourse. At least, online that’s the case. In person, your neighbors intrude, your economics intrude, your politics intrude and disrupt these fragile sensibilities, reminding us of a larger discourse.

For example, the master discourse today is not spoken in words but in money. Economically, with the current money laundering laws and identity theft laws, our financial institutions seek to mire us within their own code, so that we cannot escape their domain. Everything needs a bank account, or a social security number. We may have gained some autonomy to create separate spheres of influence, but the larger appratuses of capital also seek to dominate us by forcing us to psychically invest in credit scores, tax returns, and to play the game their way… their Truth of course, is money, which is meaningless in itself… Money is the petit object a, of the discourse of money, as it stands only for itself, a zero sum signifier, to guarantee that we are within the system of money, that all things can be exchanged for money as a kind of Money.

This locking of us into this immobility also involves slowly locking us out. Cities have started to impose “good neighbor fees” on home based businesses, so that only the residents can work at such home based businesses. Already in a post-industrial economy, our material dialectic is split by market mediation. We are purely consumers, purely meant to work as employees and consumers. The early 20th century saw the leftovers of consumer culture recycled back into the producer’s side of the cycle… but that divorce only increasingly locks us out of that side… the masters of production seek to keep newcomers out of competiting for production as a way of retaining their access to profit by imposing more power against those who might do otherwise. People who seek to do business on their own face increasing challenges, a nest of laws that would prohibit and limit access while increasing information cost (compliance laws) and start-up costs, raising the amount needed to start a business. People who would be in business see these external constraints as “bullshit” because they do not recognize that the system’s imposition on them as being central to what they are trying to do or who they would to be… that business people see themselves doing transactions (marketing, service or production, shipping) rather than seeing the outside state apparatus demanding of them a piece of their action before they even do anything.

This kind of dialectical opposition through identity is very illustrative of how the category of bullshit is created from the self’s position within a discourse that would locate the self in a different position than where it thinks it ought to be.

Second, Truth:

So if bullshit is being outside of a discourse of self-referentiality, then what is Truth? I sought to take such terms seriously that I looked into meta-language, philosophies, in order to clarify what Truth might be, or how it might be attained. In doing so, you examine words. Language. In doing that, you start to notice words and how they work, what they mean.

When you notice words as words, reality and language start to separate. This is an odd phenomenon, after all, as Lewis Carrol has been so often been paraphrased: Take care of the sense and the words will arrange themselves. The reverse is equally telling. Take care of words themselves, and the very thing you seek (sense itself) will slip from your grasp. When you reach a point that words like Truth mean only what they mean, and that their nest inevitably refers back to itself, you will hit reach the limits of language… for language can explain the objects in language — language moves such objects, manipulates them, for what else is language for, but the negotiation of meaning and personal position among Others — but language cannot explain itself, just as the thinker cannot think itself. This quote from Slavoj Zizek (from Less than Nothing) is useful:

In the opposition between the symbolic order and reality, the Real is on the side of the symbolic—it is the part of reality which clings to the symbolic in the guise of its inconsistency/gap/impossibility). The Real is the point at which the symbolic itself, mutilating it from within: it is the non-All of the symbolic. There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external Real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself. There is being (reality) because the symbolic system is inconsistent, flawed, for the Real is an impasse of formalization. This thesis must be given its full “idealist” weight: it is not only that reality is too rich, so that every formalization fails to grasp it, stumbles over it; the Real is nothing but an impasse of formalization—there is dense reality “out there” because of the inconsistencies and gaps in the symbolic order. The Real is nothing but the non-All of formalization, not its external exception.

So as discourse is unable to cohere completely, make things what they are, we get the gaps and distortions in things within the symbolic discourse itself, always as an indexical “beyond” representation to stand in for the distortion which is only “true” as it coincides with the un-able to be symbolised formation. Where Truth as a marker of stablization sets in the discourse, it acts as the single sign that is itself, to tie in the external inconsistency/gap of the Real back to the symbolic force. Another quote from Zizek, to continue the thought:

Since reality is in itself fragile and inconsistent, it needs the intervention of a Master-Signifier to stablize itself into a consistent field; this Master-Signifier makes the point at which a signifier falls into the Real. The Master-Signifier is a signifier which not only designates features of reality, but performatively intervenes into reality.

