« Posts tagged lacan

Écrits: A Selection

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Écrits: A SelectionÉcrits: A Selection by Jacques Lacan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here Lacan dazzles us with his ramblings. I suppose in some way there is very little clarity he can achieve due to constraints of language. But here he highlights strongly how consciousness and mind self develop from social selection and from bodily “cuts” that interrupt and force us to find coherence in abstraction. The final formulation for the self seems to be on the plateau of logical resonance, when one is able to comprehend and endlessly defer that empty lack that sutures our sense of person and the sense of others.

What makes some of this difficult is that this selection kind of starts in the middle; there is no easy introduction here, you are assumed to know the basics. For that reason, I would have liked the very excellent last essay to be one of the first.

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The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

May 19, 2015 / posted in reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book.

In his attempt to correct Freud, bring him up to date, Lacan approaches the same metaphysical abstraction as so many post-structuralists. A big part of psychoanalysis’s problem stems from methodology. In order to help his patients, Freud had to determine what normalcy was. And he did this through the cultural signs that were available around him. Lacan’s abstraction of these terms is an attempt to get away from the original limits of Freud and get at the principles of what Freud was talking about. The ordering that Lacan utilizes in order to center the subject is actually pretty deft. He approaches sort of sideways, from the abstraction of human desire as drive — in doing so, he places us in relation to the subject, but only from the angles at which we can see it. The distortion apparent in the subject’s view of itself, the only part where we can come to understand itself as as being — in essence, torsion in a field of the symbolic. Whether this happens through the other, or through itself, or through drive or any other conception is not as important.

What’s interesting about this difficult structure is that Lacan’s highlight follows a very familiar path. We need to have two things to measure itself against. This could be a phallic and a drive. It could be the other and its gaze. It could be the analyst and the subject. Really, there are so many available! Each of these different metrics presents for us different normalcys, different ways of sparking what may be normal. Ultimately though, Lacan is able to get us back to normalcy only when we approach the imaginary and symbolic regimes in conjunction with their phallic suture. This master signifier becomes the unit that marks the weave of meaning, in the same way that money is used as a filter in our current civilization to codify relative values.

While this is terribly interesting and a good gauge of what Lacan is talking about, what is missing in all of this psychoanalytic structure is the need for agency. We can retroactively stamp the structure onto any story or person or event we like. But we have a hard time trying to figure out how to get us back to where we need to go. The point of all this is to find out what normal is, so that we can help patients recover their sense of person, or their direction, or whatever is wrong. And that becomes a huge issue as to why psychoanalysis starts to lose its prestige today.

Of course, this is just a seminar about the conceptual framework. But shouldn’t this approach also be considered? We take this thought for granted because, I assume, we enter the seminar already believing.

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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.

capitalism as tourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nothing worst than a tourist than an enlightened tourist.

entry for no one

March 3, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, universal nothing / No Comments

in a time magazine article the most significant thing i found was a single line saying, “america’s unofficial religion of personal self transformation”

this is true, i feel. and nowhere can it be better exemplified than on the internet where people write about things they are doing and going through.

also, our commercials are so terrible. so wonderful at being terrible. the marketing for any product becomes a hermenuetics exercise to deploy it so it’s central to whatever it we are doing. products are angling that way too; not just like children’s cereal where it’s coco for coco puffs, or trix — not even fantasy nonsense, like lowes wants you to catalog everything your house is made of so you can plan your improvements on there. the deployment is to centralize everything. facebook or microsoft’s the cloud, whatever, my phone (the android one, i have two cell phones) is in some sense more important than my wallet! (although more secure..)

so the connection is that products can transform you too. make you a better person. re-center you. like religion or jesus or a good song… transformative. everything is transformative. embrace the mysticism. those pictures and text ppl are posting on fb now, an extension of lolcats and those inspirational posters — they are so misleading. those universal statements dont mean anything. they are quick bits that may or may not be applied as one likes. but reading it can make you feel good. it’s hypocritical CRAP that can be as a quick justification for any kind of good or bad behavior.

are we so lost that we can’t think for ourselves? we need random one-liners to let us feel like we are making progress?

the whole stupidity of the self transformation junk is that we aren’t transforming anywhere. we dont have a goal, or even a path to find anything. its like some bad acid trip that doesn’t lead anywhere or do anything. it’s not even enough to say this: Report: it all some kind of sick joke because to say the universe cares or not cares, or that it is playing a joke already says too much. anthromorphozie anything you like but it doesn’t lead to any real relationships. lacan was somewhat right — there are no real relationships, only shared fantasies that match up incidentally. if we can’t even see eye to eye with each other what chance is there for us to comprehend what goes on around us?

