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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

August 21, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient ReasonOn the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason by Arthur Schopenhauer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Schopenhauer finds it necessary to rescue noumena causa from Kant by calibrating our human experience to these four grounds of causation. These four grounds for Schopenhauer arise naturally due to different cuts in reasoning’s consistency. Admittedly these grounds are somewhat arbitrary, but he is unable to find much connection between these grounds except for their ability to highlight concepts. In this Schopenhauer is very much a follower of Kant.

I, too, do sometimes find Kant to be too airy. But that conceptual distant is necessary to highlight principle “noumenonal” connection between disparate phenomenon. Schopenhauer can be thought of as being a half step so as to try and bring Kant back. In the process Schopenhauer seems to find the most objectional point being Kant’s misuse of the term “ground”. Ground here is another way of denoting various cuts, “levels” of rationality for Schopenhauer, so by no means is four the only way to arrange these levels, as we can provide a multitude of differing reasons, each of which Kant would most likely state as being chimeral and undecidable in isolation.

What is of interest though, is that like Kant, Schopenhauer calibrates human action to will (desire). Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer seems to find that will is more radically aligned to create objects as well, not just through the platitudes of a noumenon as a morality but also existentially. Schopenhauer seems to find that the actual physical world is created through repetition of various consistencies like a wheelbarrow traveling the same ground in the same way as to make a rut… this dissolving of the phenomenal eliminates the thing-in-itself from view as an independence of human will. As a result, Schopenhauer requires another ground (having eliminated Kant’s ground) thus, Schopenhauer finds everything as emerging from reason as a geometry of which causation is but a mode of extension.

In some ways, Schopenhauer is like Descartes in seeing everything as a consistency constituted through a rational mentality. This is an interesting move which eventually finds its full expression with Husserl (perhaps independently of Schopenhauer) but the move to remap all in terms of rationality is perhaps too much, and allows Schopenhauer far too much freedom to disregard the world as excessive chimera, when in fact it becomes more likely that Schopenhauer falls prey to chimera himself. How else can he claim that his fourfold root is the actual calibration of that is an optimization of understanding?

He can’t. He can only show us how this view is possible, not that it is all encompassing above all other views, in part because he can’t really evaluate other views except through a neutral term, which he then goes forth and questions, as there can be no real ground as any one thing requires another thing.

In this Schopenhauer is correct, all is connected through conception and rationalization — but rather than end up with a Liebnizian monad or a Deleuzian rhizome, he reverts to a loose Kantian model of mid-modernism reasoning that cannot recognize that radical groundlessness that Schopenhauer is courting except to insist on it in terms of zero (void) or infinity (all).

What would help Schopenhauer in this, to find a quantized view of all through all else, is for him to give up the very instrument he cannot give up; to grasp that unlike Kant’s insistence on a faculty of pure reason there are in fact an indeterminate number of reason(ing)s… that reason may be sufficient but it is not the only One.

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Critique of Pure Reason

May 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Critique of Pure ReasonCritique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much has been written about Kant. Yes, he’s hard. He’s rammbly. He’s overbearing. But this is due in part to the fact that written in 1781, Kant did not have anyone to talk with. He lacked the ability to find other minds and interface. So in those ten years of silence he talked to himself. And he’s a bit disorganized.

So lets not quibble with the details. Instead let me cut to the heart of what he is saying, in a way that goes beyond any reading of him that I’ve come across yet.

The one aesthetic Kant is after, that allows him to hit a home run, is simply this: All concepts are regulatory.

What Kant is after is to understand the limits of what our regulatory reason can do. This can’t be a function to decide truth. This can’t be a function to decide reality. This isn’t an effort at wisdom. We can use reason to figure out the contours of contingency, of what is given to us. But we cannot use it alone to do anything.

Kant attempts to show us the value of reason in melding together different functions (be it imaginary or understanding or reason) and in this way seeks to highlight the vehicle by which we can come to grips with phenomenon. So weaknesses?

Yes, Alan Badiou is partially correct: Kant’s system requires that he created a negated structure, the noumenal upon which to hang his phenomenon. But Badiou is also partially incorrect. Kant was the first to recognize, through the figure of the transcendental, the necessity of having an apparatus of measurement upon which to solidify a phenomenal field. That is to say, phenomenon cannot interface at a consistent level unless there was a larger field to unify them as equivalent. Hence, this transcendental. Kant laid out the form for us, to quantize, to organize whatever we apperceptive. Historically, this is how Heidigger is able to note that Kant is Modernism Part II. Descartes introduces the need the for a transcendental field (in the form of the mental realm) but Kant completes his thought. Hegel is the application for this field to surject unto Absolute Knowledge.

