"Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence."
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by "loneliness." To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’ “–both from Peter Baerhr’s introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt: pg. XX to XXI….
First of all, I would point out that the former quote makes Orwell’s description of the totalitarian state seem a little dated and unlikely –that is even though it made points we need to pay attention to such as the staged event, especially given the very real control that corporate owned media has on our perception of reality. At the same time, it could very well have served as a distraction (or red herring (in terms of the very real totalitarian potential that was emerging in America under Reagan –that which was anticipated by Arendt’s radical and demonized observations concerning NAZI Germany.
Back in 1983, December, as we were approaching 1984, we jokingly held our breaths and jokingly sighed in relief when it didn’t happen. I was living in L.A. at the time. And we chuckled at Orwell’s prophecy failing to happen. However, at that same time, under the reactionary movement that was emerging under Reagan and Nancy’s “Just Say No” campaign (as well as Joe Biden’s campaign for a drug czar, the partiers were being driven from Glendora Mountain Road and the hookers were being chased off of Sunset Boulevard –both locations of which were major centers of the kind of energy that made California what it was and no longer is. And this, of course, was the result of America finding its self cowering in the economic shadow of Japan. America simply could not stand the idea of being number two and found its self willing to trade its soul, the old American spirit associated with freedom, for the new American spirit associated with economic and military prowess: the tyranny of the functional which defines freedom in terms of our roles as producer/consumers. I return again to the former point:
"Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws
invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence."
Let’s note here how Capitalism, as compared to Orwell’s vision of law as stability, has come closer to Arendt’s vision of a constant state of instability that we can only react to by taking on more debt in order to maintain the standard of living we’re use to. And I mean it: they are every bit as insidious as drug dealers. We experience it personally every day. When I first got on to Rhapsody, I was offered a subscription that allowed me to put streaming songs on my mp3 player: rhapsody to go they called it. Then the mp3 players you could do that with suddenly stopped being manufactured. This was because Rhapsody suddenly decided that the only way you should be able to stream those songs is by paying for a data phone service. In other words, not only am I required to pay Rhapsody their subscription fee, I am now required to pay for the data plan on my phone.
And, quite frankly, I’m waiting for some Republican to offer, as a practical solution to the debt that Capitalism (a debt based economy (forces on us, the solution that the individual submit themselves to slavery to pay it off. In that sense, the one thing the Capitalist form of totalitarianism offers us in common with Orwell’s vision is the staged event: much as corporate owned prisons are doing with black men: create the desperate environment that will drive them to the desperate measure of crime, then incarcerate them (sometimes under the watchful eye and whipping post of COPS (at taxpayer expense while making it seem as if the only reason the taxpayer would have to spend that money is because of the behavior of the black man.
Anyway: more to explore tomorrow.
Postcards:
Re: Postcards:
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by "loneliness." To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’ “–from Peter Baerhr’s introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt: pg. XX to XXI….
Before I go into this, I would apologize for the way I continually harp on Capitalism. I actually get tired of listening to myself on the subject. But as I once saw on an avatar on My Space (?:anyone remember it (there was a black individual standing in front of dilapidated wall with graffiti that said something I will never forget (may have engraved on my gravestone even:
“Every day I wake up on the wrong side of Capitalism.”
Once again, I tire of myself and try to move on to other things. Then: something always comes back to remind me. And I have to confess that when caught up in such rants, I tend to write as if “this is what Capitalism must necessarily lead to” when what I should actually be referring to is the POTENTIAL of Capitalism and the Republican party that guards it so religiously.
That out of the way, we can see here how the constant disruption of stability Arendt describes in:
"Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence."
:can lead to a turn to the stability of ideology. And we can see this potential at work in Capitalism and its need for constant expansion: it’s ever increasing appetite. Under Capitalism, we are kept in a constant state of accelerated change. On top of that, there is always the marketing strategy of creating more and more “special occasions” that obligate us to spend money we may or may not have. Once again: take any calendar and mark off the holidays. Then mark off all the birthdays and weddings and those greeting card days (boss’s day, secretary’s day, etc., etc. (and when you’re done you will recognize that hardly a pay period goes by in which you are dealing with a normal day to day routine. And this is likely because the last thing Capitalism can afford (being primarily driven by debt (is a lot of people establishing routines that might allow them to live within their means.
(This, to me, lies at the heart of Capitalism’s in-Efficiency which is a subject for a longer more finished piece of writing.)
What we might see here (in Arendt’s terms (is a vicious feedback system between accelerated change (chaos (and ideology as expressed by the growing republican movement in America, which faces the very consequence that Arendt describes:
“The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’ “
If you’ve heard it as much as I have, you may recognize that “rupture with reality” in climate change denial or the way that Republicans tend to act as if fossil fuels are somehow an infinite resource or the caveat they offer in having such a faith in the market’s, and its technology, ability to come up with that last minute save.
Either that, or you have that Christian aspect of it brilliantly portrayed in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s cartoon series Little Bush. In it, Bush Sr. explains to Bush Jr.:
“It is our God given right to use up our natural resources. Then Jesus will come and take us up in the Rapture.”
Before I go into this, I would apologize for the way I continually harp on Capitalism. I actually get tired of listening to myself on the subject. But as I once saw on an avatar on My Space (?:anyone remember it (there was a black individual standing in front of dilapidated wall with graffiti that said something I will never forget (may have engraved on my gravestone even:
“Every day I wake up on the wrong side of Capitalism.”
Once again, I tire of myself and try to move on to other things. Then: something always comes back to remind me. And I have to confess that when caught up in such rants, I tend to write as if “this is what Capitalism must necessarily lead to” when what I should actually be referring to is the POTENTIAL of Capitalism and the Republican party that guards it so religiously.
That out of the way, we can see here how the constant disruption of stability Arendt describes in:
"Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence."
:can lead to a turn to the stability of ideology. And we can see this potential at work in Capitalism and its need for constant expansion: it’s ever increasing appetite. Under Capitalism, we are kept in a constant state of accelerated change. On top of that, there is always the marketing strategy of creating more and more “special occasions” that obligate us to spend money we may or may not have. Once again: take any calendar and mark off the holidays. Then mark off all the birthdays and weddings and those greeting card days (boss’s day, secretary’s day, etc., etc. (and when you’re done you will recognize that hardly a pay period goes by in which you are dealing with a normal day to day routine. And this is likely because the last thing Capitalism can afford (being primarily driven by debt (is a lot of people establishing routines that might allow them to live within their means.
(This, to me, lies at the heart of Capitalism’s in-Efficiency which is a subject for a longer more finished piece of writing.)
What we might see here (in Arendt’s terms (is a vicious feedback system between accelerated change (chaos (and ideology as expressed by the growing republican movement in America, which faces the very consequence that Arendt describes:
“The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’ “
If you’ve heard it as much as I have, you may recognize that “rupture with reality” in climate change denial or the way that Republicans tend to act as if fossil fuels are somehow an infinite resource or the caveat they offer in having such a faith in the market’s, and its technology, ability to come up with that last minute save.
Either that, or you have that Christian aspect of it brilliantly portrayed in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s cartoon series Little Bush. In it, Bush Sr. explains to Bush Jr.:
“It is our God given right to use up our natural resources. Then Jesus will come and take us up in the Rapture.”
Re: Postcards:
First and as always, Orbie, your feedback is appreciated –even if I can’t always understand it or respond. That said, I hope my translations are not going totally off point.
“Marcel Duchamp filled an aesthetic role and the new age of philosophers filled the role of philosophy. Aesthetics usually works at a more fundamental level than philosophy, so the question cannot be asked, whether one can fill the shoes of another. That is my only comment on the above, before wandering into the implications you have noted.” –Orbie [or my translation of his response to my post:
“Duchamp had two strategic objectives. First, to destroy the hegemony exerted by an establishment which claimed the right to decide what was, and what was not, to be deemed a work of art. Second, to puncture the pretentious claims of those who called themselves artists and in doing so assumed that they possessed extraordinary skills and unique gifts of discrimination and taste.” –from Alistair McFarlane’s article, Brief Lives: Marcel Duchamp in Philosophy Now (issue 108)
“One has to wonder if philosophy isn’t in need of a Marcel Duchamp. Or did thinkers like Deleuze and Derrida fulfill that role?”
Granted Orbie, aesthetics and the arts are about what happens at a more instinctual level. This is why, for instance, that Deleuze can reasonably make the argument that aesthetics are not just about the appreciation of beauty, but also the way in which consciousness engages and comes to know the reality it is confronted with –hence the doctrine of the faculties he goes into in Difference and Repetition. Therefore, I would argue that the interests of the arts and philosophy are a little more intimately entwined than you seem to be arguing. But then I am mainly working from the post-Nietzscheian perspective that pushed philosophy closer to the literary side of the no-man’s land between science and literature in which it resides. This also why Deleuze, in his A to Z interview, spoke of the import of “engagement” (going to a movie, reading a poem, even watching a TV series (to the philosophical process. It is this kind of loose attitude towards what constitutes proper philosophical inquiry that defines modernism to postmodernism’s (which includes structuralism and post-structuralism (break from the Platonic hierarchy that wanted to ban poets from the Republic. And it is also this appeal (at least I believe (to the aesthetic/instinctive that lies behind the postmodern propensity towards etherspeak: the oblique poetics of free indirect discourse.
“In Nude Descending the Staircase, we get a sense of disintegration. He is not, it seems, describing a changing situation, is not dogmatically disintegrating the meaning of form, as American superficiality seems to. I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. That sense of it feels certain, but as in all relationships, the weighing of alternatives is balanced in Europe, between those of the East, in political as well as economic terms, and the West.”
I would first ask you to consider the influence of futurism on Nude Descending Staircase: the enthusiasm we experienced in the face of advancing technology. And given the effects we experience today of that accelerating technological advance, we might consider the disintegration of Duchamp‘s painting as prophetic: the experience of speed smear. And this returns me to the point made by Peter Baehr in the intro to The Portable Hannah Arendt:
"Under non-despotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence….