i suppose the easiest thing to do would be to narrow the scope. fuck the rest of the world, this is about America. or this is about my Family. Or our small group of friends, or even Los Angeles… in our post-cold war environment we still live with the spectre of the apocalypse, and in that sense, we already live in the post-apocalyptic world. we live it daily, pondering disaster scenarios; who we would try to band with, what matters to us when the clock resets… even if it’s only in genre zombie films… so we narrow it to the small band of strangers we are with on a multi-player game on the internet, or whatever — and so meaning has its place in tiny day to day movements, such as get this loan funded, or drive to this place and get a meal with a friend. you could live your life in vietnam so to speak, only worry about yourself day to day and all your past life is so far away.

after 9/11 happened some of us found out or whatever and didnt think much of it. i still drove to school even after my mom told me the 1st tower had been hit (i was in bed). traffic was horrible. i heard about the 2nd tower on my way to school on the radio. i got really good parking. the class was taoism, the first time i was taking it. the professor, a really old woman from montana with bright blue eyes, stood as straight as a rail and was a pedagogical nazi said a few worlds that we needed to hear. our class was there at 1030, mostly because we didn’t know what else to do… and she dismissed us for 2 weeks saying that everyday there is pain around us, all around the world. we just dont always know it because it’s not always in our face. but to be one with the world is to understand that pain is there, and to deal with it daily on a moment to moment basis. and not just pain, but happiness and joy and suffering — all of it at once. not about the things we are limited to in our immediate surrounding but also the whole spectrum of possible feeling. this is something that a sage gets and can deal with, not more easily, but is more prepared for because the spectrum is always open.

transformation is a stupid word. because only when we have a script in a movie, the clever ending is one in which we find we have the answer already. the clever loop gives us back our ability to deal with our depression because we had the answer all along — or we are the answer (like 5th element). and of course, yes, a movie is manufactured, with scripting and acting and takes 1 2 3 and writers and sets… but that’s just one possible narrative of all the narratives that happen simultaneously all the time. its just that the space and time continuum selects for just one narrow band at a time. the virtual unity is omnipresent and is not peaceful, or happy or blissful or accepting. it’s got everything all at once. like when krnsa revealed to arjuna his ‘real face’ in the bhagavad gita and arjuna (who is the avatar for the god indra but does not know it) is scared shitless seeing the naked face of a god…but only able in his mortal form to see just a part of that sublime texture. and that’s not ironic or anything. it’s just that our language based metaphysics which only abstractly supports intuitive concepts like “ontology” is unable to grasp situations that originate out of context, out of the humanity which is the foundation for language.

ive been watching alot of tv lately as my mind has been unable to function. i think i am not inspired by a task i see so clearly in the abstract but when writing it out becomes garbled…

steven colbert told a joke to a minister it went something like this.. an atheist committed suicide. he went to heaven and met god and he was like omg! i was wrong, all this, i was so wrong. there is a heaven! and a god! and why aren’t i in hell? don’t ppl who commit suicide go to hell? and god said yes, but it’s complicated. after all, everyone who has ever been has contemplated suicide at one point. in fact, i thought of doing it once. and the atheist said, well, why didn’t you? what stopped you? well, god said, i thought, what if this is all there is?

you know, the language that surrounds the thesis statement makes the difference. in phrases like “i always sit up straight because i am worried someone will see me” are always ambiguous to me. even if i agree with the first part, the reason for it may not be something i agree with. so do i agree with the conclusion because it’s the conclusion (sitting up straight) even though the reason for it may be completely off? do i vote for a candidate who will effect the changes i want even if he is a complete loon? do actions speak louder than words? and if they do, if actions is all that matters, then actually, there is no such thing as a lie and the entire edifice of language is only for its perlocutionary acts… and i guess, this means that truth is really only the lie — the ultimate lie — that is there is truth… there must be truth, so that we can do what we need to do.

eg, it doesnt matter if nature dies, or if humankind exists, only that the last human alive has a “happy life”. and for all intents and purposes you are the last human alive.

whatever “happy life” means.

so there you go. there’s the clever line. it returns us back to what we knew before, another selected potential in the virtual narrative web of all realities. living life in that abstract, is a dance — select the appropriate form of all possible* forms you have at your disposal.

