Compassion (as propped up by Sartre’s Vertigo of the Possible and/or Rawl’s original position (is really very simple:
There, but by the grace of God [or fate or whatever you need to call it [go I.
“As the right-wing has clearly demonstrated (that is in their almost religious embrace of producer/consumer Capitalism (there is no reasoning with these people. And this is because their reasoning is subject to their baser impulses. Of course, Germany and every other western industrialized nation has seen the results of that kind of thing. So the main problem lies in America (a comparatively adolescent country (and the cut-throat Capitalism we have managed to shove down the throat of every other country.” –me
“Superficiality is the general characterization of US culture in Europe, especially Germany. This is, because Capitalism is more “pure” as money fetishism is more dominate there!! A bad environment for the deeper thinking required for philosophy!!” –Harald
This, once again, returns to Layotard’s (who, mind you, mainly worked north of America in Canada (concern in the appendix of The Postmodern Condition: the terroristic potential of the accessible and easily communicated. And American culture is saturated with it to an extent that… You see it from the outside and are “in it” to the extent that it is having some very disturbing effects on you via global Capitalism and our military might. But that is nothing like being right in it and actually interacting with the actors involved. I sometimes feel like I’m in the midst of some version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the sense of producer/consumer Capitalism being the lotos in Tennyson’s Land of the Lotos eaters. And the scary thing about this is that this observation could too easily be framed as paranoia and, therefore, irrational.
And it is these kinds of socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues that dominate American culture. For instance, I should assume that producer/consumer Capitalism is working as promised (as the only economic system compatible with democracy and freedom (since we have, along with FOX News, CNN and MSNBC as well as Bill Maher’s Real Time. The problem for me is that I can no more watch CNN and MSNBC than FOX since even they feel candy coated in the way they stay within the perimeters of producer/consumer Capitalism. Even liberalism has been assimilated as Zizek points out.
(And I will have to get to Bill Maher’s role in it in a later post.)
But it gets really scary, Harald (and I mean Brown shirt scary! (when you’re standing in front of a bar and looking at a gas guzzling and CO² pumping 4 by 4 truck with a sticker in the window with the silhouette of a soldier, crouched and gun aimed perfectly horizontal, with the quote:
“If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”
Superficial? You haven’t seen shit my friend. And the scary thing about this is an experience I had at work. As I have pointed out before, I work and am surrounded by a lot of conservative guys (which would be expected in the maintenance field (as well as some who proudly claim to be right-wing. But they’re good people who I have found to be more than their ideologies. But one day I walk into my shop to find this essay pinned up called “Only in America”. And it consisted of a lot of conservative complaints about how America will do things like punishing the rich for working to be rich while rewarding the lazy for not working and a lot of other nonsense like that. Basically, they were whining when the conservative trend, at one time, was to accuse progressives of being whiners.
But even more disconcerting about this is that while, to them, to complain about the state of America is a constitutional right, when a progressive does it, it is a matter of being unpatriotic. Blend that with the phallic obsession of our military might and you get:
“If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”
You know, Juan, when I started my daily process at the “library”, I had intended to apologize since the events of Monday night are often vague and leave me with a kind of reverse Vertigo of the Possible that opens me to the possibility that I was being a bit of an asshole. But then I read what actually happened and realized even though I was “a bit of an asshole”, you were really not as interested in any kind of discourse as you were a pissing contest. Having read your points in a more lucid state of mind, pretty much every sentence you wrote read like a McLachlan approach to philosophy”
“WRONG!!! Laddy daddy da da, DA! DA! DA!”
You were basically heckling me as was evident when you wrote:
“I read what you wrote. And responded based on what you wrote. That´s precisely why I concentrated my response in those parts where I disagreed. Pure and simple. If you don´t agree, discuss what I said, or don´t discuss it.”
To which I ask again:
“And why exactly did you focus on what you disagreed with?”
And while cherry-picking from other people’s post is what we all have to do here, why do you specifically cherry-pick what you can respond negatively to? You even do it within sentences:
“Sure, dude. First you say “sorry, man, I´m drunk”, and then you call me a fucking pussy.”