Our loss of a Master-Signifier, as Zizek puts it, from the modern to the postmodern marks the fragmentation of discourses today, unable to cohere together as they split into their own alignments. Nonetheless the modern world exists today, through the auspices of Money and in its spectral form.

So how does Truth and bullshit tie together?

Third, Identity/ego:

For each of us today, as we develop identities and egos, we invest in different discourses, hoping to find one that is legitimatized and mostly compatible through whatever other discourses people around us engage in. Example of such discourses abound: a church discourse, a video game clan discourse, a fraternity discourse, academic discourse(s), economic work discoures… legal discourse(s)… these all intersect at the body of identity, bombarding us with fragmentation and contradiction. Coming to find one’s self, or to “discover yourself” is another way of saying, “I need to find an image/position immanent within a discourse where I can fit in, and become myself…” Spoken cynically, “I need to become the image others will then see as me, so that I may belong to a discourse, without the gap/distortion/inconsistency inherent in being a personality whose psychal investments connect to nothing.” Losers are narcissists for whom their meanings only mean something to themselves… no one else, no outside discourse recognizes their meanings/connections as being inherently meaningful.

Fourth, Bullshit:

And of course, noting how Truth itself functions within a discourse, radically itself because it is irrationally itself. Everything is contingent, although Truth only exists as itself, an emptiness within discourse but not of it (the center is not the center) to guarantee an anchoring of discourse. All is contingent, including the fact that sometimes necessities come out, but only do so contingently. In other words, dissolving words into words instead of reality forces us to lose the very thing we seek to gain… we lose our place because the functionality is localized into an objective model that is not-us. Truth becomes truth, and discourse becomes bullshit.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

April 27, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although a small book, Freire’s tight analysis of oppression as it dehumanizes or forecloses oppressed subjectivities from fully forming is astounding.

Freire’s thesis is fairly simple: Freedom can only be attained when people are clear on how they are not free. Thus, only though education can one attain the proper human freedom of realizing one’s place in the world.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. One’s place in one’s world is tied to who one thinks they are, and how they are. People’s identities have a solid anchor in their subjectivity. They often do not seek liberation by way of questioning their own hidden assumptions… rather they often seek liberation by attempting to become in the form of their own oppressors.

Although he doesn’t fully go into the philosophies behind his writing, it’s clear that he’s read Hegel and Marx, dived deeply into dialectics and come back with the same credo so many philosophers before him have acknowledged: radical freedom is only attained through the re-coding of who one is, of understanding the implicit choices we do have instead of limiting one’s self by not being the proper subject. So often does not simply not allow oneself permission to be simply because of habit, or social standing… The implications of new agency aren’t simply in discourse, or social hierarchy, but also in resource and labor division. Freire seeks to bring about revolutionary action through real education… on the street education, where one lets the people speak, and gives them agency to speak.

Strangely enough, much of what he says does echo cognitive psychology’s development of ego in the spiral dynamics model. One can only realize who one is, after one has realized the conventionality of being, stumbled into the negation of post-conventionality and come back with a better understanding of how we are all in this together.

I won’t echo all of his book on here, I can’t. Although less than 200 pages, Freire has not wasted a single sentence. He has cut out so much of what is inessential to emphasize what is essential.

Rarely do you meet an author who has come across such forceful passion AND thought through his message with such clarity… it was such a pleasure to read this.

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On incidental Truth, consistency and belonging

April 26, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, Theory / No Comments

The reversal of Doxa (“opinions/metaphysics”) and Episteme (“truth/knowledge”) happened around the time of the early 20th century. The theory of relativity seems to be the discovery that sparked it, but really this theoretical discover is merely the “best example” of the reversal in knowledge types that I am pointing out.

Once Newtonian physics lost its bearing as being Truth — which coincided with the scientific method being formulated as a method for truth — incidentally, we also gradually lost our ability to speak from a position of privileged reality.

