Rhizomes:

Rhizome 3/20/16:

“I shall define an “ironist” as someone who fulfills three conditions: (i) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 1050-1054). Kindle Edition.

Rorty bases this on a point he makes early in the book: that true or false is strictly a product of the language we use to deal with the world and cannot be said to actually exist in that world. And that being the case, the best we can do is seek out new ways of talking about reality. And this includes the language of science and mathematics which must work under the same agenda. To do otherwise is as Rorty points out:

“The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.” –Ibid (different page

What Rorty is reacting to reminds me of a point brought to my attention by a respected peer (I believe it was David McDivitt (that in older days it was believed that objects were the language of God and that by truly (think true: the product of language (knowing the object as is, one has managed to hear the voice of God.

And as they will tell you in any creative writing class: the idea is to show rather than tell. And what I’m starting to recognize and be impressed by is Rorty’s willingness to do exactly that. He’s just a really good writer out to do as he says: change the way we talk about things. Of course, I note this with the bias of one who considers themselves more of a writer writing about their experience with philosophy. And I can see it in the way he carefully chooses his words. I would note:

“I am saying that Kuhn, Davidson, Wittgenstein, and Dewey provide us with redescriptions of familiar phenomena which, taken together, buttress Berlin’s way of describing alternative political institutions and theories.”

Now this may not mean much to someone not wanting to be a writer, but I can’t help but note his use of the term “buttress”. This seems an equal (if not superior way (to get across what I mean when I say “prop up”. But it is about more than finding better or new words, it extends into the issue of how meaning is conveyed. I would especially note Rorty’s use of the word “Gerrymander” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It is not just a novel term. It is a term that should be added as an informal logical fallacy that any of us could too easily fall into. I mean in the process of developing our systems, it would be all too tempting to force incompatible realities into a form that doesn’t threaten our systems.

Take, for instance, Sarte’s response in defense of his statement that we all choose our world when critics asked him if it was the same for babies. And instead of admitting that (a strategy that was easily available to him (they were right in that his point mainly applied to those who had grown to the point of consciousness-for-itself, he chose rather to maintain the consistency of his system through what amounted to an ideological dance. He basically gerrymandered.

But it is a temptation we’re all prone to as we develop our systems.

That’s a novel way of using brackets you’ve got there.

Thanks!

You’re back!..where have you been!

Mostly on facebook. But I do need to do an immersion in my old stomping grounds. Thanks for noticing, mannequin.

Just out of interest, what do you do with all the left over close brackets?

Store them for later use. I may have to leave them for my kids in my will.

Rhizome: 3/23/16

“Rorty is wrong. Truth is correspondence and we have discovered a very workable method of discovering it: Science. I saw Rorty after he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His problem then and the problem with hermeneutics is the failure to accept real universals like those in Mathematics. They can be derived from Set Theory so there is no need for Platonic Forms and reality can simply be defined as whatever satisfies a bound existential variable.” –John Schoenemann​

“But mathematics is still a language responding to reality, not reflecting it exactly. Look, for instance, at weather reports. They have, due to computer technology, fulfilled the criterion of horseshoes in getting closer while not exactly predicting the weather. This is because they are mainly dealing with fractal causality (as compared to linear (which defies all scientific claims to have exclusive access to reality. Science can only confidently handle linear causality.” –me

I would first apologize to John if I came off as mocking in posts after the above quoted. It was strictly my bad in departing from the point that Rorty was trying make and succumbing to the old temptation to knock down that which is opposed to your own position in order to defend it. But this is in no way the agenda of the pragmatic/ironist position: that of undermining the value of science. We can no doubt assume that mathematics has made some discoveries (think Einstein here (that seem universal. But the thing we need to think about here is how much application Einstein’s (as well as those of mathematics in general (tell us about what we need to do to create a just world. While I cannot be sure of what John’s agenda is, one of the applications of it I see is similar that of Rands so-called objectivism:

1+1=2, Laisse Faire Capitalism is the only means by which man can achieve greatness

