zizek

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

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

(written about a month or so ago)

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

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

what an utterly and ridiculous notion!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and this is where things get a little hairy.

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

but not to get side-tracked:

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

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

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

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

like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

for example,

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

this seems contrary with the second reason:

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

the last ties the first two nicely,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

railing against the 2nd attention

September 6, 2011 / alex 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 / alex 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 / alex 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….

Can we function with an outside on the inside?

July 9, 2011 / alex 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:

all are submitted (S1)
only one is not submitted (~S2)
none are submitted (S2)
only one is submitted (~S1)

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

necessary (S1)
possible (~S2)
impossible (S2)
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:

x
~x
both x & ~x
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:

There is a Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S1)
There is no Symbolic function by which we gain meaning (S2)
Both (S1) and (S2) apply
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:

There is no self that is I (~S1).
There are no other subjectivities (~S2).
Both self (~S1) and others (~S2) do not exist.
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 / alex 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 / alex 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.

Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

March 27, 2011 / alex posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path. It went something like this:

Go to public school
Go to College
Get a job
Get married and buy a house
Have kids
Work until your kids have left home
Work until you retire
????

I asked them, what’s the point of that? They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us. We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say. I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate. After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

But that’s the catch isn’t, it? I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy. Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy. So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism. How does meaning fit in?

After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning. In particular:

Meaning in the Workplace

I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson. You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs. The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?) To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job. For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like. What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself. And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do. What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy. If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours. That’s kind of a sad thought. All those turn-key children. Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters. Here’s a compelling quote:

My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about? Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

Sounds like managers also need to become teachers! And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers! So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be. But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

What happens when we lose meaning?

The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit). If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it. If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis. This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers. I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful. The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit. The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit. I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly). When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s). By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was. I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression. And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism. If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us. To quote Callinicos,

The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether. That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary. Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system. Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further. Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me! What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone. But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself. People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well. So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis. We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change. Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”. So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”. The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading. Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”. Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

My evidence for this? Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis. This one is personal. While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy. Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy. What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles? It’s worth quoting:

Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

But then we knew this already. Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp. His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive. He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up. And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning. For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us. Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way. Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning. Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $. The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time. And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty. I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

So the takeaway? If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day. Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs. I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe. But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work. This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering. The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. The main difference is that the world then was much bigger. Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go. We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence. Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means. Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table. We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together. I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory. This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric. Only one kind of meaningful metric exists: MONEY.

One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined. But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission? Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network? Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings. This article: Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

I am not familiar with the author of this article. Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value. That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment. That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit. Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way. And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive. What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing. Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now. Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility. Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost. Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff. It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience. Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination. Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…

Beyond Existentalism

March 1, 2011 / alex posted in Business, images of being-human, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

it occurs to me two implications of the previous entry one existentialism:

http://sulphuroxide.com/2011/02/22/meaning-in-the-face-of-annihilation/

1) that if meaning only works for one’s self, there isn’t any reason to respect anyone else’s mental capacities or conclusions, except for purposes of “living together”. in cases where more authoritarian minded individuals would think things like ‘single mothers are bad for society’ ( http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/134031175/For-Single-Mothers-Stigma-Difficult-To-Shake ) there’s really no reason to respect anyone else’s life choices, or life situations… the same goes for gay marriage and homosexual relationships wherein concerned individuals would deem others as being in ways that detrimentally affect them even while more libertarian or liberal proponents would claim that such adult relationships fall under rubric of ‘no one’s business but the parties involved’…

2) nonetheless, for these reasons, existentialism does not have any strong role in politics.

while i adhere strongly to the ‘meaning is ultimately meaningless’ camp — i’m not sure where else to go with this. in the past few weeks ive been sliding really close to vulgar marxism… where questions of beauty and aesthetics become less relevant… simply because of how these problems are defined (up in the air, too, vapid and ‘feel good’…). at the same time though, especially in practice with web development (as the most obvious case) beautiful code — aesthetically pleasing algorithms and presentation — remain at the forefront of my conditions for a project that is more ‘completed’. this is a definite issue, to put it bluntly, at the onset, a huge contradiction.

