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capitalism as tourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nothing worst than a tourist than an enlightened tourist.

no authenticity

October 22, 2011 / posted in manifesto, Theory / No Comments

today let us get rid of the concept of ‘authenticity’

without ‘authenticity’ there would be no reason to fake anything.

without ‘authenticity’ there would be simply. and no measure of what is greater, locality or worldliness.

dare i say that there might not be a ‘being’ or ‘ownership’. certainly title insurance would not exist!

there also be no need to ‘lie’ because when we lie, we prize that aspect of things that are ‘true’ over things that are ‘not so’

and then maybe, Heidegger could be completely alive for longer than a moment right before his own death.

and buddhists would also not have to be ‘no-mind’ or ‘buddha nature’ because even daydreamers and schemers are just who they are.

without ‘authenticity’ there would be no ‘poser’ no ‘virgin’ no ‘elite’ no ‘bourgeois’ and no ‘original’.

i think without ‘authenticity’ we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya without needing congo drums or pot. wouldn’t that be nice?

whole foods would go out of business (yay) and the generics would flourish as generics. they wouldn’t have to pretend to be something else.

also, beyond ‘authenticity’

at some point theory is just another text, not to be prized or somehow more genuine than other texts just another piece of bullshit

instead of class, or race, or gender or ‘oppression’ there ought to be another name for that which exercises identity and in the process of

doing so, makes separations, cleaves people & designates, determines them to be lesser or greater.

i guess that’s like the zone of luce irigaray, who i have not read in a long time. i said cleaves and zone to be punny.

i suppose benjamin might want to be brought in, with this notion of art and originals… but anyway

the ‘moron in a hurry’ rests his case.

on Art

September 17, 2011 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture / No Comments

Sculpture is the most ideal art. Music is the most pragmatic. Dance is the most expressive.

The dream of the artist is to inscribe in the space inside the body outside the body. It’s very much as what Deleuze said regarding the inscription of great books being written in flesh.

I don’t mean that art should be tattooed, but that it should connect what is internal with what is external.

Yet art is not limited to the permeation of membranes or the echo of a model in the head of an artist to the exterior, nor does art have to do with the fidelity of transmission between an external source with an internal experience.

The worst artist is one who carefully conceives of his creations as a matter of controlling the experience of his audience — about transmitting a message, of needing to supplement their art with a libretto or scoffing at those who do not understand their art. Art as a capitalist endeavor is owned, but art as art is experiential germination not teleological. Art is not an essay, it is not about message or medium, although essays can be art. Mediums themselves may be art, and messages can certainly have that artistic impulse.

Rather, to make art is to germinate a form with its ambivalence and its multi-valence and its integral congruity such that the experience of that form extends itself naturally within the substrate of a manifold.

So while each of us are manifolds, select reflections of the world around us, our manifold itself is permeated by forces beyond us from the outside. Those forces can reverberate within our manifold to manifest a chamber of interlaced experience. That vibration, be it pleasurable or stinging — be it without judgement is the result of art. Great art can lead us to intenser vibrations.

Although of course, we judge such vibrations on the face of pleasurable experiences, or singular expressions in allowed social spaces. The accidental death of a parent, or the purposeful interruption of employment can both be traumatic instances, but not permissible within the social realm of ‘art’.

This is how sculpture can be the most ideal form. In the rigidity or fluidity of material, we can experience the visual (and tensile) sensuousness of a form that interrupts a space we are in and informs us of an otherworldly experience. Traditional otherworldly statues of Gods and Demons, plants and other creatures can invoke in us the presence of a static creature such as Venus de Milo. More contemporaneous forms vary in their simplicity or texture to suggest the raw indeterminacy of a gesture — perhaps highlighting the specificity of a bird in space as with Brâncu?i.

In much the same way, music allows for the literal and synecdochiac reverberation of rhythms and beats that bounce within the antechambers of our manifold. We literally vibrate with sounds that resonate with us. As the rhythms align the internal weave of our core, as it is already pre-made with alliterations from familiar genres and languages, so does speech and poetry jolt us with the strength of its diastole and systolic pistons such that we get the hip shaking, head pounding one-step, a halfway intrusion into the expressive realm of Dance.

If you follow me so far, you will understand the how dance and other forms likewise fall under art.

Great art is not the germination of a thought, so much as it is the construction brand new memetics, not of the replication of cliches and icons — although there are room for these too, as art. Art can be any kind of verbal or non-verbal language, it is a modal set operating on other modal sets. And we human subjects are not the only manifolds, although that is our best experience of alien worlds that weave worldly produce in often inexpressible or even inexcusable forms.

Manifolds exist as reflections in the pond, registers in your motherboard — manifolds are topographical maps of the earth, presented as 2D fold-outs. Manifolds are imprints of a system, or a totality along a specific interface, such that the movements of a knight in chess is a particular manifold. A table is a manifold of a factory. A chair is the manifold of the man who made it, the woman who sat in it for fifty years and the weather outside her home.

