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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On incidental Truth, consistency and belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

being and identity and reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

transcendental immanence

May 23, 2013 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

deleuze and guattari develop the concept of the plateau as being a level that is consistent with itself. there are an infinite number of plateaus, just like there are an infinite number of logics, each different but with its own internal consistency. plateaus have at their core, an absolute logic that we can understand as being a “plane of immanence” — which is an even harder concept to define. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence )

this plane of immanence is only immanent to itself — and this is what allows it to also be simultaneously transcendental but to other phenomenon outside the plane.

the easiest way to conceive of planes of immanence is to think of a specific consciousness — animal, human or alien. how sensory data enters the consciousness, or how that consciousness purposefully arranges phenomenon IS what makes that consciousness itself. this is the easiest way to understand immanence. but immanence is not limited to consciousness. it could be how a specific species of bug is, or how the building code is itself (regardless of what it specifically says), or how a system gravitation works. it could be a logical formulae and its extending existential statements. anything really. even a poem, potentially. anything with its own internal sense, or logic.

plateaus then, are planes of immanence but as they relate to other plateaus, and signs that float between them. if you take a line of flight, a thought as it escapes a plateau, it can then become another plateau. plateaus are the status quo of tight-knit groups of people. when a group of people that absolutely form a group (rather than a collective of individuals) navigate through a new space, they leave behind tracks unique to themselves. like survivors in a zombie apocalypse movie, they take certain choice items, leave others behind, and make muddy prints everywhere. forensic dramas like CIS, law & order, mentalist and bones, and whatever new tv shows exist now… they all hinge on the fact that people are planes of immanence. people can’t help it; they are immanent to themselves. their tracks are unique to them, and can be left by no one. each episode is the piecing together of a criminal profile like a new bear claw in the mud can tell the biologist the age, size, sex, diet and whatever about the bear so they can define it, contain it and capture it… normalizing the forest.

in case you aren’t impressed by the organizational power behind this post-structural philosophy: palmistry, astrology, alchemy… these are all planes of immanence on the scale of their immersion. if you grab any media, like anime or any movie or tv show — if this media is successful it will create a plane of immanence — a world uniquely itself so that we can insert any number of anything into this world and it will follow a logic. (one imagines aliens landing in the middle of an episode of SUITS and harvey spector defending earth by “out lawyering” a bunch of alien invaders)

so, if you think about planes of immanence and how they relate to things like real estate… or doing philosophical forensics — e.i. reading the signs people leave lying around and trying to reconstruct their psyche-footprint — no doubt planes of immanence is related to how we as human beings conceive and arrange things. that is, cultural knowledge can be arranged in a series of multiple planes of immanence. it follows too that biological, and physical phenomena can also be arranged this way, but only as it relates to how we define the study of that phenomenon — or more rightly speaking — how we define that phenomena. because when you take said knowledge and extend it beyond the academic field, we see (more and more so, through the internet’s ability to open us to other people’s thoughts and conversations) that nothing is by itself… changes even in one small area affect phenomena in conceptually remote places. for example, bees. pesticides. earthquakes in distant regions as they make our computer hardware more expensive. economic analysis often trace roots to surprising historical ontologies as they originate through natural or political disasters or technological disruption.

so i’m guessing that these plateaus are more a formulation of our mind than an actual out-in-the-world noumenon.

the question then becomes, for me, how is it that we choose one plateau over another? we (and i mean us 1st worlders who exist so much online) are so exposed to alternative medias, alternative media channels, lies, truths, advertisements that seek to blow our collective minds. yet we filter out some messages when other messages resonant so strongly with us. i understand that too much twisty logic is distasteful. such logic is rejected because it asks that we sacrifice too much of ourselves to follow it. but too little is boring, even cliche. so somewhere in the middle, is the pleasurable playfulness of being exposed to some kind of nonsense. it seems to me that philosophical economics is the proper field of study here.