This loss happens historically, at the same time in which capitalism as a form of economic, social and political expansion also started to intrude enough on non-capitalist people that such these peoples also began to became capitalist, and started push back. Their entry into the capitalist market bore with it a host of signifiers and meanings that at once altered what was once a solely European narrative. At this time, capitalism as a marker of progress also, in theory, stopped being as such, and started to alter its form to become capitalism without a strong and explicitly European narrative. I don’t mean to say that the signifiers of “Enlightenment” or “progress” ever ceased to be relevant, but that such narratives only became secondary to the flow of capital, that making money became primary… that while people still today talk about “progress” and “rationality” such notions are not defined independent of the market place, but only echo it’s occurrence, that is, whatever happens in the market place is “rational” rather than rationality being the primary impetus for the flow of resources. The separation of capitalist moves from social narrative’s logic forced two effects, which are arguably the same event: 1. Europe (but mostly America) lost its sense of culture as it became the “norm” for capitalism. In other words, American culture became arguably invisible to many Americans. and 2. Capitalism as a system refined/transformed its logic to become able to sustain the creation of its own symbolic Real — for example, the movements of the financial markets are based solely on itself, without any reference to “real” activity outside of its own sphere.

Whether we want to claim that the scientific revolution sparked this separation when the theory of relativity suggested that reality itself was simply beyond our ability to measure it, that our measurements are mostly, if not purely, self-referential, OR if we want to claim that the influx of non-European cultures caused capitalism to eventually separate from the master narrative of European tradition of progress, the result is really the same.

Either way, we see a separation (parallax gap) between the “outside” happening and the “inside” activity inherent within a logical system/discourse. The result is that when the outside world becomes just a thing, when science or capitalism vanquished the over-coding of traditional narratives onto “things”, we get a world full of objects that can become whatever we want them to be. In late capitalism, we are free to manipulate products, produce environments and synthesize an entire new way of interaction with the outside. Blame this on science, or on industry, but when production is hidden from the consumer, through technology, bureaucracy, finance, or any other meaningless Symbolic Real codes that refer only to themselves, we detach from the environment and end up floating in a postmodern sea that constantly spits out signifiers… signifiers that are devoid of any hard points for navigation because we are unchained from any specific environment. In short, the world becomes the reverse imprint of who we are, and what we say.

The implication of this result is best captured by the work of Karl Popper. Although Popper is a scientific philosopher, his work is best characterized as a realization that theories exist solely through their ability to be consistent (ir)regardless of experimental results. A huge question in his work revolves around sophisticated justificationism — at what point does a scientific theory become unable to be justified? At one “key” experiment (the significance of an experiment always being after discourse has been disrupted by it), or when a theory faces of other completing theories that have more explanatory power?

The basic idea through Popper is that theories have a distinctive “shape” or formative relationship inherent within their primary parts. As this “shape” is extended, it should be able to predict results from experiments not yet performed… of course, various experiments often create auxiliary hypothesises, theoretical asides, until at some point the self referential kernel of the theory can no longer sustain the added modifications, allowing the space for a new theory will come about that will be adopted with a more refined core kernel.

What is revolutionary about this model of scientific theory is that the role of induction is minimum. In fact, Popper insists that induction is not at all needed. This is amazing so let me reiterate: Popper’s claim is that science can progress solely on the level of theoretical consistencies. Each competing theory presents a pure sheet of relations, that can be used to over-code the total field of experimental results, both past, present and future. The theory that is the most consistent despite (or because of!) disruptions from other experiments should be the theory that we adopt.

This means that removing theories due to experimental results is only incidental, given the presence of other consistencies. In other words, the primary mode for selecting a theory is its “standing power” in relation to other theories. Experiments and their results are only included as one of the judgments for which theory is most sexy.

What I mean to do now is expand the understanding of consistencies beyond the initial domain of Popper’s work and apply it to all relations and all logics of discourse.

There are various theories about the logic of sense. Among them are Hegel, Zizek, Lacan, Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Sanders Pierce, Roland Barthes, Derrida, Roman Jackobson, and Hjelmslev… although the most general of them remain, for me, Deleuze and Guattari. To avoid all this philosophical jargon, I will paraphrase Zizek’s use of Lacan, although at times I will interject other terminologies where it may be useful to highlight specific relationships not given in Lacan’s meta-language.