*possible or potential is wrong here, because when i say virtual i mean that it’s real, just as real as what is reality, the difference is that the virtual is not-selected. while i use potential and virtual near-interchangably, strictly speaking, possible means that it is only different from reality in that it lacks reality. virtual is real in that the relationships are real, just not expressed.

the game of tag

February 17, 2012 / posted in universal nothing / No Comments

Looney toons always has a pair. One who “gets it” and one who fails.

Pairs, like Tweety and Sylvester. Or Wile E Coyote. Maybe in some complexity of three with Tom and Jerry (and that bulldog), but mostly in regards to two, such as Bugs and Daffy or Bugs and Elmer Fudd.

These scenes resemble little more than snapshots of complex schemes often with little change between how one scene connects with next; they all occupy the same region; they are interchangable; syntagmatic.

Contrary with more contemporary cartoons, these looney tunes begs the question; who are we to identify with? How do we enter into the narrative? We relate with one or the other: The one who struggles with desire or the one who achieves mastery?

“meep meep.”

Neither position really presents much in the way of identification — at least for modern audiences. In such vignettes, at least for me, my interest is in the interplay between the one who “gets it” and the attempts of one who does not.

I guess in that sense, Venture Brothers is the same way. Only they all pretty much fail.

No one gets anything. Not the Guild and not O.C.I..

Even the super secret agents get confused about the counter plot. Don’t you see? It’s all just a test to prove your mettle, to see if you ‘get it’ or not!

Even the super powerful agent Brock Samson is at times reduced to an angry gorilla. ‘Getting it’ depends largely on understanding your role at all times, and no one can do that. Everyone fails at some point, with the twists and turns in the plots and complex schemes. We can’t always see how we stand with or among others.

What’s intriguing in Venture Brothers is that despite super science and heros and villains a reoccurring theme appears with older characters who have given it up.

So then theres “life outside discourse” where you “settle down”… (Venture Brothers episode 406)

This is very insulating, in the sense that we are walking into a dichotomy. Whether it is “settling down” or ruling the world, Everyone wants the dream-life. In the larger picture, we just don’t know what the idea ‘it is’ or ‘how it could be’. Again, those who ‘get it’… are who we want to be, if its the start of a career as a super scientist or one who is washed up at the end of it and ‘knows better’.

I think that kind of story (finding your way in or out of a discourse) is more interesting than ones where “the course of discourse must be decided” on “the battlefield”

Examples of the latter? Like Bravehart or Twilight or Star Wars… (we won’t talk about these because they are really boring as the ‘answer’ is obvious from the start, the journey is supposedly in the resolution of the conflict, but it is ‘safe’ conflict as the ending is pretty much guaranteed.)

An example of the former?

Married with Children is one example of the former. So life is gappier. You talk the big talk, Al Bundy (or Marcy Darcy or whoever) but then through the twists and turns you are revealed to be empty. To be a fraud, to only have your dreams. Dreams no one else really cares about.

Do you get it?

In Venture Brothers, the character we follow, for whom things are revealed, must always ‘figure it out’. The colorful side characters always ‘know more’ or ‘know nothing’ but become part of the tapestry as mastermind or victim/bystander.

There is a third kind of discursive position though, one in which things are arrows, in terms of maintaining the discourse.

Sitcoms repeat drive states until one character “gets how to deal with that imbalance” before life can return to its normal repetition.

IRL is probably more like sitcoms, although sometimes we think it’s about “getting it” in which case we think others “get it” and we try to “get it” too, or at least fool others into think we “get it” until we actually become one of those who “get it”. This is best seen in business where new businesses spend an inordinate amount of time convincing others they are legitimate….

The problem with imbalance and return is that IRL there’s really nothing to return to.

Just like there ain’t a discourse that’s inscibed in the cosmos, only ones inscribed in us. And we select from those partial lines.

IRL is like a bad play that just won’t end.

If, like the current movie, j Edgar, maybe we can improve the narrative if we tell it out if order so it’s not a flat narrative in which we repeat cycles. But why not sacrifice ‘realism’ if you are going to step Outside the chronological line and stage a trial by gods where j Edgar must recall his life in purgatory and judge himself…

So the conflict is drawn out — already j Edgar relies on voice overs and incidential parallels in time to explain the character reasoning which we wouldn’t otherwise get without it. In fact, the movie starts off with j Edgar relating to an agent to write a book; he supplies a narrative in order to reconstruct his own life, suggesting for us that he is the mastermind of his own plot — (calling into question what for us, might be the actual meaning).

This is very IRL — when here on the blogosphere, or with friends, we explain how we were in the recent past — to give continuity and identity to our current actions. We explain ourselves into a discourse, bring others into the fold so as to legitimize what we are doing right now.

