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what’s wrong with baseball? Absolutely Nothing.

August 7, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, utility / No Comments

went to a baseball game. a few days ago.

dodgers vs the cubs. i went to a game before when i was 12 but it was without framing, as a school trip. overall, i dont remember anything, so i consider this to be my first baseball game

the initial striking was how immersive being in the crowd was.

usually when i saw baseball games, it was in a movie or a tv show. and so, baseball was a backdrop against a larger plot. at first i kept feeling like there was a larger story i was missing; that my attention needed to be elsewhere.

of course there was nothing like that.

a bunch of random things happened, with the jumbotron, with things like air guitar, dancing, kissing. the audience basically entertained themselves through the jumbotron while the players did whatever they did… guess baseball is a slower game so they needed that. but really, the emotional energy in the crowd was nearly overwhelming. i found myself recoiling when they did the wave, or when random shit happened… the audience was totally in it.

i realized then, something very unlike what my 19 year old self would realize, i think, if he were there.

there is nothing horrible at all about baseball games. Absolutely Nothing ™.

so this is why sports fans are sports fans: you have the near immersal of what it means to be in a group, in a community… with the colors and the cheering and the singular mindedness of the crowd. this rabble focus is what so many 19th century philosophers and political thinkers were afraid of; the mob. this is the heart of democracy and fascism rolled all into one. (south park got something right! rabblerabblerabblerabble)

i found myself kind of sickened by it and at the same time, wanting to be part of it… despite the fact that it was so inane, all the actions and the spectacles… arbitrary. random.

what was so jarring in this had alot to do with the advertisements that snuck in. this is our world; where bank of america’s logo was on the jumbotron all the time, and state farm’s logo was on all the tickets… despite this being dodgerland. dodger dogs, dodger water, dodger gear… the other brands, subway and bank of america and state farm… there, almost like part of the infrastructure…. support beams we see, sitting on the bleachers, but we don’t really see. branding to support branding.

not bad perhaps, since everything takes funding… but i think this kind of experience made me feel, wow, this is really leaning dangerously close to the beginning of social engineering… democracy works by appealing to the masses, so complex ideas and policies always need to be distilled to their simplest form for dissemination and emotional reaction. in much the same way, capitalism — marketing of experiences like dinner, or ziplines or sports events also need to be focused to be pleasurable in their specific ways that they are. everything is distilled, made simpler. focused

i see our lives as becoming fuller and fuller, until there’s very little room for us to move without having some business or some experience waiting for us to come in and sit there… that its easier to go to a dating mixer than to the bar, or its easier to do all your banking and credit cards and payments with one financial profile (linked across several or even just one financial institution)… or your medical records will be stored across a national database for instant access. no more having to go through the same proceedural exams once you switch small time dentists or opticians. everything made easy. want disney? go to the disneystore. go to disneyland. want sandwiches? google sandwiches and go to a sandwich shop. have sandwiches 24/7. want philosophy? go to the philosophy factory and download any number of works, that might have taken a PHD 25 years to find and read… you can have it all on your kindle.

this kind of hyper-realism…
this availability of different cultural affects:
apparently tonight william shatner was in the audience somewhere for they did a star trek tribute… during the fireworks display they played was to the music of star trek… movies and tv shows. when they were blowing off fireworks and i was watching young and old take out their cell phones to take pictures and record it… this event was wondrous… a real crowd pleaser. why were they trying so hard?

this notion of enchantment, which was missing from the desperation that arose out of 9/11… has found itself reborn today in momentary displays of immersive experience… ok, sure, there’s nothing really bad about going to see a baseball game and its following fireworks… (except maybe your team losing). but this is the kind of pure, unanalytical, uncritical embracing of patriotism, team spirit, community, crowd-oneness that people are missing… we all are in this together and for a moment, despite being competitors in driving, in jobs, in relationships, in living space with all these angelos, we can all pretend that we belong together and that everything fits in a secular humanism devoid of poverty, suffering and discrimination.

this kind of singularity reminds me of a conversation with some hipsters about books a few nights earlier. rather than lament that no one ever read anymore, we started talking about how people do read, but in different media. i tried to steer the conversation into “the novel started off as a distraction for victorian women on their summer trips (something to do when sitting in the carriage or on a boat)… and ends today as just another source of entertainment (like the long drawnout serial tv dramas like lost or 24)… if we are upset that no one reads anymore, we are probably missing the fact that without the novel as a penultimate art form, no one really processes data in a long drawn out way, for deeper analysis… you don’t get this immediate engagement with tv serials, movies, video games or performance… and following that, do we need the kind of thought that goes into something like moby dick or war and peace?”