economics is all about why we choose one thing over another. why we make decisions the way we do. granted, this isn’t psychology or sociology — economics today isn’t even about the maximization of utility. economics today is about the maximization of the objectively quantifiable utility (money and all the things that are money (commodities… stocks, real estate… branding… whatever…)). but the fact of the matter is, we make choices all the time about what we are willing to expose ourselves to, and why we chose to embrace one plateau (say, global warming) over another (say, scientology).

to me, this is MOST fascinating. it’s also not enough to say, okay, here’s a weird club, who goes with it, and can enjoy it… who wants to leave immediately? i want that experience to somehow say something about our psyche, how it reaches our core. i want to trace that line. so i suppose then, that i buy into the fantasy that so many forensic tv shows share: that everything is about us. that our choices matter, that they reveal to the world who we are despite ourselves. we cannot help but be who we are.

the root of this fantasy though, isn’t just that things touch us at our core, that everything reflects on us, because everything is psychologically revealing… it’s the fantasy that we even have a core in the first place.

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.

aesthetics for temporal cognition

June 13, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

have the nagging feeling that life is slipping me by even though i am productive, in the every day sense, that my actions have consequences for the ppl around me, even to people i have not met.

the sense that i do not have a life, that i do not matter, even though i kind of have a life and even without the sense of community nor with the closeknit friendships ive always had; i still go out several times a week.

this feeling must be based off the faulty illusion that we can “get it”, having achieved something, or experienced something, having it to keep forever. when in fact, even objects, which are the least objective of all, shift constantly, in imperceptible angles, adding up the way the butterfly wings kill entire weather patterns, though, the metaphor is more poetic than actual since complex systems can be expressed in tipping points graphically but not that is not equivalent to being instigated solely by such tiny singularities.

most of all though, what we have is memory. bergson in matter and memory hit the nail on the head — that ontology isnt so much about an experience but a hall of mirrors — experientially echoing in infinite recursion, each recall degrading in imperceptibly, adding up the way butterfly wings shift wind patterns, though, the insect is more poetic than aural, more whimsical than solid, more illusionary than alive… much like that cat of mr. schrodinger’s

i dont think my push to be alive!(tm) could be more actual, although it certainly could be more dramatic. there can’t be more hours in the day. and to be honest i kind of do hate going out. i also love to sleep. look forward to it throughout the day, only to stay up late at night like now.

one of the realisations that LSD gave emily dickinson was that the infinite singularity of the ALL could be found even in a closed space, in the non-all of her room in Amherst. yes, even in Amherst could butterfly wings penetrate walls, and having felt that insect from halfway around the world, she found she could witness it in all things. in the early church calls of the morning or the rocket symphony of a good and tender wine or the heavy walking beats of the bee gees. look at her poetry– YOU KNOW SHE SAW THE MARK OF BUTTERFLIES IN HYPHENS AND ELLIPSES TRAILING OFF THE PAGE IN RHAPSODIC SPLENDOR

so perhaps i need to get out more, or perhaps not. at this point, one life would interfere with another, and together they would not enrich one another. i think at this plateau, they offer the same experience, so i should just choose one and concentrate on that.

but they really dont —

i am mistaking syntagma for paradigms. it’s my mistake, and a common one. formal equivalence is not the same as ontological difference…. that difference being identity, and that kind of paradigmatic difference is what distinguishes a particular woman as soul mate rather than as just another stranger.

of course that’s the sadness about formal reductionisms, that classification at the level of meta promotes the illusion that we can be a soul mate to each and any, every and all– when in fact, to be soul mate is a completely different thing, from one soul to the next.

and of course, our human limitation will not allow us to swallow the whole ocean with our tiny little cups. in pouring more & more & MORE &MORE!, we lose what we have. that’s clear from chuang tzu, perhaps why emily stayed in her room, so as to not lose wings (even if she was only seeing her own pattern strewn across all her furniture and things).

so we seek butterflies out through formal equivalence, rather than gaining a unique deployment with each instance. perhaps this is a facet of a short-cut in cognition, to build patterns and build experience from within familiar patterns. yet we’ve each come across in ourselves and in others, a recognition that experience can be defined solely by patterns we see, when we rely on our syntagasms rather than on the uniqueness of each moment.