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by "loneliness." To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’“
As I have been working towards understanding, the whole Republican platform is just another example of Capitalism creating a demand for its products, of creating a problem (the disintegration described in Nude Descending Staircase (then selling a solution to it: the ideology of Capitalism. It is an ideology that seems to be rolling us over, darkening the American spirit and stealing its soul, and rolling your way, brother…. as you seem to be describing.
And despite the fact that every other advanced nation is more evolved than America in that they can actually talk about Marx without hearing psycho shrieks, that ideology is going to keep rolling us over until it gets everything it wants: a beast with an ever expanding appetite. You say:
“I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. “
I live among its disciples: its true believers: those that don’t have the advantage of seeing Marx as just another philosopher with an alternative to Capitalism. They are a wall at which reason fails and all that is left is force. But there is no force left against Capitalism. It owns everything. The best we can do is blend in and hope that the true believers either change their minds or die off.
And in terms of the question you are asking yourself, I would point out that America has a military might that is equivalent to the rest of the world, one financed and supported by Capitalism. So yeah: you are fucked. We all are. All we can do is articulate on our downfall.
“Marcel Duchamp filled an aesthetic role and the new age of philosophers filled the role of philosophy. Aesthetics usually works at a more fundamental level than philosophy, so the question cannot be asked, whether one can fill the shoes of another. That is my only comment on the above, before wandering into the implications you have noted.” –Orbie [or my translation of his response to my post:
“Duchamp had two strategic objectives. First, to destroy the hegemony exerted by an establishment which claimed the right to decide what was, and what was not, to be deemed a work of art. Second, to puncture the pretentious claims of those who called themselves artists and in doing so assumed that they possessed extraordinary skills and unique gifts of discrimination and taste.” –from Alistair McFarlane’s article, Brief Lives: Marcel Duchamp in Philosophy Now (issue 108)
“One has to wonder if philosophy isn’t in need of a Marcel Duchamp. Or did thinkers like Deleuze and Derrida fulfill that role?”
Granted Orbie, aesthetics and the arts are about what happens at a more instinctual level. This is why, for instance, that Deleuze can reasonably make the argument that aesthetics are not just about the appreciation of beauty, but also the way in which consciousness engages and comes to know the reality it is confronted with –hence the doctrine of the faculties he goes into in Difference and Repetition. Therefore, I would argue that the interests of the arts and philosophy are a little more intimately entwined than you seem to be arguing. But then I am mainly working from the post-Nietzscheian perspective that pushed philosophy closer to the literary side of the no-man’s land between science and literature in which it resides. This also why Deleuze, in his A to Z interview, spoke of the import of “engagement” (going to a movie, reading a poem, even watching a TV series (to the philosophical process. It is this kind of loose attitude towards what constitutes proper philosophical inquiry that defines modernism to postmodernism’s (which includes structuralism and post-structuralism (break from the Platonic hierarchy that wanted to ban poets from the Republic. And it is also this appeal (at least I believe (to the aesthetic/instinctive that lies behind the postmodern propensity towards etherspeak: the oblique poetics of free indirect discourse.
“In Nude Descending the Staircase, we get a sense of disintegration. He is not, it seems, describing a changing situation, is not dogmatically disintegrating the meaning of form, as American superficiality seems to. I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. That sense of it feels certain, but as in all relationships, the weighing of alternatives is balanced in Europe, between those of the East, in political as well as economic terms, and the West.”
I would first ask you to consider the influence of futurism on Nude Descending Staircase: the enthusiasm we experienced in the face of advancing technology. And given the effects we experience today of that accelerating technological advance, we might consider the disintegration of Duchamp‘s painting as prophetic: the experience of speed smear. And this returns me to the point made by Peter Baehr in the intro to The Portable Hannah Arendt:
"Under non-despotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence….
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by "loneliness." To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’“
As I have been working towards understanding, the whole Republican platform is just another example of Capitalism creating a demand for its products, of creating a problem (the disintegration described in Nude Descending Staircase (then selling a solution to it: the ideology of Capitalism. It is an ideology that seems to be rolling us over, darkening the American spirit and stealing its soul, and rolling your way, brother…. as you seem to be describing.
And despite the fact that every other advanced nation is more evolved than America in that they can actually talk about Marx without hearing psycho shrieks, that ideology is going to keep rolling us over until it gets everything it wants: a beast with an ever expanding appetite. You say:
“I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether American capital is oppressive to such a degree to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. “
I live among its disciples: its true believers: those that don’t have the advantage of seeing Marx as just another philosopher with an alternative to Capitalism. They are a wall at which reason fails and all that is left is force. But there is no force left against Capitalism. It owns everything. The best we can do is blend in and hope that the true believers either change their minds or die off.
And in terms of the question you are asking yourself, I would point out that America has a military might that is equivalent to the rest of the world, one financed and supported by Capitalism. So yeah: you are fucked. We all are. All we can do is articulate on our downfall.
Re: Postcards:
“Disagreement is the lifeblood of any intellectual gathering, but at the Heartland conference, this wildly contradictory material sparks absolutely no debate among the [climate change] deniers— no one attempts to defend one position over another, or to sort out who is actually correct. Indeed as the temperature graphs are presented, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off.” -Klein, Naomi (2014-09-16). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (p. 33). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Of course, it would be redundant for me to point out the bad reasoning at work here. I doubt anyone who works on these boards (anyone one with any degree of intellectual integrity (wouldn’t see it as well as me. Still, just in case, I have to articulate for those who are just starting out:
The fact that so many people could sit in a room with so many different often conflicting strategies to man-made climate change denial and not argue about the details tells us that finding an authentic argument is not the issue as much as the validation of their rejection of based on the threat it poses to their personal interest. They don’t care how it is disputed; all that matters is that it is. To contrast it with real intellectual inquiry, as a progressive who believes the only real solution to problems such as Global Capitalism and Global Warming is an expansion of the public economy, I find myself in conflict not only with right-wingers, but hardcore leftists as well who think my piecemeal approaches will not work (even Klein herself (and that of full out communism (something Klein dismisses as a solution to our climate crisis (is our only hope. And if you put me and such people in a room, as compared to the heartland conference, there would likely be conflict –that is since we would be sincerely trying to correct a problem as compared to trying to merely validate what is in our self interest.
That said, I would rather direct this to the arguments against the pragmatic approach by neo-classicists: the erroneous notion that the pragmatic is an “everything goes” proposition. I mean what intellectual process, with any integrity, would prop up the utter nonsense going on in the heartland conference. As I have said before: even a relativistic hippy knows better than to step in front of moving bus. And I think we can safely assume they have enough sense not to step in front of the above or to validate it out of some need to be a beautiful soul.
Pragmatic, Neo Classicist, Continental, absolutist, relativistic, we all know it is wrong. And we do not need any universal criteria, scientific method, or absolute truth to know that. IT IS JUST WRONG!!! And it becomes imperative that we pay more attention to what we agree on when Klein points out how effective these brownshirt methods are becoming:
“The years leading up to the gathering had seen a precipitous collapse of media coverage of climate change, despite a rise in extreme weather: in 2007, the three major U.S. networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— ran 147 stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the subject. That too is the denier strategy at work, because the goal was never just to spread doubt but also to spread fear— to send a clear message that saying anything at all about climate change was a surefire way to find your inbox and comment threads jammed with a toxic strain of vitriol.” –Ibid
And while we debate among ourselves who has the right approach, the most intellectual prowess, or the biggest claim to the truth, the liars are winning. In fact, right now (as Klein describes later in the book (if it weren’t for the non-intellectual people who are offering real resistance to the oil and gas corporations (people who act out of love of their land as compared to theory (there would be no respectable resistance –just us sitting around theorizing.
And by the pragmatic criteria: that simply does not work for anyone.
Of course, it would be redundant for me to point out the bad reasoning at work here. I doubt anyone who works on these boards (anyone one with any degree of intellectual integrity (wouldn’t see it as well as me. Still, just in case, I have to articulate for those who are just starting out:
The fact that so many people could sit in a room with so many different often conflicting strategies to man-made climate change denial and not argue about the details tells us that finding an authentic argument is not the issue as much as the validation of their rejection of based on the threat it poses to their personal interest. They don’t care how it is disputed; all that matters is that it is. To contrast it with real intellectual inquiry, as a progressive who believes the only real solution to problems such as Global Capitalism and Global Warming is an expansion of the public economy, I find myself in conflict not only with right-wingers, but hardcore leftists as well who think my piecemeal approaches will not work (even Klein herself (and that of full out communism (something Klein dismisses as a solution to our climate crisis (is our only hope. And if you put me and such people in a room, as compared to the heartland conference, there would likely be conflict –that is since we would be sincerely trying to correct a problem as compared to trying to merely validate what is in our self interest.
That said, I would rather direct this to the arguments against the pragmatic approach by neo-classicists: the erroneous notion that the pragmatic is an “everything goes” proposition. I mean what intellectual process, with any integrity, would prop up the utter nonsense going on in the heartland conference. As I have said before: even a relativistic hippy knows better than to step in front of moving bus. And I think we can safely assume they have enough sense not to step in front of the above or to validate it out of some need to be a beautiful soul.
Pragmatic, Neo Classicist, Continental, absolutist, relativistic, we all know it is wrong. And we do not need any universal criteria, scientific method, or absolute truth to know that. IT IS JUST WRONG!!! And it becomes imperative that we pay more attention to what we agree on when Klein points out how effective these brownshirt methods are becoming:
“The years leading up to the gathering had seen a precipitous collapse of media coverage of climate change, despite a rise in extreme weather: in 2007, the three major U.S. networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— ran 147 stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the subject. That too is the denier strategy at work, because the goal was never just to spread doubt but also to spread fear— to send a clear message that saying anything at all about climate change was a surefire way to find your inbox and comment threads jammed with a toxic strain of vitriol.” –Ibid
And while we debate among ourselves who has the right approach, the most intellectual prowess, or the biggest claim to the truth, the liars are winning. In fact, right now (as Klein describes later in the book (if it weren’t for the non-intellectual people who are offering real resistance to the oil and gas corporations (people who act out of love of their land as compared to theory (there would be no respectable resistance –just us sitting around theorizing.
And by the pragmatic criteria: that simply does not work for anyone.
