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railing against the 2nd attention

September 6, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

i was thinking about the fakeness of souplantation along with its faux industrial look (at this location) when my dad decided to strike a conversation with me about the illuminati.  started by saying that george washington in a letter acknowledged their existence.

he went on a little bit about the statue of liberty — talking about first how the two men who built it were illuminati… talking about various symbols in the statue of liberty.

i wont repeat the conversation but frankly i found it vaguely annoying because i don’t care.  my reasoning as i explained was that such symbols do not do anything.  does the symbols on the U.S. dollar bill serve to make the sun shine?  guarantee the U.S.’s place in the world?  serve to hurry along the 2nd coming of Jesus?  when i explained this to my cousin she found it to be incredibly negative.  she retorted, saying that symbols are important because they serve to remind one of things.  i then mentioned the stain glass windows in catholic churches with the 12 stations.  things like that do carry meaning and can help improve one’s life, but the presence of symbols themselves are meaningless — one has to take them seriously and bring them into being with one’s own person, otherwise it’s as plain as decoration.  really if one lives it, why does one need symbols?

it seemed that my dad took the presence of such symbols (in some part) to mean the presence of a shadow government, i found that completely bogus.  governments and institutions are so ineffectual.  for there to be a shadow government ruling the planet for hundreds of years, one would need an incredibly tightknit organization — one completely disciplined and lean with near perfect information (some how).  how often do the local police solve crimes (for instance)?  i won’t get started on that but i will mention that belief in a masterful conspiracy is really unlikely.  government is so cumbersome.  and any kind of super secret government won’t be secret for long — because there is no elite squad with near perfect technical information, certainly not fifty+ years ago.

nonetheless, disproving conspiracy theories is kind of a ridiculous thing to do because it’s near impossible.  it’s an epistemologist’s field (which i am bad at) but how can anyone prove anything?  if we have a choice in what we believe in and how we organize anything then we should have a set of criteria to determine the most effective beliefs.

what i want to get to here, is what carlos castenada calls the 2nd attention.

i want to extend castenada’s thought as exposited in books like ‘the power of silence’ and ‘the fire within’.  he calls the first attention to be that of everyday man.  the 2nd attention is the shifting of awareness from the first attention into the other bands of awareness, like that of other animals or other creatures not of this world.  the 3rd attention is when the entire luminescent being lights up simultaneously, and that is analogous to near immortality or complete awareness or enlightenment.  i don’t want to go into detail about this but i will analogize the 2nd attention here.

in a sense there is no first attention…if there were, it would be common sense, or an everyday sense of things.  a shared reality of sorts.  when getting into the particulars it’s apparent that there isnt a shared reality.  there are clusters of shared realities in different groups that reinforce one another.  these groups verge into areas that castenada would define as the 2nd  attention.

the analogy of the 2nd attention is best explained with the ‘sorcerers’ who search for the truth and power in the 2nd attention.  castenada talks about these men, heroically going through unknown areas of the psyche and going mad, or disappearing altogether, lost and unable to come back.  often, in castenada’s books, don juan and carlos get stuck somewhere overnight in the desert, because they are wandering through the 2nd attention (in a controlled way by don juan) when they are spotted by a creature of the 2nd attention (sometimes one who was once a man) and they must hide from it and wait until sunrise before they can escape.

in this analogy, the 2nd attention works for ppl who try to identify truth and gain power from it.  they are ordinary people like you and i but they are also people who are interested in politics, or religion, or philosophy.  they are world-builders, system-builders, mystics who try and find the source.  in reality, they are pretty much anyone who gets shaken up by reality, who experiences the death of a close one or a traumatic failure of some sort and comes to question life and existence and meaning.  we all wander the 2nd attention in some way, departing from the strict ‘middle way’ of the 1st attention to come up with our own conclusions about life and reality, of the people around us and whatever else that seems to need explaining and ‘fitting into’ with everything else.

in a way, meaning is used to formulate social hierarchies so that we can fit everything together in a way independent of any one individual or according to one individual.  we say this is how we should live, this is how society should be — we judge everyone and ourselves — whether it be from a perspective of economics, or a religion, or evolutionary psychology.  some kind of universal meaning is introduced to reinforce a social order so that we can say “this is how things should be and our place in those things”

so in that sense, all different theories and systems are equal — because what kind of objective metric for which we can possibly come up with which is ‘right’?

in what sense are things ‘right’?

