« Posts tagged hegel

The Philosophy of History

July 18, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Philosophy of HistoryThe Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hegel did his best to calibrate his philosophy to humankind. In doing so he adopts a Rousseauian sense geography influencing culture and culture itself arising out of a necessity of universality as individuals attain self awareness through the signal of the abstract greater Good that Christianity is formulated around.

This “Reality that is not sensuous” is both a rejection and a correction of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in which Hegel bridges the suture. While he talks about the raw material of geography providing the initial context for how culture of different peoples arises, he jumps this to the final point of Abstraction, in which the elevation of “Form into Universality”: where “Objective Spirit attains manifestation”. This is in a way, a literal reconciliation of the self with his soul, the soul with Truth of the State.

We can read this almost sideways and get a better sense that attaining selfhood within the European framework is only possible within European self-awareness because of its tautological nature. If we were to accept that there are different rationalities, we would need to discard Hegel’s theory completely. But as the Modernist that he is, he never considers this possibility, subjugating/mapping all rationality within the metaphysical container of Rationality. If we were to consider each self within their respective culture as needing to understand its individuality within that context as an expression of its rightful Will, we could destroy the hierarchical of Hegel’s motion. But this is a difference of modernism and post-structuralism, wherein in modernism the correct context is unspoken and assumed to be evidently correct throughout.

Interesting book. Definitely interesting ideas. Racist ideas, but Hegel was working within his own time expressing his structures with the available ideas of that era. This doesn’t mean what he did is useless but it does mean we should understand the limits of what he produced and be sensitive to the possible value his ideas still have as we would sometimes assume them.

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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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Children of Dune

May 4, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Children of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #3)Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book wraps up the trilogy, by critiquing the themes of the previous two Dune books. It does the expected thing of bringing all the characters together, while wrapping up the ending tightly. There is a bit of ridiculousness in Leto’s ability towards the end, and that seems like a deus ex machina, but that’s the only complaint. The ideas were at full force.

In a way, trilogies have to follow the initial good step, the mistaken second step, and the correction of the final step. The system of three follows why we get three lives in video games, why tripods have three legs for stability and why Hegel’s dialectic can be read as a three step process (although its really four steps, with three steps happening twice, overlaid on each other). Leto remarked on the calibration perfectly. We looking inward, at the end of the second book was Paul’s mistake, so the empire rotted. Looking outward, in the first book, with no sense of direction the empire expanded but the individual had no guidance. Paul walked into a self made trap through his error. I am not certain Leto does better, but with his twin sister perhaps that works.

Thus, we have the Preacher’s inward guidance with no external ability. We have Alia’s external ability but a rotten internal force. This bad reflection is corrected by the twin’s movement.

Typical of Herbert as well, he is able to guide self knowing mysticism as a genetic/spirit reality with the muster of political implication. The characters in their technological empires are less technicians of execution than they are forces requiring self knowledge. In a technological age when we have mastered all the materials (of space, food, shelter, &c) all technology becomes transparent to the core of our inner essence. Since our inner beings guide what technology does, and technology as a tool of the empire is the pure execution of a dictator, so must the elite come to know themselves if they are to be effective rulers. The people around them have less need to know themselves as they are focused outwardly, as technicians and policy implementers. Focused on outward action, this becomes an area where they covet power above them rather than focusing on knowing who they are.

I think this line of reasoning works well for at the top of the technological empire. In this sense, however, this book is less a book about the dune empire than it is for as a guide for inner peace.

Having read this book, the conclusion seems inevitable, although when I started it, it seemed completely without guidance, as in, what could the third book possibly be about? This is a sign of mastery, that Herbert wraps up the potentiality of the text beyond what at least I can see.

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Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

June 24, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismLess Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What is “less than nothing” is what is lost in order to maintain the relationship between subject and object. This nothing sustains the dialectic, but it’s also the ground that is synthesized in Hegel’s dialectical project. But really, this nothing is also the “form” by which phenomenon is understood. That is to say, coming from Kant, understanding or the law of desire is the pure nothingness that imposes the order we see in the chaotic world.

It’s actually pretty simple. The universal, the a priori, is the emptiness that is lost in understanding the Real. This is because we can’t apprehend understanding directly; we can only see it through the empirical world. The closest we get to understanding itself, so to speak, is the petit object a, the pure signifier that is its own lack necessarily: without this particle of necessary being we wouldn’t be able to see being in the world at all. As Zizek says, for Heidigger, we wouldn’t have Sein without Das Sein.