For j Edgar, the voice belongs to a disembodied super ego which lasts beyond the narrator’s own death. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if the voice overs was the disembodied id and the determination in the scenes was due to the superego attempting to weave a dignified plot line?

As it is, the movie starts out it was the ego but it shifted when you caught up to the ‘narrative present’…

And then confusingly surpassed it.

Over all, with j edgar, it’s too easy to understated. The movie asks the wrong questions. We want to make a tragic figure? But it was too much a victimization…

Aristolean conflicts with the cobbled story line not withstanding.

If we could be explorers. Would it be best told as Marlowe or as Kurtz?

Between Naruto and Sasuske the story is told by the witness, Sakura. Not by Sherlock Holmes, but by Watson, a bystander.

Cuz, you know, Sakura is otherwise worthless. And that is the role others play for us, to witness it, and share it, to legitimize it. The crow lets the pawnshop owner to live and run back and ‘tell the tale’ so that others may know his story. Others can ‘get it’ too.

so, back to that shared discourse, it is the effort to legitimize our behavior within a symbolic (larger social reality) which Lacan was able to extract from Freud and speak of it directly without Freud’s troublesome metaphor.

I think that is pretty much Lacan right there; we get a calculas of who ‘gets it’ and ‘who does not’ and how we are each frauds — without substance and with substance– but in different ways. I think if there is a lesson to be learned is that we must not believe in the ‘getting it’ that ought to be gotten. That even adults are frauds, and that everyone is nothing in the face of the awesome sublime. Nonetheless, some ppl can be okay with nothing, and the job of an analyst is to help you become okay with nothing. And that ppl who are okay with nothing have nothing over those who are not okay with nothing. That there is no difference, and it is this nothing that makes no difference difference with everything.

I mean, yeah, zizek says that too. But he says more than that, although its not much more… its this nothing that really helps you see where Zizek and Buddhism collide. Actually it’s fuzzy in my head, but I think Zizek did mention it, in some book, I forget where, at the end of Parallax Gap, maybe. I saw it years before he wrote that book, but someone was bound to eventually point it out in print.

Zizek himself said it. Because then at that point, he ‘got it’ too.

on Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

railing against the 2nd attention

September 6, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

i was thinking about the fakeness of souplantation along with its faux industrial look (at this location) when my dad decided to strike a conversation with me about the illuminati.  started by saying that george washington in a letter acknowledged their existence.

he went on a little bit about the statue of liberty — talking about first how the two men who built it were illuminati… talking about various symbols in the statue of liberty.

i wont repeat the conversation but frankly i found it vaguely annoying because i don’t care.  my reasoning as i explained was that such symbols do not do anything.  does the symbols on the U.S. dollar bill serve to make the sun shine?  guarantee the U.S.’s place in the world?  serve to hurry along the 2nd coming of Jesus?  when i explained this to my cousin she found it to be incredibly negative.  she retorted, saying that symbols are important because they serve to remind one of things.  i then mentioned the stain glass windows in catholic churches with the 12 stations.  things like that do carry meaning and can help improve one’s life, but the presence of symbols themselves are meaningless — one has to take them seriously and bring them into being with one’s own person, otherwise it’s as plain as decoration.  really if one lives it, why does one need symbols?

it seemed that my dad took the presence of such symbols (in some part) to mean the presence of a shadow government, i found that completely bogus.  governments and institutions are so ineffectual.  for there to be a shadow government ruling the planet for hundreds of years, one would need an incredibly tightknit organization — one completely disciplined and lean with near perfect information (some how).  how often do the local police solve crimes (for instance)?  i won’t get started on that but i will mention that belief in a masterful conspiracy is really unlikely.  government is so cumbersome.  and any kind of super secret government won’t be secret for long — because there is no elite squad with near perfect technical information, certainly not fifty+ years ago.

nonetheless, disproving conspiracy theories is kind of a ridiculous thing to do because it’s near impossible.  it’s an epistemologist’s field (which i am bad at) but how can anyone prove anything?  if we have a choice in what we believe in and how we organize anything then we should have a set of criteria to determine the most effective beliefs.

what i want to get to here, is what carlos castenada calls the 2nd attention.

i want to extend castenada’s thought as exposited in books like ‘the power of silence’ and ‘the fire within’.  he calls the first attention to be that of everyday man.  the 2nd attention is the shifting of awareness from the first attention into the other bands of awareness, like that of other animals or other creatures not of this world.  the 3rd attention is when the entire luminescent being lights up simultaneously, and that is analogous to near immortality or complete awareness or enlightenment.  i don’t want to go into detail about this but i will analogize the 2nd attention here.