yet similiarly to grasp each moment as a uniqueness lends itself to another reductionism, that this can be grasped and is a thing to itself, like the last thing in itself… and this produces another syntagmasm, a meta map for experience that contains each and every, a freshness– so that we insist on finding a novelty in each moment, forcing a short sightedness. we forget to see the entire jet stream and only see butterflys flapping. not so bad, but then why walk with your head down, each foot swinging out. and walk into a pole? or wall? or another charles?

perhaps i am kidding myself. that there is a direction there, and that we can dictate how we surf. but if your walking feet don’t hypnotize then is it possible to see the moon as seperate from the finger pointing at it? bruce lee seemed to think so, and he had great balance though he did die young.

i am rejected, am rebuked, forced back, into the same position i was before, when i started writing this damned thing. yet now feels slightly different, degraded, altered, imperceptibly by me? by time? by metabolism? hallelujah! progress? or is this just another remix for the new year?

heidigger wrote that death encapsulates meaning, a life. that right before one died, when one was dying, then one could be most complete. and having an end point, knowing it’s lurking there, lets us wrap ourselves in meaning, and bring finality to what we do/did, a beauty that when standing on the hill, we can grasp, a beauty which might be lost if we lived for too many 10,000 years. perhaps making bruce a hero too, than if he passed on in bed, an old man filled with regret, living in the past.

so if he was right, with this “a life” we can have meaning, but meaning then, can only be individual, a prior-ity given to prioritize against all other possibilities, potentialities and signifieds… each and every, any and all vectors. that if individual then that precludes the possibility of universal meaning, even if meaning can be shared by the group, by societies, it cannot exist without “a life” and cannot persist without death. bruce’s fingering the moon is the moon to bruce, not to us. then how can the universe not end? how can it not be, unless its meaning was completely inhuman, beyond human and not-human ever at all?

which it obviously is, the way an ant colony understands one things, and ice cubes grasp another, completely foreign actualization.

that we should ride, like a gigantic purple moon over a crazy ocean made of foaming milk and styrofoam, that walt witman with his opium face should preside over an archway of marble halls in deafening revolution be how we find our place — like a daisy on a battlefield — this is spectacular, and betrays our ant colony mentality. but perhaps this is not a weakness at all; that our heads should be bowed when walking. but a strength, a persistence, that happiness is good health and a bad memory, so said the famous addict ingrid bergman, in her shadowy eyes — that one of the so called greatest movies could be just a torrid affair between an older man and a younger woman. that there isnt anything sublime about love, or our role in society, our conflict with the iron will of others…. like a badly painted wall we thinly veil our intentions and let our patterns tell us how to feel.

and can we hope or fear that and each passing moment might penetrate our blindless like a strangely seen roman empire superimposed on los angeles so tormenting horselover fat because only he can step out of that pattern and witness pinkly winking lights, children who fortell of the future, living among tapes, wires, and recorders and dying before the end of the world to the horror of those who hang onto prophecy but freeing us for perspicacity of having a second chance, that death is each moment and in our grasp a creation for each, that even when we hang onto a crystal ball, then can we desire its silence to free us from delphi, free us from expectations, from our patterns, from ourselves…

art and connoisseur-ship as market affects

May 6, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, Theory / No Comments

apparently there’s a release of a new documentary called jiro dreams of sushi. have not seen it. was curious though — thought it was an anime about sushi. cuz on fb and twitter people watch the movie and then go eat sushi.

okay.

naw, it’s about a man who took sushi as an art to the next level. as a biography that’s kind of alright. but the movie seems to translate into go have sushi and appreciate it even more.

that’s okay too. its kind of duh. i mean if you know anything about japan, of course it’s an art. but at the same time, what isn’t anything anyone does an art?

stacking rocks is an art. breathing is an art (yoga). looking at something, standing. it’s all an art. so what!

If everything is art, then why should we care about art?