Re: Postcards:
There may have been a time when the republicans served as the practical voice of reason in the face of the excesses of the left (Eisenhower’s industrial/military complex, Nixon’s Keynesian economics, and the very fact that at one time agreements were actually worked toward as compared to the obstructionist tactics of today’s republicans (but now we have a platform that works to appeal to every base impulse that America could possibly have. And there are many. And this may well be why we right now have 17 or 18 candidates running in the republican primary with Trump at the lead with a paltry 17%. And I can’t help but feel that the a-rational foundation of their policies (due to the self serving agenda behind it (is finally catching up with them. It is as if the incoherence of the arguments they have to resort to (since they cannot simply argue (that is in a debate about what is best for everyone (that they are arguing a given policy simply because it is what is best for them (has forced them into the desperate position having to choose between a multitude of cheap tactics that they know, deep inside (down in that self serving base of their brain, does not work anymore. It feels like the same indecision an addict goes through right before they find themselves admitting that they are sick.
*
I mean, for all their talk about patriotism, the greatness of America has got to consist of something more than a willingness to drop to our knees and kiss the ass of every rich man that comes along.
*
“The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous— a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.” –once again: Klein’s book
Back when I first started out on the boards (Yahoo’s which has basically been reduced to a wasteland –as far as I know (I, in my Marxist hubris, made a few comments about Bush (it was 2004 during the Bush/Kerry campaign (and found myself confronted with a rather obnoxious Libertarian and his gang of disciple goons. Of course, no matter what I had to say, it was wrong. I was always made aware of that. Of course, when I brought that up, it was always the hands in the air and “Hey, I’m just here for a rational debate.”
And there was no way I could win. No matter what I pointed out, this guy (Fletch (was always there with 10 pieces of data that somehow proved me wrong. And he had pretty much admitted that he was a trained economist which meant that while I was trying to compete with him in the time left between working a full time job and studying for my third grade engineers license, he was sitting around and collecting this data full time. I argued that I was certain that for every piece of data he presented, there were plenty of other economists out there presenting data that did not support his world view. But that, of course, did not matter to him and his goons since, in violation of the common doxa of debate, I could not present it.
And not to brag, but the 2008 economic meltdown validated a lot of the arguments I made. But more important here is what Thom Hartman pointed out about Fletch: that at the time, conservative/corporate think tanks were actually hiring and financing ideological hit-men like Fletch to bring down ideological dissidents like me. He was basically a bankrolled troll.
I mean I should be flattered. But it demonstrates the insidious levels the corporate aristocracy will stoop to for the sake of its interests, to maintain its hold on our superstructure: our culture
*
I mean, for all their talk about patriotism, the greatness of America has got to consist of something more than a willingness to drop to our knees and kiss the ass of every rich man that comes along.
*
“The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous— a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.” –once again: Klein’s book
Back when I first started out on the boards (Yahoo’s which has basically been reduced to a wasteland –as far as I know (I, in my Marxist hubris, made a few comments about Bush (it was 2004 during the Bush/Kerry campaign (and found myself confronted with a rather obnoxious Libertarian and his gang of disciple goons. Of course, no matter what I had to say, it was wrong. I was always made aware of that. Of course, when I brought that up, it was always the hands in the air and “Hey, I’m just here for a rational debate.”
And there was no way I could win. No matter what I pointed out, this guy (Fletch (was always there with 10 pieces of data that somehow proved me wrong. And he had pretty much admitted that he was a trained economist which meant that while I was trying to compete with him in the time left between working a full time job and studying for my third grade engineers license, he was sitting around and collecting this data full time. I argued that I was certain that for every piece of data he presented, there were plenty of other economists out there presenting data that did not support his world view. But that, of course, did not matter to him and his goons since, in violation of the common doxa of debate, I could not present it.
And not to brag, but the 2008 economic meltdown validated a lot of the arguments I made. But more important here is what Thom Hartman pointed out about Fletch: that at the time, conservative/corporate think tanks were actually hiring and financing ideological hit-men like Fletch to bring down ideological dissidents like me. He was basically a bankrolled troll.
I mean I should be flattered. But it demonstrates the insidious levels the corporate aristocracy will stoop to for the sake of its interests, to maintain its hold on our superstructure: our culture
Re: Postcards:
“ Desiree, I feel your pain. I myself am philosophically and policy-wise, more aligned with Bernie Sanders and the Social Democrats. Unfortunately, until we change the way we vote so that we could, for instance, vote for an independent and not throw the election to the platform we despise (in my case the republican (progressives have to see the Democrats as the lesser of 2 evils. And with deep regret, I see Hillary as our our best option. And as far as Obamacare: we voted the man in because we thought he was the one that would stand up against producer/consumer Capitalism. But for all the republican shrieks concerning socialism, Obamacare fell far short of giving us what we thought he would. It was basically a fold to corporate interests. Still, the man did what he could with what he had. He, at least, did something.” –Me
“"Best option" is being misused.
Most viable option under the context of a badly flawed representative democracy model and a two party system whuch further perverts it, might be more accurate.
Still a bad reason to prop up such a flawed model instead of pointing out that it is a farce.” –Phil Cumiskey
First of all, nobody here is propping up a flawed model. Everyone knows it is flawed. And you might note here how I pointed out how we need to change the way we vote: i.e. we need some kind of runoff system.
Secondly, and more importantly, I don’t think resorting to the same kind of solipsistic paranoid conspiracy models that the right does is really helping our situation: these notions of ambitious politicians sitting around and twiddling their fingers and croaking to themselves:
“First I’m going to tell everyone what they want to hear; then, when I get in, I’m going to do what I please even if means fucking them over. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey-y-y-!-!-!”
Our present model of Democracy may be flawed. But your model is equally flawed: a rather superficial understanding of what is actually going on, a cartoon portrait of diabolical figures seeking power for power’s sake. In other words: fancy with a complete lack of imagination as Coleridge would diagnose it.
We’re pissed. I get that. But we can’t let that pervert our understanding of why it is fucked. At some point we have to consider the possibility that politicians and corporate CEOs (as well as lawyers (are people just like us who went into what they did because they thought they could help, but found themselves succumbing to systematic imperatives. Once again, I was not a big fan of Obamacare as compared to the public option I wanted. But the man was working with a senate that was neither filibuster-proof nor immune to the influence of corporate financing. Still, he did something. And there is nothing I have seen in him that leads me to doubt his desire to help.
And as Naomi Klein pointed out in her book about climate change, there have been instances in which good policy has been laid on the table and failed due to a lack of public pressure. So maybe the problem doesn’t just lie with politicians and corporate CEOs, but also with our social and political laziness: this notion that we can just vote our problems away.
Yes, our system is flawed. But a couple of hours with FOX news will tell you how much fashionable cynicism can prop up a flawed system.
“We have become a tip society: one in which the rich escapes responsibility by leaving it up to the individual to decide what dying enterprise they want to keep alive (via donations (w/ barely enough resources for themselves. It has turned us into a country of Beggars and thugs.”
A good example of this is a radio show, Philosophy Talk, that I have grown fond of while watching it slip, increasingly, into doom. At the start, it was all free. Then Stanford University decided (probably because of decreasing state funding along with increasing corporate funding (to cut it. But then it made the compromise of offering to match every private donation with equal funding. This ignited a flurry of begging on the part of the program for donations. Now, all of a sudden, apparently even that funding from Stanford is being cut which has resulted in an increase of begging on the part of the program which pretty much means (given that most of the people into it are of limited resources (it’s doomed.
The interesting thing to note here is that the hosts are both analytic philosophers. And I can’t help but feel that the rise of the analytic method has something to do with the increasing influence of corporate funding in the universities. In other words, despite the analytic assumption that they would somehow be immune to the influence of corporate funding (being more like a science and all (they’re going down with everything else that is of no interest to corporate interests: that which doesn’t serve the tyranny of the functional.
“"Best option" is being misused.
Most viable option under the context of a badly flawed representative democracy model and a two party system whuch further perverts it, might be more accurate.
Still a bad reason to prop up such a flawed model instead of pointing out that it is a farce.” –Phil Cumiskey
First of all, nobody here is propping up a flawed model. Everyone knows it is flawed. And you might note here how I pointed out how we need to change the way we vote: i.e. we need some kind of runoff system.
Secondly, and more importantly, I don’t think resorting to the same kind of solipsistic paranoid conspiracy models that the right does is really helping our situation: these notions of ambitious politicians sitting around and twiddling their fingers and croaking to themselves:
“First I’m going to tell everyone what they want to hear; then, when I get in, I’m going to do what I please even if means fucking them over. Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey-y-y-!-!-!”
Our present model of Democracy may be flawed. But your model is equally flawed: a rather superficial understanding of what is actually going on, a cartoon portrait of diabolical figures seeking power for power’s sake. In other words: fancy with a complete lack of imagination as Coleridge would diagnose it.
We’re pissed. I get that. But we can’t let that pervert our understanding of why it is fucked. At some point we have to consider the possibility that politicians and corporate CEOs (as well as lawyers (are people just like us who went into what they did because they thought they could help, but found themselves succumbing to systematic imperatives. Once again, I was not a big fan of Obamacare as compared to the public option I wanted. But the man was working with a senate that was neither filibuster-proof nor immune to the influence of corporate financing. Still, he did something. And there is nothing I have seen in him that leads me to doubt his desire to help.
And as Naomi Klein pointed out in her book about climate change, there have been instances in which good policy has been laid on the table and failed due to a lack of public pressure. So maybe the problem doesn’t just lie with politicians and corporate CEOs, but also with our social and political laziness: this notion that we can just vote our problems away.
Yes, our system is flawed. But a couple of hours with FOX news will tell you how much fashionable cynicism can prop up a flawed system.
“We have become a tip society: one in which the rich escapes responsibility by leaving it up to the individual to decide what dying enterprise they want to keep alive (via donations (w/ barely enough resources for themselves. It has turned us into a country of Beggars and thugs.”
