« Posts tagged lacan

Can we function with an outside on the inside?

July 9, 2011 / posted in art, dialectics, images of being-human, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Recently, the reaction of one homosexual individual who was hurt by the hateful remark surprised me. Her response was simply that gays are common decent folk — upstanding people too — who deserve basic respect like anyone else.  What’s surprising to me was that she failed to incorporate the point of view of the bigot.  But then why should she?  This post doesn’t explore whether or not tolerance is an issue (because it shouldn’t be), but that there are different standards of acceptability.  Granted, standards are due to valuations that individuals generate — that is what makes us individuals — but is it possible that fundamental valuations be generated from a contextual position based off of the larger whole and NOT individual feelings?

I am not debating the content of her remark, but I do find her reaction and surprise itself surprising — all the more because of the obvious evidence that her verbal assailant did not consider her (as a gay) deserving of tolerance or basic respect.  If there is a basic orientation to how one relates to others, it’s through the Lacanian filter of the Symbolic.  The Symbolic order holds for us subjects a variety of different and individual valuations but the main function of the Symbolic is to provide orientation.  The collective Symbolic regime is the resulted of a larger, abstracted social zeitgeist.  How we negotiate the perceived regimes’ changing nature and what we allow or disallow provides the vehicle for politics.  What we do on an individual level, such as towards our hurt friend, matters, however small.  This negotiation of perceived change in the Symbolic forces personal action to be becoming-political.  In a way, the hurtful remark made by the bigot is an indeterminate but discrete step.

Immaneul Wallerstein has provided a grand gesture through his World Systems Analysis which classifies a population’s attitude towards change which may be useful to our exploration: conservative, liberal and radical. Conservatives do not want change, liberals want small measured changes and radicals want a total re-orientation of the norms.  Wallerstein’s classification is useful but it’s only descriptive, not an examination of the production of meaning in relation to the Symbolic function.  To do that, we can turn towards Zizek’s explication of the Lacanian orders through the Gremasian square.

Gremasian Squares are one basic way of determining meaning.

The Gremasian square Zizek draws upon in For They Know Not What They Do, bounces the four positions of basic difference that create meaning surrounding the symbolic function. The four positions are:

  1. all are submitted (S1)
  2. only one is not submitted (~S2)
  3. none are submitted (S2)
  4. only one is submitted (~S1)

Zizek highlights these positions in order to explore different ‘species of judgement’ of a subject are

  1. necessary (S1)
  2. possible (~S2)
  3. impossible (S2)
  4. contingent (~S1)

The basic axis deals with the main difference of Symbolic (S1) and Real (S2).  The Symbolic acts as a universal signifying function, establishing a symbolic network of linguistic meaning (S1) that is necessary for us to organize our world. At the same time, within the Real order (S2), we struggle with the impossibility of such a function existing in the universe as part of the universe.  The outside Real (S2) remains indifferent and incoherent to our manifested meaning (S1).  It is this interplay between impossibility (S2) and necessity (S1) that gives rise to the complexity of the system. In order to facilitate the others who approach us from the untotalizable whole of the Real (S2), we rely on the Imaginary (~S2) to orient us to the Symbolic (S1). It is in the Imaginary that we maintain an interplay of ourselves with others, ultimately enabling us to live together (though Lacan claims this is always through a kind of cross-talking).  Keep in mind that the negated lower pair of ~S1 and ~S2 remain imaginary reflections of the actual complex pair, (S1) and (S2). What keeps us hinged in the necessary Symbolic edifice (S1) is a self-image which represents for us the kernel of our own subjectivity (~S1).  This self-image however, is not the same as who or what we are.  To this end, Lacan rewrites Descartes’ “Cogito Ergo Sum” as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think“.  Nonetheless, it is in our personal investment in (~S1) that makes us dependent on what others think of us.  This external dependence is how (~S1) is structurally contingent, although the actual content is personal and open to discourse. So within this square, it is the universal function’s failure to completely foreclose the Real and prevent distortions of others (or ourself) that highlights the three different reactions Wallerstien segments as a population’s willingness to adapt to or reject change.

So to return to that surprising reaction, I would have assumed that one who rejects some social norms would understand that with this rejection, their position may occupy an untenable difference within another’s Symbolic (S1). That is to say, a conservative who would be unwilling to accept in themself a difference of sexuality without losing that possibility of self (~S1) would definitely reject that difference of sexuality in another or at least locate the unacceptable difference wholly in another (~S2). Our poor friend however, is hurt by the verbal assailant’s remarks as her subjectivity (~S1) is questioned and she responds by reinstating her own position in the necessary order of things (S1) as a public declaration.  The way to read the Gremasian Square is to understand that subjectivity is contingent on both the Imaginary others (~S2) who reject or accept the subject as well as the appeal to the Symbolic (S1) against the Real (S2).  Without the Imaginary (~S2) acceptance of the subject (~S1), there is no subject.  Such a position is the horror that Zizek calls the space between two deaths, when one is biologically alive but ostrasized from the community, publically dead.