And I do apologize for calling you a “pussy”. But then you basically engaged in the cheap tactic (cheaper than the “victim” approach (of focusing on the straw man validated by common doxa: both in your reference to my drinking and the fact that you conveniently left out the whole sentence:
“You whine like a fucking pussy with a lot of appeals to common doxa.”
And believe me, I’ve seen a thousand guys (and they are invariably guys (try to pull the same shit as you. But with you it gets especially noxious and contradictory given the main topic at hand here: Deleuze. At one point you say:
“What the fuck? You quoted me in your post, remember? To indicate your disagreement with that quote. So, I responded to that, with my own reading of the situation. That´s “trying to win”? No, that´s debating, giving arguments. Grow up, dude.”
First of all, why exactly do people engage in debates or give arguments if not to win? To basically establish authority and power over the other? But even more contradictory here is that we are talking about Deleuze who, with Guattari, pointed out in What is Philosophy that philosophy has no interest in debates because it has better things to do. As you rightly said:
“It´s not a contest….”
Your right, it’s not. Then why are you acting like it is? Why was it so important to you to invalidate Rorty by completely detaching him from Deleuze’s agenda? I mean I’m perfectly aware that their styles are completely different. But I still argue there is an overlap in the purposes they serve: a desire to break from the classicist criteria that dominated our culture up to the 20th century. I think you are turning Deleuze (and the radical (into some kind of cult. You say, for instance:
“No basement Overmen, just two examples of purely and effective radical new social assemblages: 1) Zapatism, in Chiapas (20 years; more than 3 million people in a radically new type of society), and 2) Rojava, Syria´s Kurdistan: democratic autonomy and confederalism in a creative social approach in the Middle East (and in the Middle of a war with ISIS, the Turkish State, the Syrian State and Western powers), and with support of nearly 40 million kurds.”
First of all, how much effect did the radical etherspeak of Deleuze have on these events? And how do we go from the radical working in what were likely extreme situations to assuming that that the radical is the only response to less extreme ones?
I just think you are taking what is basically a creative pastime way too seriously, Juan. And you are going against a concept embraced by Deleuze and Guattari: the philosopher’s toolbox. To me, philosophical systems are just tools with which we engage with reality. And if you don’t find the tool of Rorty or Pragmatism useful, more power to you, brother. We all gotta find our flow.
To be honest, guys, I’m starting feel to like I’m running out of things to write about –as if I have depleted the reservoir. The upswing though is reflected by Sartre in Nausea:
Today: Nothing: existed.
Those are the kind of days I get more sleep.
*
Still, I have to keep writing as it is the payoff of all the reading I do. But I approach it with a sense of dread as it has become like sex with a hooker or masturbation: an itch that won’t stop till it’s scratched and invariability leads to a feeling of being dirty.
*
“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?
*
“As the right-wing has clearly demonstrated (that is in their almost religious embrace of producer/consumer Capitalism (there is no reasoning with these people. And this is because their reasoning is subject to their baser impulses. Of course, Germany and every other western industrialized nation has seen the results of that kind of thing. So the main problem lies in America (a comparatively adolescent country (and the cut-throat Capitalism we have managed to shove down the throat of every other country.” –me
“Superficiality is the general characterization of US culture in Europe, especially Germany. This is, because Capitalism is more “pure” as money fetishism is more dominate there!! A bad environment for the deeper thinking required for philosophy!!”- Harald Helmut Wenk
Something I didn’t get to in the previous response to this was my understanding of “superficiality” as America’s (especially as concerns the rightwing element (deficiency in critical thinking: that which can be described as a willingness to push (via the tools of logic and reason and whatever other tools are available: anecdotal, instinct, subjective experience, etc. etc. (beyond one’s present understanding. I, of course, have done a lot of harping on terms like “reason”, “logic”, “objectivity”, or “the scientific method” because I have mainly seen them used as badges of authority which allows the individual to flash them and demean the other despite the lack of real proof on their part. Such terms basically appeal to socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues while failing to satisfy the criteria of critical thinking by putting more emphasis on the tools than the agenda: understanding. Such terms are too often used in support of the status quo.