So we miss the point when we quibble with his mathematics or his bad physics, or how he didn’t understand quantum mechanics. None of his examples matter in their detail. What matters is the principle behind this critique, one which reveals that concepts are regulatory.

And while it’s true, as Kristeva points out, Kant did not “discover” negation (leave this to Hegel as a way for him to bind according to the dialectical-synthesis process) Kant does reach negativity. Negativity is necessary as the limits for a given concept. And if you look at towards the end of this masterful work, and ignore his annoying repetition, you come to understand the antinomies are but examples of the limits of conceptualization itself.

Yes, Dedekind’s cut of real numbers or Badiou’s theory of points belie the same “cut” as Kant’s antinomies. By injecting reason in at various arbitrary positions, we can cut a dichotomy into a mass to differentiate positions. Such positions then become expressive of the cut, which we use as an absolute reference. This reference allows us to orient ourselves. So yes, when only we do not “extend reason beyond the bounds of experience” can we avoid these antinomies, Kant highlights these antinomies as way of showing how reason provides the extension of any given cut, which are always contingent by arbitrary parameters, be they a sensuous apperception or some inherited folly of the imagination. This section following The Ideal of Pure Reason all the way to the end of the work, gives us the apex of Kant’s reach. He was articulated much, but never brought it back around to exploding the limits of concepts themselves. He could only fumble and say, well, they are regulatory.

Not only are they regulatory but they are necessary for the organization, the quantization into phenomenon, inasmuch as the sensuous, as he calls it, is necessary for logic to take a stance. We need contingency to make a mark somewhere, otherwise we get nothing but pure logical presentation without any place for differentiation into a real context. It is this dual refractory nature that presents us with agential cuts to determine the nature of what is real, a mixture of contingent sensuousness and transcendental formalism. This mixture however, isn’t stable, it belies on the context of previous cuts, usually derived from our human need to have agency in limited domains.

This is the start of post-modern fragmentation of knowledge, as each domain acquires its own organizing cut.

But this is also well beyond the context of where Kant was going.

So if you keep in mind the “regulatory” nature of conceptualization, you’ll come to a fruitation that is far more radical than any reading of Kant that I’ve ever come across. I think you’ll find as well, that this radical negativity, necessary to cut concepts out of the larger folds, is why Deleuze found himself returning to Kant towards the end of his career. In this way Kant is still more radical than most anyone gives him credit for… and in this sense, his admiration for David Hume speaks volumes about where he’s going with this critique. In fact, he exceeds Hume in this way, by abstracting Hume’s explanation of human behavior as conventional habit into the modality of regulatory concepts. Kant finds the limit of reason but in doing so he is able to demonstrate how reason is utilized to supplement understanding beyond the bounds of experience. His four antinomies are but possibilities for unfounded regulations, many of which Hume would simply call “conventions”.

To wrap. I for one, am glad to have Kant as a guide. As staunch and “joyless” as he is, there is a core of clear direction within his thought that allows him to calibrate his awareness to a finely tuned point regardless of content. Kant turns rationality in on itself and is able to note the different vectors within rationality as a manifold, a field of its own connectivity. Kant adds these various example, these vectors together, rotates rationality as a vehicle of deployment and is able to find a navel limit within rationality, negativity on the one hand, sensuous apperception on the other, and the chimera of the transcendental dialectic on the third. This groundwork of pure formalism is the striking aesthetic consistency that belies German philosophy post-Kant, while marking the groundwork for the very abstract structural formalism that is to follow in mathematics and science in the 19th century and beyond. Without having the ability to negate all that does not logically follow, or being able to create limited phenomenon within a transcendental domain, we would not have any technological or mathematical achievements today.

This isn’t to say that Kant should be given credit for this because he “invented” this. Rather, he was simply the first to stake out the parameters for the nature of these kinds of endeavors, endeavors which continue to structure human experience and behavior today. No doubt, if Kant did not do this, then someone else would have formalized this exercise, eventually. Still, to one lonely man in Königsberg, thank you.

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Descartes; Spinoza (Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31)

April 14, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31 - Descartes; Spinoza)Great Books of the Western World by René Descartes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Descartes is the father of modern math. What do they have in common?