Zizek goes to great lengths to demonstrate the post-structural condition: that how we read comes before what we read. Borrowing from Karen Barad, we can separate how we read from what we read, because we can use how we read to discover what we read — or we can use what we read to discover how we read – but we cannot discover their entanglement, that is the border between the two. To paraphrase him, in order to find out how the two go together, we need to realign the objects so that we, the viewing apparatus and the object in question, are tested against a third thing…which is impossible. There is no third point of view, in the theory of relativity. Results always come from the position of the viewing apparatus, as it cannot be outside itself. Philosophically, there’s no third view either. We may try to step out of this understanding, out of the metaphysician’s realm, but all attempts to determine the root of discourse find themselves mired in the failure to fully explain the framing of that discourse. To put it another way, Zizek notes that antiphilosophy is at the heart of philosophy. With each failure to explain antiphilosophy, we get more philosophy. With this line of reasoning, Zizek, as usual, goes through a huge nest of thinkers to demonstrate how their different philosophies circumambulate various centers of discourse:

The basic motif of antiphilosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for Marx, Existence for Kierkegaard, Will for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations. [. . .] The great theme of post-Hegelian antiphilosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: representation is reduced to the “mirror of representation,” which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground (841).

Of course, Zizek wants to say that Hegel was the first to reach this irreducible ground, as the synthesis of consciousness – and he traces this through a variety of manners that is both entertaining and enlightening. But Barad’s point remains; whatever language Zizek adopts, we see the mysterious Presence continually being shuffled from point to point, which reduces all discourse to a manner of tautology:

The mistake resides in the fact that the limit pertaining to the form itself (to the categories used) is misperceived as a contingent empirical limitation. In the case of cognitivism: it is not that we already have the categorical apparatus necessary to explain consciousness (neuronal process, etc), and our failure to have yet done so pertains only to the empirical limitation of our knowing the relevant facts about the brain; the true limitation lies in the very form of our knowledge, in the very categorical apparatus we are using. In other words, the gap between the form of knowledge and its empirical limitation is inscribed in this form itself (284).

So while we understand the mysterious Real though our a priori categories, these categories give us an incomplete view. In order to mirror ourselves with the exterior, to be “appropriate” to reality, we create a standing social order, a consistency within discourses (or many discourses themselves) each of which approach the mystery of the world from another angle. These discourses are always defractions, which are in themselves incomplete, hinging on one another but only shuffling pure Presence about. Spoken through Fichte: this absence can be expressed as antoss, or as Lacan liked to say about the Self: “I think where I am not.” This can be unpacked to mean that the self is simply what mediates itself. In this way, Hegel remains for Zizek the genius that first notices how what we read is how we read:

In this sense, it is meaningless to call Hegel’s philosophy “absolute idealism”: his point is precisely that there is no need for a Third element, the medium or Ground beyond subject and object-substance. We start with objectivity, and the subject is nothing but the self-meditation of objectivity (144, original italics).

Unpacking this thought, lets realize that not only is the self “less than nothing” but “less than nothing” is also the pure Presence mediating the discourse itself. We get the symbolic reality through the loss of pure Presence. Its lack allows us to read through it to get discursive reality as a full blown immersive social environment of culture.

I rather enjoyed this lengthy and inspired book. To be brief, Zizek does philosophy to hide the fact that philosophy no longer works, that in Heidegger’s language, philosophy has been suspended while capitalism contemplates itself. In this sense, capitalism tries to say what reason cannot (in this sense, capitalism occupies the same position as Art for Kant, that of a second nature). No wonder then that Zizek says philosophy stopped with Hegel, that the many guises of Hegel are in fact not-Hegel or a stunted Hegel so that we can continue on with postmodernism, with the avant garde, because we haven’t learned Hegel yet… so we hide him away while we continue on in endless jouissance. So to cut to the chase:

In every discourse, in every sense-making, we either sacrifice completeness or we sacrifice contingency. Master discourses (like that of Gods) generally sacrifice contingency to create completeness, to wrap us in universals, to guarantee the universe be stable for us to live in. But in all of these cases (and you can go on ad infinitum), you will end up asking, why is there necessity? As in is there a “necessity particle” that makes existence be (as existence itself is without cause)? Why are things even necessary? Is there pure being somewhere? Zizek’s answer is to locate the split of symbolic reality (necessity) and the Real together within the subject, that only through a split subject do we get contingency as the only necessity. Our ability to understand is then only supplemented through both Reason and an encounter with the Real that stands in to verify the completeness of discursive truth. For Zizek the subject’s being split is another way of saying that necessary to subjectivity is the provision of what needs to be included within its view, of what cannot be compromised. Zizek provides the example where some Christians replied to Darwinism by insisting that the world was 4,000 years old, that fossils were placed in the Earth to test faith. Zizek doesn’t believe this to be true but he cites this example to show that the “grain of truth” in the Christian example is their

impossible-Real objectal counter-part which never positively existed in reality – it emerges through its loss, it is directly created as a fossil. [T]he exclusion of this object is consistitutive of the appearance of reality: since reality (not the Real) is correlative to the subject, it can only constitute itself through the withdrawal from it of the object which “is” the subject [. . .] What breaks up the self-closure of transcendental correlation is thus not the transcendent reality that eludes the subject’s grasp, but the inaccessibility of the object that “is” the subject itself. This is the true “fossil,” the bone that is the spirit, to paraphrase Hegel, and this object is not simply the full objective reality of the subject [. . .] but the non-corporeal, fantasmatic lamella. (645).

This is another way of encountering the symbolic Real, the meaningless floating signifier that would guarantee completeness, that is the subject in its actualization. Be this ontology, money, or joy, fear, anxiety, love, mana or luck, such signifiers often allow discourse to hinge on these terms in order for that discourse to continue to be relevant, a kind of antiphilosophy in the heart of philosophy or antilaw at the heart of law. Zizek writes

Every signifying field thus has to be “sutured” by a supplementary zero-signifier, a “zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains.” This signifier is “a symbol in its pure state”: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning and such in contrast to its absence, in a further dialectical twist, the mode of appearance of this supplementary signifier which stands for meaning as such is non-sense [. . .]. Notions like mana thus “represent nothing more or less that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought. (585, original italics).

So is there any way to get out? The only meaningful answer is no, as to escape pure Presence is to fall into non-sense, or at least a difference sense that is non-sense from where we current are. Even attempt to transgress the limits of the law end up invoking the law in its transgressed form, simply because those forms are how we understand. This is how the Real becomes mirrored within the symbolic as the pure form of the symbolic. The symbolic Real, which is what Zizek would call meaningless encodings necessary to moor our consistency (our discourse, so to speak), operates through the contingencies qua Real, a maneuver of the subject to mediate itself and actualize.

At this point, to recognize a new thing, like a new world order, or a solution from our capitalist dilemma, means coming to new coordinates, a new phenomenon, a new axis. Zizek locates this between drive and reason, to have the two come together. You can read this like the unification of money with language, but he leaves it open, because after all, these are metaphysical terms. Directly speaking, such terms are always beyond our understanding, lacking substance, even as they are always within the area delineated by our pure understanding, but completely impotent to interrupt our world and realign it. All we need is the right content to come along, the right void to allow us to rename it, and recognize it as the new event, in the language of Nietzsche, “the eternal return.” With that, we could have a new epoch, a new pure Presence emerging from nothingness itself, and that new Presence would be a new world order, a new symbolic Real to realign our world, to remake our world. Compared to anything in or current state it would be more than anything, a new nothing from which there would never be any possibility of return as we would irreparably be someone else.

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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.

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.

on radicalism and hegel — and why zizek should not be listened to

September 23, 2011 / posted in dialectics, Theory / 8 Comments

currently slavoj zizek is the rockstar in academia. while i am a bit out of touch from academia, i find it a bit disturbing that many of my idealistic colleagues and cohorts still praise zizek for various articles and statements.

i plan on making this short. so let me get to the point: we shouldn’t praise or hold zizek in such high esteem. in some sense, it’s good for one to adopt radical positions — we can learn from that. but radicality can spiral in a dialectic as one switches different basis.

for example,

1. academia is a tool of the status quo as public funding needs to (con)serve monetary infrastructures which support them. this monetary tie often forces institutions to adopt only modest changes while maintaining the superstructures which support them. nonetheless, zizek’s success in academia (and beyond) ties heartily in with supporting the status quo. how radical can zizek be while remaining entrenched in academia?

this seems contrary with the second reason:

2. the zizek of the last 10 years has enjoyed a terrible amount of success. his political position has changed somewhat — his attempts to continually focus on radical positions pushes him to adopt more and more conservative positions as he continually steps against the general positions of his liberal academic base. this seems good in light of the first position, except that by stepping against the first, zizek ends up back in the arms of the status quo in the name of being radical.