All subjectivities/egos/identities (I know the terms are used differently but bear with me) are constructed out of the logic of negation. In the formulation of the ego, through a self-differentiating process analogous to autopoiesis, the self carves a space out of intersubjective symbolic space to understand its role among others. At first, it may want to be belong — to follow part of the group. Eventually, it may want to lead the group and be recognized as itself.

To also interject the language of Deleuze and Guattari, in the process of autopoiesis, selves carve out vast territories for which there exist collections of intensities, black holes, and other erotified zones. Black holes, in particular, exist as indexical signs (Pierce and Jackobson) that signify/refer to the outside of a system. Such black holes, exist on the territory of the human face, such as the eyes and mouth. In terms of profiles, for a subject, the signifier/d “father” may also cover such a black hole. Such zones are unique to each individual, depending on how they have pushed meaning from term to term. Although individual distinction of such psychial positions may differ depending on a subject, the event of such positions is the effect of autopoiesis as much as it is the intersubjective space differentiating population from population, group from group, or meta-group from meta-group. We create these piles to bracket meaning as a foundation so that we can go about the business of our lives, to create empty space to move freely. The weaker the ego, the less space it carves for itself flourish, and the more easily it is threatened by its own internal inconsistencies (which are also antinomies found in the world, in itself, and in its own immanent verticies).

As Lacan was so quick to point out, through his example of the Edgar Allen Poe’s Purloined Letter, the existence of such intensities pre-dates the “accident” of encountering such intensity. If you have issues with your father, you may have created, in the image of your father (and by extension all Fathers) a repository for the entangled meanings that you have discarded. In order to create a clear sense of self, or a clear space for yourself to exist, certain meanings such as being a “loser” or other similar undesirables may be buried inside such intensities, wrapped up in the particular of “father”. Such intensities, buried as they are, may be incompletely buried so that they create such a sinthome, that the encounter of a resemblance may bring about again, a threatening of this knot so that the ties of this knot, that hold together the topology of the subject may threaten to become undone. A non-psychoanalytic example of how the creation of such a place in discourse creates the space for the verification of this discourse through its encounter with the outside. Hegel uses the example of a man, Ceasar, to illustrate this. Ceasar created such a revolutionary space for himself so that even after his actual death, that space he created persists under the his moniker. All others after him, would become Ceasar, a subset of being marked as he had been/was/is… and this verification reifies their position as Ceasar, as the centerpiece of Roman political life.

This kind of incidental verification occurs often, beyond scientific theory. In fact, the reaction of individuals that are “out of proportion” with their circumstance bespeak the tripping of such sinthomes since they have encountered (through happenstance), a particular antinomy particular to their identity construct (which is also their singular world view).

The general rule, however, to understanding this is that this merely doesn’t happen in regard to individual encounters that are out of proportion… an encounter with an other/object/not-me is always an encounter with discarded meanings, constructs that have been laid aside through autopoiesis. When I see an other, I am actually seeing my construct because I am seeing an other. This isn’t to say that our senses deceive us (although they do, on a different level), or that one who is different isn’t different in how they appear. But the meaning of what they appear to us, is a meaning that is inscribed in the very heart of how we have created our-self, through either our identification of them, (you are like me, we are of the same/similar group) or our rejection of them (you are not-me, you are an other).

Of course, history and political discourse abounds with such examples, which can be expanded upon later.

The primary extension of this notion of sense, lies in how individuals through political discourse (or discourse in general) are able to weave a super-structure of meaning that is independent but also of, how they encounter the world. In an environment where very little is prized as being key, “the discourse” of different consistencies with different constructs can be brought forward by individuals whose only claim to being true, is the very consistency inherent in the logic of their discourse. Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”, as it were. The “facts” as they are, often only function as incidental but “meaningful” accidents that verify/validate discursive claims for-itself. In other words, when you are within a logic of discourse that supports your sense of self, objects will speak to you of their truthiness and seem to mean the things you need them to mean. When you are within a particular consistency, the strength of this consistency will be that you fit the lifeworld and the lifeworld fits you. In short, the illusion is that you (and your view of the lifeworld) are validated by external markers that seem to speak for themselves when in fact you are speaking to yourself what you mean for them to be, and what you mean to be, through them.