He gives us his rules for the mind, his meditation on first philosophy — that is, the very method by which he seeks to find for us the truth. This method, described in part by Irme Lakatos as analysis-synthesis brings to us the very foundation of both math and philosophy. In fact, together, math and science form the same pair bond for analysis-synthesis paralleling each other’s formulation as each provides inflection points to form the other. Descartes’ method is no longer in vogue however, as it relies too much on a hidden conjecture to get to first philosophy but his methodology and its grounding assumptions still stand.

That is to say, with Descartes we get the calibration of a cut. If you read his philosophy or how he formulates his analytic geometry, one piece is used to measure the other. The model is calibrated to itself. The split predicate of “i think” therefore “i am” work in the same way that he uses lines through euclidean angles in order to measure parabolas in order to calibrate them to each other. The description of parabolas through their roots is a way in which we define the “zeros” of the coordinates in a domain. In a way, although Descartes was looking for some absolute referent (in philosophy) he found also in math, the arbitrary referent becomes the absolute referent! This missing link isn’t provided as any given cut can work, if treated with the proper methodology, but rather is raised to a metaphysical level as being an expression of the model of the cut to be made. If you read between the lines in Descartes treatment of the matter, especially in describing his methodology you’ll see how he breaks down the process into a series of chunks (cuts) and then those chunks inform us how to synthesize them back together, so as to be sure that this is in fact the only way to do so. I owe this analysis in part to Irme Lakatos. The analysis gives you the synthesis in part, and that assured nature that is self reflexive is a powerful aphrodisiac. I am sure Descartes sees his eternal truths quite well after experiencing how magically the pieces he made fit back together again.

I did not read Spinoza’s Ethics also contained in his book, as I aim to read Spinozas’ work in a different book.

Still, we owe Descartes much. Reading him verifies the basic root of his method, so that we can then use his thoughts as fodder for calibration of modern thought to itself. With these cuts, we can begin to see the unsupported cut as being arbitrary but also as being absolute, when we continually cut with consistency so that the entire situation comes to be constructed in terms of that arbitration. This is a way for us to recognize the constructed nature of our knowledge, as it has been continually refined, to the point at which knowledge becomes fragmented because each discipline interjects their own cut, following their own scientific truths as each attempst to reify each respective field as an absolute domain of self sufficient a priori presentation.

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Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

February 22, 2015 / posted in dialectics, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.

While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.

This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.

Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.

What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.

What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.

2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.

Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.

This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.

This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).

Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.

I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.

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Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into BeingWhere Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cognitive linguistics has at its underlying aesthetic the very literal understanding that how we think of things is what they are. This follows post-structural rhetoricians like Paul Ricoeur who argue that the connective tissue of language is metaphor — where metaphor is the substantiation of the naked copula form is through content. We forget the form of the copula in metaphors and thus experience the content as a variation of the copula form instead of being the actual connection. In other words we understand our world through representations, never understanding that an ontologically reified point of view is only possible because metaphors position the copula through its latent content so that the form of the copula becomes seen as the “ding as such”. In other words, representations only appear to be representations because one of the formal representations comes to represent nothing but the pure presence of its own linguistic connectivity.

Having said this, I was surprised (but also not surprised) by the comments below. Many people were confused by this book, blaming either the psychologists for not living up to their expectations (of not being neurologists), or blaming the thickness of the mathematical concepts presented. We often think of the pure formalism of math as being objectively isometric (as one reviewer said) to the proposition that reality is always present beneath our representations. One key connection that Lakoff and Nunez being up repeatedly is that many mathematical formalisms (such as zero, negative numbers, complex numbers, limits, and so on) were not accepted even long after their calculatory prowess was proven effectual… what made these concepts acceptable wasn’t their caculatory significance, but rather their introduction to the cannon of mathematical concepts via metaphoric agency. For instance, we take zero for granted as being “real” even though we understand it to not be a true number. It only was after a new metaphoric concept was presented for zero to be sensible (numbers as containers and origin on a path) was then zero incorporated into the cannon of what was acceptable. This understanding proves to be the very “twist” needed for Lakoff and Nunez to write this book. While many of the concepts are perhaps difficult for some of us non-mathematicians to grasp, I found their presentation to be concise and illuminating. Their tabulatory presentation of metaphors side by side allow us to grasp the mapping of logically independent factors from one domain into another. This basic movement is in fact a methodology they may have picked up from analytic geometry as invented by Rene Descartes: the translation of continuums into discrete points.