in a sense there is no first attention…if there were, it would be common sense, or an everyday sense of things.  a shared reality of sorts.  when getting into the particulars it’s apparent that there isnt a shared reality.  there are clusters of shared realities in different groups that reinforce one another.  these groups verge into areas that castenada would define as the 2nd  attention.

the analogy of the 2nd attention is best explained with the ‘sorcerers’ who search for the truth and power in the 2nd attention.  castenada talks about these men, heroically going through unknown areas of the psyche and going mad, or disappearing altogether, lost and unable to come back.  often, in castenada’s books, don juan and carlos get stuck somewhere overnight in the desert, because they are wandering through the 2nd attention (in a controlled way by don juan) when they are spotted by a creature of the 2nd attention (sometimes one who was once a man) and they must hide from it and wait until sunrise before they can escape.

in this analogy, the 2nd attention works for ppl who try to identify truth and gain power from it.  they are ordinary people like you and i but they are also people who are interested in politics, or religion, or philosophy.  they are world-builders, system-builders, mystics who try and find the source.  in reality, they are pretty much anyone who gets shaken up by reality, who experiences the death of a close one or a traumatic failure of some sort and comes to question life and existence and meaning.  we all wander the 2nd attention in some way, departing from the strict ‘middle way’ of the 1st attention to come up with our own conclusions about life and reality, of the people around us and whatever else that seems to need explaining and ‘fitting into’ with everything else.

in a way, meaning is used to formulate social hierarchies so that we can fit everything together in a way independent of any one individual or according to one individual.  we say this is how we should live, this is how society should be — we judge everyone and ourselves — whether it be from a perspective of economics, or a religion, or evolutionary psychology.  some kind of universal meaning is introduced to reinforce a social order so that we can say “this is how things should be and our place in those things”

so in that sense, all different theories and systems are equal — because what kind of objective metric for which we can possibly come up with which is ‘right’?

in what sense are things ‘right’?

is it arguable that a paranoid-schizophrenics’ daydream “works” for them as much as my paranoia about paying my taxes on time “works” for me?  there are consequences to both!  and while we can say well, most of us all pretty much believe in paying our taxes (as we also believe in the consequences) can we say also say that when reading a paranoid-schizophrenics’ exposition (say written in a notebook) about the nature of the universe when we understand that words can have inter-textual, slipperiness?  likewise, to capitalize on deleuze and guattaris’ schizo-analysis (which is not about schizophrenics at all, but a structure or a way of connecting things, a different kind of meta-epistemology) can we reject alternate modes of meaning make simply because they are unfamiliar to us?  most of us do!  that’s the point of meaning!  to find the big man, or who should be the big man on campus.

so it comes about that i think a criteria for 2nd attentions that ‘work’ should be whether or not those models are ‘dead-ends’.  i think in the ‘planet earth’ series, sponges were called ‘evolutionary dead-ends’ because they could not progress anywhere else.  likewise, in the castenada world, many of those sorcerers are dead-ends simply that because while they may gain power, they are also lost, or unable to return from their situation.  they are trapped in their own separate worlds, forced to focus and rely solely on the inhumane in the second attention.

example?

many some ppl who know me know that i like philosophy (or that theoretical shit) so that when dan brown’s book ‘da vinci code’ came out, quite a few recommended it to me, equating what i liked to what dan brown did.  i know many ppl won’t equate philosophy with whatever dan brown wrote about in his book, but if you think about it, abstractly the two do resemble one another.  esoteric knowledge, hermeneutics — systems of thoughts, abstract arrangements of meaning… much like what foucault’s pendulum by umberto eco was about with the knights templar, the crusades, free masons and what not.  connections of history and finding a meaningful connection/system in place by which we order the world.  the difference between philosophy per se, and this other stuff, is that philosophy isn’t tied so necessarily to individuals nor do specific time and places.

nonetheless such ‘master’ conspiracy theories seek to explicate events and order a grand narrative, much like fredric jameson’s the political unconscious, such that even ‘the end of narratives’ qua postmodernism is incorporated into an articulate structure which cannot but preserve the theory itself.  to get back to grotesque conspiracy theories such as those involving the knights templar, such theories often take real ambivalence and incorporate it into the theory so that one’s own ignorance plays a role in reinforcing the theory’s metaphysics of presence.

like the 2nd attention sorcerers, one then becomes trapped in that world.

and what then?