is it arguable that a paranoid-schizophrenics’ daydream “works” for them as much as my paranoia about paying my taxes on time “works” for me?  there are consequences to both!  and while we can say well, most of us all pretty much believe in paying our taxes (as we also believe in the consequences) can we say also say that when reading a paranoid-schizophrenics’ exposition (say written in a notebook) about the nature of the universe when we understand that words can have inter-textual, slipperiness?  likewise, to capitalize on deleuze and guattaris’ schizo-analysis (which is not about schizophrenics at all, but a structure or a way of connecting things, a different kind of meta-epistemology) can we reject alternate modes of meaning make simply because they are unfamiliar to us?  most of us do!  that’s the point of meaning!  to find the big man, or who should be the big man on campus.

so it comes about that i think a criteria for 2nd attentions that ‘work’ should be whether or not those models are ‘dead-ends’.  i think in the ‘planet earth’ series, sponges were called ‘evolutionary dead-ends’ because they could not progress anywhere else.  likewise, in the castenada world, many of those sorcerers are dead-ends simply that because while they may gain power, they are also lost, or unable to return from their situation.  they are trapped in their own separate worlds, forced to focus and rely solely on the inhumane in the second attention.

example?

many some ppl who know me know that i like philosophy (or that theoretical shit) so that when dan brown’s book ‘da vinci code’ came out, quite a few recommended it to me, equating what i liked to what dan brown did.  i know many ppl won’t equate philosophy with whatever dan brown wrote about in his book, but if you think about it, abstractly the two do resemble one another.  esoteric knowledge, hermeneutics — systems of thoughts, abstract arrangements of meaning… much like what foucault’s pendulum by umberto eco was about with the knights templar, the crusades, free masons and what not.  connections of history and finding a meaningful connection/system in place by which we order the world.  the difference between philosophy per se, and this other stuff, is that philosophy isn’t tied so necessarily to individuals nor do specific time and places.

nonetheless such ‘master’ conspiracy theories seek to explicate events and order a grand narrative, much like fredric jameson’s the political unconscious, such that even ‘the end of narratives’ qua postmodernism is incorporated into an articulate structure which cannot but preserve the theory itself.  to get back to grotesque conspiracy theories such as those involving the knights templar, such theories often take real ambivalence and incorporate it into the theory so that one’s own ignorance plays a role in reinforcing the theory’s metaphysics of presence.

like the 2nd attention sorcerers, one then becomes trapped in that world.

and what then?

is the purpose of developing such a theory, one founded on history and specific events to continually find more information to support it?  even freud with his oedipus complex moved into a different direction as time went on.  it’s inevitable that one’s theorys and ideas should slide as one grows older, or changes location.  but isn’t it usually the case that ppl abandon their ideas, and forget them if they don’t write them down?  we are not our ideas and our ideas are not us.  but ideas at a particular time do suffice as the internal workings of how we orient ourselves among everything else.

and if orientation is what’s at stake, then truth is less important than we feel it to be absolutely.  i say it is best to have an out look which does not force us into any kind of intellectual, emotional or otherwise ‘dead end’.  one should, aesthetically and on principle, seek to come to terms with one’s surroundings… and as we are imperfect beings, in the spinozan sense, we always will have partial knowledge, incomplete and inaccurate.  we must continue to absorb, be flexible and evolve.

even when choosing a career, who wants to be hemmed into being just a customer-specialist?  it’s true (in nature and in today’s world of specialists) that to survive well, one should pick a robust niche that will exist regardless of market forces, and narrow in on that niche to ensure one’s employability.  but that’s only if you want to stay still.  staying still though, is much like a mollusk or clam.  we can’t direct the environment — it’s too big — so it’s best to just ride along within its shadow.

i think of the energy used to lodge and unlodge one’s self from a position to be analogous in structure to the pianists who practice for hours daily to become virtuosos.  when you play a passage, your hand does the motion in the most efficient way for it.  but that’s not going to help when you have a variety of complex forms to perform which require a different motion.  so to be efficient in those complex forms you need to undo the easiest hand motions repertoire in your subconscious and mold your virtual hand (stored in your head) closer and closer into the shape of a keyboard.  and to do that you must transverse the keyboard.

the energy to unbind and re-train one’s hands can be thought of in terms of activation energy.  to transition to a lower energy state (smoother motion and thus, more efficiency).  this is much like the energy it takes to unravel ‘bad habits’ or in our case, to utilize complex hermeneutical pathways to satisfactorially explain phenomenon.  theories which do not explain phenomenon well, require continual maintenance and continual upkeep.  it takes a great deal of energy and anger to be a racist or a bigot.  it takes a great deal of emotional investment and risk of suffering to be self righteous in the face of society.  the harder one solidifies a theoretical apparatus the greater the risk to the thinker if it fails.