While it is understandable that they trace the building of conceptual metaphors via simple to the more complex, I did find their delay of speaking of analytic geometric to be confusing. When a topic is presented I want it to be explained, rather than having to wait half a book to read on it again. This is really my only possible complaint.

Overall, this book helped me connect the observation of formalism being prevalent as an organizing feature of pretty much all procedure and knowledge formation today with the root of that formalization, being the atomization of discrete epistemes of knowledge, whether that knowledge is granular or point or vector, or some other kind of rigor. We can also thus understand mathematics as being synthetic, contrary to what most philosophers in the west (excluding the great Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) understood.

Today, through our rockstar mathematicians and physicists we revisit the old Platonic hat that math is somehow natural, only apparent in our minds and yet more real than anything else this world has to offer. This is a troubling and definitely cold and etymologically naive sentiment. It’s mysterious that anything in this world is the way that is, let alone consistent as though following laws, but that isn’t any reason to be hypnotized by our own intellectual conceptions. As Lakoff and Nunez point out, while some math is applicable in the physical world most conceptual math remains beyond application of the physical world, as there is no physical correlation with those domains. Such application may be possible in alternate universes, but such universes remain the sole conception of our mind.

In other words, how we think of something is what we understand it to be, that is true, but it’s also how we experience what we understand to be to be what it is. To get into that deeper thought requires an unpacking of the most erudite philosophical concept of all — that of the number One, arguably the only number there ever has been and in fact the only thing there has ever been. Understandably this is beyond the scope of mathematics itself, or at least beyond the tenants of what most mathematicians are willing to go. I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I will state that the case study at the back of the book is quite compelling. If Euler’s equation may work in formal procedure alone, but as Lakoff and Nunez point out, the construction of that equation is only possible through the discrete projections of layered metaphors to understand equivalence of conception regardless of the different construction domains these metaphors originate from (logarithms vs trigonometry, vs Cartesian rotation vs complex numbers)… ultimately a unity is made possible because such closure is driven by the singular domain of our minds. In our minds, with their ornate metaphors, their clearly trained disciplines and their innate mechanisms of spacial orientation, we are able to combine complex concepts into the most brilliant of abstractions.

As such this book may be too difficult for most of us to read, because it requires we re-orient our thinking along different parameters, different assumptions about who we are and what we are doing when we study and create math. This probably won’t jive with most people, as it seems for most people, knowledge is less about reworking what they already know into a new arrangement, and more about filling in gaps in the arrangements they already have.

I’m not saying that this cognitive linguistic approach is equivocally true, I’m saying that truth is more than how we arrange something, but the entire range of what we can conceive of to be a relation that brings to light new connections. In the end, I think for most of us, the only legitimatizer of reason remains one’s singular emotions, of what feels to be acceptable. To get around this, requires the most stern of discipline and the most unabashed eagerness to learn something new. This is also a reminder that math is not formal procedure as we learned long division in our elementary grades. Rather, math is the unabashed conceptualization of formal arrangements in their absolute complexity. In this way, even understanding how highly educated mathematicians think of math is illuminating to how you and I can understand something (ourselves and the universe) in new light. That alone is worth reading this book.

So do read this book because it’s beautiful, but also read this book because it’s another way of considering something you already think you know. After all, learning isn’t a matter of facts. Facts are boring; the world is full of facts we can never memorize (such as where your car was on such and such date and time. Kind of useless, except in special cases, such as in the immediate). Learning is the mastery of how to conceptualize, how to arrange information and how to further that arrangement through metaphor of what is.

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the Disheartening Metonymy in Facebook

July 28, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

In the midst of the ontic we look for ontology. I started at 15 or so, with excerpts from Plato’s Republic, Carl Sagan and Nietzsche which I did not understand at all and did not get past the first few pages.

It is in this search for ontology that one will digest, and read, and seek for a center.

I think most will do this, perhaps, when things are bad or chaotic.

Beyond ontology however, we slip into a regime of mirrors, a hall of confusion by which we must choose that which has Being, a contest between beings which ends either in nihilism, a rejection of ontology or a dogmatic stand that this arbitrary figure is not at all arbitrary and in fact has the real deal. The stand most often occurs with what feels certain, what gives the subject certainty and what the subject likes most naturally.

Many of us don’t share any given subject’s appraisal of Being. Pointing out that this reliance on a figurehead is arbitrary gives rise to relativism and humor which is most prevalent on the underbelly of the internet.

It is in this reliance of values and the questioning of values which I take to be central to any question, something I like to point that Heidegger ended his career with.