is the purpose of developing such a theory, one founded on history and specific events to continually find more information to support it?  even freud with his oedipus complex moved into a different direction as time went on.  it’s inevitable that one’s theorys and ideas should slide as one grows older, or changes location.  but isn’t it usually the case that ppl abandon their ideas, and forget them if they don’t write them down?  we are not our ideas and our ideas are not us.  but ideas at a particular time do suffice as the internal workings of how we orient ourselves among everything else.

and if orientation is what’s at stake, then truth is less important than we feel it to be absolutely.  i say it is best to have an out look which does not force us into any kind of intellectual, emotional or otherwise ‘dead end’.  one should, aesthetically and on principle, seek to come to terms with one’s surroundings… and as we are imperfect beings, in the spinozan sense, we always will have partial knowledge, incomplete and inaccurate.  we must continue to absorb, be flexible and evolve.

even when choosing a career, who wants to be hemmed into being just a customer-specialist?  it’s true (in nature and in today’s world of specialists) that to survive well, one should pick a robust niche that will exist regardless of market forces, and narrow in on that niche to ensure one’s employability.  but that’s only if you want to stay still.  staying still though, is much like a mollusk or clam.  we can’t direct the environment — it’s too big — so it’s best to just ride along within its shadow.

i think of the energy used to lodge and unlodge one’s self from a position to be analogous in structure to the pianists who practice for hours daily to become virtuosos.  when you play a passage, your hand does the motion in the most efficient way for it.  but that’s not going to help when you have a variety of complex forms to perform which require a different motion.  so to be efficient in those complex forms you need to undo the easiest hand motions repertoire in your subconscious and mold your virtual hand (stored in your head) closer and closer into the shape of a keyboard.  and to do that you must transverse the keyboard.

the energy to unbind and re-train one’s hands can be thought of in terms of activation energy.  to transition to a lower energy state (smoother motion and thus, more efficiency).  this is much like the energy it takes to unravel ‘bad habits’ or in our case, to utilize complex hermeneutical pathways to satisfactorially explain phenomenon.  theories which do not explain phenomenon well, require continual maintenance and continual upkeep.  it takes a great deal of energy and anger to be a racist or a bigot.  it takes a great deal of emotional investment and risk of suffering to be self righteous in the face of society.  the harder one solidifies a theoretical apparatus the greater the risk to the thinker if it fails.

i don’t know if enlightenment is ‘real’ in the way of stories.  certainly buddhist enlightenment is real, in the sense that is a publically acknowledged phenomenon within various religions.  i won’t speak of it, but i will mention that it’s difficult to discern how if ever anyone were to understand that one was not in fact lodged in the 2nd attention and that one ‘got it’.  this brings back the question of metrics — or i should say, the lack of metrics.  there are so many different systems and ways of understanding.  for instance, to bring ‘karma sutra’ back to its origins, there is a warning in many tantric traditions of looking up and trying esoteric meditations and yogic practices by ones self. without the proper teacher, one runs the risk of invoking pain and wandering off the path these practices were designed to follow.  the risk in this reminds me of much in the end of the yoga sutra which warns against indulging in the powers that arise from getting close to the unpolished mirror.

when one closes in on the sun, one risks blindness.  the closer one gets,  the increase in the risk of permanent blindness.  if one were on the path to becoming the perfect pianist (assuming such a thing were possible), if one were to stop when one were close, the habits that one has acquired only solidify all the more so, for all the energy and work one has sunken in would help emboss the structures one currently has.  it takes more energy to undo errors done in the extreme than it does errors early on.

this warning, of course, only explicitly functions within the context of there being a given path to follow.

real life — naked life, i should say — is fuzzy and without clear boundaries.  within the context of organized religion, there is always a direction to tread (as it’s organized in a certain way).  slavoj zizek, true to his hegelian loyalties has written extensively that one should follow a given (and perhaps seemingly arbitrary) path as such a path is the best way to guarantee one access to the universal.  if one follows the hegelian dialectics for synthesizing meaning, then one should!  and so zizek has written a good number of books on why the christian legacy should be protected, and what such a pathway has to offer.  aesthetically it’s also consistent that zizek is in fact an authoritarian.  the best way to ascend to a universal guarantee of some sort (any sort, for with zizek all roads lead to the hegelian-esque Notion) is to follow a path as deeply as it goes.  sufis, as well, have an added requirement that one should master at least two different disciplines in order to understand how mastery extends beyond the prohibitions of a medium.