:as if we are to be so impressed by the fact that she got the 1+1 part right, we should automatically accept her assertion concerning Laisse Faire Capitalism. And I apologize to John, but his point was clearly about discouraging me from Rorty and the pragmatic position based on the fact that mathematics have found a few principles that seem to be universal –that is while not actually representing reality as we perceive it every day. Furthermore, it serves as little more than a misdirect from the real agenda of pragmatism which has more to do with theory and philosophical discourse:

“For the ironist theorist, the story of belief in, and love of, an a-historical wisdom is the story of successive attempts to find a final vocabulary which is not just the final vocabulary of the individual philosopher but a vocabulary final in every sense - a vocabulary which is no mere idiosyncratic historical product but the last word, the one to which inquiry and history have converged, the one which renders further inquiry and history superfluous.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 1387-1389). Kindle Edition.

And, of course, what we are talking about here is the intellectual arrogance of anyone who might think that they (like some kind of chosen one (will have the final word on intellectual discourse, that their process will be the end of all processes. The ironist can only see this as silly, self indulgent, and contrary to the real value of creative and intellectual inquiry. John may well be right in pointing out mathematics’ ability to point out universal principles; but that seems little justification for acting like mathematics must have the last word in every discourse we engage in. In fact, do so could be detrimental to the extent that it establishes a vertical/hierarchal power structure in which we allow mathematicians to tell us what our reality is. As Rorty points out:

“The ironist theorist distrusts the metaphysician’s metaphor of a vertical view downward. He substitutes the historicist metaphor of looking back on the past along a horizontal axis.”

And:

“(Metaphysically, and so misleadingly, put: The ironist wants to find philosophy’s secret, true, magical, name - a name whose use will make philosophy one’s servant rather than one’s master.)”

The point is, ultimately, that our situation is such that it will take a lot of different people doing a lot of different things and using a lot of different methods in order to fix it. Therefore, we might be better off not haggling over the advantage of our methods and just using them and letting the products speak for the method.

Rhizome 3/21/16:

“I have defined “dialectic” as the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another, rather than merely to infer propositions from one another, and thus as the partial substitution of redescription for inference.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 1129-1130). Kindle Edition.

And here we see (yet again (Rorty doing what he does best: finding different ways to describe and justify the hermeneutic approach. And this is why I find the chapter “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” one of the most exciting so far. It serves a function similar to that of Joseph Campbell early in my process in that it accelerated my enthusiasm for the process I was already engaged in. Rorty does so by describing (therefore validating (the very loose dialectic I, myself, have been engaging in for some time. What makes it revolutionary for me, however, is that I never really thought of it as a dialectic –that is even though it makes perfect sense now.

As I have always said: the only thing I am interested in is taking in a lot of information from a lot of different sources and seeing what happens in my own writing. Basically: the thrill of an input/output dynamic. And Rorty gives me his blessing by pointing out later that ironists tend to seek understanding (that is as compared to “the Truth” or some transcendental/metaphysical criterion (by simply continuing to read more and more books by different people with different final languages or playing different language games –and, BTW, inherently the most democratic approach we can take to it. In this sense, Alexander Pope was prescient:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”

:which seems to me the only criterion we really need honor. Still, as Rorty points out elsewhere:

“Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.”

And I have to go with him and against my point above in recognizing that our situation has grown so complex that it will take a lot of different people doing a lot of different things using a lot of different methods to solve. And in this sense, we can see a justification for Rorty’s (as well as Deleuze’s (emphasis on discourse (or the exchanges of energy as described by Deleuze and Guatarri.

At the same time (and I think this can be confirmed by everything written above (I can’t help but feel the hermeneutic/ironist method is as haunted by confirmation bias as the metaphysical method as described by Rorty. We have to admit that there is certain amount of self flattery involved in that our revelations with a given text amounts to “that’s just what I thought!” You get to a point where you feel like what you are mainly looking for are different vocabularies (different languages (to describe what you already feel.

On the other hand, this may well be what gives the hermeneutic/ironist an advantage in their willingness to admit it as compared to the metaphysician that eventually has to gerrymander in order to make every phenomenon fit into their system.