The rejection of that desire as considered by the other to be one’s own introduces an element of the Real (S2) into the fragile Symbolic (S1).  No wonder then, that slogans from those who oppose gay marriage include banners that equate one man to marrying another to one man to marrying a dog. The equation doesn’t mean to equate men with dogs but rather, to equate the feeling of beastality with homosexual marriage.  This absurd equation betrays their bend as conservative — a genuine fear that should the Symbolic (S1) be extended, that fragile absolute (another title of one of Zizek’s books) may give way. A recent expression of this comes from David Tyree’s equating New York City’s acceptance of gay marriage with anarchy. One wonders then, at how fragile some conservative’s hold on the Symbolic order may be and if we could ever relate to one another without this Symbolic (as it is a point of reference). For the function of the Symbolic, is it possible to include the Real as a space within the function while maintaining tolerance and social order?  In other words, how possible is it to locate within the Real a minimal relation to be Symbolic — to provide space in the Imaginary for tolerance and acceptance?

The function of the Symbolic order appears more robust than we might think, as it goes a long way in orienting ourselves to external events. South Park, the popular adult series created Matt Stone and Trey Parker, explores various positions people take in relation to Real, unaccountable events. These events, as a rule, come from media presentations and perverse positions, other (~S2) possibilities which must oriented to the Symbolic function (S1).  It is through this accounting that we get a dialectical backlash in South Park between possible configurations of acceptability as the characters attempt to orient themselves within a Symbolic order (usually unsuccessfully) to justify or explain the acceptability of actions. Contrary to most conservative commentary on South Park, the ending configurations of the characters are usually presented to be ridiculous or at least out of proportion to the issue at hand. Earlier episodes in the show’s run were more to the point as to what is a ‘rational’ position ought to be.  Some of the later satires reject an overt explanation and choose instead to settle on positions that maximize humor.  Even so, for humor to function, it must retain a monocum of the Symbolic as reference.  As Julia Kristeva wrote in Powers of Horror, what is humorous is usually only so as the exposure of different signifiers in a novel arrangement create jouissance.  In other words, what is humorous is usually only acceptable as humor because it’s not an acceptable arrangement except as humor. The pleasure of humor is the pleasure of play within the Symbolic (so long as it does not shatter that regime).

South Park, as a satire, functions by simplifying most of their character’s interest in maintaining their own contingency, preferring to underscore instead, our tumultuous relationships within the Imaginary.  (What makes South Park an examination of actual possibilities and not an examination of the Symbolic is the protagonists often not-listened-to appeals to a standard rationality.  The under-grid of Symbolic rationality remains ignored, not questioned.)  To give a real world example of this instability with the Symbolic we can turn to the avant gaarde’s push for new directions.  Such movements are often offensive to some, as such movements often rebuke representationalism.  Representationalism best deploys the Symbolic as over-coding the Real in a 1:1 relationship as though conservatives are less able to handle schisms in the Symbolic.  The more extreme the over-coding, the stronger violations of the Symbolic invokes a bodily reaction to events that reveal the Real’s incoherency. The adherence to such an over-coding is what establishes our societal ‘grand gesture’ which in the 20th century was known as Modernism.

Modernism philosophically started long before the 20th century, but as a social movement, Modernism came together in the late 19th century as a style of presentation and coherence that in some ways matched the singularity of world orders like the United Nations. Modernism as a whole, however, is best digested as a rejection of traditional aesthetics, an establishing of new parameters of how we are to experience and relate.  Modernism marks the single largest and far-reaching break in tradition.  For the life-world, Modernism became coherent as new human existence for a current Now. This emphasis on ahistorical values arises as an absolute order without an outside, the best example being Formalism.  In other words, if you are not within this absolute order, you are nowhere to be found.

In the larger picture, while Modernism can be connected with capitalism’s ever expanding market, market capitalism is but one expression of the ‘make it new’ of Modernism. Other expressions of Modernism include Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism. So while many philosophers such as Lyotard claim that Modernism is dead in favor of Postmodernism, Modernism continues as a grand narrative, under the guise of Postmodernism. Under Postmodernism, deployment of new expressions continues as an ahistorical re-framing of historical contexts.  As such, Postmodernism functions as a hyper-modernism, co-opting the small other to illicit a homogeneous world order.  Despite the many disavowals of the I and the kowtowing to small others when recognized as legitimate, any and all contacts with global capitalism usually means the destruction of alternate Symbolic configurations in favor of our global capitalism.  Any sensitivity of context is a sensitivity necessary in a Postmodern deployment.

I bring this up not because it has anything to do with the dignity that our homosexual couple insisted on, but rather because our current Symbolic order displays an absolutism — that relationships and transactions be concluded through a narrow regime of Symbolic association.  For instance, one of the main modes of our Symbolic relies on the filters of money and legal documentation, two contractual basises which form the bridge of our current Symbolic Regime. Fights over gay rights, or the slutwalk occur within capitalism because the market has not established a preference either way (unlike say, stealing). As time persists and capitalism benefits from the religious right and the spending power of the homosexual left so both will continue to contest one another in the public space at the expense of other policy decisions. Most likely though, capitalism is not incompatible with homosexuality and ultimately marriage will be expanded to include homosexual arrangements as this does not hurt global capitalism.