The problem now, that I see it, stems from a collapse of long term and short term, personal and public spaces. I don’t believe that what’s good for an individual is good for society and vis versa. But how our legal and political system runs most effectively collapses all these different regimes such that we are slipping into a slow paralysis. We are choking ourselves with the weight of not only ourselves but those before and after us for whom we represent and stand in for. In the interest of American Brotherhood (of equals) each us has access to the universal but it is that access which gives rise to the oppression of living fragmented, dual lives. We can’t deal with each other as individuals but each interaction becomes of political and social significance. Talking to an Other on the bus becomes a gesture of political multicultural relativism. Dealing with your boss or employee becomes not just a negotiation of your individual and professional interests, but also a meter between how any boss or employee should/not interact (Thank you for pointing this out, Walter Olsen). Judges today sometimes cannot pass verdicts they may see as appropriate because they may set precedence for future situations which are undesirable.

We live not just in the present but in the past and the future simultaneously.

This happens as every instance of a category becomes a stand-in for the relations inherent in the category.  In otherwords, any employee becomes synonymous with the legitimate boundaries allowable (or not) by every employee.

Of course, some measure of categorization must be appropriate — we must classify in order to better deal with the extraordinary difference out there on the street. But it is the centrality of categorization and classification qua primary that gives rise to the proliferation ontic-value confusion. In the quest of ontological signifiance, we skew via a set of values qua necessary and that proliferation of values generates multiple ontologies which are a priori incompossible (cannot coexist in the same world) leading to nihilism or, that proliferation produces a heady multiculturalist categorization which is inherently racist and Other — threatening both to make each us of into one of five or seven power rangers (of different color and manner but of “equal” ability and status) while obscurating what the purpose of ontological centered-ness is (the actual people in the suits).

So to get out of this skew, we might seek the beyond of values as Nietzsche had suggested.  In doing so, we establish for ourselves our own primary motion, that which cannot be but imitated. This is the wet dream of the Uberman, something I do not believe in as it sounds nice on paper but in real life gives rise to dickish, assholish pieces of garbage which often are shadows of what might be an original.  (Their lack of originality stems from a production of signs meant to signify originality — insufficient for the condition of Uberman status anyhow).

So my response?

I think my humor has moved into the inappropriate for the most part — as any movement to ontologize values is laughable. So I laugh, and that’s what’s ridiculous (my response). But when you think about it, it’s really the ontologization of values which is something laughable, not the people who seek ontology! Doing something like ontologizing values gives rise to a constant checking of behavior — which in some sense is better than living however you like while preaching the gospel — but it’s a losing battle. We don’t need more special cases — we don’t need more “races” of humans.  We exist on Earth, we don’t need the attempt at radical proliferation like it’s Star Trek.

We simply need more application of the generic instance and a refusal to insist on “common sense”.

What I mean by that is that we cannot be beholden to a race of Others for fear of offending them — that’s not the point (since we offend ppl who are like us anyway).  For each of us live within the fuzzy range of probable acceptability where we coexist (peaceably, hopefully). For it is in that semi-conscious realm that the foundations for our human interaction are generated and contested and it is because this generation and judgement is in some sense only by partial choice that we cannot solely have nihilism, multiculturalism or Ontology. We cannot lose our values but we cannot ontologize them either, for they these are only metonymetic towards a singular Being — they are not condusive to point to a Way as while there may be Being, there is no universal.

What Facebook has taught me is that I find myself somewhat affronted by individuals’ reliance on signifiers of what’s Real in everyday life, whether they be carriers of “Stuff” or lessons in “Values”. In both, these statuses attempt to point the Way but in fact fail because those statuses are both generated by particular instances only the subject is privy to, and/or it relies on the particularity of the subject while deeming to be of something beyond the subject.

Oddly enough, if anything, I find this to be a real life example of Descartes’ problem of multiple mental realms.  Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am, but where I think there are no others.  So while I think therefore I am is also Others are where I do not think and I am where Others are not.

(Don’t worry, no Lacan today) but this is the parable of the modern horror movie — they jump out unexpectedly.

So to wrap it up, these thoughts, as perpetrated by others, signify, despite intent, the values they hold within their actual lifeworld and in some sense act as a kind of encompassing meta-physics of presence. That expression qua status updates in social media like Facebook and Twitter are projections of the )(in)compossible universals pointing not only to specific manifestations but also entire universes coexisting simultaneously on one’s update stream.  Any one with access can see it, and each are a statement about the nature of everything around it.