Rhizome: 3/24/16

““Rorty is wrong. Truth is correspondence and we have discovered a very workable method of discovering it: Science. I saw Rorty after he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His problem then and the problem with hermeneutics is the failure to accept real universals like those in Mathematics. They can be derived from Set Theory so there is no need for Platonic Forms and reality can simply be defined as whatever satisfies a bound existential variable.” –John Schoenemann

“I would first apologize to John if I came off as mocking in posts after the above quoted. It was strictly my bad in departing from the point that Rorty was trying make and succumbing to the old temptation to knock down that which is opposed to your own position in order to defend it. But this is in no way the agenda of the pragmatic/ironist position: that of undermining the value of science. We can no doubt assume that mathematics has made some discoveries (think Einstein here (that seem universal. But the thing we need to think about here is how much application Einstein’s (as well as those of mathematics in general (tell us about what we need to do to create a just world.” –me

Apparently, my apology and attempt to clarify the position of Pragmatism wasn’t enough for John as I looked on my notifications today and found out John had added me to a Philosophy of Religion group which I can assume to be a smart ass inference about the nature of my process and that of Pragmatism as well. Clearly it wasn’t enough for me to be willing to engage in a respectful discourse with him, it was either him as the GURU who saved me from myself or I would be delegated to the realm of the supernatural. One can almost see him and Searle and Hawking goonishly chuckling among their selves at his cleverness. At least, that is the fancy I see John indulging in.

And it is this very intellectual arrogance propped up by the Capitalist values of the vertical hierarchy of classicism that Rorty and the pragmatic approach seeks to undermine. And this is evident in John’s knee-jerk response to my refusal to be his disciple: to not jump up, when he commanded me, and immediately read Pierce. And no doubt he can buttress his position with the fact that the money goes where he is going –something that the inquiries of science and mathematics seem blind to.

But let us also look at the hypocrisy of passing off all processes that don’t bow to science and the capital that backs it (simply because they can’t produce an I-phone (as somehow beholden to the supernatural or a religion when, in fact, Science and Capitalism has become the new religion: a faith, according to the analytic approach (once again: backed by capital, that must condemn (by any means necessary (the non-believers: pragmatists, post-moderns, me….

I’m a pretty bad person when im drunk, d63 :evilfun:

Welcome to my world. It’s why I try to avoid it even though I like drinking. I would hate to have to quit.

“And it is this very intellectual arrogance propped up by the Capitalist values of the vertical hierarchy of classicism that Rorty and the pragmatic approach seek to undermine…. And no doubt he [John] can buttress his position with the fact that the money goes where he is going –something that the inquiries of science and mathematics seem blind to.

“But let us also look at the hypocrisy of passing off all processes that don’t bow to science and the capital that backs it (simply because they can’t produce an I-phone (as somehow beholden to the supernatural or a religion when, in fact, Science and Capitalism has become the new religion: a faith, according to the analytic approach (once again: backed by capital, that must condemn (by any means necessary (the non-believers: pragmatists, post-moderns, me….” –Rhizome 3/24/16

“Science thinks it knows more than it does.” –Donald Hughes

“I thought the whole idea behind science is that it is not infallible. That would make it fantastic. Like a deity?” –Tony Rothwell

I would first admit that Rhizome 3/24/16 was not one of my best moments in that it was primarily inspired by having nothing better to write about: to fill the 4 to 500 word space I have committed to everyday –that is except for Tuesday (the second day of my weekend (which I have delegated to being something like a normal person: no facebook and a barbecue –weather permitting. But I digress.

While it may have been a bit of an exaggeration to call science the new religion (and though I spent a lot of time at work last night second guessing myself (I would still argue that it is more of a faith than its advocates would like to admit. And I risk the informal fallacy of an appeal to authority in pointing out that Rorty and many postmodern thinkers point to the enlightenment folly of displacing religion only to put science in as a replacement that only continued many of the same hierarchal social dynamics. And I would also note science’s close relationship with Capitalism (via corporate financing (which can be seen to be a kind of religion in its faith in the god-like entity of the “Invisible Hand” of the market. As I like to say (exploiting the paradigmatic nature of language:

It use to be “pray hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of heaven”.