no one had any answer that moment. but i think that if we start having our entertainment as immersive singular experiences that exist in “dodgerland” or “when you turn on your xbox and select any video game” … that fragmented disconnected disjointed (ir)relevancy, means that we won’t be able to examine this content without understanding the larger frame its presented in… (since each content will have its own specific logic, like an anime with a ton of characters who behave weirdly but fit together). in other words analysis will be limited to less about what something is, than how it fits in — less what it says than how it functions when placed in the context of a larger whole… in a metaphysical way what “time” it presents in, as it defines its own time and is defined into a time. in a sense, we will have to leave the why to programmers, marketing departments, designers and engineers who create the box, package the content, as they understand how it fits in financially and socially, why people come to it, how they use it, what they are looking for… the only way to engage has to be on a deeper level of abstraction. otherwise, you will a puppet in the system. even while philosophizing, you run around, a rat in a maze of market forces. you are collectively shuffled into traffic, follow the defined paths beaten by urban engineers to maximize efficiency of travel, regulated by invisible giants for a specific purpose… the result of which, is poor design that juxtaposes and fails in most dimensions (lost in traffic, stores isolated and starving, stuck in traffic, accidents, even death); or good design that maximizes its output (easy flow, plenty parking, encouraging you to feel good about buy things you dont need, to a highway that dumps you onto your neighborhood with easy access home to bed).

i think the majority of systems are designed to input-output, they are haecceity oriented; transform one material into another for the purpose of quiddity. it might be information of one type, into another, but the result is nearly always a modularity that interlocks with other modularities… be it a car on the road with other cars, or one web page that functions on most any browser. you can be a unique, but the big system knows you entirely; plays you like a fiddle and when its done with you, you’ll don that solider uniform. your condition may be weird but the health care system has a form for you! its all about the processing. not as an industrial society that used to can fish or make fords on an assembly line; we do this to ourselves now. the rationalization of process invades our subjectivity and cleans it out. even in scifi dystopias of post-armageddon, we still have robot mass murders, insane, inhuman machines that have a system to wipe out the human element.

rationalizations of process and process oriented management (of people, as employees or as customers) is probably the one far reaching mindset that came out of the 20th century…. its also the biggest, most useful and most damning box that we have built for ourselves. as capitalists, we have developed money, at least as students of economy, into a raw unit of social value. in the process of using money as an objective measure to determine the viability and value of pursuing endeavors, we’ve also had to objectify processes so as to track money… so we can further measure the potentiality of any and every course and each level and each intersection, be it in government or business.

as mice in such processes, we are bombarded by a variety of paperwork, forms, meetings, appointments… junctions which administrators and bearucrats alike shuffle us into different hallways, websites, telephone transfers, offices… we are transformed from one client into the next client, and our goals are often sidelined by the process we must endure to reach our goals. the only reprieve from this process must be immersive entertainment, new worlds that we can partake as fully as possibly… with their own logic and their own rules… to be fresh and enchanting, to allow new and better candies… which ironically, sublimates this model of rationalization… single player video games are the most obvious, since there’s a path (or paths), a storyframe the player must masochistically follow to reach the endline. like sade flogging our subjectivity into the perfect worthy superhero who only he can reach the end (and you must be he if you were there for this all). in baseball and other distractions, we have the model which is presented as a series of courses, time for the jumbotron, time for the commercial break, time for the cliffhanger at the end of the season… the better the structure is hidden, the better disney reminds us we aren’t standing in line for hours, the more immersive the experience, the more hidden the process, the more successful the distraction, the purer the aesthetic and the more separate that highpoint emotion is from everything else (to be repeated?).

so when stacking processes, the model of the individual as a free standing spiritual being has to give way to a multi-valent subjectivity… a raw nothingness that is waiting to be transformed into client, or employee, tracked along a series of rationalized tiers (level 1 admin, level 2 senior engineer, platinum card member)… on the producer side we have a series of machinic trees that eat employees and shuffle customers and product like blind jugglers. on the consumer side people are demographized into a crowd of impersonal hunger for particular experiences (a particular sporting team, snowboarding or surfing, the regular motley of a demographic of restaurant, a group tour)… very different from the very personal subjectivity of the “everyman” individual that nearly every main character written since tom jones was approaching the end of the 20th century… (this past naturalistic subjectivity was most visible in mary shelley’s frankenstien, a subjectivity in a non-subject body, the post-human frankenstien!)…

what we are doing is no longer a matter of self improvement, for there is nearly no self. we are regulated into narratives trapped in bodies, with too many properties to count! i am every kind of number to any institution. to find yourself, to look for that center that william wordsworth had when he wrote “Lines written a few miles above Tin Abbey” is impossible today. wordsworth could be whole writing as an upper class poet, lazying in the shade with his sister, but we can only be EAT PRAY LOVE, a series of disconnected, disjointed experiences that are marginalized by the objective processes that dominate our landscape of process oriented institutions., that package experience, package us so many slices of individually wrapped cheese. this post-self is an XML file, a tree crowded with attributes, children and nodes, namespaces needing to populated and defined, attributes that connect only to one or two situations… we are maps that defeat definition, maps that can be read from any dimension but are every shifting and changing in tenor dependent on vector, content and value. you could become any fan at any moment; soak in the media light and follow any event; you can jointly comment on yahoo news, or huffington post or reddit. thats because we are one piece. as individuals on the street we have no connection but our connection is deeper than occupying space. together we create a mindless, headless bastion moving godlessly and clumsily, an orgy of demographics, unified and unpredictable, gobbling up the planet, turning the earth inside out as we stack her guts along as highways, guardrails, airplanes, cell phones, and strip malls, event as we stack her guts on us as an exoskeleton of devices to extend ourselves in invisible social dimensions, to join as a single forge of entertainment and profit maximization.

each layer is different; at each step up the tree or across a branch, we have a different logic, a different department. vast stretches of sociality are the same; paper work, stamps, requisition and cross-benefit analysis, but many areas are radically different; and they may bump into one another like galaxies whose gravitational influence cross-congregate and (dis)assemble like rap and rock or 4chan and minecraft or the colbert report and highschool… but an interesting elucidation for another post.

so yes, this is what i went though while watching the baseball game. dodgers vs cubs. dodgers won, 6 to 1.