i don’t know if enlightenment is ‘real’ in the way of stories.  certainly buddhist enlightenment is real, in the sense that is a publically acknowledged phenomenon within various religions.  i won’t speak of it, but i will mention that it’s difficult to discern how if ever anyone were to understand that one was not in fact lodged in the 2nd attention and that one ‘got it’.  this brings back the question of metrics — or i should say, the lack of metrics.  there are so many different systems and ways of understanding.  for instance, to bring ‘karma sutra’ back to its origins, there is a warning in many tantric traditions of looking up and trying esoteric meditations and yogic practices by ones self. without the proper teacher, one runs the risk of invoking pain and wandering off the path these practices were designed to follow.  the risk in this reminds me of much in the end of the yoga sutra which warns against indulging in the powers that arise from getting close to the unpolished mirror.

when one closes in on the sun, one risks blindness.  the closer one gets,  the increase in the risk of permanent blindness.  if one were on the path to becoming the perfect pianist (assuming such a thing were possible), if one were to stop when one were close, the habits that one has acquired only solidify all the more so, for all the energy and work one has sunken in would help emboss the structures one currently has.  it takes more energy to undo errors done in the extreme than it does errors early on.

this warning, of course, only explicitly functions within the context of there being a given path to follow.

real life — naked life, i should say — is fuzzy and without clear boundaries.  within the context of organized religion, there is always a direction to tread (as it’s organized in a certain way).  slavoj zizek, true to his hegelian loyalties has written extensively that one should follow a given (and perhaps seemingly arbitrary) path as such a path is the best way to guarantee one access to the universal.  if one follows the hegelian dialectics for synthesizing meaning, then one should!  and so zizek has written a good number of books on why the christian legacy should be protected, and what such a pathway has to offer.  aesthetically it’s also consistent that zizek is in fact an authoritarian.  the best way to ascend to a universal guarantee of some sort (any sort, for with zizek all roads lead to the hegelian-esque Notion) is to follow a path as deeply as it goes.  sufis, as well, have an added requirement that one should master at least two different disciplines in order to understand how mastery extends beyond the prohibitions of a medium.

i have waxed about hegel before, so i won’t do that now, but it will suffice to say that if one reaches beyond the mode of the medium one can encounter analogous structures unbound by a particular medium.  we master painter and a master musician can talk!  we don’t need to use the language of a particular language to understand that literature of one culture has analogous movements and tropes possibly found in other literatures… and that syntax in computer languages can invoke syntax in non-computer expressions.

in this way, one can seek the various territories of particular fields, as they are woven with their tropes and their memes and their intensive structures to alight on more primary principles.  such principles posit indexes which can become expressed in a particular discipline.  folks, i am talking directly on deleuze and guattari’s combined notions of plateaus, machinic indexs and territory.  deleuze and guattari are right to repeatedly invoke the success of man not only of his hand as a de-territorialized paw (which can become a hammer in holding a hammer, or a screw driver when using a screw driver) but also in his ability to abstract beyond aesthetic and sexual beauty — to combine abstractions in fomulations of bodily meaning, philosophy and the literary arts.

we can be affected!  and we can affect!  highly developed sensibilities follow the most human of us.

while in the abstraction of so much internal semiosis eventually allowed each of us to experience the reterritorializing of that internal phenomenal space as ‘consciousness’, the process does not guide us in a given direction to further de-territorialize the signs which are re-terrtorialized along specific expressions originating from specific contexts.  perhaps a word ‘allegory’ will always remind you of your 8th grade english teacher, or ‘meta-physics’ will always be the astrology and tarot card section in a bookstore.  and the sight of lingerie will always afford a sexual or ‘naughty’ sensation.  we respond to that with our vaguely deterritorialized bodies, smitten with tattoos and panty hose and other trappings of social signify-ance…  and for all our abilities to abstract, build bridges and realize that a pen is also a weapon… remain trapped in the inner workings dependent on the inherited contexts of our social bretherian.

is it enough then, to realize an illumaniti conspiracy theory as a way of gaining access to social order?  is it enough to work out a ‘pick-up-line’ system to get laid only to have to invest into that system over and over, and refine it and work it so as to be able to work it?  or to vote for a particular political party and rally under that party with the trappings that this is the only way to clear up society and make it ‘what it should be‘ so that it is the ‘best possible world’?  to clothe julian assange with the trappings of christ or satan when he is still a man?  or in some cases, to claim our less fortunate as ‘mere animals’ for living off welfare?