This brings us back to the original question — in terms of our current grand narrative of global capitalism — is the Symbolic completely mutually exclusive to the Real?  Is there a psychial configuration that would allow us to better tolerate instances of the Real? Why rely on the contingency of others as deal with ourselves and each other in the imaginary spaces of (~S2) and (~S1)?  In seeking to find a philosophical method to explain going beyond the Symbolic edifice, we run analogous to Buddhist thought on enlightenment.  Enlightenment serves as a psychial position that exceeds the worldly concerns that structure subjectivity.  Now as the order of the Symbolic operates more as a referent than a set content, so a re-centering the four positions can be best understood by retooling the Gremiasian Square through an analogous the structure in Buddhistm known as the Tetralemma.

The Tetralemma is a four fold step introduced as a logical exercise in Buddhist doctrine to expound the doctrines of two truths.   Put simply, the two truths at hand are conventional truth — the common place wisdom of existence having substance, and the sacred truth — the emptiness or non-existence of substance.  The four lemmas of the Tetralemma involves the precepts:

  1. x
  2. ~x
  3. both x & ~x
  4. neither x & ~x

In dealing with the concepts of existence (x) and emptiness (~x), through the exercise of the Tetralemma, we step beyond having just classifications of the conventional existence of substance and the philosophical existence of nothing.  In other words, the goal of the Tetralemma is to gain an understanding beyond the distinctions of ontology, of which emptiness is a exposition of the formal constraints of ontology.  This is different from the Gremasian square in the sense that the Tetralemma works as a delimiter rather than as a position.  The goal is to avoid all four positions, whereas in the Gremasian square it is the orientation of the positions that provide meaning.  Nonetheless, used in conjunction with the Gremasian square above, we can utilize two Tetralemmas of emptiness and substance with the two indexes from the Gremasian square as the actual (S1) and (S2) with substance and the reflective (~S1) and (~S2) with emptiness.  In the first Tetralemma:

  1. There is a Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S1)
  2. There is no Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S2)
  3. Both (S1) and (S2) apply
  4. Neither (S1) and (S2) apply

In other words, we are dealing with the grounding of both existents and nothingness.  Arguably, the social schism introduced by Modernism killed philosophy’s search for an ontological life leaving us with nihilism.  Nihilism, like early postmodernism, insists that the formal constraints of ontology are not applicable anywhere, leaving us with nothing (to fit the bill with).  Rather than a full blown rejection of the system itself, nihilism involves an adaptation of the system of meaning and its consequential failure to cohere meaning.  Nihilism does not mean that there are no systems, only that the metrics we use to find valid systems yields no content.  In this way, the third step and fourth step both appear to be alternative universalisations that happen when the symbolic function fails to yield an appropriate conclusion.  Nihilism occupies both positions such that we have the system but no ontology or we reject the system and still do not have the authenticity of ontology.

This position reflects the same underpinnings as dialectical nihilism by at first insisting on a universal position although it goes beyond dialectical nihilism by in fact not sublimating the structure of the Tetralemmas at the level of the Notion.  It is through the Tetralemma’s four precepts that we gain a richer understanding that unlike conservatives and our gay couple above, it’s not simply enough to be within the function and to desire collapse the Gremasian square to gain a tolerance of the Other so as to live with them (to insist that what I imagine to be the other’s position is in fact where I am as well, that (~S1) and (S1) and (~S2) and (S2) are in fact all super-imposed, without difference… the way to read this desire is that the conservative judges the homosexual to have a desire the homosexual then denies having).  The Tetralemma instead goes beyond this to reject both the system and its content reserving neither Notion nor internal distance to uphold this desire or its judgement.

A rejection of the distinction of both the Symbolic (S1) and the Real (S2) constitute, in traditional terms, a confusion between how we are to understand our role in the world and how to basically orient ourself in the world.  How can we make sense of what we could do vs how things happen to us and what we should make of them?  Both the Symbolic (S1) and the Real (S2) rely on specific instances in order to provide actual interactions.  It is in the application of the function in the imaginary spaces of (~S1) and (~S2) by which we run across the negative Tetralemma.  Without addressing the application of the orientations inherent in (S1) and (S2), we run into the profound difficulty of skirting the regime of madness:

  1. There is no self that is I (~S1).
  2. There are no other subjectivities (~S2).
  3. Both self (~S1) and others (~S2) do not exist.
  4. There is neither no subjectivity (~S1)  nor are there no other subjectivities (~S2).

The main difficulty in this Tetralemma lies in the lack of orientation a rejection of the application of possibility and contingency implies.  Within this regime of non-applicability, we run into pitfalls similiar to those who do not socialize properly.  I speak of some criminally insane who do not genuinely understand others, nor read on others the desire and pain, both reflective and independent of their own subjectivity.