i have waxed about hegel before, so i won’t do that now, but it will suffice to say that if one reaches beyond the mode of the medium one can encounter analogous structures unbound by a particular medium.  we master painter and a master musician can talk!  we don’t need to use the language of a particular language to understand that literature of one culture has analogous movements and tropes possibly found in other literatures… and that syntax in computer languages can invoke syntax in non-computer expressions.

in this way, one can seek the various territories of particular fields, as they are woven with their tropes and their memes and their intensive structures to alight on more primary principles.  such principles posit indexes which can become expressed in a particular discipline.  folks, i am talking directly on deleuze and guattari’s combined notions of plateaus, machinic indexs and territory.  deleuze and guattari are right to repeatedly invoke the success of man not only of his hand as a de-territorialized paw (which can become a hammer in holding a hammer, or a screw driver when using a screw driver) but also in his ability to abstract beyond aesthetic and sexual beauty — to combine abstractions in fomulations of bodily meaning, philosophy and the literary arts.

we can be affected!  and we can affect!  highly developed sensibilities follow the most human of us.

while in the abstraction of so much internal semiosis eventually allowed each of us to experience the reterritorializing of that internal phenomenal space as ‘consciousness’, the process does not guide us in a given direction to further de-territorialize the signs which are re-terrtorialized along specific expressions originating from specific contexts.  perhaps a word ‘allegory’ will always remind you of your 8th grade english teacher, or ‘meta-physics’ will always be the astrology and tarot card section in a bookstore.  and the sight of lingerie will always afford a sexual or ‘naughty’ sensation.  we respond to that with our vaguely deterritorialized bodies, smitten with tattoos and panty hose and other trappings of social signify-ance…  and for all our abilities to abstract, build bridges and realize that a pen is also a weapon… remain trapped in the inner workings dependent on the inherited contexts of our social bretherian.

is it enough then, to realize an illumaniti conspiracy theory as a way of gaining access to social order?  is it enough to work out a ‘pick-up-line’ system to get laid only to have to invest into that system over and over, and refine it and work it so as to be able to work it?  or to vote for a particular political party and rally under that party with the trappings that this is the only way to clear up society and make it ‘what it should be‘ so that it is the ‘best possible world’?  to clothe julian assange with the trappings of christ or satan when he is still a man?  or in some cases, to claim our less fortunate as ‘mere animals’ for living off welfare?

i don’t write this so much for you, because i don’t doubt that this doesn’t apply to you.

in fact, you already know how things should be, and that it’s very apparent this or that style is the right style and that the order inherent in credit cards and drivers licenses are in fact one of the real orders of things.  this is not far from the truth, and if you are thinking i am saying there is a way of mastering reality then you are a bit mistaken.

lets go back to aristotle with his seemingly minor distinction between artificial and natural.  aristotle posited an order of things which says that natural things have essence.  he aligns the state with natural things, as it is supported by people.  artificial things, like wooden statues, do not have that essence, they do not ‘belong’ to the primary motion.  and of course, aristotle brings about a taxonomy to get us closer to true immaterial being… a like a great-grandfather of the biological taxonomy we use today.  but if aristotle allows the state to have essence because people make the state up, and the state changes over time, so then do all items and things of people.  and it is not the objects themselves that we make (artificially) which have essence, but their meanings and ideas.  in a very real way, we then go back to the earlier idea in this entry — meaning is what allows us to create social hierarchies for us to orient ourselves to everything (including each other).

reality as such, is all that, by definition, a meta-state of orientation: any kind of grasping or inclusion of another piece is also reality.  we cannot unthink reality.  very lacan!  and given that all our positions, experiences and bodies are different, it makes sense that there be as many Real(s) as there are people.  beyond that social criterion of orientation, we do have some abstract ability to understand non-people orientation, such as with chemistry or math.  to understand how we fit in with them, however, is to mistake a rock for having the same kind of meaning as a spoon.  natural things have essence as they were, but artificial things only have essence by virtue of how it functions (pragmatics — interesting aside but this does suggest that everything is pragmatics in the the deleuze and guattari schizo-analysis sense).  in a real way, how you understand things is who you are.  and how you change, when you do change, incorporates those alterations in a worldview.

but — wandering in the 2nd attention is not pointless!  and to find commonalities in how various relations work in the inexpressible beyond specific signifying processes internal to us is in some sense to grasp the noumenal skin by which we generate context and meaning.  certainly not a pointless endeavor!  after all, to forgo such a process is to strongly risk being ruled by a 2nd attention dead-end, to be required to bring energy to maintain a world-system, which only asks everything of you — and takes away your free choice as a de-territorialized mammal, denying you much of the energy you might have otherwise, to grow.

wander free and easy.