Now it’s “work hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of success”.

And I would argue this to be a dynamic at the back the minds of those who advocate fanatical scientism, those who would arrogantly assume that science and mathematics has some kind of privileged language game.

But let’s put aside the effect of Capitalism on science and focus on science in itself. As Donald and Tony rightly suggest, there is an element of faith involved in extreme scientism. And if you think about it, this faith is generally argued for based on what it believes science will eventually be able to do. It presumes a determined universe based on the few simple systems it has managed to predict via linear causality. For instance, it is based on this linear causality that it can present the homunculus problem as proof perfect of the non-existence of free will and the illusion of consciousness. But the homunculus problem seems to have no application to the causal (and likely non-linear (feedback loop that occurs between the body, the brain, and the environment they are working to negotiate.

What I’m struggling (fumbling even (to get across here is that what scientism is engaging in (including that which obtusely dismisses philosophy and the pragmatic approach (is, in fact, a form of faith in that it is working from its successes with finite systems and making totally unjustified leaps to the nature of reality: the infinite. Its claim to privilege is based on an assertion that everything is determined based on the few determined systems it has found (those it can predict ( and, therefore, can only prop up its privilege on what it assumes it will EVENTUALLY be able to do: the promise land of science (the kingdom of success.

Rhizome 3/26/16:

“No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosophy more maligned and hated. To grasp the reason for this it is not enough to recall the great theoretical thesis of Spinozism: a single substance having an infinity of attributes, Deus sive Natura, all “creatures” being only modes of these attributes or modifications of this substance. It is not enough to show how pantheism and atheism are combined in this thesis, which denies the existence of a moral, transcendent, creator God. We must start rather from the practical theses that made Spinozism an object of scandal. These theses imply a triple denunciation: of “consciousness”, of “values”, and of “sad passions”.” -from Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

I would first note, having just entered this immersion for about the second or third time (I’m sure it is the third, how much of a difference it makes having actually had a couple of immersions in Spinoza himself. It’s as if having done so has altered my filters in such a way that I can read Deleuze’s book with the same ease I might a Steven King novel. And this says something about about the deferred systems of meaning involved in philosophy.

Secondly, I would note that I was wrong in my immersion in Spinoza to mainly associate Deleuze’s interest in him with Spinoza’s metaphysical system: substance. It was clearly rooted in Spinoza’s defiance against the common doxa of his time: hence the subtitle “Practical Philosophy” -although I wouldn’t totally dismiss the role the metaphysical/ontological played in it.

Where I can claim some bragging rights is in recognizing is the value of taking on a materialistic perspective (even if it is provisional as is my case (in that by doing so, we get a better understanding of the human condition by recognizing the underlying systems that are the foundations to what we experience as consciousness. In this sense, it works in the same way evolutionary psychology does while not condemning us to its mandates. And Spinoza did this by arguing that what can make us free (confronted with a god incapable of free will (is our capacity for reason: that which extends from the body and its passions. And in that sense, it seems to me that he was still clinging to the classicist model of mind over emotion and body. But then culture has always worked in baby steps.

At the same time, what I see in this is the genealogical root of Deleuze and Guatarri’s desiring production: that which works through sad affects (that which takes power from the individual (and joyful effects: that which empowers the individual.

My mission (should I choose to accept it (is to somehow meld it into my golden egg: the concept of Efficiency: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the energy put into an action and the energy gotten out of it.

It just seems to me that our culture has primarily been based on the Capitalist value of more. And, thus far, it has proved unsatisfying.

The rhizome of the etymology is the radical reflection of the definition. one of the roots of the existential philosophy of the Protestant Kierkegaard, gave Heidegger’s ontology the attractiveness of the nonspeculative. Just as the concept of existence is a false conceptualization of existing things, the complementary precedence which these things are given over the concept allows the ontological concept of existence to profit in turn. If the individual is a socially transmitted phenomenon, so is his form of theoretical epistemological reflection. The category of the root, the origin, is a category of dominion. It confirms that a man ranks first because he was there first; it confirms the autochthon against the newcomer, the settler against the migrant. The origin—seductive because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by ideology—is itself an ideological principle. But the project is a false one; all meaning, derives and is derived, and all language is dendritic as well as radical: there are no roots which are not also the stems of trees.