What marks the difficulty in deploying an orientation of these concepts isn’t in their conceptual nature.  We should not assume that the proper position within the Tetralemma involves a rejection of their concepts as such, but rather a rejection of the desire that navigates these polemics and binds us in these orientations.  Movement within the Tetralemma isn’t accurately a dialectic, although I have used the term.  Dialectical movements within the Hegelian traditional involve a progression of positions within an order to explain their meaning.  The Tetralemma instead involves the limits of expatiation.  When we abut a lemma we encounter a failure to grasp the Tetralemma as a whole.  This is how the Tetralemma also is not a Gemasian Square — it does not rely on static positions from which we can garnish meaning from the other three positions.

So for applicability, let us return to our original example, it is not that the knee jerk response of our friend is in fact inappropriate.  She is correct to understand that her subjectivity is contingent on the external circumstances of others who accept her, legitimatizing her place in the Symbolic.  But the most the Symbolic can guarantee her or anyone else is a position of contingency and tolerance.  Acceptance within the Symbolic does not assure her of the dignity of her subjectivity, it only imprisons her within the confines of the possibility of authenticity when continually confronted with others.  This is the nature of contingency (~S1).

The ‘way out’ as espoused through the dialectical and radically transformative nature of the Tetralemma isn’t in the sublimation of the Tetralemma the way Hegel might want us to distance ourselves from the Notion in order to better find ourselves within it.  The key of the Tetralemmas is best expressed through the Real, as the Real remains the threat for all other positions.  What makes the position of the Real ‘Impossible’ (S2) is not only the ineffectual application of Symbolic order on a shifting and vague desire — but, from the point of view of the Real, the union between any of the other three relationships are impossible because of the shifting and vague nature of desire undergridding each.  When we seek to legitamize ourselves, that legitamcy is in fact never permanent, being contingent.  When we seek to understand the other on their terms, it is impossible because we must resort to imagination — we can never know their radical difference, only read on their difference a reflection of our own difference.

This insubstantiability of position that all eight lemmas deploy disallows one to fully invest in any position, opening the door to the Real as it were without casting one fully into it.  We acknowledge our own insubstantiality inasmuch as anyone else’s.  For instance, in neither accepting being submitted to the function or outside of the function, one rejects both the absolute madness of emptiness and the contingency one might always bear.  One can be oneself, as it were, all the while allowing others to be themselves without that reflexivity or demand that one be ‘with it’ or not ‘with it’.

The Violence of Subjectivity complements our Lack of Negativity

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

There is an inherent violence in being a subject.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think of the French Revolution.

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

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

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

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

from Social to Universal, what comes after a Monetized Economy?

April 29, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rules, Uncategorized, utility / No Comments

I’ve written about the failure of our economic models to account for our happiness and welfare in the work place. I want to go into a little more detail about what an alternative view for our society might look like post-money, but first, some more general news about the failure of our economic models to register real value outside of the work place in terms of the Global Economy.

 

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

…expresses a criticism of the FED. At the Roosevelt Institute there recently was a panel on the Future of the Federal Reserve, a large debate surrounding the current actions and criticisms of the Federal Reserve as well as panel talks about the FED’s current program, the so called QE2 which is scheduled to be halted by June of this year without a clear date (or even plans) for a better and more effective QE3.

It seems that the general consensus agreed upon by everyone except the Fed and the government is that QE2 was in fact too conservative to be a success and was in fact a failure. QE2 did not generate the jobs people hoped for nor did it spark the economy with low interest rates.

The FED becomes an easy target in current debates as to why the economy is at risk as to why haven’t job growth happened and who is to blame. I am not an economist, so I will spare you the details, but I am very interested in the subject. If anything, we are plagued by a systematic failure of the existing financial infrastructure. The problem comes from huge debt. In order to handle many of the national and international debts that are due this year entire nations will have to get debt financing. The question, of course, is who do they get it from?

If the government that prints money has no money to pay for its debt, then who does it?

The current bailout situations and the burst of that financial bubble earlier in 2008-9 resulted in monetizing private debt as public debt. A short term solution seems to be simply to do the same thing again. If that happens, loser in these transactions will be individuals who have saved up money. It will eat away at the savings of the American public — in fact of the rest of the world since the US dollar is known as “reserve currency” meaning that people in other countries will use the US dollar to transact business because their own government’s money is not considered stable enough. In fact, China has the largest amount of US currency in reserve, totalling an astounding 3 trillion dollars.

But of course, decisions the FED stem directly from situations here in the U.S. and not of the rest of the world.

This might stave off the problem for another time, but the debt problem persists. Interest rates will mount and at some future point an even larger debt will be incurred, things time with our public economy and our private savings exhausted… our credit exhausted…

So what is the solution?

If you are not sure if you can trust the reserve currency, the idea is to switch to a currency you CAN trust. In this case, GOLD and SILVER. SO you see that the price of gold is to break $1,600 for a troy ounce by the end of 2011. Additionally companies that mine metals are a desired commodity as well as indicated by China’s repeated bids to buy foreign mining and farming companies. In fact there are rumored talks among some of China’s officials to reinvest their U.S. Currency into Gold.