This ability of consistencies to swallow “facts” through (invisible) dialogical reasoning is of course, the problem with pundit discourse — the same fact can be used to deploy alternate/contradictory meanings depending on which discourse it has been deployed in. While statements can be taken out of context, the fault lies less with the original context of the fact itself, than with the differences in context given different discursive logics, different worldviews and different identity constructions that need to be preserved differently.

In other words, even when encountering a beloved, a prized pet, or a car, that beloved is only such because of their place in how you construct the meanings surrounded your own identity. The looser your inscription defining such position that the prized beloved incidentally aligns with, the less meaningful such incidental occupation of such a position will be… and the less pleasure (or pain) you will have when the validation is (or is not) affirmed.

So, “life” affirming memes, or posts, telling you that life is precious, go surround yourself with good, beauty and truth… is really just telling you to create a situation where the positive “hot-spots” in your psychial world are fulfilled by any other who can fill them, while not challenging your world view. In this model, the strong case for discourse consistency is that truth is really only about the you using the outside validating what you’ve always wished to be the case… not about finding something new. The weaker case for discourse consistency is that truth can only exist when the outside coincides with a position in the psychial consistency… so that the discourse is “useful”… whether that position is desirable or not, is irrelevant.

This ability of the mind to sublimate facts in-itself is not a bad thing… but given the impermanence of even change itself… chances are your consistency is not rugged enough to survive for very long if you venture away from your nest of like minded associates (which given technology, is both easy and hard). The energy it takes to constantly redeploy and maintain such meanings can be very astounding, depending on how desperately you hang onto your identity construction. When you start to understand how you are blinding yourself, when you see your own internal cause is the root of external meaning, most likely you won’t be able to identify with such a construct any longer, because you can see how things could be different. When the magic goes away, you won’t find any good reason why what was, was at all possible… even if you remember how plausible, wonderful and orderly it all seemed to be.

Existence and Existents

April 16, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Existence and ExistentsExistence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not well versed in Heidigger’s work. And as for Levinas, I’ve avoided him for as long as I have heard of him.

This work however, is one of his first, and well worth the read. Much of it stems from his working closely with Heidigger. Heidigger restarted after the mess Hegel and Kant left, understanding that one cannot think through Being, he instead started to think around Being. This book works in much the same way, as Levinas begins with a critique of Heidigger and ends where it seems, he will work through on his own issues separate from Heidigger.

What was surprising for me, is that Levinas develops the same dialectical twists to talk around being as do other masterful dialecticians, such as Lacan, Zizek and the like. Although Levinas first starts with moods, explains the originary ground of such feelings like fatigue in order to highlight where one ends and the world begins, as a relationship to the world, Levinas quickly establishes being as independent of the world, as the ground of the self that is not incorporatable by the self or the world… ending with the there is, the limit of what can be thought… the same limit that Kant reached poised at the limit of the phenomenological.

This brief excursion (brief in page numbers) then takes a sharper turn as Levinas expands on how the self relates to the world in the last chapter. I’m not certain if hypostasis is a concept he turns towards later on in his career, but this last chapter is again, the respelling of the limits of existent in various axial dimensions, such as space, time and of course, language. His rhetorical device is dialectics without being obviously enamored with negation but he spells out a particular parallel between the I, and the present moment vs the existent and existence as a field. This thought remains the limit of the rest of the book, where the irruption in anonymous being of locationalization itself is best expressed temporally as the engagement in being on the basis of the present, which breaks and then ties back to the thread of infinity, contain a tension and a contracting. It is an event. The evanescence of an instant which makes it able to be a pure present, not to receive its being from a past is not the gratuitous evanescence of a game or a dream. A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present. If commitment in being thereby escape the weight of the past (the weight that was seen in existence), it involves a weight of its own which its evanescence does not lighten, and against which a solitary subject, who is constituted by the instant is powerless. Time and the other are necessary for the liberation from it.