 

What is wrong with Art for Art’s sake?

i am not sure why i am on such a bent on thinking of connoisseurship. what’s wrong with it? i think art for art’s sake is stupid. i think art for a purpose is just as stupid.

art for art’s sake or collecting specific knowledges like collecting shot glasses. connoisseurship for personal development is a waste, a sign of our decadent society. behaving in this manner is like picking a random thing and making that thing central. that kind of imbalance isn’t really all that great for anyone. but taken seriously, it becomes a replacement for actual life.

i would like to make a distinction now, between knowing what you like and being a snob, an otaku or a fanatic about it… there too is a formal difference between being a connoisseur and being an addict, but i don’t think that in this context, addict vs connoisseur is a meaningful distinction as both seek to centralize a content area. what’s tragic about this content area is that the borders of the content area are often arbitrary, formed from external factors (market influenced, historical or personal, to name a few). EX: you can be a tennis connoisseur but why not soccer or racquetball? that’s a different sport? what about clay courts vs concrete or grass? what about right or left handed players? singles or doubles? mens or womens? you see my point.

in contrast to this decadence, is knowledge collected for the sake of solving a problem. for instance, being nitpicky about how a certain module is built can have an impact on the entire system for the purposes of a network server. that’s fine. or how a proposal is written. okay! but being nitpicky about how a wine is aired is some sense ridiculous.

so art is nebulous, a matter more of deployment and affect than of substance.  this is because there’s no big picture for art. a big picture which preserves art as a concrete thing is a fantasy, because art like authenticity exist in the middle as a tactical endeavor.  art as a material affect lacks authenticity.  authenticity is about relations.

 

Authenticity and the Market place, What makes Hipsters Capitalists

so yes, all i do is talk about the big picture. but there is a difference between relationships and meaning/intention. certainly there is a correlation between things, even cause and effect. for instance, as i’ve complained before, hipsters have a notion that only non-market effects have authenticity.

this means that we (as hipsters) buy things that are local and personal. we despise corporate. but this really misses the point. the corporate (market) culture worships material. through branding, through product and design… the whole point is to get to the point of sale. so knowing this, hipsters avoid markets, and seek far flung corners of the globe to escape market realism.

but this is nonsense because by considering the non-market affects as alternatives to market products, hipsters actually bridge the gap between market and non-market. they introduce global capitalism by seeking supposed non-market areas and introducing rational choice theory and other market constructs. ive said it before; hipsters are very much the avant-gaarde of global capitalism by bringing fringe affects to the center.

so my point about authenticity is that hipsters like their corporate nemesises, miss the point:

Authenticity is found in relations, not Material.

you may complain that your boss treats you inhumanly, like a cog in the machine. but that treatment is authentic because when you are at work you are a cog in the machine. getting cut off on the freeway is definitely an authentic relationship, as is talking to the local barista for five minutes each day. in much the same way, hipsters mistake authenticity as a market construct — they think that having a human relationship means getting to know your local bum as your brother.

walter benjamin got it right with art in the age of mechanical reproduction. art as a market construct comes about when an item can be massed produced. the ‘original’ item then, becomes something more than mass produced. it becomes art, valuable and priceless because of its non-market origins. this is a different understanding of art than as a tactical maneuver.

when you think of non-market influenced art, like performance art.. but even more so like street art, graffiti art or transient earth art as real art (non-museum, non-institutionalized pieces) you are making a mistake about what art is. art as a produced item, even if it has non-market origins only enters the market as more market produced items.

graffiti art just happens to be the latest taste… performance art (which cannot be traditionally museumized due to its localized and temporalized nature) and earth art were previous forerunners in a series of attempts to experience non-market reality. but this too becomes just another item that is more prized as art once reproductions (albeit even imperfections) are passed on.