When Charles Bukowski grew old, wrote poems and started to vomit his brains out, drink is heart and his relationships down the toilet, he is a manifold of a great deal things. His abusive father, his teenage acne, his misery and search for pussy, his subsequent selfishness and alcoholism, his many wives, his days traveling and giving talks. When Michel Hemmingson wrote about the human scum, like the step-father who fucks his step-daughter, or shall we imagine a novel Hemmingson might write… a Vietnam vet who ends up in Hawaii, drugged out, alcoholic, washed out, alienated from the his family, his life interrupted, working a worthless job, waking up drunk each morning, walking the beach dressed like a bum, watching the waves crash on virgin sands, dreaming of the pussy he had, of his children who hate him, barely riding his bike to work once in a while, and his friend who drives a crab truck. This too is a manifold, the manifold written out in words meant to be inscribed in flesh, a way of life. A way of living, a weave, a potential argument for humanity, for existence, for the interruption of alien consciousness on our planetary cosmos.

Philosophers desire to be artists, they desire to walk the thin line that intersects all manifolds, runs through them. But that too is a manifold, one which seeks to imprint its attending indexes onto other manifolds. Plato wrote his Republic as an exploration of what he thought is, justice and the best social roles to express that justice. Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche, Marx and even Hegel all wrote on what the best way to live was, the best life to be. The different indexicals that tie these manifolds together act as spaces within a statue, to help formulate the different modes of awareness along bands of consciousness. Shall we name the indexes in Freud? Father, Child, Mother. Lacan? Analyst and Patient, Symbolic and Real and Imaginary. Language works as Moebius Strips that both inform us of our specific meaning along an indeterminate range. Art that does not apply so directly to such vast and vague concepts such as Society and Justice still carry a language a rhythm like Frank Sinatra’s do-be-do-be-do or a do-wop that enfolds us and unfolds within us in a place and time of our being-here regulated by limbs, circadian rhythms of day and night, our social function (formal, wedding or in the bedroom with an intimate guest) and what we had for lunch earlier, our hopes and dreams, the deixis of our self image &c.

In this manner, art is more than just a medium or a message. It is the way in which we weave and are weaved by our surroundings, the ripples of our actions in other’s lives and their actions in ours. We are made and unmade by the minute, by the hour with the expressive forms that carry alien forces directly into our filters, such that the Simpsons expressed in South Park is more than just South Park or the Simpsons, but informs us of each. We watch Lost not as Lost is made or watched by its producers or written by its writers, but as we are made and it is made through us. So the truths and beauties that Moulin Rouge spoke so highly of in Art is less the periodic expression of “partial theories as though formalized through science” but the deployment of our own orientation to that stimulus, our own expression of our manifold as a slice of a context, through the deixical filters of self image and being and through the rubric of oneness, the way evolution isn’t about the development of a single species through time but the cohabitation of a series of forces as they co-evolve, the planet as one massive domino, biome on biome, niche on niche and weather system on planetary rotation.

Living life is art in the broadest sense and our awareness of it does not make it less rich but in fact is irrelevant to its continuation. If anything our awareness is an interruption of a process through the privatization of a deterritorialized space and the prizing of one deixical filter above all others. The projection of ego and selfhood is to mistake the manifold for everything else, when in fact manifolds are little more than dirty mirrors. Remove that dirty mirror from its manifestation and place it in a vacuum and it would be like putting a diamond in a room with no light. Or cutting a figure from a painting out. Taken out of context, the figure lacks all balance of perspective and is no longer adequate to its task. It functions as an empty vector. Unless one projects the original painting around the figure or introduces the figure as a piece in a new manifold, nothing will happen. A mirror in the dark like a soul without a body will falter and vanish completely without a trace like animals in iron cages.

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.

on ‘letting your meat decide’

September 3, 2011 / posted in manifesto, note to self / No Comments

finding meaning is a horrible thing to do.

better recommended is lapping after things like a dog, gottadododo have have have, reacting to things, barking madly or jumping after something just because you feel like it.

everyone looks for meaning in some way, as it can be awful oppressive not to have meaning. meaning gives direction. so any direction will do. but direction is there for just part of you.

meaning is the justification for us to do the things we want to do anyway, and then feel good about it.

actively looking for meaning is much like saying there isnt anything good in what’s directly in front of me.

“in order for me to accept it(the thing in front of me) i need to turn it into something else,” that’s what looking for meaning in things does.

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.

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 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).