*
This is what it always is: the ability to approach a blank space and fill it with something: words, images, sounds, something, anything….
HI, AGAIN. Marchel Duchamp filled an aesthetic role and the new age philosophers filled that role. Aesthetics usually predatem philosophy, so the question can not be asked, whether one can fill the shoes of another. That is mynonly comment onthe above, before dwelling intothe implications You have noted, d63
In Nude Descending the Staircase, we get a sense of disintegration, it seems, he is describing, not changing a situation, he is not dogmatically disintegrating the meaning of form, as is American artificiality seems to. I wonder to what degree the correlation is appropriate, though, and whether, American capital is oppressive to the degree, to make the decline of European culture unavoidable. that there is a sense of that, is certain, but as in all relationships, the weighingnofmalternatives is balanced in Europe, between those of the East, in political as well as economic terms, and the West. there is no doubt as to the rise of the East, especially if calculations bear out the rapid rise of China, overcoming both the EU and the USA economies in another few years. Which leaves the old European archaic cultures voulnerable to the Estern influence, in regard to immigration, cultural exchange, etc, to the degree, where, the Us influence, lessening in this balance. this balancing act, unfortunately is essential to the future economic development of EU, as the politically motivated moves bear out.
Philosophy, and aesthetics go by the wayside, as seminal, germinating dynamic qualities, which are beginning to be used for other then root cultural reasons. The modern world is based on newly emerging assimilation of artificiality based on perceptions of perceptions of conglomerate views, and the holders and movers of large Capital accumulation base their moves on techno calculated printouts on a daily basis. that influences character assessment as well. Across the board, and referring to the Nude Descending the Stairs, is pointing to a very early me infestation of awareness of this then, newly approaching process. This is not a singular man who thinks out such a program, where this trend began, was more intuitive-artistic, and the philosophers could only try to economize the situation, as did Marx, who as can be seen , failed, at a terrific cost, both in economic and human terms.
The latest is a reversal of the Marxian dictum, that those who change philosophy matter, not those who interpret it, it’s the differance that is prevalent in Your own views, the reversal of the very logic of being able to identify the modus operandi, rather, to differentiate and try to eliminate the least likely of the options. The ontologic suffers at the hands of the ontic, we arrive into area of pseudo logic by way of the tier of economic reality facing the world, specifically EU.
I’m not of the belief that writing for the sake of writing is a good thing
Your first post mentioned it being okay to mumble. Do you like when people mumble? Do you like when people ramble?
You are your own witness, and I don’t think you should aim to annoy yourself
Has anyone noticed how Republican’s tend to resent the wealth of celebrities who espouse leftist ideologies while overlooking the wealth of corporate CEOs: that which is actually effecting their lives.
*
“I as a writer definitely procrastinate when it comes to writing. The ideas for the story come so quickly yet the work involved in developing the story is so mundane. Usually I can rectify this by writing with different color pens on different colored paper.
Still, I fall into the mundane quickly. I push myself to research things relevant to the story only to find myself down the rabbit hole of websites that get further away from my initial search finally landing on Facebook.
I think my will power is fleeting when it comes to buckling down and pursuing the passions that would allow me relief from the mundaneness of working for other people. Well that coupled with a minor fear of success and performance anxiety to outdo the book I haven’t written yet.” –Elizibeth
Feel your pain, Elizabeth.It’s not just the tedium that writing can sometimes involve. It’s the fear and dread that comes down to facing the blank page and not knowing whether you’ll be able to fill it with anything meaningful. Therein, lies the value of free writing with no expectations about the quality. This why it is best not to dwell on the book you haven’t written yet, and focus more on breaking that book down to easily managed projects -once again: Hemingway’s 500 words a day.
The other really good advice I got on the matter was from a book about making art. It was critiquing the various myths about art. And the one that really struck me was the myth of art being a mystical activity. At first, this took the fun out of it. But then I realized that looking at art (or any creative act (as a mystical activity can only stifle an artist (especially a young one (since it could leave them with the idea that the only time they should be writing is when they happen to be inspired. And how does one develop the craft of writing doing that? You have to look at it as an act similar to a cabinet maker: an activity that one engages in (inspired or not (because it is what they do. As Picasso said: taste is the enemy of art.