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.

The Confusing Junk of Modernism: How Duchamp isn’t an Artist

March 4, 2011 / posted in art, rhizomatic architecture / No Comments

In Cabinet Magazine, issue 27, there is an article titled Readymade Remade about Pierre Pinoncelli who first made a big name for himself by pissing in Marcel Duchamp’s readymade urinal. The article examines Pinoncelli’s argument that he was bringing history and value to the urinal by doing so. While the French gov’t did not agree with Pinoncelli at all, especially after Pinoncelli pissed in the same urinal again in 2006 — the article decidedly agrees with Pinoncelli. The writer, Leland de la Durantaye, smartly cites Duchamp himself as the authority — Duchamp, after “defacing” the Mona Lisa, claims that his Mona Lisa is not a readymade. Rather this remade Mona Lisa is an “assisted readymade”. By taking mass produced art and introducing “a unique commentary”, Duchamp means to bring this item back into the spectrum of art. With this, Durantaye implies that Pinoncelli is right in his claim that the French gov’t is wrong — but then after fining Pinoncelli, should the French gov’t pay him the money? After all, Pinoncelli’s “unique commentary” has increased the value of this French treasure by taking a mass produced readymade which has “lost [its] readymade authenticity, [its] unique identity, and [. . .] dynamically infus[ing] one of the replicas with [authenticity]”.

Pinoncelli's Duchamp's Urinal

Twice stained, thrice as valuable. Look up Pierre Pinoncelli on the internet. You'll see he's quite a pissant. HA HA HA!!

Besides the “unique critique” of Duchamp’s work (of which Pinoncelli is a decidedly excited fan) there are three possible directions for contradictions:

1) Durantaye takes for granted the implication that what is valuable in art is expressed monetarily.

2) Benjamin’s famous essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction equates uniqueness with art — that mass produced copies only accentuate the value of “originals” which the elite can then possess as being art. By unifying Duchamp’s readymade and his assisted readymade, Durantaye implies that Duchamp is not producing art at all — if a readymade meant to be art can be in need of “assistance” to rejoin the status of art then Duchamp is not at all an artist for Duchamp is not producing art.

3) Simultaneously, as you can imagine, Pinoncelli’s urine was cleaned from the “defaced” readymade. Nonetheless, Pinoncelli left, in the language of Lacan, an unseen stain, on that particular readymade. The British have recognized this readymade as being more intrinsically valuable. One of the subtexts of this article is that what is valuable is not necessarily tangible… that art itself has moved beyond the realm of pretty pictures and skillful techniques (for what kind of technique has Pinoncelli, besides the admirable ability to urinate in public before the eyes of others? — no doubt a feat most of us could not accomplish).

Taken all at once, although somewhat contradictory, we come across a paradox. Art then, in the contemporary age, is what both unique, intangible and monetarily valuable. Of course no matter what the French gov’t thought, they could not allow anyone pissing on any art. Imagine if they awarded Pinoncelli? What kind of people would go to the museums in the hopes of making “readymade” money? At once we see that art cannot be what is tangible. Of course, tangibility may be our best claim to any sort of possession of it. We go to museums to see art, but in fact run abut something else. So is art tangible?

If it is only tangible then Duchamp is not an artist. If it is intangible, then Duchamp and Pinoncelli are both artists. Durantaye sides with Pinoncelli and Pinoncelli with Duchamp.

But if art is not material, then what is art? If Duchamp is not an artist but a “materialist contextualist” then how are we to approach material context? We all understand that art can be horribly elitist, but is it so only in order to promote/protect its own value? Does this then make the lives of our celebrities art? What about expensive, corporate, buildings? What then happens to punk and the D.I.Y. culture? Is that no longer art but just noise (since anyone can punk)?

Again the direction seems to lie more with Deleuze and Guattari’s how more than the what. While both of these thinkers equate art with concept, if we take this discussion seriously it seems that art lies more with social positioning than anything else: architecture must be valuable because of the resources taken to produce it, as are museum housed works — and the millions of punk fans world-wide.

This bodes woe for fans of Kristeva, and all the art lovers around… as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. But that’s the one book of theirs that I do not like. So that’s fine by me.  (Any “commentary” I would like to share on that book?  I think not, at least, I can’t comment if you’re watching…)

Me, personally? I don’t believe in any of what I just wrote anyhow.
Is that tangible enough for ya?

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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