Rhizome 3/27/16:

“At the same time, what I see in this is the genealogical root of Deleuze and Guatarri’s desiring production: that which works through sad affects (that which takes power from the individual (and joyful effects: that which empowers the individual.
My mission (should I choose to accept it (is to somehow meld it into my golden egg: the concept of Efficiency: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the energy put into an action and the energy gotten out of it.
It just seems to me that our culture has primarily been based on the Capitalist value of more. And, thus far, it has proved unsatisfying.”

“I also wanted to mention that ‘more’ is not inherently to be despised. Capitalism is a perversion of ‘more’ love, more life, more solidarity and community, more joy.

Instead it has symbolically transferred all these ‘mores’ into more profit. It has convinced people psychologically that profit is the only more that matters- that all the other mores are dependent on the foundational one of profit. Almost everyone has internalized this now and it becomes increasingly hard to question.

But more itself is not to blame!” –my respected peer, Greg Enge

First of all, Greg, thanks for today’s rhizome.

That said, ‘more’, in itself, is not altogether to blame and can even be useful within the model of Efficiency. Unfortunately, a lot of our difference on the issue comes out the fact that I have, for the most part, only mentioned the term and given an entry definition (that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between that put into an act and that gotten out (without actually describing the interactive matrix it works in. This, once again, is why I really need to write that article.

And I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you, my friend, have stepped on the landmine of giving me an opportunity to go into it in a little more detail -which could take several rhizomes/days. And as a great thinker of the 90’s, the Brain from Pinky and the Brain would say:

“Now I’ll be able to carry out my diabolical plan to take over the world.”

First of all, I’m guessing that your point comes out of Efficiency being thus far thought of as a single entity. Which is my bad for not describing it in any detail. But what I’m actually talking about is an ecological system (very similar to that of Deleuze and Guatarri’s desiring production (in which various instances of efficiency/expectation interact. You, for instance, are an instance of efficiency consisting of various sub efficiencies (your various needs, demands, and desires (to which you are the supra-efficiency (that are, in turn, supra-efficiencies to the various sub efficiencies that constitute their makeup. At the same time, you are a sub-efficiency to the various social systems you find yourself affiliated with: your family, your workplace, your city, your state, your country, and your world as a whole. And threading throughout these various degrees of locality is the always supra-efficiency of the coexistence of efficiencies or what (now that I have described it (we can reduce to (for sake of brevity ( coexistence.

Now I hate to break this down, so soon, into the atomistic building blocks of the model, but it goes to the issue of the role “more” plays in it. It comes down to a formula I have devised:

Epot=R/e

Or to blue-collarize it: Efficiency potential =Resources/expectations. So let’s play with it. Let’s say you and I are working on a project (an instance of coexistence (and have a resource pool of 30. We divide that pool into 15 apiece. Now we have 2 instances of expectation/efficiency that look like Epot=15/e. Then we say we both have an expectation factor of 2: Epot=15/2 which means that both our Efficiency potentials comes up to 7.5. Now say I decide to become a self indulgent prick and decide I have higher expectations: say 3. Now what I have to do to maintain the same Epot is take more from the resource pool which would add up to about 24 which would leave you 6 and an Epot of 5.This threatens our instance of co-existence in that you have one of 2 choices in order to get back to the Epot you were at. You either have to take, by force, those resource factors I took from you or break away thereby stealing resource factors from the initial instance of co-existence (put mind here that your cooperation with me in the first place was a resource to me (in order to seek resources elsewhere.