(On a side note: Picasso was an artist and likely not one to haggle too much on the terminology he was using. For instance, he might have recognized that Art is actually a matter of taste since it is the social expression of the creative act subject to public scrutiny. The creative act is the private activity: that which sustains itself through a sense of Play. Art is the public discourse it hopefully evolves into. Therefore, I would (for our purposes (revise his statement to taste is the enemy of the creative act. (
That said, Picasso’s point becomes a two edged sword for us on the boards. We have to be wary here of the instant gratification of instant publication when what we are mainly doing here is the equivalent of the sketches and studies (a form of Play (of an artist working towards a finished piece they hang in a gallery. This is basically a workshop as compared to a platform. And that really becomes a problem when you find out that the more finished piece you developed online is not publishable because most magazines want their content to be seen for the first time. Poetry magazine, for instance, explicitly asks you to confirm that you haven’t published online when you submit.
Still, the draw of it is hard to get beyond. I can hardly write anything without seeing what it looks like on a message board. But I’ve been thinking about putting my vice to work for me and create a completely private board that no one can read but who I invite: those who are interested in developing their private projects. A workshop in the rhizome cafe if you will.
Good luck with your process, unsuper.
“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.
Just off the cuff, where did You live in La In the eighties, we may have crossed paths…Maybe we even met, who knows, where did you hang out, etc. this is a surprise
I lived in LA from 80 to 84 -actually in suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley: Industry to be more precise. Pretty much hung out all over the place. Went to Papillions a lot. Was actually born there and moved to the midwest at 7. Mom used to take us on rides on the weekends throughout LA and Hollywood in the 60’s. No doubt, that had a tremendous impact on me.
Looking at your posts. Will try to get to them tomorrow.
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.
“It [Capitalism] wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty….
“Cutthroat competition between nations has deadlocked U.N. climate negotiations for decades: rich countries dig in their heels and declare that they won’t cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in the global hierarchy; poorer countries declare that they won’t give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all.” -Klein, Naomi (2014-09-16). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
We can see here the diabolical manner in which Capitalism has assimilated the prisoner’s dilemma –especially as concerns global Capitalism. It’s become a situation in which no one can make a move against it since Capitalism always has the option of moving somewhere else. We can see this (as Klein points out (in the way our free trade deals have allowed corporations to elude carbon control measures by moving their operations to regulation-free environments –and this is likely due to threats to politicians of shutting down operations in their respective countries and thereby destroying their economies. Of course, we could just burn or renegotiate those agreements. But then all the corporations would do is turn to the one or two countries that promised to do otherwise.
It has come to a point where either everyone (every country (has to create policies against the excesses of Capitalism together, or end up being suicidal in implementing such policies. This becomes especially acute in the United States in which each individual state has a lot of room to determine their own tax rates. This is why, for instance, while everyone knows that the only solution to our financial problems (in every country (is a progressive tax rate, no one social body can do it alone because it would only lead to corporations pulling up stakes and turning to environments that were more conducive to their demands. The same goes for such protectionist measures as tariffs. I mean it: every progressive policy I can think of (when I follow it through (only ends up in Capitalism striking back.
So it’s easy to see why so many of us would take the defeatist attitude of if you can’t beat it, work with it. On the uptick though, we finally have the clarity of recognizing that it is no longer a matter of an “emerging” oligarchy/aristocracy or an “inverse totalitarianism”. We just are under one while being too distracted by the Orwellian vision to see it. We work under the assumption that since this looks nothing like 1984, we must be safe. Yet we stand by and watch as global entities, that are beholden to no one state, dismantle our Democracies. We stand by and watch as America (propped up by a military power that is equal to the rest of the world (spreads its poison.