A good example of this is a radio show, Philosophy Talk, that I have grown fond of while watching it slip, increasingly, into doom. At the start, it was all free. Then Stanford University decided (probably because of decreasing state funding along with increasing corporate funding (to cut it. But then it made the compromise of offering to match every private donation with equal funding. This ignited a flurry of begging on the part of the program for donations. Now, all of a sudden, apparently even that funding from Stanford is being cut which has resulted in an increase of begging on the part of the program which pretty much means (given that most of the people into it are of limited resources (it’s doomed.
The interesting thing to note here is that the hosts are both analytic philosophers. And I can’t help but feel that the rise of the analytic method has something to do with the increasing influence of corporate funding in the universities. In other words, despite the analytic assumption that they would somehow be immune to the influence of corporate funding (being more like a science and all (they’re going down with everything else that is of no interest to corporate interests: that which doesn’t serve the tyranny of the functional.
Re: Postcards:
First of all, Orbie, I apologize for taking so long getting back to you on this. But my process tends to go from rhizome to rhizome and it doesn't always take me where I would like to go. Plus that, I'm on vacation right now which involves me "vacating" my life as a whole (including my studies (so while I have been engaging in the standard drive-by style of expressing ourselves on boards, I haven't been in full post mode. The uptick though, is the flow of things has landed me in a position where I can at least make an initial move in our discourse concerning the Mirror Phase.
I would first point out that while I cannot offer you an intimate understanding of how Lacan perceived it, I can offer a layman's understanding that can act as a steppingstone to a more subtle Lacanian understanding. It's one a I got from the Bolinda beginner's guide. And it's really very simple while offering some profound implications:
A child (being a brain in its most elemental state (starts off as a complex of pre-linguistic impulses -some of which conflict. Now you have to look at the following as literary or metaphorical since not every child necessarily or literally goes through this. But you have to imagine such a being looking in a mirror for the first time. Then you have to imagine that being, for the first time, actually seeing itself as a coherent whole and how profound that experience would be.
Then you have to imagine that individual spending the rest of their lives always trying to get back to that fundamental experience. This is why, for instance, roles are so important to us. But to give you a more immediate example: it is why you and I do what we do here. We work to define ourselves as intellectuals in order to give order to the complex interaction of basic impulses that we are.
Hope I have been some help here.
I would first point out that while I cannot offer you an intimate understanding of how Lacan perceived it, I can offer a layman's understanding that can act as a steppingstone to a more subtle Lacanian understanding. It's one a I got from the Bolinda beginner's guide. And it's really very simple while offering some profound implications:
A child (being a brain in its most elemental state (starts off as a complex of pre-linguistic impulses -some of which conflict. Now you have to look at the following as literary or metaphorical since not every child necessarily or literally goes through this. But you have to imagine such a being looking in a mirror for the first time. Then you have to imagine that being, for the first time, actually seeing itself as a coherent whole and how profound that experience would be.
Then you have to imagine that individual spending the rest of their lives always trying to get back to that fundamental experience. This is why, for instance, roles are so important to us. But to give you a more immediate example: it is why you and I do what we do here. We work to define ourselves as intellectuals in order to give order to the complex interaction of basic impulses that we are.
Hope I have been some help here.
Re: Postcards:
First know that I am kind of easing back into my process (that is after a week’s vacation and a stomach ailment I’m getting over (and my thoughts right now are varied and vague. It’s like I have several lines of thought converging (some of which are responses to articles I’ve read in the recent Philosophy Now (and that are not forming into a coherent harmonious whole. So if I seem to be meandering or completely incoherent…. well!
“A famous example of leaping too quickly from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’– or in other words, deriving an ethical system too quickly from a scientific discovery – is eugenics. Many Victorian-era scientists and philosophers were so enthusiastic about the thrilling new scientific theory of natural selection that they thought it could be applied to everything. So just as it’s a fact that based on the ability to thrive in its environment, nature selects for or against individual organisms, these thinkers thought that human beings should also act as arbiters of fitness. Thus from the late Nineteenth Century to the middle of the Twentieth, many scientists thought that the human species should be ‘perfected’ through the judicious selection of traits to pass on to future generations. In other words, they thought they should select against those individuals possessed of supposedly ‘undesirable’ qualities – ‘selection’ in this case meaning sterilizing or killing.” –from Amy Cool’s article, Science & Philosophy: A Beautiful Friendship (issue 109)
Now given the title, it is obvious that the main point of the article is a defense of philosophy in the face of science’s smug dismissal of it. As Marc Champagne points out in his article Analytic Philosophy, Continental Literature?:
“American philosopher Brian Leiter, for instance, writes on his popular blog that he is “genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments.”
And I would assume the scientific community (by which I mean those members who dismiss philosophy (holds the same sentiment.
And I cannot help but feel that the two oppositions to the continental/literary approach to philosophy are connected in their submission to producer/consumer Capitalism (via corporate financing of universities (or what Deleuze and Guattarri referred to as state philosophies. Both dismissals stink of Capitalist values not only in their willingness to bend to the tyranny of the functional (I mean what does the analytic approach amount to but philosophy’s guilt at its inability to create an i-pod (and their enthusiasm about turning understanding into some kind of hierarchy, but the kind of in-crowd mentality, Capitalism’s tendency to turn everything into a players game that, at an anything but objective level, underwrites the smug dismissal of anything that opposes the privilege it gives it itself through a circular argument brought up by Champagne:
“Analytic philosophers have often been reproached for the remoteness of their technical craft, but somewhere along the way they have figured out that if they band together tightly enough, their way of perceiving philosophy can be impermeable to such external criticisms. Philosophers are suspicious of circularity in arguments (we consider it a fallacy, in fact), but we should be suspicious of institutional circularity too. Thus, without checks and balances from the outside (or a dose of open-minded humility on their own behalf), for philosophers fixated on displaying appropriate markers, their self-serving idea of professionalism can easily create “a self-perpetuating clique, like freemasons” (Jonathan Rée, Radical Philosophy #1, 1972).”
A point he had reinforced via Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“It is always other professionals who decide who counts as a professional. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn stressed the role that such clubbishness plays in ensuring the cohesion of disciplines (in his study it was scientific disciplines, but the point may be applied generally). Through his distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, Kuhn showed that there are long interludes when communities of scientists are committed to not questioning their shared core assumptions.
The analytic philosophers at Kuhn’s university largely dismissed him as a philosophical lightweight: when he applied for tenure, they relegated him to a history department. I nevertheless think Kuhn’s ideas have had a lasting impact on how the analytic tradition sees itself. Indeed, in a Kuhnian manner, between short-lived episodes of turmoil, are lengthy periods where the philosophical status quo reigns supreme and rival proposals are debarred outright. And further, in the hands of analytic philosophers, who see their central goal as the piecemeal clarification of linguistic confusions, Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm of shared core assumptions can vindicate their assertion of the special value of their goal and its method.”
He further points out:
“Yet as Hans-Johann Glock writes in his book What is Analytic Philosophy? (2008), “just as theists should not be allowed to define God into existence, analytical philosophers should not be allowed to define themselves into excellence.”
Once again: STATE PHILOSOPHY: that which does not so much help the condition of humankind as act as expression of the power and glory of the status quo. (And I would refer here to Robert Michael Ruehl’s In Defense of Alain Badiou, a response to James Alexander’s neo-classicist dismissal Badiou in ‘A Refutation of Snails by Roast Beef’.) And to get to what a total failure of intellectual inquiry such smug dismissals are, I would quote a random thought I had:
“America is engaging in a fascist experiment: we are creating a situation in which people should fail (think ghettos: the concentration camps (and jailing them when they do. We do the same with the 45,000 people a year who die from lack of access to healthcare. Of course, we white males should not concern ourselves with this since it won't happen to us or anyone close to us. Still: it could be us.”
Such smug dismissals of any contribution to the discourse can only prop this up –support it. For instance: how do you pose the subjective, but very real, experiences of the poor against the hard hard data of the scientific?
*
Now I want to return to an earlier point by Cool and do a reversal based on the Social Darwinism at work here:
“A famous example of leaping too quickly from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’– or in other words, deriving an ethical system too quickly from a scientific discovery – is eugenics. Many Victorian-era scientists and philosophers were so enthusiastic about the thrilling new scientific theory of natural selection that they thought it could be applied to everything. So just as it’s a fact that based on the ability to thrive in its environment, nature selects for or against individual organisms, these thinkers thought that human beings should also act as arbiters of fitness. Thus from the late Nineteenth Century to the middle of the Twentieth, many scientists thought that the human species should be ‘perfected’ through the judicious selection of traits to pass on to future generations. In other words, they thought they should select against those individuals possessed of supposedly ‘undesirable’ qualities – ‘selection’ in this case meaning sterilizing or killing.” –from Amy Cool’s article, Science & Philosophy: A Beautiful Friendship (issue 109)
Now let’s start with the recognition that we do not need the scientific method to recognize that eugenics is just wrong. And then let us recognize that those who embraced eugenics, and the underlying Social Darwinism, are those who do so for perfectly unscientific reasons: they are people in positions of privilege who were mainly concerned with protecting their position. And we pretty much see the same dynamic at work today. And that includes the analytics and scientists who are basking in the glory of Capitalism. I mean I would assume that scientists are making more than most philosophers since they can produce an i-pod.
But let’s look at what evolution is actually about: the survival of a species –despite the fact that tends to work primarily on individuals. It seems to me that the members of our species that are least useful to our species are the rich. They don’t produce anything. They just put up the money. They don’t even consume in any meaningful way. They invest. But all the investment in the world means squat without someone to buy the product. In evolutionary terms, the rich (and their elite house slaves (are superfluous and a redundancy.
In other words, in evolutionary/social darwinistic terms, they are a genetic dead end that really doesn’t need to exist. Take on top of that they are the main reason we are racing towards self destruction through man-made climate change and they become little more than fat that must be trimmed from society in order for it to function properly and even survive.
It’s not the Mexicans or minorities or welfare queens who are the intruders. The rich, by the very terms of social Darwinism, are the problem. And Donald Trump, and those who support him, are the fallback of that genetic makeup.