i don’t write this so much for you, because i don’t doubt that this doesn’t apply to you.

in fact, you already know how things should be, and that it’s very apparent this or that style is the right style and that the order inherent in credit cards and drivers licenses are in fact one of the real orders of things.  this is not far from the truth, and if you are thinking i am saying there is a way of mastering reality then you are a bit mistaken.

lets go back to aristotle with his seemingly minor distinction between artificial and natural.  aristotle posited an order of things which says that natural things have essence.  he aligns the state with natural things, as it is supported by people.  artificial things, like wooden statues, do not have that essence, they do not ‘belong’ to the primary motion.  and of course, aristotle brings about a taxonomy to get us closer to true immaterial being… a like a great-grandfather of the biological taxonomy we use today.  but if aristotle allows the state to have essence because people make the state up, and the state changes over time, so then do all items and things of people.  and it is not the objects themselves that we make (artificially) which have essence, but their meanings and ideas.  in a very real way, we then go back to the earlier idea in this entry — meaning is what allows us to create social hierarchies for us to orient ourselves to everything (including each other).

reality as such, is all that, by definition, a meta-state of orientation: any kind of grasping or inclusion of another piece is also reality.  we cannot unthink reality.  very lacan!  and given that all our positions, experiences and bodies are different, it makes sense that there be as many Real(s) as there are people.  beyond that social criterion of orientation, we do have some abstract ability to understand non-people orientation, such as with chemistry or math.  to understand how we fit in with them, however, is to mistake a rock for having the same kind of meaning as a spoon.  natural things have essence as they were, but artificial things only have essence by virtue of how it functions (pragmatics — interesting aside but this does suggest that everything is pragmatics in the the deleuze and guattari schizo-analysis sense).  in a real way, how you understand things is who you are.  and how you change, when you do change, incorporates those alterations in a worldview.

but — wandering in the 2nd attention is not pointless!  and to find commonalities in how various relations work in the inexpressible beyond specific signifying processes internal to us is in some sense to grasp the noumenal skin by which we generate context and meaning.  certainly not a pointless endeavor!  after all, to forgo such a process is to strongly risk being ruled by a 2nd attention dead-end, to be required to bring energy to maintain a world-system, which only asks everything of you — and takes away your free choice as a de-territorialized mammal, denying you much of the energy you might have otherwise, to grow.

wander free and easy.

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….

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…

    rule #1 of business (and life)

    March 8, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, rules / No Comments

    Do not try to change people’s behaviors.

    (Don’t base your business or inter-personal relationships on trying to get people to change).

    Meaning in the Face of Annihilation

    February 22, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

    A few days ago, I was showing houses to an old friend who is now a client. It was raining and we had passed by a smaller duplex. The pictures on the MLS aren’t the same as seeing the context of the property with your own eyes. After seeing it, he decided he didn’t want to gos in and disturb the people in there. There are better deals around. We were talking about life in general — catching up as it were — since we hadn’t really talked in a long time. In showing houses, you inevitably turn towards the topic of the future. Let’s call this future-talk.

    Future-talk is odd, it’s not often grounded in the present even though we talk about the future by way of the things we do during the present. But sometimes it is, and you can see that doesn’t just contain hopes and dreams that people have for the future. The future often also contains a justification of the present (current actions, current statuses &c). The present then, acts like a bridge that links the past and the future… even though it’s really disjunct (the present belongs to neither past nor future). And yet, looking for a home does this past-present-future connection quite well. People who want to buy a home, who have money are serious. It’s not chump change to drop close to half a million… It’s something to want a place to call your own, to START A FAMILY

    What people want in a home is about as important as who they are, and what their priorities are. Buying a house, even as an investment, represents a whole-lotta-commitment, (in a Led Zeppelin kind of way) and as old friends we were genuinely interested in what the other was doing. This is the best kind of relationship building anyway, and the best sales people do it well. They are interested and understand their client — at least they can appear to be to the client. And that’s what’s important, to orient yourself. Not just what the inside of the house looks like (which is where most of us see the house anyway)… but also the outside, the kind of neighborhood, the people, the schools, the local businesses, if we can see our parents coming over (or not), or friends… in American Literature, the home is a very important character. It’s kind of like the over-shadow, even if the home is also the town… where someone runs from, or runs to… And in that way it acts much like how God acts for people’s lives. It orients them, it becomes an attractor (or repellent)…

    So fast forward a bunch of particulars, when we got back into my car, he asked me if I believed in God.