I don’t portent that each person who updates their status seeks to establish their creditability as an Ontology — as I extend this blog, it may very well be that Ontology is an outdated model.   But as a expression of our here and now Ontology is still something sought by individuals to be established — many of the status updates are in fact an attempts to codify what should be, be it in the form of “THIS IS EPIC” or “PEOPLE SHOULD NOT”.

When we speak of the personal, often these expressions are placed with a deleted subject.  We know that someone may be sad, or that someone is angry but the “FUCK &^@%” is not in fact carrying with it a hidden “(In my honest opinion FUCK &^@%)”.  And even if it was, the rejection for a place in this universe is still present against “&^@%”.

This kind of sentiment is what makes it political and ontological at the same time.

Even in broader circles, as it is, in political speak in either public broadcast media like NPR or Cable News, people still seek manifestations of the true American spirit to vote or be a particular way, or hold certain views (like ours and other someone else’s).  Many liberals who are heterosexual would not engage in a non-heterosexual activity personally, but nonetheless embrace it as being allowed to be.  To be an American in this sense is structurally as intolerant (of intolerants) as those who would be intolerant.  THat kind of structure, found in abundance throughout political discourse seems unavoidable.

If this isn’t a throwback to a false Ontology found in pre-WW2 Heidegger, then I really have no idea what I am pointing out.

But even today as Nationalists or culturalists or multiculturalists, it is very much the establishment of Ontology(s) meant to be the inclusive bulwark against all kinds of deformations and confusions.

Why am I pointing this out?  I find this kind of structuration to be abhorrent.  While I do not possess any kind of “solution” to be readily expressed, to do believe that a people obsesses with Ontological establishment, even should they be unaware of doing so, is a people courting a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality — and all the ensuing pitfalls that come with thinking that only people like themselves* should be.

 

*In this case, people like themselves extends far beyond simply being of a race or even a set of values… but of fitting the very categories which we take to be the case.  This is where I agree with Zizek (even though I am not a Lacanian) — the distance we need to have from these categories is itself a necessity to living a more complete life of being who we actually are… fragmented and split subjects — allowing us better to come to peace with that, as it were, “outside” of discourse….

The Violence of Subjectivity complements our Lack of Negativity

May 5, 2011 / posted in dialectics, life as we know it, manifesto, Theory, Universal non-all / 2 Comments

There is an inherent violence in being a subject.

AS what Slavoj Zizek calls the universal exception, our subjectivity each, is an exception of the unbreakable rule of the universal.

This subjectivity must be “non-all” an untotalized whole which prevents the universal from foreclosing.

Part of why I think so much continental philosophy goes on and on about subjectivity and cannot bridge the gap between subjectivity and society remains in this gap between the “non-all” and the universal.

A great part of why modern philosophy starts with Kant is that Kant provides exegesis on subjectivity — but only does so at the expense of the noumenal.  Kant sacrifices the rest of the world, the external world in exchange for securing subjective phenomenal experience.

Hegel tries to fix Kant.  The genuis of Hegel is that he wrote on the extra subjectivity, the becoming-universal of particulars — he tried to bridge that gap with his dialectical absolutist system, to totalize the non-all and unproblematize the subjectivity by enfolding it back into the Notion.

Whether he succeeds or not is up to debate of course, but no other philosopher has come close to his achievement.  This is why Hegel remains for both Marx and Lacan (in fact even today), the godfather — Hegel provides the only comprehensive system of talking about the universal qua society with an eye on the particular.  He does so by nearly sacrificing the subjective, but saves it through a kind of transcendental rambling.

By comparison, Deleuze and Guattari don’t even talk about subjectivity; they make it irrelevant.  Graham Harman also side-steps this Cartesian mutualism by going via the Object with Merleau-Ponty and his notion of flesh.

But I’m not going to go in depth to examine others.

What’s so damning about Hegel is that through his particular becoming-universal he found the universal on the particular, through a kind of metaphysical “raising” of essence.  This is obviously what Deleuze and Guattari do with various meta-tools, like territorializations and refrains, the difference though is that Hegel does this raising through negation.

Negation eliminates what does not fit that form.  To emphaize my point, Kristeva attributes negation as a concept to Hegel — the specific making of a negative (something).  Contrast this with Kant and Kristeva points out that Kant only discovered negativity — the absence of what we are looking for.

The negation of Hegel allows us not only a radical de-subjectivising but also the clearing of room to make way for the *trumpet sounding* throne of one particular to rise up to the throne of universality. In contrast, Kant used negativity in order to make room.