post-industrial capitalism as a whole is rightly a post-modern worldview, of signifiers divorced from having a penultimate signified.  post-industrial capitalism encapsulates material within a decontextualised territory, of market place, passing on the content as the form. hipsters seeking to escape market influence only spread its affects further because they mistook the market place as a set of content not a logic of deployment.  to grasp onto someone who was the first or who was the best (as with jiro) is just another expression of those elevating forces that define art and artistry as another market deployment. (this works, of course, the same way with music hipsters, who must hate a thing once it has obviously entered the market…)

so if you re-tool authenticity as relationships which originate from us as who we are, then we have to accept that authenticity is market-agnostic. so to go over human relationships as being authentic or not, wearing your mother’s sweater she got you is an authentic thing — not because she made it by hand (rather than old navy — because it might be from old navy) but because you note she loves you and you love her back is the thing. so in this i agree with zizek. the waiter who notes his role as waiter with a dose of cynicism is the man who actually is a waiter… he notes the expected rules and approaches them with the intention of being effective as a waiter is one who is authentic about his being a waiter… more so than the one who just does what he is supposed to with a pure heart… that kind of attitude means that the latter has not sacrificed all that he is into the role — he has not given up that which is not waiter yet, as he has not acknowledged it to give it up.

this is kind of a complex idea, but it comes from zizek’s background growing up in stalin eastern europe. one’s actual actions count, so that if one even carries with it the negativity about their duty and yet performs their duty — then one really is completely “into it” so to speak since one has made the choice to accept one’s fate… rather than one who mindlessly does it because it’s there (suggesting that the latter has yet to really make up their mind as they haven’t yet realized their mind).

in much the same way, one who is with their spouse despite their spouse’s flaws is one who is committed to the relationship. perhaps that is a more obvious way of speaking.

this of course, defines authenticity regardless of market influence.   authenticity has to do with personal affect, if it touches you or not.

sad to note though: the most authentic relationships most people have in their daily lives are with their pets. we can imbue our pets with subjectivity so as to better relate to them — or we can take that subjectivity away, should it be inconvenient. what makes most people’s relationships inauthentic is our inability to really accept the other person, due to expectations, market forces, career pressures, emotional hang ups or whatever… (i don’t mean that one should blindly accept whatever your significant other dishes, i mean that your relationship should be defined on a personal basis before one plays the role of “wife”… not because one has to be a “wife” so that means you behave in a particular way regardless of how one feels or doesn’t feel)

So where does that leave us with Art and Jiro?

rather than pursuing art in terms of market, we should probably see it natively. that is, with the viewer’s  (our own) sensibilities than any group focus. group objectivity is a theoretical position, one which is best fostered through art community consensus or market forces (enough people recognize, or it has been reproduced enough times to be famous). this means that art is a nebulous thing… and it is up to the artist to manage their audience’s expectations, should they wish to be an artist. i don’t think that art for arts sake should be how we see it, otherwise as a model of self expression, bad poets are the most artistic of all, since they speak directly from their emotions regardless of craft… and bad poetry is something most people will recognize as not being at all art.

so what we take from the movie is what we will, be it a biography, or a better appreciation. and if it be the latter, than we have achieved the most simple marker, haven’t we? and if watching a movie lets us be affected by sushi as art, then so be it.

what’s missing from corporate materialism is enchantment… and tactically, that is what art does.

so yeah, i did start somewhere, against something and i ended up in the same spot, with everything possibly, as an art. so what!

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.

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

February 21, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, Theory / No Comments

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

OR

how being philo-subject is being psychoanalytical

basically getting ‘better’ means to shrink one’s self. we think of getting better as increasing in numeric value, like you are a level 1 and that’s where you start. when you achieve expert you are level 7, or something. or as with weaving there are 304 distinct levels. with vietnamese cooking there are 72 levels. with american ‘southern’ cooking there are 55. like that. with piano, there is 677. and they have marginal stages of increasing complexity and clarity.

but in fact the increase in numeric value represents not an increase in height (if you think 2 dimensionally) but in fact, an increase in density if you think within an additional dimension. what i mean to say is that as one gets better one gets more condense. you discriminate more between what was previously ‘the same’ and your margin for preciseness shrinks. as a result, as you become a more specialized attorney, your area of practice gets more niche and your ability to draw meaningful divisions is more refined into smaller and smaller tools. this is true of coding as well. when you are a generalist programmer you draw broad strokes. but when you get into the nitty gritty, you need to do more with less lines. the lines themselves stand for more, and you take less moves to do the same thing.

like wise, it is as though an artist who has mastered it can do with one stroke what a new artist might take with twenty. or a poet can say with one line what a klutz might grumble on and on about. you get what i am saying.