    Now I don’t know what he thinks, and I didn’t ask — but I told him, yes I believe I do. Although if most people ask me if I do, I usually say No because if I say Yes, then I appear to be very misleading. The fact is, what I am thinking of in my head probably in no way resembles what they are thinking of when they mention God..

    This needs elaboration so I said very directly, I don’t really believe in the supremacy of a particular entity, per se, at least not one that is separate or dis-contiguous from everything else. I also don’t believe that I am (or that human beings are) central to the workings of the universe or that my actions (or that human actions) have any centrality to what’s actually going on. The universe is indifferent.

    My friend then said, Yes, that’s really not in agreement with most people.

    I also added I don’t believe that the meaning in my head has any bearing whatsoever on the universe at all. Meaning makes no difference to anyone except myself and vis versa.

    A good short article on the uncentrality of Das Sein can be read by Paul Graham. He wrote an essay called See Randomness. I realize now, after I’ve put it in here, that the article itself exists in a vacuum much unlike future-talk and houses but very much like the present. In other words, this article does not attempt to bridge any kind of relationship with a point of view that we are in fact central to the universe, or that the meaning we take for granted is inscripted in the very core of the universe. Rather Graham argues for consideration of alternate understandings of events. He grounds his appeal for personal distance on an evolutionary foundation — that our ‘identity’ of a cohesive, rational self is an indeterminate fiction — that we should not take central our own needs and desires when orienting the ‘meaning’ of the things that happen around us. He would agree with me then, that meaning is the way each of us navigates what would otherwise be ‘randomness’. This meaning is not a universal principle in which our suffering or joy has any bearing in the cogs of the cosmic machine. Our suffering or joy is, rather neutral, much like how chemical reactions are neutral.

    Gilles Deleuze in Practical Philosophy wrote very elegantly on this topic. I read his book twice to understand how he dismantles notions of ontology and instead recombines (and yet includes them) from a ground floor up so that they retain their parts, their sums, essences, attributions and conjugations. The first reading only served to confuse me, as the orientation wasn’t around a metaphyics of presence even while he preserves ‘essence’ as a central mode of anchoring meaning. The difference lies in the supposition that essence is constructed as “a relation of reciprocity” even while “Essence — Necessarily constitutes the essence of a thing …, a thing can neither be nor be conceived without, and vise versa, what can neither be conceived without the thing” (64). See how Deleuze has his cake and eats it too? Essence is the thing and the thing, essence. Likewise, what overrides the interactions of what we would understand both in a physical and a mental way is abstracted as a neturality of the interplay of relations — the exposition of Spinozan Ethics — without consciousness as being at all primary. In fact, it’s closer to epiphenomenalism if anything, although what Deleuze does does not push a metaphysics of presence of anything, nor does it sustain that heavy mutuality of dualism…

    When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. This is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we ever apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. [. . .] In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their real causes. That is why it is scarcely possible to think that little children are happy, or that the first man was perfect: ignorant of causes and natures, reduced to the consciousness of events, condemned to undergo effects, they are slaves of everything, anxious and unhappy, in proportion to their imperfection. (19)

    I believe that to most people who would orient themselves (or at least humanity) in the universe, and understand that there is an intrinsic place for them, for an I to wait and stand in luxury, as the children of the universe — either in this life or the next. I suspect that many of us feel (even if we know otherwise) that we are some how important — or that we are somehow deserving of all good things. So many of us, after Deleuze’s reading may feel that this point of view is horrible burden. Without that grounding of I or even God, there is no reason for anyone to behave or be good. Without God, many would insist that we get ultimate freedom but you also get ultimate responsibility. The universe won’t take care to preserve you, or transmogrify you based on karma… It is as though, without a direct core to the center of the universe, we should all eat each other and be terrified that others can do to us as they will.

    Many thinkers and writers have written that exposure to the Scared Other, Big Other, the Eagle are all terrifying experiences that would destroy small others like ourselves. To experience God, as it were, is to become annihilated. I don’t believe this to be the case though. Yitz Jacob who ponders the mystic musings in the Jewish tradition has a particularly applicable story here about one’s relation with the Sacred Other on Heaven and on Earth. The point of the story then, I think, has to do with being able to relate to HaShem, which is easy in Heaven but not so much on Earth. While being stifled on a “Heaven that sees all” makes much sense to me, the radical view that our essentiality is not at all cohesive (that we disintegrate) when faced with the Cohesion of the Almighty jumps too far. Now, Jacob does not claim we disintegrate in his blog post, but he does note that when in Heaven, everything is visible — by this, I took it to mean that HaShem is visible too. And if God is apparent then it also becomes very apparent what we should do. This doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t exist in Heaven, but it does mean that we lose our free will.