So why aren’t U.S. officials fazed? Everyone’s doing the same dance right now — everyone’s still using U.S. currency. At some point there needs to be an exit strategy. According to Max Keiser, Goldman-Sachs officials have started sipon money from the stock market into commodities and alternative currencies. One such online company, Zynga, wildly successful for its which had made a move last year in Oct 2010 to create its own currency. With the investment of Goldman-Sachs officials, the Fed is investigating the matter. According to Keiser though, Goldman-Sachs is siphoning money from Wall Street all the while keeping the bubble of pricing up through the use of computers that trade. One of his evidences despite the Dow’s recent record high even in this bad economy stems from the drop in VOLUME even while the PRICE is high. The idea being that the unwitting American shareholder will be left holding the worthless shares when this new bubble bursts.

 

Holding the bag means holding… what?

So my judgmental sentiments aside, it seems that when the economy “downsizes” in value because of inflation — because the monetization of our economy creates excess value, value based on speculation of the future value of money — the system will implode. Much of this is doom and gloom. One fair indicator of when this will happen in the near future is the fall of the United States as an economic power — passing its economic torch to its largest landowner, China as soon as 2016 according to Chris Martenson.

This of course may not happen, 2016 still is over one presidential term away, and who knows maybe Bernanke will wisen up and the Financial overlords that bombed a 65 trillion dollar world economy to personally make for themselves a few million will find themselves in jail…

But if that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that we homo sapiens will have to reorganize into a new resource distribution system. Doubtlessly, this will involve money, as people have always had money, but it may not involve capital as the primary exchange for labor.

This is a little beyond the scope of this post, but it’s perhaps important to note that democratization of private industries is not the key to establishing a more free society.  The logic of freedom, as Zizek put it eloquently:

the key to actual freedom resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family. Here the change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production—which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other “political” measure in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.” In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital.

He continues on here, citing how violence is the inescapable and inevitable truth of the States’ impotence, and that extending the logic of the state into new regimes is a needless production of the same. So rather than dwell in violence and democracy, let us instead move back into the apolitical communities where most of us are heavily invested and are infact, as American sitcoms like to show us, largely apolitical.

There are perhaps an infinite number of possibilities but I will cover only one form, Peer to Peer Networks, which, instead of being an extension of state democracy, or state anything, rather is an extension of the communal commons “space” by which most of us interact anyway… (even if it’s not recognized by our current global the economy as such.)

 

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

The rosey scenario of so called Peer to Peer Networks comes from a computer analogy but it carries with it a sociological ideology of individuals interacting as individuals and not through the manifests of corporations. Peer to Peer interaction gets a great deal of exploration through P2P Foundation, a utopian organization that seeks to explore the very real possibility of a new form of distribution closer to the maxim ‘think global, act local’ in which interested individuals interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways. If you think this is radically different from Homo Economius, you’re absolutely right. This organization tends towards the touchy-feely-poetics but one article likens the difference between spiritual self-suifficiency vs interdependent interbeiningness via “spiritual collectives” vs “gurus” with the emphasis on collectives as being more wholesome since we are socially interconnected.

There is much to be said and in my opinion (not said) about how P2P is beneficial but as presented here, the impetus is to take a larger view of who we are as human beings and offer a human solution rather than one concocted through the confines of “Rational Choice Theory“. The thinker I would like to cite for this line of thought is Hazel Henderson.

Henderson is a grown-up hippie. Her main attack on the economy today stems from what she sees as two critiques:

  • Seeing monetary exchange as the only meaningful measurement of production
  • understanding human beings as theoritical economic creatures that seek only to maximize utility and reduce cost

    • She points out of course, that people are not so perfectly greedy, although greed is a part of who we are… and that over half of all the meaningful production occurs through the work of women. The PTA meetings, the cooking, the cleaning, even helping your neighbor paint their house on the weekend — these are meaningful acts of production that are not measured in any form of monetary exchange. Likewise, for her, financial instruments whose only purpose is to change a tax status or promote speculation is not a meaningful act of production, although it carries with it a monetary cost. Many of the ‘goods’ we enjoy, like the environment, likewise cannot be monetized, valued or taken into the consideration as a cost inherent in any kind of business plan. As such, the environment is generally worthless and meaningless according to economic theory. Also, our hanging onto the notion of GDP as a meaningful measurement of economic health makes no sense, especially since new cars may be exchanged between two countries and then counted as GDP for both countries.  Structurally her critique means a few things:

    • Money fails as an indicator of meaning since it fails to objectively capture what we value
    • On the producer side, a variety of interactions exist without any consideration of money (they are valueless, even if those behaviors maintain the quality of life for all)

    Our attempt to organize our society around economic theories of value is a terrible thing, resulting in incredible amounts of waste and human misery. We work too long to support those we love who we never see because we have to work.  An extensive video of hers can be found here: The Alternative Economy of Hazel Henderson.