“A famous example of leaping too quickly from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’– or in other words, deriving an ethical system too quickly from a scientific discovery – is eugenics. Many Victorian-era scientists and philosophers were so enthusiastic about the thrilling new scientific theory of natural selection that they thought it could be applied to everything. So just as it’s a fact that based on the ability to thrive in its environment, nature selects for or against individual organisms, these thinkers thought that human beings should also act as arbiters of fitness. Thus from the late Nineteenth Century to the middle of the Twentieth, many scientists thought that the human species should be ‘perfected’ through the judicious selection of traits to pass on to future generations. In other words, they thought they should select against those individuals possessed of supposedly ‘undesirable’ qualities – ‘selection’ in this case meaning sterilizing or killing.” –from Amy Cool’s article, Science & Philosophy: A Beautiful Friendship (issue 109)
Now given the title, it is obvious that the main point of the article is a defense of philosophy in the face of science’s smug dismissal of it. As Marc Champagne points out in his article Analytic Philosophy, Continental Literature?:
“American philosopher Brian Leiter, for instance, writes on his popular blog that he is “genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments.”
And I would assume the scientific community (by which I mean those members who dismiss philosophy (holds the same sentiment.
And I cannot help but feel that the two oppositions to the continental/literary approach to philosophy are connected in their submission to producer/consumer Capitalism (via corporate financing of universities (or what Deleuze and Guattarri referred to as state philosophies. Both dismissals stink of Capitalist values not only in their willingness to bend to the tyranny of the functional (I mean what does the analytic approach amount to but philosophy’s guilt at its inability to create an i-pod (and their enthusiasm about turning understanding into some kind of hierarchy, but the kind of in-crowd mentality, Capitalism’s tendency to turn everything into a players game that, at an anything but objective level, underwrites the smug dismissal of anything that opposes the privilege it gives it itself through a circular argument brought up by Champagne:
“Analytic philosophers have often been reproached for the remoteness of their technical craft, but somewhere along the way they have figured out that if they band together tightly enough, their way of perceiving philosophy can be impermeable to such external criticisms. Philosophers are suspicious of circularity in arguments (we consider it a fallacy, in fact), but we should be suspicious of institutional circularity too. Thus, without checks and balances from the outside (or a dose of open-minded humility on their own behalf), for philosophers fixated on displaying appropriate markers, their self-serving idea of professionalism can easily create “a self-perpetuating clique, like freemasons” (Jonathan Rée, Radical Philosophy #1, 1972).”
A point he had reinforced via Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“It is always other professionals who decide who counts as a professional. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn stressed the role that such clubbishness plays in ensuring the cohesion of disciplines (in his study it was scientific disciplines, but the point may be applied generally). Through his distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, Kuhn showed that there are long interludes when communities of scientists are committed to not questioning their shared core assumptions.
The analytic philosophers at Kuhn’s university largely dismissed him as a philosophical lightweight: when he applied for tenure, they relegated him to a history department. I nevertheless think Kuhn’s ideas have had a lasting impact on how the analytic tradition sees itself. Indeed, in a Kuhnian manner, between short-lived episodes of turmoil, are lengthy periods where the philosophical status quo reigns supreme and rival proposals are debarred outright. And further, in the hands of analytic philosophers, who see their central goal as the piecemeal clarification of linguistic confusions, Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm of shared core assumptions can vindicate their assertion of the special value of their goal and its method.”
He further points out:
“Yet as Hans-Johann Glock writes in his book What is Analytic Philosophy? (2008), “just as theists should not be allowed to define God into existence, analytical philosophers should not be allowed to define themselves into excellence.”
Once again: STATE PHILOSOPHY: that which does not so much help the condition of humankind as act as expression of the power and glory of the status quo. (And I would refer here to Robert Michael Ruehl’s In Defense of Alain Badiou, a response to James Alexander’s neo-classicist dismissal Badiou in ‘A Refutation of Snails by Roast Beef’.) And to get to what a total failure of intellectual inquiry such smug dismissals are, I would quote a random thought I had:
“America is engaging in a fascist experiment: we are creating a situation in which people should fail (think ghettos: the concentration camps (and jailing them when they do. We do the same with the 45,000 people a year who die from lack of access to healthcare. Of course, we white males should not concern ourselves with this since it won't happen to us or anyone close to us. Still: it could be us.”
Such smug dismissals of any contribution to the discourse can only prop this up –support it. For instance: how do you pose the subjective, but very real, experiences of the poor against the hard hard data of the scientific?
*
Now I want to return to an earlier point by Cool and do a reversal based on the Social Darwinism at work here:
“A famous example of leaping too quickly from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’– or in other words, deriving an ethical system too quickly from a scientific discovery – is eugenics. Many Victorian-era scientists and philosophers were so enthusiastic about the thrilling new scientific theory of natural selection that they thought it could be applied to everything. So just as it’s a fact that based on the ability to thrive in its environment, nature selects for or against individual organisms, these thinkers thought that human beings should also act as arbiters of fitness. Thus from the late Nineteenth Century to the middle of the Twentieth, many scientists thought that the human species should be ‘perfected’ through the judicious selection of traits to pass on to future generations. In other words, they thought they should select against those individuals possessed of supposedly ‘undesirable’ qualities – ‘selection’ in this case meaning sterilizing or killing.” –from Amy Cool’s article, Science & Philosophy: A Beautiful Friendship (issue 109)
Now let’s start with the recognition that we do not need the scientific method to recognize that eugenics is just wrong. And then let us recognize that those who embraced eugenics, and the underlying Social Darwinism, are those who do so for perfectly unscientific reasons: they are people in positions of privilege who were mainly concerned with protecting their position. And we pretty much see the same dynamic at work today. And that includes the analytics and scientists who are basking in the glory of Capitalism. I mean I would assume that scientists are making more than most philosophers since they can produce an i-pod.
But let’s look at what evolution is actually about: the survival of a species –despite the fact that tends to work primarily on individuals. It seems to me that the members of our species that are least useful to our species are the rich. They don’t produce anything. They just put up the money. They don’t even consume in any meaningful way. They invest. But all the investment in the world means squat without someone to buy the product. In evolutionary terms, the rich (and their elite house slaves (are superfluous and a redundancy.
In other words, in evolutionary/social darwinistic terms, they are a genetic dead end that really doesn’t need to exist. Take on top of that they are the main reason we are racing towards self destruction through man-made climate change and they become little more than fat that must be trimmed from society in order for it to function properly and even survive.
It’s not the Mexicans or minorities or welfare queens who are the intruders. The rich, by the very terms of social Darwinism, are the problem. And Donald Trump, and those who support him, are the fallback of that genetic makeup.
Re: Postcards:
“I see how you want to build a rhizome, and it´s not dialectical but dialogical, as probably is Deleuze thinking.” –Cid Martinez
I actually agree with you Mario and stand corrected. HOWEVER (you knew that was coming didn’t you? (I would put on the table the possibility that the dialogical, at least, is an expression of the dialectical –that is if the reverse is not true and the dialectic is, in fact, an expression of the dialogical. I mean what is the dialectical but a dialogue between various factors until some kind of agreement (a synthesis (is reached? Or maybe I’m overly influenced by the philosophy 101 interpretation of Hegel. Or maybe some deep anarchist aspect of my makeup just wants to confuse the issue. Or maybe (even hopefully (I’m just putting out another detail that MAY need to be considered in order to explore the issues at hand. As it stands, it is up for debate.
At the same time, what you may be pointing out is Deleuze’s dialogical departure from the more rigid dialectic that dominated philosophy up to his time. Or maybe the terms have been confused. Maybe even because both involve a synthesis of some kind. Just something to explore.
“The most difficult thing is to understand vacuity as an active and productive machine and as the condition of possibility of any difference and any desire, reaching that way a positive nihilism.”
What I mainly work from is a point made by Sartre in Being and Nothingness: that a pure nothingness would nihilate itself. Into something, perhaps? And this, to some extent, answers a question I have asked elsewhere on these boards (that is based on Henri Bergson’s explanation centered around the elan vitale:
What is it about existence that had to gravitate towards the complexity that resulted in human consciousness? To me, this lends some credibility to the anthropic assertion that everything seems to be designed mainly for the purpose of being perceived: that which could understandably be followed by desire. And it may well be that this aspect of existence that Eastern traditions are exploring. Even the German’s, with the heavy crunch of their language, are seeing it. As my German brother Harald argues:
“Knowledge of Indian philosophy is a good background for any philosophical process and is deeply seated in the history of western philosophy as well as the state of philosophy today. It's partly why Deleuze is so drawn to Nietzsche.”
In Nietzsche, we see that kind of Zen nihilism at work in his willingness to let go of his ego (that produced by social doxa (and just see what results: he taps into the underlying nothingness in order to better see what is. This, I believe, is why he embraced the aphorism like he did: rhizome to rhizome.
Still, we have to deal with Keyvan's perfectly valid point:
“Nihilism is also about the lack of meaning, there is no lack in the "nothingness" of Zen!”
I have gotten into conflicts with Buddhists before about this. Even had to abandon one over it. And I assume that the main issue the Buddhists are taking with my insertion of the nihilistic perspective into it centers around their concept of mindfulness. Fair enough. But I can’t help but feel that their sense of mindfulness consists of an awareness (the contrast between (of the underlying nothingness: that which allows an individual to see things as they are (much as one does in the meditative practice of contemplation where one simply looks at a thing while driving out all thoughts about it (without the overcoding of one’s existential baggage. I'm thinking the poetry of Gary Snyder here.
I actually agree with you Mario and stand corrected. HOWEVER (you knew that was coming didn’t you? (I would put on the table the possibility that the dialogical, at least, is an expression of the dialectical –that is if the reverse is not true and the dialectic is, in fact, an expression of the dialogical. I mean what is the dialectical but a dialogue between various factors until some kind of agreement (a synthesis (is reached? Or maybe I’m overly influenced by the philosophy 101 interpretation of Hegel. Or maybe some deep anarchist aspect of my makeup just wants to confuse the issue. Or maybe (even hopefully (I’m just putting out another detail that MAY need to be considered in order to explore the issues at hand. As it stands, it is up for debate.
At the same time, what you may be pointing out is Deleuze’s dialogical departure from the more rigid dialectic that dominated philosophy up to his time. Or maybe the terms have been confused. Maybe even because both involve a synthesis of some kind. Just something to explore.