so we tighten our belts and sink into the same. it’s like, you take the modules for granted but then, you eventually learn to take those modules apart and deal directly with them too.

this extra dimension might be dealt with as a spiral too; going up. if you see it in two dimensions, it’s a constant return, a swaying, an oscillation between two poles. but in fact, you are overcoding one side as you overcode the other. when we have arranged this west end with the new paradigm, the east end must be arranged. and when the east has been arranged with the new consequences, the west must also be arranged. this oscillation is our attention returning to one and then returning back to the other, as change ripping throughout the block. as the block becomes more complex, its grains noted in ever smaller detail, so must we always return back to basics. our foundation shifts ever so slightly.

often, a single oscillation is needed as the theme, then variation and then recapitulation. a sonata or rondo must repeat its A and B themes if it is to complete itself. you start at home, go on a journey in which you introduce variations and different moves, and then return home to reincorporate those moves into a new kernel.

sometimes we want more than a single oscillation. in ravel’s bolero , with each return, we get a louder, more present presence, one in which we can note what was single birds to be a gigantic bird, with the feathers in your face, up close and without the framing of a concert.

this intensive view, this microscoping of a particular was mistaken in phenoemnology of spirit by hegel to be the becoming universal of a particular. and when you are swallowed by the particular up close, thrown into the void like alice through the rabbit hole, you are in it, and it is empty as it is spacious — completely enveloping you as the Notion. be it a religious universality or a cultural whole for which you are both citizen and state, one with the community, one with itself A:A if you like ayn rand.

blast those particulates though. when you zoom back you, you at once see it is a liebnizetian game, each particular a monad running through other monads, commenting and interlocking, intertextual and at once phenomenological and transcendental as we can note monads overwriting monads like a web of individuals in a community, influencing each other, a shifting complex of community consciousness we suppose, as in the movie magnolia. magnolia is another modernist story, one in which we both investigate the graininess of the images and come out of that investigation with a supramacy of kernel, of intensiveness that we can only note as a ‘thing’ a unified whole as characters are commentators on one another, each a progressive level of difference, embedded in one another as a density, a unit you cannot escape, self contained, finite and yet boundary-less.

so depending on how you want to cut your rabbit hole, you can be big alice or small alice, and in either end of the jaberwocky you have either too crampt a house or too empty a room. either a/the Notion or the/a particular.

i suppose the question is often answered within the context of its functionality. if it goes together, and best juxtaposes one another then it is a unit. fingering on a piano is hard to separate from understanding the layout of her scales. and a pianist is hard to divide from the piano especially as the piano continually molds the pianist into her shape-becoming- like a lover who has a favorite position he insists on so the other lover eventually gets to being in it. one is hard to separate from the other so that they are most easily referred to as one.

in that way it is appropriate that lovers have offspring, be it homo or hetereo, when they self-organize into units that become-… best expressed in a new subject, a confluence of tangents that uniquely entwine, carrying with them, the comments of the foundation where they were level 1. in this sense, the reaction of an offspring is still the legacy of the parent. so we return too, to that headspace in how each of us is an interwoven complexity, a multitude of indeterminate, indistinct successions, best known to go with one another as me.

i got a little off topic, but so, the with each oscillation be it a meaningful distinction, a deeper delving of each grain requires additional geometric or even exponential energies to microscope. one resists that attention even as one desires it, as shrinking into a smaller space requires alice to shed herself, what was unnecessary to that smaller space.

indeed it is hard and harder to become experter and experter.

metaphysics of anti-presence OR without “ontic” context there is no ontological

January 19, 2012 / posted in Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

(written about a month or so ago)

i suppose that thanksgiving is when one is supposed to be reminded to be thankful. while this in principle, is the same for pilgrims as us, i don’t believe it to be the most useful of things to do with our time.

if anything we ought to be “thankful” all the time. but that’s not even a question of giving thanks… as it begs the question, thanks to who? even the universe in general isn’t good enough, because it implies that if one is thankful for one day then — you can take advantage of everything all the rest of the days?