Where violence comes into place is our rejection of the negation.  Our supposition as a subjectivity must come about through social effluence — we stand up to this symbolic universal by declaring our relevance against our own negation by this universal.

We tear out and subjectivise what would be an object.  We would do violence to universals and other would-be universal small-others through our radical Otherness qua subjectivity.  Think of the violence today perhaps in Libya and Egypt

Think of the French Revolution.

Think of all the expressions of free-self organization that the U.N. throughout the 20th century and up till today have stamped out, and how small-other Universals qua government seek to legitimize their claim on what would be a universal expression of their own brand of subjectivity… we return to State Democracy its own Jacobianian Excesses in the form of our own self-subjectivisation which then must always be violent.

This is also how Hegel is also the first modern philosopher-statesman inasmuch as the first and only true philosopher on modern Universality.

Unfortunately we seem stuck on this in Continental Philosophy and unable to articulate other forms of universality. We can’t articular a society let alone conceive of one. And no, ramblings of a disintegrated body of objectivity does not a society make.

So no: the radical pluralism of Deleuze and Guattari do not count simply because while they clear our the space for alternate forms they are too reactionary against Hegel to be useful in constructivism.  It’s also questionable as to whether or not we are at a point in which there is enough space for anything else to be constructed.

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!

on Inscripting Meaning into the Universal Void

February 4, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, universal nothing / No Comments

This is why I would miss Dave if something ever happened to him.

I don’t get this level of conversation with anyone else.

In case you can’t tell from these first four lines, I’m going to try and write this out in a different way.

I was at the gym about two weeks ago with him. Immediately after checking in at the counter I picked a random topic of conversation I found interesting.

“Dave! You know that some astrologers up in Minnesota have decided that there are 13 astrology signs?” (link here 13 Astrology signs due to Alteration in Earths Rotation)

Dave did not say anything so I continued. (I know he does not care about astrology at all.)

“So, I told *** that according to the new astrology she’s not really a Scorpio — she’s really a Virgo. And that her kids were actually Sagittarians. She disagreed. I told her that this was a ‘typical virgo-trait’. She then told me that this new astrology sucked and that she could strangle me. Then I told **** that she that we weren’t really virgos but a leos. She said it was only for people born after 2009. Maybe that’s really true but I disagreed. Then I said it was retroactive and she called shenanigans. Then I told ***** that she wasn’t really a Capricorn, but actually a sag. And you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said ‘ooh, so that’s why my horoscope never matched.’ Haha, it only didn’t work on *****. Astrological-trolling.”

By this time we were sitting at a chest weight machine. We put some weights on and without discussing it were starting to take turns.

Dave: “You know, Alex, this actually makes me really angry.”

“Why?”

Dave: “Because it’s so stupid. Astrology isn’t real. Why should they care about what astrological sign they have? It’s completely irrational.”

“What does it matter? It’s a filter, an arbitrary way of assigning meaning.”

“But it’s not true! Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

This is something we’ve discussed many times. “So? The meaning is what’s true, not the specificity of the actually sign-ology. You may not think that there is a God but you don’t know that. It’s what’s on South Park, that episode about Mormons. It may all be just untrue but it helps people live in a good and upstanding way.”

Dave: “You know, I used to work with a co-worker back at ********** and we would talk about this.” I got onto the machine. “I asked him once, what if you found irrefutable evidence that God was not real. No one knew you had this evidence and it was absolutely convincing. What would you do?”

“What did he say?”

Dave: “He said he would destroy the evidence. He said he would find some way to destroy it so it would be irretrievable and then he would hide the fact he ever found it.”

“He wouldn’t – He wouldn’t bring it out to other people to enlighten them? What if he was afraid of social unrest?” I got up and Dave sat in the machine.

Dave: “He said he would pretend he never found it. And I believed him. I really believed that’s what he would do.”

“Hm.” I watched Dave work the machine. While he was pumping at the machine: “But that’s what faith is.”

Dave: “But he’s being irrational. There’s no reason for him do that. Even if he didn’t want to tell anyone else, he could reform. Why believe in a myth, in an illusion?”