To bring this back to a more nominal level, Greg, and to get to the question, I not sure that the Democratic and union solution (while helpful (of more (more wages, more benefits (is as useful an answer to our problems as a more thoughtful distribution of resources and the expectations being imposed on people. People, for instance, should not be forced to focus resources on owning a car in order to function in the job market –resources, BTW, that they could be focusing on what justifies their point A to point B. To me, it is not so much a matter of more wages as lowering the money they have to put into just getting by. The problem isn’t that we’re not making enough; it’s that everything costs too much.

Anyway, it’s a lot to explain. Hope I haven’t totally mucked it up.

Rhizome 3/28/16:

[Based on shared pic by Dan Rayburn (who called it terrible (with the statement:

Wouldn’t be great if all the socialists in America (shows American social democrats (went to live in socialist countries: shows some kind of line (a reference to breadlines apparently (in some third world latin country[

This is, yet again, an expression of the desperation of FreeMarketFundamentalism in the face of Capitalism’s daily failures to do as it promised, the usual misdirect propped up by complete ignorance of what Marx actually said.

Marx basically acknowledged that we would have to go through a Capitalist phase (he was, after all, heavily influenced by Adam Smith (in order to build the means of production and technology. Now let us note the language on the sign: Spanish. So we’re basically talking about a third world country that, not having gone through the same Capitalist phase as all western industrialized nations: that process of developing the means of production and technology, made the attempt to jump from a mainly agrarian society to a socialist one. I mean it was the same dynamic at work with both Russia and China. And it was a dynamic that was and is quite different than the dynamic those young Social Democrats in America and every other developed nation are dealing with. And America, by the very prescience that Marx showed, is a prime candidate for the experiment they are asking for, an experiment that will likely succeed much as it has in Scandinavian countries.

What the FreeMarketFundamentalists need to think about is the fascistic nature of what they are doing. And in order to understand this, we need only look at the almost Orwellian staged event of the failure of the Weimar Republic (social democrats (that got the Nazis in. No one, at the time, was looking at the fact that the Weimar Republic failed mainly because of sanctions being put on Germany at the time as a result of WWI. They just, out of theoretical laziness, engaged in the false causation of assuming that it was all the fault of those in power.

And we can see that same kind of goonish misdirect at work in the heavy-handed (and ineffective to anyone smart enough to know better (humor at work in the pic.
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And I would also note here one of the main concerns among Cubans as America opens up their relationship with them. Many of them are concerned that American healthcare corporations will sneak in and destroy their access to healthcare as they know it.
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“Now I hate to break this down, so soon, into the atomistic building blocks of the model, but it goes to the issue of the role “more” plays in it. It comes down to a formula I have devised:

Epot=R/e

Or to blue-collarize it: Efficiency potential =Resources/expectations. So let’s play with it. Let’s say you and I are working on a project (an instance of coexistence (and have a resource pool of 30. We divide that pool into 15 apiece. Now we have 2 instances of expectation/efficiency that look like Epot=15/e. Then we say we both have an expectation factor of 2: Epot=15/2 which means that both our Efficiency potentials comes up to 7.5. Now say I decide to become a self indulgent prick and decide I have higher expectations: say 3. Now what I have to do to maintain the same Epot is take more from the resource pool which would add up to about 24 which would leave you 6 and an Epot of 5.This threatens our instance of co-existence in that you have one of 2 choices in order to get back to the Epot you were at. You either have to take, by force, those resource factors I took from you or break away thereby stealing resource factors from the initial instance of co-existence (put mind here that your cooperation with me in the first place was a resource to me (in order to seek resources elsewhere.”

The point , Greg, is that “more” plays a role in it to the extent that it helps when it comes to resources. Our efficiency potential increases with the increase of our local resources. But it can also increase when we lower our expectations.

And the main reason I’m excited about it (why I consider it my golden egg (is because it stands in opposition to the expansionary model we can no longer sustain. It applies, as well, to environmental issues in that as we increase our population (our expectation factor (the earth we live on remains a static resource factor.