In other words, not only is each being anonymous, but it is also a unique and indistinct instant, a brief encounter in infinity like all other encounters, only this one is mine. You see that Levinas is suspended between questions of one and infinity, unable, at least in this book, to resolve the very question he succinctly ends with: The event which we have been inquiring after is antecedent to that placing. It concerns the meaning of the very fact that in Being there are beings.

Very nice place to end. But one curious thing he brought up at the very beginning regarding how existence and existents were separated: that the existent and existence are understood as separate because life needs to be struggled for; that existence needs to be earned, be it at the level of 19th century biology or immanent within the economic order. While he set this as the stage for outlining fatigue, I think this young Levinas could have been better served to understand how the order of a priori necessarily arises as a special case of the a posteriori… but that is a different approach, a different school, one of the domain of semiotics and dialecticians of the negative (such as Zizek). It will be interesting to read more Levinas and see how this book fits into his work about transcendence and the encounter with the Other.

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being and identity and reality

April 11, 2014 / posted in art, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

I think much of politics stems from identity construction. Most discussions about identity are approached from the question of the Other — include them or teach them or change them. But really, any position of otherness must be mediated by what the Self is. The self mediating the self is the “invisible” point of reference that creates this initial distortion.

Post race isn’t exactly the same as post identity. Even if it’s a class distinction or, say, identifying as a “punk” which means “I’m real” then others who are not punk are “sell outs.”. Identity works that way.

So being American. Being a man. Being your age. Your personal history your children’s future your parent’s past your politics your sexuality your (in)unique soul. These are still pretty much identity construction that traps us as being a type and others as not being us. Except for genuine interaction, which basically needs both sides of the interaction to shed the image of itself, the Other is always a mirror that reflects back to us our negative that is not-me.

These groups of similar mes that see me as being us organizes groups, and super-groups. This organizationing(s) “hows” how we talk to one another and share resources/work. But each group, and group of groups also describe it’s own outside. You have to be outside the outside, to really step away. This organization/description/structure is not accidentally, how things are supposed to be. Based, on the outside of itself, it has to be this way, as defined by the outside that is not itself defining itself. So, each grouping also describes it’s own outside or “rebellion”. Being a punk is inscribed at the heart of being a sell-out. So it really seems impossible to step out of this reality.

But I guess that really doesn’t matter. Most people just want to fit in somewhere and be themselves. Lol, be who their identity tells them they are. :-)

for-itself, for-yourself

April 11, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human / No Comments

i don’t think it really matters to much what i do with my life anymore.

the human mind has the capacity to make the best of a bad situation. with paraplegics and lotto winners, happiness asymptotes to normal.

the most you can do, if you have adopted a story for yourself, identify with it and be it, is to try and live the life who you are in the story. this will bring you the maximal meta-enjoyment.

another way of putting this, is to simply say, “be true to yourself”

***
this of course assumes that what we want most is happiness. happiness is really only a surface feeling, prompted by conditions. conditions that are always changing.

what is most suspect lies in the identity construction — of having a story in the first place. as it seems, the creation of difference in identity creates a self and an other — the other serves as a repository for discarded affects, meanings that are lost, the extreme points on either side of the self, to define the self. NOT-ME relies on a fundamental recognition of other i’s as being i, a mistake of too much for the self, identified with others “like me” always, taking in too much substance for subjectivity.

what’s wrong about having a story, what’s racial about having an identity is the exclusionary features that by definition it needs.

true, having a story and finding that the world verifies that story — verifies YOU can lead one to happiness. it seems that being happy really needs a story to be happy of. the stricter the story, the more happy you can be, when the world fits it. no wonder people live in communities where everyone thinks like them, makes friends with people who are like them, find allies and constantly flock in groups that agree with one another.

and in this world, where change is constant and being impermanent, who doesn’t want to be happy? we aren’t hurting anyone! but making happiness requires a balance. if all things even out towards neutrality due to impartial statistics… you can expect as much happiness and you can sadness. furthermore, all identity relies on a formal exclusion. if people are more themself, they are also more not-someone else. by creating a self that the world can accidentally verify, you are also creating others for whom you know as they appear to you (Vorstellung), and not through genuine interaction.