Take, for instance, Obama’s recent opening up of relationships with Cuba: an important and noble move on his part as far as I’m concerned. But in a recent episode of To the Best of our Knowledge “Inside Cuba” (ttbook.org/book/radio?page=8 (an issue came up that concerns me as well as the Cubans. As one interviewee brought up, they did not want to suddenly see McDonalds popping up all over the place. But their bigger concern was losing their access to healthcare for the sake of a more American style of healthcare policy.
And my advice to the Cubans is to be afraid. I mean BE VERY AFRAID!!! I can easily see advisors coming down there like horny young men trying to get a piece of tail and promising them everything. Of course it will start with something small that will work well for the Cubans. But it will only be a matter of time before they end up with a shit system like America’s that pays 3 times more per Capita than the Canadians while getting statistically lesser results and allows 45,000 people to die each year from lack of access.
It will be interesting to see what happens. And I really hope the Cubans reject it.
“This book is about those radical changes on the social side, as well as on the political, economic, and cultural sides. What concerns me is less the mechanics of the transition— the shift from brown to green energy, from sole-rider cars to mass transit, from sprawling exurbs to dense and walkable cities— than the power and ideological roadblocks that have so far prevented any of these long understood solutions from taking hold on anything close to the scale required.” -Klein, Naomi (2014-09-16). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (pp. 24-25). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
This addresses one of main points I failed to get to in yesterday’s post: that it’s not just a matter of changing our political or economic system, it’s a matter of changing sensibility, of addressing issues that simply cannot be legislated except through Orwellian methods that have been shown time and time again to fail. And this is what philosophy (as well as art (is best equipped to do.
But I’m not just talking about philosophy here. I’m mainly thinking of philosophy of the continental kind, that which leans towards a more poetic approach such as that of Rorty’s, or of Deleuze’s or Derrida. Certainly, the more analytic/scientific approaches of such thinkers as Dennett, Searle, Pinker, or Dawkin’s have a role to play. But their primary focus is on changes in the body of knowledge the reader gets from them. The literary/continental approach, on the other hands, drives mainly towards changing the sensibility of the reader: of offering a different perspective from which the reader can derive their own way of engaging the world (their reality (that is influenced by the writer.
For instance, if we read a continental writer like Baudrillard too literally, we might recognize that, at some point or other, the entity he describes, the Simulacrum, does not exist in any tangible sense. Still, if we engage in the suspension of disbelief required for the enjoyment of literature, we change in terms of sensibility which leads to a change in understanding. We begin to recognize the way corporate owned media makes this all seem like something it is not. We begin to see how the world we see in TV ads (or even movies and TV series (the shadows on the cave wall in which everyone lives in this age of joy based on consumer/producer Capitalism (that is despite their resonance and seduction (is not our world. In other words: our sensibility is changed and we begin to feel the very alienation that Marx described in a very postmodern way.
And I would note here, Deleuze and Guattarri’s dismay in What is Philosophy about how marketers are out to steal the role of creating concepts. But for the marketers, it is more about controlling sensibility as compared to influencing it.
To give you a more concrete example of what I am on about, consider the American mythology concerning home ownership. It is this very mythology that has led to urban and suburban sprawl that has led to the mythology of car ownership (as compared to public transport (that, in turn, has contributed greatly to manmade climate change; that is when what we should be doing is concentrating our space of habitation and employment (thereby leaving more room for trees which convert CO² into oxygen. We have to ask ourselves if owning a home or a car is really that important when (given the maintenance they require (we could be focusing our energy on finding our higher selves: something we could as easily do in an apartment within walking distance of our place of employ? We have to ask ourselves if it is really worth it.
And given that what we are mainly up against here is a mythology, wouldn’t the best route for us be fighting fire with fire: of pitting our mythologies (our resonance and seduction (against the mythologies of producer/consumer Capitalism: their (the marketers (resonance and seduction?
“ 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.
Anyway:
I love what I’m doing. I’m just not sure it loves me back.