Beyond Existentalism

March 1, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

it occurs to me two implications of the previous entry one existentialism:

http://sulphuroxide.com/2011/02/22/meaning-in-the-face-of-annihilation/

1) that if meaning only works for one’s self, there isn’t any reason to respect anyone else’s mental capacities or conclusions, except for purposes of “living together”. in cases where more authoritarian minded individuals would think things like ‘single mothers are bad for society’ ( http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/134031175/For-Single-Mothers-Stigma-Difficult-To-Shake ) there’s really no reason to respect anyone else’s life choices, or life situations… the same goes for gay marriage and homosexual relationships wherein concerned individuals would deem others as being in ways that detrimentally affect them even while more libertarian or liberal proponents would claim that such adult relationships fall under rubric of ‘no one’s business but the parties involved’…

2) nonetheless, for these reasons, existentialism does not have any strong role in politics.

while i adhere strongly to the ‘meaning is ultimately meaningless’ camp — i’m not sure where else to go with this. in the past few weeks ive been sliding really close to vulgar marxism… where questions of beauty and aesthetics become less relevant… simply because of how these problems are defined (up in the air, too, vapid and ‘feel good’…). at the same time though, especially in practice with web development (as the most obvious case) beautiful code — aesthetically pleasing algorithms and presentation — remain at the forefront of my conditions for a project that is more ‘completed’. this is a definite issue, to put it bluntly, at the onset, a huge contradiction.

i think this ‘huge problem’ that i have is very similar to more traditional philosophies (of which i think i draw a large part from)… namely the differences between idealism and physicalism… the lines are badly drawn (imho) because it’s not so much the mentalists vs the physicalists… but really a difference between “ontology” and “ontic” or design and economics. zizek fielded this area strongly with this back in ticklish subject although I must say that by parallax gap, he may have resolved it enough in his head that the question is buried but never fully addressed anymore but as a more general debate… i don’t know i havent read any zizek recently…

a more pragmatic approach can be found within the debate between urban designers on the point of view of ‘good design’ vs ‘economic business plans’– neither of which by itself, are always what’s best for neighborhoods. the quote froms directly from this discussion, and it’s eloquently put by mariela alfonzo
you can catch the link here: http://www.publicprivatepassion.com/2011/02/can-cities-take-stand-on-good-urban.html

Ultimately, the bottom line is you cannot reach a compromise between urban design and economic development – that’s a losing battle. I firmly believe you need the former to achieve the latter, but you have to understand the latter when devising the former. We HAVE to stop looking at “design” as a line item within the “costs” section of a pro-forma.

the company apple masters these principles with their slick ipod, and iphone designs… and while they do not have market dominance wen it comes to the cell phone industry, they are industry leaders.  if you apply this ‘solution’ analogously to philosophy then you get that meaning, in order to be more than an existential statement of how one navigates — in order to be ‘meaningful’, it must also be epistemologically sophisticated in how one interfaces with their situation, to put it in a smarmy but ‘duhh’ kind of way. so as far as politics go, we can’t be sophists… and we can’t be arrogantly totalitarian, but at the same time, we need to reify our problems. we must be sophisticated in the deleuze and guattari way via concepts — we must seek to address problems that are critically problems — in how those structural crises make a real impact. we can’t address all problems that we find — because many of them are not really meaningful problems.

how we separate this, between what is meaningful and what is not, throws us back quite a few steps. the ‘corporate’ response would be to define the problem in a tangible metric… so that we can attain that goal. which of course, would please stock holders, give us a strong sense of progress… but this ‘solution’ by itself also did cause the stock crises of our current day. we do also need to keep in the big picture as well. which is a problem, because tactically we have ‘solutions’ which cannot be ‘solutions’ in an open-ended undefined system.

you realize that philosophy as a whole works best when it abstracts/extracts meaning from complexity.  it reduces phenomenon the way language names things, the way we put new information, new items we encounter into old files.  so philosophy, and a systems approach can best work at giving us tools to handle past situations.  it can ‘predict’ previous events accurately because the relationships which were relevant at the time of philosophizing were — relevant.  things change, and sometimes those events don’t work no more — the indexes have been re-shuffled so a system may not predict anything much anymore.  i think this is where the quote above (from an urban planner on the relationship between ‘good’ urban design and ‘productive’ economic plans) applies.  the various ‘schools’ are great, because they have focused on their limited scope questions on real world situations.  we’ve gotten so in-depth!  but that depth is narrowly defined and runs the risk of becoming a kind of art-for-artists.  in order to make great statements that shake up those studies AND make them accessible for outsiders, we need genius,  we need something new and fresh to break out of old paradigms.

believe it or not, the bloggers from the havard business review all echo the same issues.  in a world of structured relations, structured cash flow, marketing plans and business plans… urban planning and a SYSTEMS approach, we need what they call ‘innovation’ — part of the key in many of their posts is a kind of ‘how to break out of our mold’.  if existentialism as a philosophy only works for one’s own meaning — how we connect with others, how we expressedly cross the gaps in this field becomes a matter of innovation and creativity.  after all, getting stuck in one’s head is like starting a college in academia. to use a classic example, do neurologists and cognitive psychologists talk to one another?

to use the quote above as an analogy, to use effective communication requires that we understand the mindset of the one we speak to and our own mindset.  both need to inform each other, which means of course, a transdisciplinary approach. (again, DUHH).  how descartes has problems with this, stems from how he defines the mind as a closed system.  well guess what, our minds ARE closed systems in so far as we think about them as such… they obviously still manage to create objects and process new information in astonishingly innovative ways.

where this happens at the subterranean level, is of course, what deleuze and guattari call rhizomes.

how we facilitate and actively push for those connections is what i call rhizomatic architecture. ITS NOT JUST ABOUT TREES (aborescence), BABY!

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