    If you are like me, then I apologize, because the only thing I find somewhat grating is that she calls it the “Love Economy”. All the same, her suggestion is not to remove money, but to de-center it.  Instead of money, we would find meaningful metrics in the healthiness of society through several different axises which are not tied to the market.  She cites thirteen separate axises of human need.  For instance, the quality of clean air will be measured by environmental engineers on a scale relevant to their industry, not to a dollar value which can then be compared to other monetized “goods” and found to be more or less valuable than other goods as an ‘objective’ dollar amount.

    The Love Economy however, is just one expression of P2P. In the larger picture, the Love Economy stems from a trying to arrange society in order to maximize it values, something which is largely impossible to maintain if you hold that the only value is the collection of money.

    This would mean the end of the cost-benefit analysis and ROI for decision making. (If you would like to glance a governmental body of text related to the work I do on a daily basis for businesses, take a peek: Cost Benefit Analysis for Americans with Disabilities Act 2010, in particular “side transfer for water closets 602.3”.) Even if this text puts you off, I am afraid most of us would not be able to function without these kinds of “objective” guidelines.  How would managers or committees decide any course of action without a financial basis to limit and define meaningful activity?

    It’s most likely too, that the destruction of money as the primary signifier/coupler/de-/re-territorialisating agent will signal the end of corporations. The injunction of corporations as legal entities that benefits key players in the corporate hierarchy must end.  Corporations as entities of ownership and resource control were seen by Marx as a form of communism and collective ownership, but modern corporations are concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few:  I forget where I heard this but something like the top 34 corporations in the world have more GDP than all but the top 8 countries, of which the corporations are “members of”, but you can imagine how long that would last, especially with a weakened US dollar.  As reported by Lenin’s Tomb this class struggle is comparable to what’s happening in other countries like the middle east because it’s a class struggle, even if the stakes are somewhat different.  If corporations throw their weight around, of course local governments that can’t follow them need to provide conditions for those corporations such that a corporation will understand that it makes monetary sense for them to stay.  This is perhaps ironic for those of us living in the United States, as our material wealth in the 50s – 90s had come from corporation’s exploitation and the oppression of other nations for the US’s material interests, as pointed out by Keith Hart.

    But now that the corporations have become increasingly powerful in a global economy, they have the option of forcing by design or accident local changes to their favor.  It’s not too far off then, that Corporations can be considered the dominant species on the planet.

     

    from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

    Given such a dramatic statement, for us individuals to understand our place in the world we cannot rely on simply being just a citizen of a nation or a worker inside another corporation.  We have to understand our role as producers and consumers, first and foremost (since that is how we meaningfully interact with a value-system of money).  This switch from citizen to consumer/producer fuels much of the current revolution in Search Engine Optimization.  Most of the industry is still mulling over how social networking influences online presence.

    Online presence includes all the online discussion in the 3rd dimension of consumer to consumer (the first being business to consumer and the second being consumer to business).  The freedom of information on the internet has eliminated the days when corporations had control over their timely product unveilings, or their press releases.  The internet has allowed companies to have a better feedback of what works for their customers and what doesn’t.  Since the speed of information is so much faster, companies need to release products that aren’t perfected in order to remain competitive or deal with informal press releases better.  Both Apple and Coke have proven adept at providing expression as their main marketing maneuver rather than the more traditional marketing which aims at offering consumers impressions.  The influx of twitters and facebook “likes” and “shares” have proven to have an increasingly huge but causally unclear influence on search engine ranking.  Already all the major SEO companies have begun to recognize that in good marketing relationships with customers online, your cusomters produce your best (and worse) content.  More often than not, relationship building online and instantaneous information flow has allowed each of us to become both consumer and producer.

    Which brings me to back to the original point, the producer-consumer dichotomy. One interesting point, among others, that came from an interview with Rachel Botsman came from her observation that we generally think of ourselves as citizens only, or first. That kind of view will need to change in the near future when we have to reorient ourselves as simply participants. In a peer to peer economy, we will be both consumer and producer, not just consumer. We will be directly responsible for our individual interaction and participation as to how resources are transacted. Her example is eBay, in which strangers can participate on equal footing for remote merchandise that is bought without examination.

    The philosophical implications of this are many.  The internet has provided a new objective, recordable voting mechanism for companies to be ranked even before consumers open their wallet to “vote” in economic transactions.  A blogger can collect a valuable audience which then becomes an asset to marketers.  Facebook is an extremely intelligent implementation of this kind of collection of information, perhaps one that rivals even Google, with it’s long term information hoarding.  This kind of objective interaction with the Other verges on an interaction with the Universal.

    Arguably this kind of dichotomy was marked by the first modern cosmopolitian philosopher, Hegel.  Hegel reverses the formalism of Kant by extending Kant beyond subjectivity and as Zizek says, Subjectivising substance devoid of content.  By the imposition of his dialectical process, Hegel reaches the notion of the Universal, garnishing a multitudinous rambling along the way.  Any contemporary philosopher who seeks to tackle the universal must address Hegel, even if it’s by avoiding the Hegelian Dialectic method.