*
Was listening to a To the Best of Our Knowledge episode about David Foster Wallace (ttbook.org/book/remembering- … er-wallace (which was really quite moving. And I suppose what made it so moving is that the main reason for doing it was a movie coming out, End of the Tour, with Jason Segal as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as his interviewer, David Lipsky. I first set aside that I really like Eisenberg’s work then point out that the main source of my response to it was listening to Wallace in an interview and recognizing what a good choice Segal was to play him: that same soft voice as well as a compassionate and humorous personality. Everything Wallace said sounded like something Segal could possibly say. It is definitely a movie I am committed to checking out as well as Wallace’s books.
*
The primary trait of the so-called “independent thinker” is their tendency to talk about being one rather than just being one. But when we look at our cultural history, we find that those whom we have deemed to be independent thinkers (those who have changed the way we think (are those who have the humility to admit that they are (or were (who they are because of those great thinkers they have absorbed. It’s pretty much like the term “genius”: one best left to historians.
This claim to being an “independent thinker” (an appeal to a socially programmed response to a socially programmed cue (becomes especially odious in the political sphere. I mean it is uncanny how, in America, we watch the same cycles occur in politics –that is while media sits around and comments on it like some kind of sporting event. We get a democrat like Clinton in only to see, in the next senate and congressional election, him faced with a republican dominated hill. And the same happened with Jr. and Obama. We have to wonder if the powers that be (the aristocracy/oligarchy of global Capitalism (are not instituting an Orwellian staged event in which government is proved to be so ineffective that we must turn to corporations for leadership.
Of course the excuse for these regular shifts we are given (via media (is the so-called independent. But in terms of politics, what the fuck does it mean to be an “independent”? You don’t know what policies you support? Are you unclear about the distinction between the democratic and republican platforms? What? If there are such people, they’re little more than pretentious morons playing on socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues to make themselves feel like they’re “above the common fray". Either that or they’re basing their choices on the personality of the politician: their media friendly qualities -which puts them decidedly among the common fray.
Nothing illustrates this better than an interview on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in which Bill O’Reilly claimed that he hadn’t decided between Obama and McCain. Really? Now how many of you really think O’Reilly voted (or might have voted (for Obama.
The claim to be an “independent thinker” is a pretense: little more.
Actually Greg, I think I’ll follow this rhizome for today:
“I think it would be kind of hard not to take Christianity serious since it lies at the roots of and is all over our present culture. Not to understand it (or take it seriously (would be a serious gap in any attempt to understand the human condition“,said I.
“Or at the very least the Western tradition. Yet it is shocking to me how many do actually dismiss it or account for it as simply expressing the core of ‘what is wrong’ with the West. But it ain’t that simple!
In fact that obscene desire for simplicity not only accounts for the present “politics as circus” we see in our Republican primary, but in the signal misunderstandings of Liberal politics,” said Greg.
“While I do admire people like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkin’s, I agree their dismissal of Christianity over-simplifies in ways that are no better than the oversimplifications of the right.”
It’s as if what the left is reacting to, in a knee-jerk kind of way, is the knee-jerk interpretations of the right. It fails to understand that what the right is doing with Christianity has less to do with Christianity and more with a rationalization of personal interest. In other words, both the left and the right are basically caught in a conflict based on misinterpretation.
For instance, the left will point to quotes in the bible that explicitly deride homosexuality as a sin as concerns gay marriage. But this, to me, suggests a kind of hypocrisy since it is the left that delegates the bible to literature –which I personally believe is the right way to see it. And it assumes that the only reason that rightwing Christians are so resistant to gay marriage is because of these passages. Hence: their wholesale rejection of Christianity.
But we all know this is nonsense. What the rightwing rejection of gay marriage comes down to is a personal aversion to homosexuality (the sense that it is just weird (and the quotes from the bible are little more than rationalization for what they would have felt without those quotes. And the left assuming that bible is just literature should have pointed them to this dynamic. For instance, should I, having read Crime and Punishment, kill someone just to see what the experience was like, be able to blame it on having read that book? And why wouldn’t we give the same consideration to Christianity?
Ideologies do nothing; people, on the other hand, do.