    I am not so sure that is the case. After all, should not the Cohesion of the Almighty must in fact include the cohesion of all our little partial essentialities as well? So it’s not so much that without God we get everything. Rather, it’s with God that everything is allowed.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov explores this topic through Ivan Karamazov — this is related to Ivan’s struggle. The brunt of it is that only with God can we have anything — only with God is everything allowed. The naked weight is that God is necessary — He does define for us what is allowed, but only because without God we would be an indistinguishable mass from everything else. Ivan, ever so rational, insists on the sheer the perversity of human beings that the Devil is made from Man’s image even though a God may or may not exist. I don’t know who Dostoevsky found inspirational enough to create a character like Ivan from, but I do feel that Ivan is under-developed. Ivan’s main source of torture is that he isn’t sure if there is a God or not — he seems to think there isn’t actually a God because of the vast cruelties that people play on one another — because bad people get away with so much! Ivan is getting two things confused though. Ivan continues to serve in a religious institution, so not believing in God is a terrible burden for him. Nonetheless Ivan sees the reasoning for expressing a belief in God — unity and singularity in the physical sense, not withstanding, but also for human society. People need God. People need to be put into their place — his poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ uses the tools of the Devil to do the work of God. And it’s through the Devil that the goodness of God can become apparent… that we then can see that we do have a choice. God becomes then, a field that anchors it all, Devil, God, everything. This field contains everything actual and anything possible — while containing an inscripted navigation as to what is good and right for people.

    So to go back to Deleuze, what is right and good for people as a society is what mutually increases their power — what allows them to coexist in harmony. It is of no small coincidence then, that this relationship is much like the Cohesion of the Almighty. On the one hand, the big picture is necessary — for us to be one, but to ride upon the Law and live it to its fullest extent would force us to lose our ability to have freedom. To use Jacob’s parable, the Earth is curved so we can’t tell what’s all around us — so we can do what we like, in a limited scope — even if it is to make mistakes. It’s only in the firmament where we can see all around, and experience the full blunt of it. Keeping the big picture in mind is difficult — as material creatures we are made to get what we can now, enjoy ourselves and satisfy immediate urges. Why wait? We don’t know what will happen to us next! So we end up with conflicting behavior that satisfies one aspect of our person but not another or we short ourselves in the long run for short term gain… and where does meaning fit into this?

    Meaning fits into everything as the justifications, explanations, short-circuits in our daily lives that smoothen over the otherwise random assortment of information that would bombard us, distract us, vex us or otherwise provoke perhaps too much uncertainty in our lives. If we were terribly uncertain, it’s doubtful we would ever have children, or ever buy a house, or ever do anything. If we didn’t think we could finish what we wanted to do then most of us would probably never do it. I believe meaning is the tactical moves that assure us coherency in our personal internal lives.

    In other words, meaning isn’t the inner workings of physics or math, or biology. The knowledge of science explores actual relations, insofar as we can test them. But that’s not meaningful. Rocks are not meaningful. Plants are not meaningful. Being alive is not meaningful. Being alive is biological. Evolution is not meaningful. The movie A Serious Man, one of my favorite movies, explores this issue. Larry Gopnik understands the math that he teaches in his class but he does not understand the story behind Schrödinger’s cat. He is always caught up in a series of diversions, wondering what the ‘truth’ behind any event is. Knowing or not knowing the truth is not important — the Coen brothers continually sink us into ambiguity, delay our reception of what anyone actually means or the actual intent of any character’s action. Gopnik then gets caught up in how that ‘truth’ of anything is both hidden and not at all meaningful. He can’t ever decide what he wants because he thinks he needs to know ‘what the intent of everything’ must be before he can figure out what he should want. It drives him to the brink, where he comes speechless, and only stares ahead.

    This is very much the serious philosopher’s problem is. We think that the universe should somehow have a place for us, that what we want should somehow be apparent to us, written for us in the stars, in our surroundings, in life. We may come some day to understand how life works, how to stop death, how to create beauty and art — these things may become possible through science. But that kind of knowledge isn’t meaningful because it won’t tell us how to live or deal with all things personal.