“The most difficult thing is to understand vacuity as an active and productive machine and as the condition of possibility of any difference and any desire, reaching that way a positive nihilism.”
What I mainly work from is a point made by Sartre in Being and Nothingness: that a pure nothingness would nihilate itself. Into something, perhaps? And this, to some extent, answers a question I have asked elsewhere on these boards (that is based on Henri Bergson’s explanation centered around the elan vitale:
What is it about existence that had to gravitate towards the complexity that resulted in human consciousness? To me, this lends some credibility to the anthropic assertion that everything seems to be designed mainly for the purpose of being perceived: that which could understandably be followed by desire. And it may well be that this aspect of existence that Eastern traditions are exploring. Even the German’s, with the heavy crunch of their language, are seeing it. As my German brother Harald argues:
“Knowledge of Indian philosophy is a good background for any philosophical process and is deeply seated in the history of western philosophy as well as the state of philosophy today. It's partly why Deleuze is so drawn to Nietzsche.”
In Nietzsche, we see that kind of Zen nihilism at work in his willingness to let go of his ego (that produced by social doxa (and just see what results: he taps into the underlying nothingness in order to better see what is. This, I believe, is why he embraced the aphorism like he did: rhizome to rhizome.
Still, we have to deal with Keyvan's perfectly valid point:
“Nihilism is also about the lack of meaning, there is no lack in the "nothingness" of Zen!”
I have gotten into conflicts with Buddhists before about this. Even had to abandon one over it. And I assume that the main issue the Buddhists are taking with my insertion of the nihilistic perspective into it centers around their concept of mindfulness. Fair enough. But I can’t help but feel that their sense of mindfulness consists of an awareness (the contrast between (of the underlying nothingness: that which allows an individual to see things as they are (much as one does in the meditative practice of contemplation where one simply looks at a thing while driving out all thoughts about it (without the overcoding of one’s existential baggage. I'm thinking the poetry of Gary Snyder here.
Re: Postcards:
“It's the existential trap of individualism and libertarianism.... and ultimately a complete failure to grasp or engage with the real person who was Nietzsche.... or the realities of his life.” -Andy
Yes, what people fail to consider is that Nietzsche was a generally sickly man that would have died a virgin had it not been for the alleged hooker that gave him the alleged syphilis that allegedly drove him mad, a man that totally fell in love with Salome only to watch her drape herself in the arms of other men, men he likely felt were nowhere near his greatness.
In other words, we are talking about the perfect M.O. for a propensity towards fancy. This is not to say that Nietzsche completely lacked imagination. But we still have to give some consideration to the role that fancy was playing in his philosophy. Harald makes the point:
“In Spinoza, as in Indian yoga, fancy is an inferior mode of thinking. To think as "real" as "true" as possible is one of the main means of becoming more effective.”
What I am mainly working from is a point made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as concerns poetry and the distinction between fancy and imagination. And the following is my particular twist on it. Fancy is that natural thing we tend to do when we’re just letting our mind wonder. A sexual fantasy, for instance, is one of the most extreme versions of this. It’s just something we naturally do when we’re horny. Imagination is a matter of moving beyond that and playing fancy against the harsh realities of life (the fact, for instance, that we're not getting any (and hammering our fancies into something a little less personal and more communal. And I would note here something Coleridge argued: that it is alright to build castles in the sky; the idea is to build foundations under them.
As I understand it, we have to look at the relationship between fancy and imagination as a spectrum and process that works from those spontaneous workings of the mind to a better grasp of the human condition and predicament. And not only does this have literary and creative implications, but philosophical and social applications as well. You say, for instance:
“They buy into the fantasy of the mind, the intellectual elites trapped in the Neitzscian/Randian(I think Ayn Rand actually has had more influence on us in the last 60-70 years than Nietzsche) version of 'Plato's Cave', where part of the trap is that they spend most of the time telling each other (and the rest of us) how special they are... how their opinions and beliefs are superior to those of those of us who reject this 'trap' and instead live our lives trying to engage with the realities outside of Plato's Cave.... “
What we should note here is Rand’s well known propensity towards mythological heroes and complete disdain for literary characters that were portrayed as subject to fate. Hence: the unintentional comedy (based on its nonsense (of Atlas Shrugged. (Just watch the movies on Netflix.)
The social, philosophical, and dangerous implications of Coleridge’s distinction is suggested in another point made by Harald:
“Delueze, in his short book on Nietzsche, noted that many fascists have been motivated by Nietzsche.”
Of course, many of Nietzsche’s apologists will argue that what the Nazi’s did was not Nietzsche’s fault. And I agree with them. He was, for instance, not anti-Semitic. However, there were aspects of Beyond Good and Evil that were clearly Social Darwinistic and, given his history, the result of a man who fancied himself great enough to come out with the upper hand in that formula.
And we see the same formula at work in America. What Capitalism here seems to sell better than anything is possibility. I mean look at the TV shows Who Wants to be a Millionaire and American Idol. This country would rather cling to the possibility (the fancy (of becoming rich than act to create any kind of real (that which takes imagination (economic justice. It’s why, for instance, a rich nutjob and outright fascist like Trump has managed to achieve the political validity that he has: his appeal to fancy.
Yes, what people fail to consider is that Nietzsche was a generally sickly man that would have died a virgin had it not been for the alleged hooker that gave him the alleged syphilis that allegedly drove him mad, a man that totally fell in love with Salome only to watch her drape herself in the arms of other men, men he likely felt were nowhere near his greatness.
In other words, we are talking about the perfect M.O. for a propensity towards fancy. This is not to say that Nietzsche completely lacked imagination. But we still have to give some consideration to the role that fancy was playing in his philosophy. Harald makes the point:
“In Spinoza, as in Indian yoga, fancy is an inferior mode of thinking. To think as "real" as "true" as possible is one of the main means of becoming more effective.”
What I am mainly working from is a point made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as concerns poetry and the distinction between fancy and imagination. And the following is my particular twist on it. Fancy is that natural thing we tend to do when we’re just letting our mind wonder. A sexual fantasy, for instance, is one of the most extreme versions of this. It’s just something we naturally do when we’re horny. Imagination is a matter of moving beyond that and playing fancy against the harsh realities of life (the fact, for instance, that we're not getting any (and hammering our fancies into something a little less personal and more communal. And I would note here something Coleridge argued: that it is alright to build castles in the sky; the idea is to build foundations under them.
As I understand it, we have to look at the relationship between fancy and imagination as a spectrum and process that works from those spontaneous workings of the mind to a better grasp of the human condition and predicament. And not only does this have literary and creative implications, but philosophical and social applications as well. You say, for instance:
“They buy into the fantasy of the mind, the intellectual elites trapped in the Neitzscian/Randian(I think Ayn Rand actually has had more influence on us in the last 60-70 years than Nietzsche) version of 'Plato's Cave', where part of the trap is that they spend most of the time telling each other (and the rest of us) how special they are... how their opinions and beliefs are superior to those of those of us who reject this 'trap' and instead live our lives trying to engage with the realities outside of Plato's Cave.... “
What we should note here is Rand’s well known propensity towards mythological heroes and complete disdain for literary characters that were portrayed as subject to fate. Hence: the unintentional comedy (based on its nonsense (of Atlas Shrugged. (Just watch the movies on Netflix.)
The social, philosophical, and dangerous implications of Coleridge’s distinction is suggested in another point made by Harald:
“Delueze, in his short book on Nietzsche, noted that many fascists have been motivated by Nietzsche.”
Of course, many of Nietzsche’s apologists will argue that what the Nazi’s did was not Nietzsche’s fault. And I agree with them. He was, for instance, not anti-Semitic. However, there were aspects of Beyond Good and Evil that were clearly Social Darwinistic and, given his history, the result of a man who fancied himself great enough to come out with the upper hand in that formula.
And we see the same formula at work in America. What Capitalism here seems to sell better than anything is possibility. I mean look at the TV shows Who Wants to be a Millionaire and American Idol. This country would rather cling to the possibility (the fancy (of becoming rich than act to create any kind of real (that which takes imagination (economic justice. It’s why, for instance, a rich nutjob and outright fascist like Trump has managed to achieve the political validity that he has: his appeal to fancy.
Re: Postcards:
First of all, Lorenzo, I consider the following a jam: a sort of creative bounce off of what I consider a worthy peer. Should I come off as condescending (especially as concerns our differences, please know that it was purely unintentional.
Okay then:
“I don't know if I would call Trump a fascist yet. I'll start considering it when he demands that Mexicans wear tags identifying them as Mexicans.”
And already I find myself treading lightly and glad I added the disclaimer I did above. I would first point out that I tend to work from the position of Deleuze and Guatarri: that we must seek out and undermine the pockets of fascism tend tend to emerge everywhere, including those (and most importantly ( within ourselves. Your point suggests something I believe we all have to work beyond (I know I did: the Orwellian vision of the totalitarian state. This, to me, has served as a kind of distraction from the less regimented forms of fascism that seems to be emerging under Capitalism.
Now granted, many descriptions of fascism (including that of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (tend to involve about ten different characteristics, some of which suggest your vision of Mexicans wearing tags. But the most important characteristic to me is that which feels that the world could be right if such and such wasn’t in the way. This is why I can see a close connection between the genocide of Nazi Germany and that of Rwanda. Both were about eliminating the undesirables.
(And I would note here the common solipsism involved in the Nazis referring to the Jews as rats while the Hutus referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches. I would also note how both expressions involve a sense of resentment: the Nazi’s resentment of the Jews for the wealth they were accumulating while Germans were living in post WWI economic distress and the privilege the Tutsis were experiencing under the arbitrary distinction made by their Belgium occupiers. )
And this expands the expressions of fascism a great deal and in very subtle ways. We can see it, for instance, in the fact that we casually dismiss the fact that 45,000 people a year die from lack of access to our healthcare system. And we can basically do this because we have the culturally ordained alibi that the only reason those people did so is because they failed as producer/consumers. Once again: a way of eliminating the undesirables. We see as much in the public whipping post of the TV series COPS where we wet ourselves at the spectacle of watching minorities and white trash (the non producer/consumers (get what they deserve.