Dave seemed to be getting upset. I said: “There’s a fundamental flaw in what you are thinking — and it’s the opposite of what most people would think. Most people assume that there has to be a solid relationship between reality and meaning. That facts mean specific things and the presence of those items verifies a particular logic. Like everything is sensible like in CSI or in Sherlock Holmes. Most people don’t critically think either, they fit facts into a pre-ordained meaning they would like to see. For example racism as posited by Slavoj Zizek is pathological in the Kantian sense — meaning that perception and meaning tie regardless of the actuality of a situation.” I sat in the machine and in the process of pushing weights I continued to speak: “In Zizek’s example, assume that someone who was Anti-Semitic was faced with a Jew who was misery. That someone would declare, that ‘Jew is misery!’ (because he’s a Jew) and not because (he’s tight with money). You’re just taking it to the next level, that reality and meaning have to be tied together. If meaning doesn’t fit the facts then meaning should change too. The two really don’t coincide. It’s almost like saying, ‘Jews being misery is racist therefore we can never declare someone who is a Jew to also be misery… because that is also racist’.”

I was huffing when I got off and Dave sat in the seat: “There are laws to the universe. Things begin and things end.”

“Sure, so you would believe in the absent watch maker.”

Dave: “What?”

“The absent watch maker. It’s the idea from Deism in the 17th century that the universe is orderly, and that alone determines that there is a God… without religion. He set the watch rolling, disappeared and everything matched up. We all have a place in the universe, our lives have cosmological significance.”

Dave’s turn again. He increased the weights. He got back on. Dave: “This is a weighty subject matter.”

“Ha ha. Reality itself is not orderly. In fact, Lacan hit it on the head when he claimed that the Real is a miss-match of misshapen, disorderly partialities that coincide in an unrecognizable, irreconcilable manner. We each understand and attach meaning to these coincidences, create other from apparitions and claim that this has a cosmological significance that continues beyond our sight.”

Dave: “Sure reality is orderly. I like to think that the ball rolling away appears on the other side — and is the same ball.”

“Sure reality is orderly, that’s why [this gym] is playing ‘Already Gone’ by the Eagles — think that’s a coincidence? No it’s orderly! Because God is Already Gone! All we have left is a universal order WITHOUT the possibility of coincidences!

Our conversation kind of ended there because I forget what happened afterwards. But I think he got what I was saying. If you see order in some places, you might as well extend order into other areas. Without an objective measure that is universally real, there isn’t really any way of determining what should also be objective. Science is one way, but it’s based on our shared experiences, and what we can agree on as a bunch of humans.

Plus, science is out of the realm of philosophy, strictly speaking. When we start to deal with softer issues, like the indeterminateness of tribes in anthropology or ontology — items that we can’t test in an objective circumstance, we begin to lose our bearings. Never mind that science may structure technology which shapes our lives in countless fashions — for our every day human being, we exist in a personal constellation whose orientation is without any outside referents. No one knows what things mean to us, for instance. No one knows how these connections work — except for us, the subject. And so when it comes to culture we too as a society assume that certain items have a weightiness that members outside our culture would not readily attribute.

But that is how we like to fit things. We think that the role of a person in a culture is inscripted into tradition, inscripted into the universe, for time immemorial. When I got to bed in the morning, I will wake up in the same place I woke up at. And if not, then there has to be a reasonable continuity of experience that happens even if I do not directly experience it — that it is in fact experiential (by someone like me). That people are meant to be a certain way, to play certain roles. Each of us then objectively exist in universes that are incommensurably different. Descartes had this problem when he ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’med his way into two distinct substances… then was unable to not only meld the two substances of mental and physical together — but also unable to account for the fact that we while we share physical experiences with others, we don’t also share mental experiences with others in the same way as the physical realm.

If anything, what Lacan notes as being the Symbolic — that realm of meaning making — is itself the horizon of the Real, the bulwark that fends off the insecure unaccountable, ir-reasonableness of the Real. In much the same way this inability to think through facets of reality that deny cognitive metabolism can only be analogized by our continued trips to the gym… going through the pain of building up our the most ir-reasonable, silent, and unaccountable mass of dividuation1 — all for the purposes of assigning and assuring our place without the social continuity as being male, fit and buff… with all their attendant significations. — the other side of our dividuation being namely that other black mass which is our unknown inner portions of our consciousness. Our body is restless, our mind is restless. Each one prompt the other, — Act! much like the tension between personal and social determinations…

In this sense, the only universal available to us is the universal void — not the “out there” beyond the scope of our senses, but that Heideggerian “black box” of Das Sein, somewhere in the non-shape of our Cartesian soft axies of mind and body.

1 It is a split subject divided between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, a demand that makes it the subject that it is, but which it cannot entirely fulfill. From Simon Critchley