what an utterly and ridiculous notion!

i have been trying to stay away from some of the pitfalls of philosophy. see, it’s not a matter of specific knowledge it’s more of the way in which we apply our thoughts. philosophy as an exercise isn’t the extrapolation of “key points”, that is something anyone and everyone can does — stoners especially. what makes something philosophy is the consideration of these key points within a territory of meta-physics. so while there are some artists that certainly give philosophical critiques, and i know of some, they are still not, strictly speaking, philosophers.

so for example — how the paragraph above applies to me — would go something like this… something i might’ve done (but have not, to the best of my knowledge) is approach someone who is claiming to not be a philosopher because he is proposing an anti-metaphysics and say to him loudly: THE NEGATION OF A METAPHYSICS IS A METAPHYSICS

which in a philosophical sense, is definitely be true. and is true in a heideggerian kind of way. but really is not a useful thought to anyone except philosophers.

so you get trapped, see? once you unconsciously apply that context, you’re kinda stuck addressing context, which is slippery and hard to define.

so this question of thanks, or not thanks, is really a false dichotomy. you can have a day of thanks and still be thankful. all the time.

lately though, i have been disgusted with the world we are living in. from consumerism, to everything else. it seems there is too much baggage around. and what is one to do? go to your parents or your whoever and say, look, you know and i know x y z is supposed to happen but let’s agree not to play that game and be genuine with one another… and deal with one another on the basis of a natural ethics.

even if they agree, and didn’t decide you were looney and trying to impose a crap load of your own constructions onto them, it’s almost laughable that there be some genuine authentic human being underneath all of these games. i mean, how many of you women would be willing to give up your identity and learned behaviors of womanhood? if you address the question to men it’s even stickier because most men may be aware of “being a man” of when they are to do that kind of “man thing”, but at the same time, how many of them are really willing to give it up? being a man is more socially “default” than being a woman, so it’s harder to realize when you are “being yourself” and when you are “being a man”. in fact, i would argue that its impossible for many men since we are so much “ourself” “a man”.

after all, women can wear pants and ppl don’t really care…

so its kind of like, give up what? let’s imagine i was trying to fit in. and that i am making myself miserable doing it. so i stop “fitting in”. but what does that mean? how do i earn a living? and at what point should i no longer stop giving things up, and accept that i have reached my genuine self. so.. okay, we can agree that i am not cut out to be a finance person. i admit that. i suck at it. and i get lost easily in finance (but not math)… and i don’t have patience for it. so i can stop that. but does that mean i need to stop working? if i want to stop doing sales, fine. im not an extrovert, and it drains me alot to talk to ppl. but does that mean i stop being self-employed? who am i really? that’s a really really REALLY dumb question though, because it doesn’t go anywhere. am i assuming that i have an inner fireman (or some other job) i can channel and suddenly discover that i need to reorient my life in a cosmological way and that cosmology happens to correspond to a banal everyday job THAT I CAN DO IN LA IN THE EARLY 21st CENTURY AND STILL BE “FIT IN” to the larger society? its kind of a tall order to think that ideal something would make everything “work”.

see, it’s easy to locate conflict in the local. like, oh it’s my coworker(s) that make me unhappy, or its the fact that i need to make 20k more or that my gf isn’t the right person… but it’s much harder to reasonably assume that local conflicts do not result from global fissures.

in one sense it’s easy to say, oh, everything is local. so if i have a problem with my mother, it’s not pathological — meaning it’s not a structural issue in how i make my surroundings/relationships. that if i run away from home, i won’t have a similar problem with someone else, elsewhere. so the presence of conflicts in the local do not assume that problems aren’t global too. but absence doesn’t work that way. should everything be okay locally, then we suddenly don’t care about the global… since our experience of the global is always mediated by the local.

this is still pretty mundane. on thanksgiving you can say, oh, i love you ppl! you ppl who want to spend it with me! and that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? that’s what any holiday is about, spending it with those unique others. there isn’t a magical soulmate you haven’t yet, or the perfect family you have to find and become — this is the moral conclusion of any good thanksgiving family movie. and that conclusion lends itself to supposing a radical absence of the global all together.