(Christ!!!! Ford Motor Company..... I am in enemy territory.(
And it is this hateful aspect of fascism that we can see in Trump (that which way too many Americans are getting kranked up over (and his proposal for immigration reform: take all the money they have earned here, deport them, and use that money to build that fence at the southern border. I mean for fuck sakes: most of them are here to support their families (think family values here. It may not be exactly leading them into ovens. But hatefulness, beyond a certain point, is just hatefulness. I’m almost glad Trump has gotten where he has in that he has made the more subtle strains of fascism in America more obvious.
That said, I agree with you when you say:
“To clarify I don't believe we should be throwing this word around as descriptives to people whose political views we disagree with. It reduces this word to a sack of shit we throw at people we disagree with. “
It is a word that tends to be thrown around indiscriminately. I, as a progressive, know this all too well since any policy that might actually help people tends to be associated with it. I mean look at how the right tends to describe the slippery slope of universal healthcare: I’m thinking of Palin’s “death panels” here, that is with the fact that without universal healthcare, 45,000 undesirables die each year.
We could, as has been brought up in terms of Deleuze and Guatarri, make the distinction between fascism proper (that which is described in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (and fascism with a small “f”. But I’m not sure how much good that would do us. In fact (and this is where I strongly (yet respectfully (disagree with you (such quibbling could actually distract us from the very real possibility of an emerging fascism in America under global Capitalism.
Christ!!!! Ford Motor Company..... I am in enemy territory.
Okay then:
“I don't know if I would call Trump a fascist yet. I'll start considering it when he demands that Mexicans wear tags identifying them as Mexicans.”
And already I find myself treading lightly and glad I added the disclaimer I did above. I would first point out that I tend to work from the position of Deleuze and Guatarri: that we must seek out and undermine the pockets of fascism tend tend to emerge everywhere, including those (and most importantly ( within ourselves. Your point suggests something I believe we all have to work beyond (I know I did: the Orwellian vision of the totalitarian state. This, to me, has served as a kind of distraction from the less regimented forms of fascism that seems to be emerging under Capitalism.
Now granted, many descriptions of fascism (including that of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (tend to involve about ten different characteristics, some of which suggest your vision of Mexicans wearing tags. But the most important characteristic to me is that which feels that the world could be right if such and such wasn’t in the way. This is why I can see a close connection between the genocide of Nazi Germany and that of Rwanda. Both were about eliminating the undesirables.
(And I would note here the common solipsism involved in the Nazis referring to the Jews as rats while the Hutus referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches. I would also note how both expressions involve a sense of resentment: the Nazi’s resentment of the Jews for the wealth they were accumulating while Germans were living in post WWI economic distress and the privilege the Tutsis were experiencing under the arbitrary distinction made by their Belgium occupiers. )
And this expands the expressions of fascism a great deal and in very subtle ways. We can see it, for instance, in the fact that we casually dismiss the fact that 45,000 people a year die from lack of access to our healthcare system. And we can basically do this because we have the culturally ordained alibi that the only reason those people did so is because they failed as producer/consumers. Once again: a way of eliminating the undesirables. We see as much in the public whipping post of the TV series COPS where we wet ourselves at the spectacle of watching minorities and white trash (the non producer/consumers (get what they deserve.
(Christ!!!! Ford Motor Company..... I am in enemy territory.(
And it is this hateful aspect of fascism that we can see in Trump (that which way too many Americans are getting kranked up over (and his proposal for immigration reform: take all the money they have earned here, deport them, and use that money to build that fence at the southern border. I mean for fuck sakes: most of them are here to support their families (think family values here. It may not be exactly leading them into ovens. But hatefulness, beyond a certain point, is just hatefulness. I’m almost glad Trump has gotten where he has in that he has made the more subtle strains of fascism in America more obvious.
That said, I agree with you when you say:
“To clarify I don't believe we should be throwing this word around as descriptives to people whose political views we disagree with. It reduces this word to a sack of shit we throw at people we disagree with. “
It is a word that tends to be thrown around indiscriminately. I, as a progressive, know this all too well since any policy that might actually help people tends to be associated with it. I mean look at how the right tends to describe the slippery slope of universal healthcare: I’m thinking of Palin’s “death panels” here, that is with the fact that without universal healthcare, 45,000 undesirables die each year.
We could, as has been brought up in terms of Deleuze and Guatarri, make the distinction between fascism proper (that which is described in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (and fascism with a small “f”. But I’m not sure how much good that would do us. In fact (and this is where I strongly (yet respectfully (disagree with you (such quibbling could actually distract us from the very real possibility of an emerging fascism in America under global Capitalism.
Christ!!!! Ford Motor Company..... I am in enemy territory.
Re: Postcards:
Tallis is right: time doesn't move;
Things, on the other hand, do.
Still: things are always moving.....
?: would it really matter if there was anyone there to measure it...
Things, on the other hand, do.
Still: things are always moving.....
?: would it really matter if there was anyone there to measure it...
Re: Postcards:
From Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies:
“In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the ‘jouissance’ we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. In the anti-Semitic ideological fantasy, social antagonism via the reference to the Jew as the secret agent who is stealing social ‘jouissance’ from us (amassing profits, seducing our women….)”
He then, in the footnote attached to this, says:
“The paradigmatic case of narrative which ‘explains’ how the ‘jouissance’ we are deprived of is amassed in the Other is, of course, the primordial father.”
And this is easy enough to relate to given the tendency of fancy to be about compensation in the face of a reality in which we are too often powerless. It is this aspect of it that is idealized in James Thurber’s classic story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which the protagonist starts out as a weak, henpecked man who compensates through fancy and ends as a weak, hen-pecked man who compensates through fancy. The irony here (and a recognition of how immersed we are in fancy (is how the rejection of that idealization can only lead to yet more idealization based on fancy. This can be seen in the folly that the recent movie version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (with Ben Stiller (wandered in to. Rather than end with weakness compensated through fancy, the Hollywood version chose to end with Mitty actually achieving heroic feats. It was as if they forgot they were making a movie and, in the process, did little more than replace one form of idealization with another: the fantasy of the lone wolf (the Nietzscheian overman (who can overcome any obstacle put before them. And we can see the same self contradiction at work in Rand who, as is well known, despised narratives that described an individual at the mercy of forces beyond their control (Thurber’s Mitty for instance (and was disposed to more mythological types. As Paul Krugman wrote:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
And it here that we can see what seems to be the main point of Zizek’s book: the ubiquitous role that fancy seems to play in ideology, the way it can legitimize what ultimately has no basis in reality. To give a contemporary example of this and how scary it really is, one only need look at the fanciful musings of an Alabama redneck at a republican convention reported by the New Yorker. What this individual waxed poetic over was a day when President Trump turned the southern border into a resort where you could buy a 25$ permit and get 50$ for each confirmed kill. Now, of course, we cannot honestly attribute this to Trump. This individual clearly read this fantasy into him. But we still have to look at the forms of fancy that Trump is appealing to –if not the Republican Party as a whole. We still have to question the direction that the Republican Party is taking America in. We have to ask if they don’t represent a fascistic potential. I mean the fact that this individual said this without strong public condemnation has to be cause for worry.
PS:
“Trumps comments found favor with many in the cheering crowd with one local man, Jim Sherotta, 53, telling a reporter from AL.com, he’d like to see bounties placed upon the heads of undocumented workers coming over the border.
“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,'” Sherota explained. “That’d be one nice thing.”
Sherrota later stated that he was just kidding."
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/white-p ... he-border/
“In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the ‘jouissance’ we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. In the anti-Semitic ideological fantasy, social antagonism via the reference to the Jew as the secret agent who is stealing social ‘jouissance’ from us (amassing profits, seducing our women….)”
He then, in the footnote attached to this, says:
“The paradigmatic case of narrative which ‘explains’ how the ‘jouissance’ we are deprived of is amassed in the Other is, of course, the primordial father.”
And this is easy enough to relate to given the tendency of fancy to be about compensation in the face of a reality in which we are too often powerless. It is this aspect of it that is idealized in James Thurber’s classic story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which the protagonist starts out as a weak, henpecked man who compensates through fancy and ends as a weak, hen-pecked man who compensates through fancy. The irony here (and a recognition of how immersed we are in fancy (is how the rejection of that idealization can only lead to yet more idealization based on fancy. This can be seen in the folly that the recent movie version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (with Ben Stiller (wandered in to. Rather than end with weakness compensated through fancy, the Hollywood version chose to end with Mitty actually achieving heroic feats. It was as if they forgot they were making a movie and, in the process, did little more than replace one form of idealization with another: the fantasy of the lone wolf (the Nietzscheian overman (who can overcome any obstacle put before them. And we can see the same self contradiction at work in Rand who, as is well known, despised narratives that described an individual at the mercy of forces beyond their control (Thurber’s Mitty for instance (and was disposed to more mythological types. As Paul Krugman wrote:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
And it here that we can see what seems to be the main point of Zizek’s book: the ubiquitous role that fancy seems to play in ideology, the way it can legitimize what ultimately has no basis in reality. To give a contemporary example of this and how scary it really is, one only need look at the fanciful musings of an Alabama redneck at a republican convention reported by the New Yorker. What this individual waxed poetic over was a day when President Trump turned the southern border into a resort where you could buy a 25$ permit and get 50$ for each confirmed kill. Now, of course, we cannot honestly attribute this to Trump. This individual clearly read this fantasy into him. But we still have to look at the forms of fancy that Trump is appealing to –if not the Republican Party as a whole. We still have to question the direction that the Republican Party is taking America in. We have to ask if they don’t represent a fascistic potential. I mean the fact that this individual said this without strong public condemnation has to be cause for worry.
PS:
“Trumps comments found favor with many in the cheering crowd with one local man, Jim Sherotta, 53, telling a reporter from AL.com, he’d like to see bounties placed upon the heads of undocumented workers coming over the border.
“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,'” Sherota explained. “That’d be one nice thing.”
Sherrota later stated that he was just kidding."