i think this ‘huge problem’ that i have is very similar to more traditional philosophies (of which i think i draw a large part from)… namely the differences between idealism and physicalism… the lines are badly drawn (imho) because it’s not so much the mentalists vs the physicalists… but really a difference between “ontology” and “ontic” or design and economics. zizek fielded this area strongly with this back in ticklish subject although I must say that by parallax gap, he may have resolved it enough in his head that the question is buried but never fully addressed anymore but as a more general debate… i don’t know i havent read any zizek recently…

a more pragmatic approach can be found within the debate between urban designers on the point of view of ‘good design’ vs ‘economic business plans’– neither of which by itself, are always what’s best for neighborhoods. the quote froms directly from this discussion, and it’s eloquently put by mariela alfonzo
you can catch the link here: http://www.publicprivatepassion.com/2011/02/can-cities-take-stand-on-good-urban.html

Ultimately, the bottom line is you cannot reach a compromise between urban design and economic development – that’s a losing battle. I firmly believe you need the former to achieve the latter, but you have to understand the latter when devising the former. We HAVE to stop looking at “design” as a line item within the “costs” section of a pro-forma.

the company apple masters these principles with their slick ipod, and iphone designs… and while they do not have market dominance wen it comes to the cell phone industry, they are industry leaders. if you apply this ‘solution’ analogously to philosophy then you get that meaning, in order to be more than an existential statement of how one navigates — in order to be ‘meaningful’, it must also be epistemologically sophisticated in how one interfaces with their situation, to put it in a smarmy but ‘duhh’ kind of way. so as far as politics go, we can’t be sophists… and we can’t be arrogantly totalitarian, but at the same time, we need to reify our problems. we must be sophisticated in the deleuze and guattari way via concepts — we must seek to address problems that are critically problems — in how those structural crises make a real impact. we can’t address all problems that we find — because many of them are not really meaningful problems.

how we separate this, between what is meaningful and what is not, throws us back quite a few steps. the ‘corporate’ response would be to define the problem in a tangible metric… so that we can attain that goal. which of course, would please stock holders, give us a strong sense of progress… but this ‘solution’ by itself also did cause the stock crises of our current day. we do also need to keep in the big picture as well. which is a problem, because tactically we have ‘solutions’ which cannot be ‘solutions’ in an open-ended undefined system.

you realize that philosophy as a whole works best when it abstracts/extracts meaning from complexity. it reduces phenomenon the way language names things, the way we put new information, new items we encounter into old files. so philosophy, and a systems approach can best work at giving us tools to handle past situations. it can ‘predict’ previous events accurately because the relationships which were relevant at the time of philosophizing were — relevant. things change, and sometimes those events don’t work no more — the indexes have been re-shuffled so a system may not predict anything much anymore. i think this is where the quote above (from an urban planner on the relationship between ‘good’ urban design and ‘productive’ economic plans) applies. the various ‘schools’ are great, because they have focused on their limited scope questions on real world situations. we’ve gotten so in-depth! but that depth is narrowly defined and runs the risk of becoming a kind of art-for-artists. in order to make great statements that shake up those studies AND make them accessible for outsiders, we need genius, we need something new and fresh to break out of old paradigms.

believe it or not, the bloggers from the havard business review all echo the same issues. in a world of structured relations, structured cash flow, marketing plans and business plans… urban planning and a SYSTEMS approach, we need what they call ‘innovation’ — part of the key in many of their posts is a kind of ‘how to break out of our mold’. if existentialism as a philosophy only works for one’s own meaning — how we connect with others, how we expressedly cross the gaps in this field becomes a matter of innovation and creativity. after all, getting stuck in one’s head is like starting a college in academia. to use a classic example, do neurologists and cognitive psychologists talk to one another?

to use the quote above as an analogy, to use effective communication requires that we understand the mindset of the one we speak to and our own mindset. both need to inform each other, which means of course, a transdisciplinary approach. (again, DUHH). how descartes has problems with this, stems from how he defines the mind as a closed system. well guess what, our minds ARE closed systems in so far as we think about them as such… they obviously still manage to create objects and process new information in astonishingly innovative ways.

where this happens at the subterranean level, is of course, what deleuze and guattari call rhizomes.

how we facilitate and actively push for those connections is what i call rhizomatic architecture. ITS NOT JUST ABOUT TREES (aborescence), BABY!

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so2 – rhizomatic architecture

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

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

railing against the 2nd attention

on nil

the Disheartening Metonymy in Facebook

Can we function with an outside on the inside?

The Violence of Subjectivity complements our Lack of Negativity

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

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

Holding the bag means holding… what?

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

Meaning in the Workplace

The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

Beyond Existentalism

Theory

Lyrical Narratives

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Current Opinion from some Economists today…

Holding the bag means holding… what?

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

Meaning in the Workplace

The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

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