and this is where things get a little hairy.

because there isn’t a cosmological signifiance to the global. global is only a position we reify ourselves — through our pathology or the repetition of our situation. conflicts in the local originate from the vehicles of how we situate or deploy things that happen around us. we repeat our histories because we recreate those contexts. this is pretty plain psychoanalysis-wise but the larger situation i am attempting to express is one devoid of oedipus, symbolic regimes or other meta-physical crap. we can and should suppose the global as the vanishing mediator by which we explain and interface with our surroundings, but we should not limit our surroundings to this global mediation! (maybe zizek would say at this point, who cares about the cosmos? only global only global. but no, the property isnt transitive, there is a parallax)

but not to get side-tracked:

reality is not the pawn of ideas. reality may be a playground for ideas to find expression, but the ghost always needs a body. it’s in the body that a ghost becomes real — not the other way around. rather, ideas are the pawn of reality. we can play with them, and create them but they ultimately only remain facets of our own distinction having ‘reality’ only when we align them with the actual happenings in reality.

reality is not limited to the ideas we have in our head. i think this kind of rationalization is very very damaging. i see this happening alot in political discourse, or in social situations where 1) individuals assume others embody a principle or 2) individuals or situations are defined in terms of a principle.

both are limiting behaviors and discard the larger reality which has no principle or idea. one might as well assume there is an evil in the world, originating from a particular source. it’s like harry potter defeating whatever his face is. he removes evil from the world, so now we can never have evil ever again.

or in some other stories, where there is one good, like if some super mad scientist found where jesus lived and decided to imprision jesus. oh no, make that santa claus. now there’s no xmas.

like that.

human beings may construct for the larger society, a discourse of thanks, or political salvation or what have you, but that discourse is reality only for the people who accept the temporal context or the narrative context. this is a very powerful thing to have happen, but it’s also very damaging for us, because we become blind to what we are doing and what we are not only thinking we are doing but what else we are actually doing (to ourselves or others). i am not advocating a return to gaia or that we need to live with one with nature — or embrace our biological imperative — those discourses are also a return to the ‘true authentic self’ which are defined by anthropomorphosizing concepts. nature is a concept. biological imperatives are concepts. i don’t mean to say that concepts are not real, just that are they are not definitively real, inscribed in the cosmological void! the global exists too, but only for the one, not for the cosmos. this is what hegel means when he talks about universal vs the Notion, but that’s for a different time.

so what does it leave us? with an authentic…. what? one might as well assume that chimps have biological imperatives and study them in labs. removing one from the situation is to defamiliarize that removed one.

i kind of want to move away from this now, because i am skirting on this notion of ‘choice’ and ‘free will’ which is too much to get into right now. a good example of how discourse and pre-conceived notions comes into play is in the discursive writings of evolutionary psychologists… who presuppose natural identity for man and woman since the dawn of time. or who ‘discover’ our ‘true nature’ as some kind of social evolution concurrent with our biological evolution. for example, seeing ‘modern hunter gatherers’ as ‘a window to our prehistoric man’ is both racist and ignoring the fact that the present is not the past’s present. the present in the past is gone, and the past’s present seen today is a very different thing than the past’s past. unfortunately like all discourses, the precepts of that discourse create the conditions for fulfilling and expressing that discourse. if ‘we’, the contemporary man, are the pinnacle of evolution then we deserve what we got. those who are ‘lesser’… well, you get it. most of discourse is, is to narratively sort out other people and to tell us how to treat them and deal with them.

so we know ourselves in the process through the global mediation of the narrative about other people.

i guess i could have said all of this, after thinking about it and procrastinating on my CEU (continuing education units) by saying for this entry

1. there isn’t anything to be thankful about, except that you can be thankful
2. there is no (big Other) to be thankful to.
3. you aren’t being thankful, it’s your role in the story to be thankful… because there is no real you, only your body and your projected identity.

but look at this. haven’t i narratively told you who you are, how to deal with other people and how you can fulfill and express yourself?

i have! but only if you believe in this discourse, of course.

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