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/white-p ... he-border/
Re: Postcards:
In my recent run with the Modern Scholar lectures on Evolutionary Psychology, there was a point made that I think might have some subtle applications to some contemporary issues and the anthropology of the boards as well. It pointed out that in our primate days, the consequences of a false positive would have been far less consequential than a false negative. For instance, if you were walking in the jungle and thought you saw a snake or a lion and there wasn’t one, nothing would be lost. On the other hand, if you saw nothing and there was a lion or snake waiting in the bush, you would likely end up dead. So what we’re talking about here is an evolutionary adaption that has managed to get us to this point thus far.
Now one of the modern phenomena that this is generally attributed to is phobias. And I think we can see the roots of many neuroses in it. But can’t we also see it evolve into the expect-the-worse attitude that tends to haunt modern society and the general negativity: that fashionable cynicism? For instance, I realize that not all of you are Walking Dead fans enough to want to watch The Talking Dead that follows. But for those that do, I ask you to pay close attention when they do their surveys about what is going on in the series. When they offer the 3 possibilities, I ask you to seek out the most cynical answer and see which one wins out every time. In fact, it would be interesting for social scientists to do a study on it. But I can’t help but feel it would mainly confirm my instincts on this –instincts based on what I have seen.
The scary thing to me is we have come to a point where this evolutionary legacy, while having gotten us to this point thus far, may end up destroying us as a species thanks to conservatives that want to conserve that legacy. This can be seen in a study by Dodd and Hibbings at the University of Nebraska Lincoln –go Huskers!!! They exposed both liberals and conservatives to a montage of images and randomly inserted violent ones. What they found out is that conservatives tended to react (through physiological measurements (more intensely to the violent ones than liberals. The conclusion extracted from this is that conservatism is a matter of wiring that tends to react more strongly to perceived threats. And we can easily see this at work in what they base their policies on: the perceived incursions on the well being of white heterosexual males by gays, Mexicans, environmentalists, and socialists.
And can’t we apply this to the anthropology of the boards as well? The fashionable cynicism that way too many people appeal to on here? The way they use it to beat down any attempt to do something positive and are often reinforced by others? And we should note here how they tend to prop it up through the group, how they can never seem to work alone. Could this be because they have passed their evolutionary usefulness and have to appeal to obsolete evolutionary legacies? That is as compared to the beyond our immediate self interest reasoning that we have evolved into?
Now one of the modern phenomena that this is generally attributed to is phobias. And I think we can see the roots of many neuroses in it. But can’t we also see it evolve into the expect-the-worse attitude that tends to haunt modern society and the general negativity: that fashionable cynicism? For instance, I realize that not all of you are Walking Dead fans enough to want to watch The Talking Dead that follows. But for those that do, I ask you to pay close attention when they do their surveys about what is going on in the series. When they offer the 3 possibilities, I ask you to seek out the most cynical answer and see which one wins out every time. In fact, it would be interesting for social scientists to do a study on it. But I can’t help but feel it would mainly confirm my instincts on this –instincts based on what I have seen.
The scary thing to me is we have come to a point where this evolutionary legacy, while having gotten us to this point thus far, may end up destroying us as a species thanks to conservatives that want to conserve that legacy. This can be seen in a study by Dodd and Hibbings at the University of Nebraska Lincoln –go Huskers!!! They exposed both liberals and conservatives to a montage of images and randomly inserted violent ones. What they found out is that conservatives tended to react (through physiological measurements (more intensely to the violent ones than liberals. The conclusion extracted from this is that conservatism is a matter of wiring that tends to react more strongly to perceived threats. And we can easily see this at work in what they base their policies on: the perceived incursions on the well being of white heterosexual males by gays, Mexicans, environmentalists, and socialists.
And can’t we apply this to the anthropology of the boards as well? The fashionable cynicism that way too many people appeal to on here? The way they use it to beat down any attempt to do something positive and are often reinforced by others? And we should note here how they tend to prop it up through the group, how they can never seem to work alone. Could this be because they have passed their evolutionary usefulness and have to appeal to obsolete evolutionary legacies? That is as compared to the beyond our immediate self interest reasoning that we have evolved into?
Re: Postcards:
It’s a good thing a distraction (the digression it entices you into (is just one trajectory among others (think: Frost’s Path Not Taken (because you guys are distracting me from points I should be making on my present reading of Rorty’s Objectivity, Reletavism, and Truth. I can only hope that the fact (and may the wrath of Strunk rest in its grave (that we are on the pragmatic board feels like salt on the wound.
Are you feeling the cut, guys? Anyway:
“There are some serious alternate paradigms on the problem of self - for instance Panpsychism, which is probably closer to Deleuze's ideas I imagine D Edward Tarkington” –Chris
“Am i missing something here? Panpsychism sounds like complete bogus.” –Jan
While Chalmers and Panpsychism has been forever on my to-do list, I’m not sure I would not totally dismiss it –that is without having the info I would like to have. As a guest on a Philosophy Now podcast on the mind (https://philosophynow.org/podcasts/Free ... _the_Brain) enlightened me with: we can’t dismiss the possibility that particles, at the atomic level, are capable of carrying data. And we have to put in mind here that what we experience as consciousness is rooted in the grunts and silences in the meat of the brain: the cumulative effect of various cells in the brain that are either active or not.
As to whether Deleuze subscribes to panpsychism, Chris, that would require an expertise on Deleuze I’m not sure anyone can achieve. As I understand him, he subscribes to the same kind of qualified materialism (think: machinic and social production(as Rorty for the sake of a social agenda based on discourse unimpeded by transcendent criteria (territorializations such as objectivity or “the scientific method”: power discourses (that, via the momentum created by the exchanges of energy, can facilitate our evolution as a species. It’s basically Hegel without the fixed endgame.
At the same time, Chris, I can’t totally dismiss your point since Deleuze does seem to work from an rhizomatic interchange at an atomic level. It’s something we’ll have to explore.
“As Descartes said "I think therefore...", we must necessarily take self for granted, that we exist, and to avoid solipsism accept others exist, too. With self comes all the things we do, such as having ideas and forming logical cause and effect relationships.” –David
I’m not exactly sure where David stands here, but I have to go with the school that has abandoned Cartesian dualism. For instance, I believe we need to concede to the materialists and neuroscientists and stop talking about Free Will. What we should be talking about, rather, is participation: that which I believe lies in Chaotics and that subtle point at which the determined transforms into the random and the random transforms into the determined. Here we can see the possibility of a participating (sort of (self in the interface of consciousness that occurs between the brain and the environment it has to adapt to in order to protect the body and its genetic legacy. Doing so, we can downplay the Causa Sui argument offered by hardcore materialists by pointing out that it is based on an outdated linear understanding of causality as compared to the feedback loop we are talking about here. I mean why would a participating self necessarily need to be an uncaused cause?
In Dave’s defense, he does go on to say:
“I agree self cannot experience self. Self is what does the experiencing. Just as the idea of self love is a farce.”
What I see here is a point made by Dennett in Consciousness Explained against the notion of the Cartesian Theater: the multiple drafts theory in which the brain brings in data and passes it around different modules until, through an additive and revision process, the mind arrives at a final understanding. And it seems legit to me. However, it doesn’t eliminate the idea of the Cartesian Theater as much as make the actors the spectators as well: a theater troupe performing purely for its own satisfaction.
So why couldn’t we experience “self love”, Dave? And it has been suggested that narcissism is a quality embedded in our very make-up.
Are you feeling the cut, guys? Anyway:
“There are some serious alternate paradigms on the problem of self - for instance Panpsychism, which is probably closer to Deleuze's ideas I imagine D Edward Tarkington” –Chris
“Am i missing something here? Panpsychism sounds like complete bogus.” –Jan
While Chalmers and Panpsychism has been forever on my to-do list, I’m not sure I would not totally dismiss it –that is without having the info I would like to have. As a guest on a Philosophy Now podcast on the mind (https://philosophynow.org/podcasts/Free ... _the_Brain) enlightened me with: we can’t dismiss the possibility that particles, at the atomic level, are capable of carrying data. And we have to put in mind here that what we experience as consciousness is rooted in the grunts and silences in the meat of the brain: the cumulative effect of various cells in the brain that are either active or not.
As to whether Deleuze subscribes to panpsychism, Chris, that would require an expertise on Deleuze I’m not sure anyone can achieve. As I understand him, he subscribes to the same kind of qualified materialism (think: machinic and social production(as Rorty for the sake of a social agenda based on discourse unimpeded by transcendent criteria (territorializations such as objectivity or “the scientific method”: power discourses (that, via the momentum created by the exchanges of energy, can facilitate our evolution as a species. It’s basically Hegel without the fixed endgame.
At the same time, Chris, I can’t totally dismiss your point since Deleuze does seem to work from an rhizomatic interchange at an atomic level. It’s something we’ll have to explore.
“As Descartes said "I think therefore...", we must necessarily take self for granted, that we exist, and to avoid solipsism accept others exist, too. With self comes all the things we do, such as having ideas and forming logical cause and effect relationships.” –David
I’m not exactly sure where David stands here, but I have to go with the school that has abandoned Cartesian dualism. For instance, I believe we need to concede to the materialists and neuroscientists and stop talking about Free Will. What we should be talking about, rather, is participation: that which I believe lies in Chaotics and that subtle point at which the determined transforms into the random and the random transforms into the determined. Here we can see the possibility of a participating (sort of (self in the interface of consciousness that occurs between the brain and the environment it has to adapt to in order to protect the body and its genetic legacy. Doing so, we can downplay the Causa Sui argument offered by hardcore materialists by pointing out that it is based on an outdated linear understanding of causality as compared to the feedback loop we are talking about here. I mean why would a participating self necessarily need to be an uncaused cause?
In Dave’s defense, he does go on to say:
“I agree self cannot experience self. Self is what does the experiencing. Just as the idea of self love is a farce.”
What I see here is a point made by Dennett in Consciousness Explained against the notion of the Cartesian Theater: the multiple drafts theory in which the brain brings in data and passes it around different modules until, through an additive and revision process, the mind arrives at a final understanding. And it seems legit to me. However, it doesn’t eliminate the idea of the Cartesian Theater as much as make the actors the spectators as well: a theater troupe performing purely for its own satisfaction.
So why couldn’t we experience “self love”, Dave? And it has been suggested that narcissism is a quality embedded in our very make-up.