    This means then, that meaning is not universal. Meaningfulness is for US… each of us… independent of one another. It makes sense then, that our mental worlds are coexistent but also incompossible — that a gull of incommensurable, indefinite and indeterminate difference separates one mind from another … and that we aren’t privy to one another’s minds… even if we are all ‘made the same way’. We aren’t made to read each other’s minds. It would be bad for us if everyone else could read our mind… because we would be manipulated and abused. Our individual survival would be uncertain… yet ironically, as humans we are incredibly social and we DO need each other. Together we are strong. Under an Almighty, we are all the more Mighty. As a society, we do need those ‘universal’ inscriptions that having a God would define for us. It’s just that, while there is always a Big Other in any human culture who judges each of us small others (even if it is a reciprocity such as the Asian notion of ‘face’) only the Judeo-Christian-Islam traditions so directly gave Him a Voice, or should I say, the Word. And it seems that traditions in this tradition, such as Protestants, so individuated this Word so that it wasn’t a complex system like Confucianism or the Hindi-castes, but rather it was tied to a single soul, for each of us, waiting for us to become ripe, to gain awareness of it.

    And that’s where I can’t follow. Personally, that’s too much like a road written in the firmament (although to some it isn’t…). To project such a path seems to me to prompt a kind of Lacanian hysteria — much like Star Trek — we would zip around the universe looking for something but not knowing what. On the one hand then, Protestants, especially Puritans, have a very dour outlook. They are serious. And now, we get to the most deadly of future-talks. After all, everything, all responsibility for their own relationship with God rests on their shoulders. What about their past? Their present? Their future? It’s all written in the sky. Without that relationship with God, there can only be nothing. But now that I wrote this, I don’t think that responsibility rests only with Puritans… In any group, understanding how responsibility is divided is important; be it on an individual, a family or a collective of some sort, any group needs its members to be responsive in a way that is coherent. I suppose though, by separating any kind of Word from meaning means I am writing this entry as a philosophical dead-end. There is neither impetus nor universal appeal because this kind of meaning is too individual. (It is, after all, one philosopher can hardly talk to another!) Nonetheless, what I have put here works for me (at least now)… although it is written mostly as a universal statement about human kind.

    Perhaps ironically, as such a ‘universal’ statement, it must encapsulate an unnavigable void and include other minds… even though this statement most likely, is not meaningful for you.

    Yet at the same time, it becomes a very special thing, when a home speaks to you about your future.

    on Testing IRL

    February 8, 2011 / posted in Business, life as we know it / No Comments

    So I did join Ramit Sethi’s earn1k insider’s list.

    It’s quite interesting to note how often he responds to objects and naysayers about his product. Of course he’s right — if you can’t spare 30 minutes from your day to save you potentially hours then you’re wasting time by even considering throwing 1k into a program on how to improve… (business practice, marketing, negotiation skills…). Most of his regular emails seem composed of this kind of hustle, to urge people to get off their butts and refuse mediocrity.

    This is good because often many of my closest friends, while all intelligent and capable, do not invest their time into activities that will benefit them in the long run. Video games are the best time-waster. You spend 40 or 60 bucks to buy a game and then spend the next week or two playing it and beating it. It’s good to spend 12 hours, say on Ico or 115 hours on GTA4 and then go to bed at night feeling like you’ve made progress. You have made progress. It’s just not applicable to life. It’s the same thing with wildly successful multi-player games like Left 4 Dead, Battle Field 2142 or Call of Duty 4. Yes I’ve played most of these games (except Ico). And I’ve not beaten a single one of them. But the online games are especially trying because you do cooperate with other people, or play against them, and you get players who take them way too seriously. Any sense of accomplishment from a video game is real — even if the accomplishment and the work never fully or even partially translate into a real life benefit. Unlike say, climbing a corporate ladder or learning a new trade… So the email urging is good. People are hooked in some sense, many many people. And it’s good to call people out — the ones who would set goals for themselves but never follow through… because the goals are only there for them to remind themselves that they aren’t as loserly as anyone else… (I find that so annoying, to have a ‘serious’ conversation with someone who believes they will do something but never do it!) So I do agree with Ramit on this.

    But at the same time it’s freak’n annoying. I didn’t realize that reading his emails would mean that I would get badgered into doing whatever he wanted me to do. Taking action right away, or at least within a reasonable time frame. That’s okay though, because if it’s annoying enough I could always unsubscribe. But I won’t because I do find value in what he says, even if most of his emails is him responding to whining (he must get alot of people who reply with whining).