    The most traditional conception of the universal is best expressed through Lacan’s (read Zizek’s) Real in which madness, phantasms and partial objects cannot cohere into a meaningful subject.  Is this rhetorically not the perfect analogy to describe the unlinked disorder of the internet where we reach 404 and partial hits on keywords — such as when I search for one word and get something completely different that I click on?  I don’t want to go into schizoanalysis or anything like that.  Rather I want to point out that our relationship with the universal, especially as monitored through the internet is mediated by a direct attempt by a corporatized other to impose universality on each of us small others through a medley of law (and other paranoiac applications).  Whether this be through the paranoid discourse of the state (legality) or through the internet’s opposing hysteria as expressed through Bing’s initial video campagin today we have the increased injunction from the Other Enjoy! and Obey! simultaneously.

    This is not a new injunction.  I won’t blame this on Hegel, but increasingly in an more ethnic world with global trade, everything becomes relevant for examination — starting with culture and human rights and ending with intellectual property and intangible costs.

    Overlawyered.com‘s author, Walter Olson has written extensively about how the legal system has developed into the political monstrosity it exists as today.   Apparently attorneys before law school were more pragmatic, trained on their job in apprenticeships.  After law school invoked a liberal agenda to use the legal system to argue for change, everything became a matter of litigation — what was perhaps previously a personal dispute between you and your boss now became a matter of employee and employer for all to bear witness to.  Increasingly individual concerns have become scrutinized, first through totalitarian states like Stalin and Maoist Communisms, but more recently in the overlawyered culture that exists today — anyone can sue anyone for anything, right or wrong.  The influx of attorneys qua politicians (up to 30% or 40% of politicians are attorneys, I believe) comes from the desire to use the court room as a place to change law, which it isn’t supposed to be.  Legislation is supposed to change laws.

    Anyway, in many ways, the injection of the internet into the intermix of what is accountable (accidential emails, even blogging about belly dancing can ruin a divorce settlement).  This kind of dissemination of all aspects of human life even a humorous but somewhat mostly true guide on how to live with your philosopher-relative or life-partner becomes fodder for the voracious paranoia (followed by aimless surfing/hysteria) leaving footprints of human desire and meaning objectified even if this wealth of information doesn’t lend itself directly to meaning.

    Don’t get me wrong, participation in the world is definitively more meaningful than retracting into rigid rationalism, i.e., Hegel is more relevant than Kant, who can’t even leave his house without a God as a universal-guideline.  After all, isn’t that what WW2 showed Sartre?  Young Sartre stopped writing so much and took his place as a public intellectual, held himself accountable for his actions and attempted to take his message of humanism and authenticity in the face of an ever-growing global economy of maginalization and monetization of human meaning.  After all, old Sartre knew that meaning was in social interaction not in transactions.

    Social interactions is something people complain about losing, in an environment with too many people, when we can be alone in a city of one or fifty million people.  Companies are finding out that we got choices — as with any sales person today has to answer to each of their clients: “Why should we buy from you?”

    Just like companies are discovering that collecting Facebook shares and re-tweets is the truest indicator of actual meaning.  And that meaningful relationship will lead to trust, reliance and transactions.  Given this article, that social networking produces the same chemicals falling in love, perhaps I should rescind my statement — that love economy isn’t so far off…. only perhaps “economy” is outdated.

    Perhaps we should call it the love network.

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

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

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

    Pinoncelli's Duchamp's Urinal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    on Inscripting Meaning into the Universal Void

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What?”

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

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

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

    “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

    “What did he say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Dave: “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    manifesto for living

    December 12, 2010 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto / No Comments

    alot of my friends, and old friends are not people i can really relate to. i started noticing and complaining to myself about it around 3-5 years ago. i don’t want to hear about the latest video card, or the hottest computer game. many of them have stopped talking to me about anime too. this is normal, i think.

    crappy but true. people move in different directions.

    i find it mostly inane but also insidious how ‘living life’ often means getting drunk and partying all night. it’s mostly harmless fun. but at the same time, it’s terribly wasteful in the same way that your parents probably found it wasteful. and if your parents didn’t find it wasteful then there’s a good chance that they may have not found much time to be your parents (ha ha…?)

    but seriously. this is has been a kind of weird transformation over the years. i accept that my nights and days spent ‘partying’ or staying up all night doing ‘fun stuff’ have been lost along the way side. and i don’t really care if other people behave like that (as long as they don’t keep me up or disturb me in any particular way). many of the people who choose to, at times, cut loose and revel in somatic pleasures like drugs or getting drunk or sex or whatever are quite accomplished individuals. they have done great things, they have good career — they are not bad people. i guess there’s a bit of slight disapproval from me though, (not that it matters, because it doesnt!) as i find that the energies that go into such recreation are really just thrown away.

    but the larger question comes to be, what isn’t thrown away or lost?