on nil

August 19, 2011 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

(from twitter)

what’s odd about nothing is that there are 3 kinds of nothing: 1.absence of anything, 2.absence of change and 3.absence of a particular x.

in programming terms, this analogizes to 1. null, 2. loops and 3. zero.

what’s further odd about zero is that in languages like php, zero can be the value zero, empty, null or one.  this 0 = 1 is a 4th kind of zero.

i think this overlap has to do with either specific content, the context of expression or the structure of expression —

all of which may be nil.

the most basic nil is in the structure of expression — which is the kantian negativity. context of expression is hegelian negation (zizek)

and of course specific content is what we are most familiar with and deal with everyday. in culture finding the hegelian negation is akin

to finding the “species which is its own genus” as zizek says, the primary case. something i think south park keeps trying to hit.

of course that’s also philosophy’s goal too, to explicate the zero point of structure, find the root of being all that jazz.

the purest case with the simpliest move. we can always tailor our structure to support other items “a priori”, in theory.

 

Zeros in numbers are a purely expressive entity but as such refers to what would otherwise be uncaptured substance.

Saying that is like making digital analogue. An mp3 recorded on vinyl.

The inexpressible is expressible by virtue of the concept of the negative, by voids in expressive structure.

This is not to confuse a deployed camera’s negation with the negativity of blackness on a movie screen.

Where hegel abuts universality in force is like law taking onto account violations by being more strict than necessary.

Or like good design swallowing common human error.

This is what theoloticians may mean by taking about human freewill made compossible with god’s supreme will VIA Jesus, god as man.

 

(post-twitter)

god’s will must encompass everything, including that which is free of god.

that’s where determinism and freewill intermix, in a figure like jesus.  jesus acts as the central binding agent on the way to universality, as petit objet a, the stain of god on man, a stand in for the subjectivity/godhood.

but if jesus is the stand in, and jesus is negative, how can god be negative?  not just in terms of not-man and not-god but also as zero qua one (as stated above).

what’s particularly interesting in this is that in the fullest level beyond universality, hegel still insists on the emptiness of the notion beyond the traditional readings of dialectics.

in a very real way, negation for hegelian dialectics is necessary — one can’t have universality without taking into account that which is not explicated.

joan copjec in her brilliant essay ‘body as viewing instrument or the strut of vision’ takes heed of this when she explains how renaissance painting isn’t simply a field.  the field from the subject projects an idealized viewing point just behind the head of a viewer situated squarely before the painting.  the ‘final’ negative acts as the last suture, by taking into account that final kernel of understanding — rooted from the subject.

this brings us beyond negation into universality — but the step beyond negation qua universality is to consider the totality itself as self-determining — that Emptiness is Godhood itself which can only be expressed as the zero-sum of structure.

once again, we find ourselves enwrapped in a kantian lock-box of phenomenon — only this time there isn’t a noumenality by which we cannot know, for the noumenal is included as part of the structure itself like how phenomenon is structured.

if anything, at this point we’ve aligned the first three nils on one another: content, expression and structure like an empty structured database, or a spread sheet or pivot table without data, devoid of content.  virtually there but inexpressed.  what we’ve ended with is the last kind of zero, where it acts in a higher level as one.

this is simply because while one is a totality when viewed from the outside –from a position of immanence, one is needed as zero to establish metaphysics of presence, marking a structural change from pure absence to a structured presence.  in terms of programming, a zero is already one bit.  a nothing wouldn’t even show up and cannot be considered.

an interesting consequence of this concept of zeroth-ing is to understand that subjectivity itself is the zero point sum, the empty category that establishes the modal structure of renaissance order.  this seems to suggest that we understand others as a consequence of our own singularity.

but this grasp of subjectivity as zero misses the point, for we have a totality as one in subjectivity already.

so where is the nil point that is pre-subject?

copjec talks of the gaze as the field that cleaves and binds; for if the subject is us, what does our presence guarantee?  how does being one equate to being zero?  it is in the consequences of getting to be one that we already assume a zero — in Lacanian language it is the Other that bounces off subjectivity in so as subjectivity requires others.  what copjec calls the gaze guarantees both subject and object and acts as the originary marking place.  they are dual views of the same situation.

therein lies the structural difference by which noumenal and phenomenal are cleaved, inexplicable but also nil.  the ground of being separate must be established before being can be, a crux of psychoanalysis from motherandchild to i and you.  in each point epistemologically, we must have the empty container-notion which can contain it all, and is rightly not anything.  The set of all sets is not really a set, it is the empty set par excellence.

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….

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