    Anyway, I’m starting to ramble but I did look at Ramit’s offering of a 60 minute interview with Tim Ferris on the subject of testing. They are about the same age I am, and they speak of testing as Testing. I listened to the interview while I was writing some database code for MySql and while answering some emails on a Saturday afternoon. The subject of testing is interesting, although I kind of wished they had set the foundation for it better.

    In my work-life I don’t have much guidance as to how to go about conducting business. Since my services are relatively new on the market (as a niche business), testing is necessary for me. So some areas in which testing apply are in a networking situation, saying different things for the breakfast 30 second microphone time — is useful. Trying out different pricing, and trying to see what fits best is another thing I’ve done. Asking customers and potential clients how we may better service their needs, also works. Ferris had some interesting and useful comments about testing (for instance don’t test when the risk is too high). Perhaps I am too new to Ramit’s blog — because I am not certain what the context is for testing. For instance, when is it good to test? The interview seems to conclude that testing is always good — when the risks are not too high. I guess this is alright, but I think at some point, testing becomes trolling. In real life or online.

    How do you know what to test? Going back to the video game scenario, people ‘test’ the rules in video games all the time. For instance, in the original Battlefield 1942 people learned that they can put the engineer bombs into a jeep and drive it into a tank, effectively destroying the tank with a car bomb. That’s testing but the rewards are so low… and transitory. Owning on an online server might be great if you are 14, but it’s less relevant if you’re 25 or even 35… Social ‘situations’ online such as on discussion forum don’t seem like a good place to ‘test’ although asking people their opinions on things is less a test than just surveying… (this is where I disagree with their notion of testing, although its vaguely applicable). If anything, determining when to test seems like a matter of boredom or curiosity. Ultimately, doing website SEO requires some kind of testing — to find out one’s target market or to find out which words are the ones which best attract customer dollars (if it is indeed that kind of website). So testing as an effective activity really depends on the context of what’s really at stake. When does testing become less effective and more about provoking people for whatever reaction they get?

    If anything, the most useful point about testing is more about how to determine when we need to test something. It’s obvious when we aren’t getting results at all or if we don’t have enough information to make a decision that we need to expand out knowledge base. The best way to do that is to test new situations. But it becomes less obvious if we are succeeding that we need to test if we are to maximize or improve what we want to do. Life is (often but not always) about learning new things. If we are complacent, satisfied with what we have, or afraid of losing — then testing becomes less important. Likewise, how we can step outside of our normal processes and conceive of a new way of doing things — paradigm shift or whatever you want to call it — is a completely different topic in itself, one that has had many many books written about it. In fact, such a level of creative-stepping-outside-of-the-proverbial-box is the wet dream of many many scientists, writers, managers, marketers, CEOs… and of course all those really smart finance people who create new finance instruments for investors all the time.

    So figuring out how to test or construct new paradigms or ‘scripts’ as Ramit calls them, may be beyond the scope of this entry, even if that’s what I’m talking about. In fact, the other side of testing is the purpose of testing — at least in business — and that’s INNOVATION.

    Recently Harvard Business Review Blogs have got some interesting thoughts on INNOVATION. Two of the three articles they have relate to the topic of testing. For instance, Quicky is an open-source model for product innovation, created by users to try and make better products. In essence, the users themselves were suggesting what they would like to buy. That certainly circumvents normal business ‘testing’. Of greater relevance, though, is this entry on Google’s attempt at being innovative — which basically could be resolved if Google were to test its innovations before committing to creating them. This is a clear case where testing is necessary.

    In general, testing isn’t just about originating a new idea and seeing if it will fly, it’s about interacting in the field of interest — succeeding where you want to succeed and trying new things to mark out territory for proposed behavior.

    On this vein, it may be of greater interest to introduce someone who has built a career off of testing (social boundaries) — and then publicizing it for all to gawk at… Would Ramit interview Tucker Max about testing and how he determines what next to test or how he goes about ‘testing’? (Who knows, maybe he already has! I just started reading the Ramit’s blog, but I don’t read Tucker’s…)

    *note, bringing up the two of them yet again seems kind of nefarious, or atleast it feels that way to me, but I think relevant because their models of interaction seem so similar… it may be interesting to see if Tucker Max can engage on the level of discourse Ramit seems so bent on focusing… and what he might be able to say… if it would even be relevant at all. It is of note though that Ramit did mention pick up artists I haven’t listened to this pod cast, but I did read the entry. Ramit’s main criticism about PUA is that it’s more about scoring than less about personal self-development… I don’t know… do you think Tucker Max is about personal self-development? It seems to me that he is about some kind of development… although it’s quite unclear what.

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