    i spent alot of my formative years watching star trek the next generation. this is because my family (and some close friends, at the time) were really into it. i don’t have tv at my house so i watch it on tivo when i am at my parents. most of the time, visiting parents = some break for me, since i don’t have my computer and are not tempted to work late at night since i can’t. i mean i do, sometimes on their notebook computer but it’s purposefully devoid of my materials (and of dropbox) so getting onto the server and working directly from there is kind of a pain… i recognize i need some rest… so that’s how i sort of set things up for myself. anyway, watching sttng is a way of relaxing at my parents house. i really only watch tv when i am there. because there’s not much else to do and because tv is easy. it’s inane and the episodes while i have seen them all, sometimes i don’t recall. so it’s alright.

    there seems to be a huge theme running throughout sttng i didn’t notice as a teenager. captain picard or members of the crew are always explaining what it means to be mortal, or whatever it means to be human. they explain to aliens who are immortal or super-powerful energy beings that “we are not like them, we die and live short lives… or explain to lesser developed aliens that “we are like you, we are not gods, we die and live short lives… (sorry if the unclosed quotes are annoying to you i did it because i am talking in his voice and my own)

    but sttng is really not an exploration of the universe, but a moralistic tool that tries to brainwash the audience into thinking about the greater good of humankind and of all sentient beings… dead and alive…

    this really isn’t something that we humans seem to ascribe to.

    i spent about 2 hours this evening going to and coming back from a hipster art performance of sorts in north hills. it wasn’t bad. but i had also spent all last night and most of today working on a program… rewriting code and developing a new schema… i had drank a large amount of caffeine and was very focused. and really feeling impatient.

    i arrived late, to meet my friend there… so i missed half the performances. i listened to a sound piece. and wondered why it was so unpleasant. a few years ago i might have tried to think deeply about the implications of various words. but like most sonic art, it escapes meaning by the use of non-linguistic sensations. like dance, it’s hard to translate into text even if it is literally in the kristevan term, inter-textual… meaning that it invokes a wide range of semiotic jolts. sound does that. it jolts us.

    eventually though, i lightened up. and enjoyed the atmosphere and the sensation. but it grabs me that hipsters can be connoisseurs of sorts (i don’t consider myself one) of things art… art here, is only a collection of anything that creates different bodily sensations of light, and sound… the point of which is the sensation. so food and dance count. so does hiking and traveling. but this kind of art can be a fascinating exploration of various modes of consciousness in a way; the way a friend of mine’s installation changed the openedness of the space by stringing rope at about 10 feet above us across the room… cutting us off, in a way, from the 40+ high ceiling. these hipsters do it and then they talk about it. i find the talk inane mostly because it’s devoid of abstract language which would specify significant topological features of the individual expressions. but the fact remains really that there isnt any framework for such discussion… (as much as deleuze and guattari would like there to be) and to develop such a framework would be in some sense, to isolate one’s self in inanity…

    this kind of art is all well and good, but i find myself asking if this attention to these light kinds of foray into second attentions — second because it’s not our first -daily- attention (to use some language from carlos castenada) really adds anything to our human experience. listening to soft live music from hipsters with guitars… okay maybe. it can enrich us subtly, in a sort of under-consciousness kind of way… if we choose to let it. but that kind of fantastic group explorations, which performance art is and can be, between a performer and the audience — is at best only a distraction from everything else. a sort of island from all our other energies and attentions and times.

    i think we can be naked to the Name of the Father as it were, in a kierkegaard or a sartrean or a lacanian or a heideggerian way — submit ourself to the function, become the little warm center of the universe qua subject but that in itself won’t bring meaning to our activities… and maybe such a hipsteresque distraction… much like the drunking and partying that goes on every night in all the major (and minor!) settlements of the world serve as our only buffers to the general apathy of being a subject or quasi-subject. there really isn’t any kind of relief from any oppressive feeling from the Name of the Father. you hate it you love it you commit suicide because of it. and it doesn’t matter because it goes on like some crazy superego gone mad.. always to force an injunction that you comply.

    personally i follow sartre mostly. i think, because i believe in choice. i don’t believe in oblivion. i don’t believe in the beautiful death that heidegger does. i don’t believe in submission and i don’t believe in any of the lacanian discourses. really, the Name of the Father is just another nomenclature for the cage of being configured as any kind of subject… and i choose to be a subject who wants to make a difference in the world. the explosion of what it means to be human (or atleast the desire for that) as radical as it sounds — is really a conservative way of foreclosing what could be, for me and i think most every one of us, to be destructive impulses that would really only get me, you and anyone else in trouble… eventually.

    i don’t think i would drink myself to death. or get arrested or anything like that. although in a sci fi kind of way, anything is possible. i doubt that i would be as hysterical as the enterprise… streaking across the galaxy looking for something… but not at all knowing what that is… or like a broken record, always having to justify our tenuous position with life and bringing meaning and order in the name of peace and humanity. in a way, sttng is just us repeating to ourselves, everything is okay, we are all right. it’s not a great leap then, that star fleet headquarters is in san francisco, as lovely as that sounds… all right.

    but what else is there?

    Newer Posts »