being you qua identity also means being not-there and knowing others without ever really talking with them.

this is the root of all otherness — the self qua the image of yourself to yourself.

capitalism as tourism

May 1, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, note to self, Theory / No Comments

there’s something to be said about people who, for whatever reason, have the basic necessities taken care of. i, of course, am one of those people. it’s doubtful that i will ever starve. i’m not rich, but i do have a cushion, of sorts. and there are plenty of people who are like, in a way. i don’t mean the very rich, or trust-fund babies, or young people with great careers. i also mean people who live off their parents and do nothing for themselves, who may be highly intelligent or even well educated, but for whom life is one big video game fest. or whatever.

this problem, if it is in fact one, has been around for ages, for as long as there have been wealthy or bourgeois. but with capitalism it’s even more pronounced. when you consider that most of us being human, have the same taste, for bacon or fatty foods, or good beverage… most of people in the sum of human history have struggled for the basic necessity — never getting to taste oyster. it’s hard to get oyster. so unless you have a connection to someone, or you yourself have that skill, you’ll never get to experience it. much like a good piano performance or whatever. but with capitalism you can be better than most people at something completely useless. like bean counting. and with the right business structure, you can fit into a machine that needs expert bean counting. so now you have a job. and with money, you can transform your better than average, otherwise useless skill into something extraordinary. now you can have all the oysters you want. or all the beautiful music you have no skill to play.

this video, the above video is kind of the opposite. but it fits too; heres someone who can become more of an expert at something relatively useless. if he had to get a job, it might be getting bird’s nests… or living in the arctic to climb cliffwalls to get bird’s eggs to feed his family. but it’s not even that. with the market place you can indulge in whatever desire you want, and really hone in and focus on it.

i think there is a dialectic in development, that prevails across anything that requires skill. like darts, or chess or horseback riding… playing the tuba. it’s like how children find a picture awesome, because they’ve never seen something so shiney before. but when they get older, shiney doesn’t so much matter. it’s now about composition or mass. if you can get enough taste, you begin to appreciate tension in a picture, something that is off balance, that was before, a little disturbing because it’s not perfect. eventually what is art isn’t the topographically ideal symmetry (all buildings are cubes), but buildings which suggest that ideal symmetry without being it, and then buildings which exaggerate that function to the point at which it almost doesn’t work — but they pull it off.

its alot like the marquis de sade with his art — you can worship the ideal body like some marble heart, you can flail a body until it is really just a body and becomes the marble heart — you can stretch the body so it hangs on a thread of life, and in turn stretch that consciousness until it’s a pure consciousness on its own horizon. i mean, what is what you love isn’t it, when you meet someone, when you two are together on your own horizon.

i guess there’s no accounting for taste. but it happens so many different ways in so many different directions. especially when it comes down to connoisseurship. when the art becomes central, and everything else wraps around it. that central disharmony is an elevation of a gradient so that all the white beads are to one side of a membrane that holds them there. against entropy. i suppose when smoking a cigar, there’s a way to do it without burning too much. or drinking your manhattan, there’s a balance of bourbon to vermouth depending on the specific flavors (i like wild turkey 101, so that’s difficult to balance). addiction is the finest of gradients, the centralisation of specific disharmony. i guess this rock climber needs to collect his off beats, so he can dispel them in a fury of climbing.

that kind of collection is on the one hand, admirable. the attitude he speaks of, of going at it with positive energy day to day… to do the task. that’s life isn’t it? what architect or designer or film director or chef or even waitress or file clerk or call center rep can’t relate to that?

but having conquered one climb and celebrating before going to the next — that’s a token given right to chess puzzles, to sheet music, to composition of novels, to picking up girls, to fucking video games. and no one admires an obsessive video game player. is there an art to fiddling with controls? yes. it’s not easy and in the old 4 bit or even 8 bit games, there’s a finesse of skill in timing and execution that you don’t often get in today’s intensive graphics shooters.