Rhizome 3/31/16:

“People in power want to stay in power. One way to establish power, is to provide a reason for that power. Illiterate people are not the problem, It’s simply the distinction that is the problem.” –Chris Horner

“It is theory of the affections as a whole that defines the status of the sad passions. Whatever their justification, they represent the lowest degree of our power, the moment when we are most separated from our power of acting, when we are most alienated, delivered over to the phantoms of superstition, to the mystifications of the tyrant." -from Gille Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

What Deleuze follows this with (perhaps (perhaps not (via Spinoza (is the import of the joyful passions: that in which one has the power to affect (as compared to the sad passions: that in which one lacks the power to avoid being affected.

And we can see this at work in the success of Trump who is clearly exploiting the impotence of his followers through a false sense of empowerment.
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Anyway, one of the issues I’m starting to take up with Spinoza (which may end up a non-issue (is his emphasis on sad and joyful affects which center around power. But don’t get me wrong: it is a powerful conceptual construct. Basically, the sad affect is that situation in which the given individual (the body (is affected by a body with more power while the joyful affect consists of having the power to affect another body. And it makes perfect sense when you consider the nature of your shitty moments in life (when everything seems to be happening to you (and the good ones in which you seem to have the Midas touch and everything seems to turn to gold. There is no disputing the application of Spinoza’s model.

(And it would be interesting to apply this to things like gambling, drug, or alcohol addictions, the dynamic of self abuse perpetuated through the too brief moments of joyful affects. I’ll try to go into this tomorrow.)

The problem for me is that this seems like yet another model built around the notion of “more”. And full confession: my issue here is mainly built around my vested interest in what I consider to be my own golden egg: Efficiency: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the resources put into an act and the resources gotten out –that which I tried to explain in rhizomes 3/27/16 and 3/28/16.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel that Spinoza was approaching it in the very contradiction of pushing a model that seems to be about more power while also pimping the ascetic. It’s similar to the sense I get of Marx. On one hand he seems be talking in the language of more (more wages, more benefits, more personal time, and whatever I forgot to mention (while seeming to be seeking Efficiency: of being able to minimize the resources we put into the petty and mundane so that we can focus them on finding our higher selves: self creation as Rorty would put it.

This was why Spinoza put his emphasis on self-empowerment through reason (adequate ideas (while railing against the petty and mundane through the ascetic.

That said, and my window closing in, I want to commit tomorrow’s rhizome to the concept of Jouissance as described by Lacan and Zizek.

Rhizome 4/1/16:

“Anyway, one of the issues I’m starting to take up with Spinoza (which may end up a non-issue (is his emphasis on sad and joyful affects which center around power. But don’t get me wrong: it is a powerful conceptual construct. Basically, the sad affect is that situation in which the given individual (the body (is affected by a body with more power while the joyful affect consists of having the power to affect another body. And it makes perfect sense when you consider the nature of your shitty moments in life (when everything seems to be happening to you (and the good ones in which you seem to have the Midas touch and everything seems to turn to gold. There is no disputing the application of Spinoza’s model….

“The problem for me is that this seems like yet another model built around the notion of “more”….

“That said, and my window closing in, I want to commit tomorrow’s rhizome to the concept of Jouissance as described by Lacan and Zizek.” –from rhizome 3/31/16

Now, of course, a lot of what follows must be attributed to Spinoza’s point in our cultural evolution. And by that criteria he warrants all the accolades he gets while still keeping in mind that the evolution of a culture , by definition, is a process of getting beyond those who have gone before us. It is primarily an issue of a shortcoming in his prescience (even though it was right there for him to recognize –in fact, within the very ecstasy inherent in the concept of the joyful affect (but it is a prescience we could not possibly expect of him given the intellectual technology as it stood in his day.

The main problem I am seeing is that while Spinoza made some revolutionary breaks from the classicist tradition, he still seems beholden to it in his desire to break everything down to first principles. And in doing so, he offers us a model that just seems a little too pat: a simple spectrum between sad and joyful affects that offers a simple way to find ‘the good life’.

What he seems to have failed to get is the complex, subtle, and dynamic interaction of sad and joyful affects that constitute our experience of pleasure as described by Lacan in terms of Jouissance:

(And I apologize to the readers on the Zizek board for explaining what they’re likely all too familiar with.)