the last ties the first two nicely,

3. both marx and lacan, zizek’s two philosophical fathers have a common ancestor in hegel. hegel’s absolute system was created for two purposes — the first was to tie noumenon with phenomenon — the second was to nail absolute truth down in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. hegel’s system works by weaving all the different phenomenon of life together in a super-structure that is not of any particular phenomenon. absolute truth is achieved by finding it everywhere and nowhere at once. this absolutism does not care if one is radical or one is conservative. the system works by discarding difference to find principle relations which structure those differences. such structures are often ontologically conservative as linguistically constructed relations are, as a rule of thumb, established and integrated rather than radical and novel.

in other words, as a hegelian zizek does not care if he supports the status quo or if he supports a liberal agenda. either agenda will ultimately support the dialectical synthesis which must occur in order to step us closer to the heart of the empty Notion. in fact, in order to introduce new material for a synthesis (and to keep things interesting) zizek must continually provide new angles on old material.

it is in this adherence to a Notion that traps his philosophical framework within the established parameters (be it) capitalism, classism and/or psychoanalysis… while simultaneously giving excuse to everything under the sun. certainly powers of explanation are desirable to remove the unknown in phenomenon, so that phenomenon is just phenomenon. but moving towards the Notion is a different movement than moving back away from it.

it is as dostoyevsky’s character ivan expressed; under God everything is allowed. under the hegelian notion — all things are equal — without responsibility. also, there is little movement within hegel to achieve a difference or an aesthetics to be. hegel works by subsuming things into its own immanence. so with this in mind, zizek’s authoritarian politics takes on a nefarious tone. while zizek is perhaps not completely speaking out and writing against current events today, he is edging towards becoming a spokesperson for the status quo while clothed in the sheep of radical intellectualism. beware — reading and sharing zizek as a conservative inevitably leads to positions of “obey” and “follow” rather than “question” and “learn”, something all too available to for those who are in positions of popularity mistaken for authority.

this comes to light especially in some of the recent articles he has written. take a look at this gem: in which zizek accuses lesbians of being unable to love. or perhaps zizek’s rant on the recent riots on the u.k.. these two pieces aren’t the only articles of course, zizek is famously prolific. in some sense, it doesn’t really matter whether this famous speaker becomes a spokes person for the status quo or not. he’s just one man, and his betrayal of his fan bases’ sensibilities will only hurt him in the end. certainly as intelligent as he is, he won’t be the first celebrity to succumb to stardom by become a parody of himself.

nonetheless, while i don’t fully agree with the analysis of zizek in either article, i do believe it to be important for us to really understand not just what he says but where he is coming from. zizek by aesthetic and philosophical choice can only really promote what is conservative as he is bound by a conservative philosopher.

when trying to understand a philosopher, we must first understand what problems he wishes to solve before we can fully understand what his philosophy is all about. being taken in by soundbites or clips, be it a paragraph from an article or an entire book in a collection work won’t give us the full picture of what the philosophy is all about.

the best hint of zizek’s agenda comes from his own mouth in astra taylor’s zizek! in which zizek professes that he wishes to merge marx and lacan. his later talks have tended to view totalitarianism as the best way to find both the sublime and authenticity as an ethical subject. in the latter, totalitarianism acts as a bulwark by which individuals can be perverse, ethical singularities. i believe it is only the desire for a bulwark which serves for zizek to recommend authoritarianism as the quickest route to subjecthood. without that bulwark, there can be no ethical subjectivity, only a mess of pre-subjective desires. in that sense, zizek would not embrace permissive post-modernism and apparently, that includes the snippet above about lesbian love.

while zizek is undoubtably creative theoretically, it behooves us to ask if zizek’s position on subjectivity is what is best for society or even an individual. it probably does not serve us all to be perverse subjects, to take ethical stances in the form of unyielding drives, nor would it be in our best interest as a group of people who need to live among one another for us each to embrace totalitarianism just to cast it aside.

to me, zizek remains an interesting spectacle, but one who is so theoretically entangled in his musings that he seems to believe that if he is hysterical enough, everything he says will come to be… that people are synonymous with subjectivity and that the theoretical edifices he lays out will become absolutely true. if anything, he remains fully trapped by the dichotomies and gremasian squares he continually lays out for his readers.

so the question remains. do we need this roundabout philosopher to tell us what the most conservative of political groups already say?

on Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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