but even having gone there, what about the mindless action of early 8-bit textured 3D rendered 2D worlds, like DOOM?

but everyone constructs their own horizon. we all have our own values and hooks and traves. we make our own house with our own definitions, and store our own fancies. character, which many of us have at least, topographically, is the result of internal and external strife. literally — we are like stars. stars want to explode because of fusion, but also want to implode because of gravity. our character is the boiling of our surface due to external and internal stimuli. character is how we deal with our blindspots, how we deal with our intensities. those of us who harness our own specific intensities and sculpt our own obsessions still have our own horizon — but it becomes more obviously focused. raymond roussel wrote locus solus in the same byzantine labyrinthian excess as the marquis de sade wrote justine or 100 days of sodomy. only rather than a crass sexual game, we have a objectification, raised to the meta. a garden of disharmony built on cultural excess. think of samuel beckett as the super-james joyce — the pulling through of narrative as a THING, to sculpt out that ill-defined kernel called narrative and make it into its own living and breathing surface. i am speaking of the indulgencies of post-industrial capitalism each expressed as a film, a genre, a brand name. each with its own internal world brand, which is disconnected from the last. schizophrenia with deleuze and guattari is a conceptualized way of noting half worlds in disconnect, interacting with a multi-valience of bursting out logics. this is that schizophrenia, but even more so, an eating of its own internal excess to be an excess. the lacanian moebius strip best explains how the inside is also the outside — and so with this caterpillaring of self as a climber, or as any connoisseur we have the bending of fundamental distopias into a collective consciousness called self. neurotic and bundled as a person, we don’t seek to become at peace in the utopian hippie sense, one with the world, but we seek to be consumers, one with our digestion.

ultimately though, the need to digest different kinds of ornate-tacies is limited to forms which fit our central disharmony. he seeks a new climb which he can then chew on with his fingers and does, his weight as he swings the planet around his gravitational center. i am the center of the world. as a financial otaku one’s digestive system collects financial tools as unique shapes in the cilia, embedded in several stomaches, as monies that imprint shadows in the interior lining as options or leverages. its at the bar that you pick your poison and at the university with a list of colleges that you do the same.

in difference and repetition deleuze highlights how thought is another form of metabolism. flowers contemplate the variance of sunlight with their circadianisms as consumers in supermarkets contemplate products with their digestion and their social affluences.

in the end though, you might as well travel to japan to experience their politeness and their ramen, or go to arches national park in utah for their red rock formations. try shabu shabu in taiwan with real pork blood, you know the kind actual taiwanese eat, with their native mushrooms. or sit at a fancy whiskey bar trying different scotches from the thousands of islands and peninsula that decorate the topography of scotland. look at different rothkos in a book, or read balzac and then compare him voltaire or proust. be an arm chair traveller, watch andrew zimmern eat things from other parts of the world. you’re still tasting exotic landscapes. you’re still sampling different pussies — different only through age, and diet, and something that can only be individual. funny how when you think of phallic signifiers, pussy becomes another cock. we’re all sticking things in our mouths and contemplating, sniffing, seeing.

in the end though, all this excess. all this sightseeing, all this sniffling of new butts. just try it, and leave, feeling like somehow the journey has changed you. you are 1up on the dialectical ladder, one more climb richer. one more scotch wiser. and you get that, on your own horizon, you stamp another sopwith camel on the side of your red tri-fokker. when really, you’re just feeling things out with your intestines, tasting exotic packaged sausages and ultimately making exotic shits. wearing our your digestive system for the brief blaze of your lifetime, that much more knowledgable about the wall papers youve landed on. so it becomes a thing you can show off about on twitter or vimeo.

spend 20 years traveling all across italy for the different wineries.

don’t fool yourself. truth is, you’re just another tourist. only because you don’t wear mickey mouse hats and snapshots of tall skyscrappers, you carry some dignity with you, like some neo-electronica hippie. so much wiser for living now than thirty decades ago. crowd in all the hotspots you saw on yelp and make a nice collection of shot glasses.

nothing worst than a tourist than an enlightened tourist.

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