We start with the experience of sex. Now if you really think about it, it is, as Lacan describes, an experience of pleasure at a conscious level (empowerment even to put it in Spinoza’s terms (while being an experience of displeasure at a subconscious level. As Lacan defends his point: if you were to cut it off right at the point of climax, the individuals involved would experience displeasure –or blue-balls as we commoners like to call it. But it runs deeper and more subtle than that. Once again: if you really think about it, sex is a process of working one’s way to a threshold that will take them out of place they are really enjoying at the time. It’s like being pulled in two directions at the same time.

Lacan then goes on to reverse this by recognizing that a lot of our hysterical and neurotic tendencies are the result of experiencing displeasure at a conscious level while experiencing pleasure at a subconscious one. And this makes perfect sense since there could be no other reason we would repeat behaviors that give us displeasure. For example, a guy in a relationship finds himself imagining the woman he loves having sex with other men, men he sees as being, in evolutionary terms, superior to him. What he eventually has to admit is that the reason he repeats this behavior is that he is taking pleasure from imagining the pleasure of his lover getting pleasure he feels he cannot give her: yet another repeated pattern based on his feeling of inferiority that he continually indulges in like a neurosis.

And Spinoza may have failed to see this because he didn’t get a lot of sex. But he should have seen it in the pleasure we get from philosophy: the mixed dynamic of pleasure and displeasure that keeps us all coming back for more.

Still, we can fold into this dynamic (the dynamic of Jouissance (the empowerment of joyful affects and the disempowerment of sad affects. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder why Deleuze didn’t take this into consideration. Or did he?

That’s an interesting fallacy, Nicolae. At the same time, it’s a little like the naturalistic fallacy (that which assumes that because something seems more rooted in nature, we are somehow committed to it –a fallacy that Neo-Liberals like to appeal to a lot in acting like Capitalism is some kind of natural force (in that it can basically be considered a sub-category of the appeal to authority. Much as the naturalistic fallacy appeals to the authority of nature, the appeal to purity is equally an appeal to the authority of a the given social group one is attached to. In fact, were we to take a Saussurian paradigmatic approach to it, we could easily exchange the statement:

“No True Scotsman….”

with:

“No Natural Scotsman….”

Both seem to be in complete denial as concerns the purpose of evolution: that of improving on flaws within any given system such as that of nature or being a Scotsman. That said, the image’s explanation of how the tactic works seems legit to me. I can only add to it by pointing out that it basically a variation of a point made by Layotard (via Wittgenstein (in The Postmodern Condition: that too often, in our striving for power, we tend to resort to the tactic of putting more import on controlling the rules of language game at the neglect of content. Marcuse refers to this as operationalism. And nothing, to me, could be more important in understanding the nonsense being thrown at us on a daily basis in the context of our given power structure.

To give an example: when I first started to come on these boards, I found myself, in the wild west of the old Yahoo boards impulsively spouting my semi-Marxist rejection of Bush Jr., confronted with a trained libertarian/neo-liberal economist (Fletch (who, for every point I could make, could beat me down with 10 pieces of data and information. He also came with his personal little cheer-squad: a group of parasitic goons that, in packs, tended to take over boards and turn it into their own little circle jerk. I knew at the time, even though I lacked the time, that for every piece of data he offered there were several others out there that disputed his main agenda. But that didn’t matter to him or his little cheer squad. All that mattered was that I was losing according to the criterion (the rules of the language game (they were imposing on me. And I would point out something I found out after the fact from Thom Hartman about what it was I had confronted: that conservative think tanks and corporations were financing intellectual hit-men to go on message boards and destroy any argument against their power based agenda.

Of course, Fletch’s argument, when I confronted him on it, was that he was just presenting the facts –that is when all he was really presenting was data which is as interesting for the facts it excludes as the ones it includes.

The point is, Nicolae, whether it is an appeal to purity, or nature, or to a data war, it is ultimately an appeal to authority which is always, at bottom, an appeal to authority and the power discourse (think Foucault here (behind it.

PS: thanks for today’s rhizome.