And we can see the same dynamic at work in a point made in Trey Parkers and Matt Stones series Little Bush in which Bush Sr. explains to Little Bush that it is our God given right to exploit and use up our natural resources until Jesus comes and takes us up in the Rapture. And the left, having determined the bible to be literature, should be able to see this as a one-sided and self serving interpretation of the bible (not some inherent quality of Christianity (as having neglected the part that said we are keepers of the earth. And we can see this understanding at work in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
The problem for the atheist left is that we run into a contradiction when we refer to the bible as literature then act like that piece of literature has any kind of absolute hold on the Christian –that is anymore than any other work of literature might have. Doing so, we fail to distinguish between what Christians do and the inherent nature of Christianity.
And in doing so, we fail to recognize what may be the very element we will need to deal with our present circumstance. We, right now, are (via global Capitalism and the climate change it is creating (facing the new Rome: the Beast if there ever could be one. And who would be better equipped to save us but some Christ-like figure? Someone who truly understood the revolutionary nature of Christ?
?: how does the secular left hate religion and claim privilege over the hateful aspects of religion, especially when our biggest worry should be the secular right: the libertarians…
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.
“Trotsky said that revolutions only happen when there is no other choice. I take this to mean they are forced upon us. I’m still holding out for a “revolution of the mind” of course! There is the idea that despite the nasty corporate stuff, rising living standards have kept populations happy enough to put up with the status quo. It’s called compromise equilibrium.” –Chris
First of all, Chris, I apologize for posting what we already know: mainly your quote. But I started out to write a simple response to your point, and it all went crazy on me with all these spontaneous rhizomatic connections. I had to go from just posting a response to writing my rhizome for the day. I would also apologize to the board if I seem to be wondering too far off the topic of pragmatism. I had to post this here since this is where the discourse originated.
But yeah, the subtle forms of oppression that Capitalism utilizes seem to be its most powerful weapons. It is not uncommon to hear an argument that amounts to: sure things suck; but it could worse: we could live in a third world country. What this argument basically breaks down to is:
Since things could always be worse, why even ask how we could make them better?
Sound very rational to you? Yet, as you suggest, this is exactly what has kept us beholden to Capitalism. It’s a little like being with a beautiful woman who will give you just enough to keep you hanging around while never allowing you to feel secure about anything. The thing is it is this dynamic that defines abusive relationships. And this is the epiphany (the rhizomatic connection to an old riff (that which can only result from the roll of the dice or chancing to put it in Deleuze’s terms (that has forced me (against my will even (to turn this into a rhizome.
If we look at abusive relationships and the question of why individuals keep going back to them, we find that it is always a matter of a honeymoon in which the individual experiences pleasure beyond anything they have before, then a gradual degradation in to cycles of abuse and pleasure –that is with the cycles of pleasure growing smaller and smaller while the cycles of abuse grow longer and more intense. It is never a matter of constant abuse. That would only end the abuser’s reign too quick. Rather it is a matter of pushing the other to their breaking point then giving them just enough pleasure to keep them coming back. This cycle is well known in cases of domestic abuse.
But we can see the same dynamic at work in drug or alcohol abuse. The individual starts off with experiences that are like being on top of the world. But as those experiences become less frequent and the negative experiences become more pronounced, the good experiences in between begin to feel, in comparison, good enough to keep coming back. Of course, this is a physiological as well as mental phenomenon, therefore, more obvious. But we can take the dynamic deeper into what seems to be purely a mental one: the gambling addict. In this case, it is all about the run: that experience of being able to do no wrong, that of being a top player with all the attention and benefits that come from it. It’s why gamblers, when they are winning, will often buy the house a round or tip high. This is what drives gamblers to keep gambling even when their luck is shit. What you will notice about them is that is not so much a matter of coming out ahead in the long run. They rarely ever do. It is strictly about the run and that hope that they will hit the big one.
And in that sense, we can see the same dynamic at work with Capitalism. You have to remember that we did have a honeymoon period with it as it drove up the standard of living that culminated in the post WW2 economy that, ironically, was based on Keynesian economic theory. Unfortunately, the biggest addicts among us, the rich, co-opted the atrocities of the misguided uses of Marxism and communism and the cold war that resulted to establish a cultural environment in which they always got theirs first. And all they have left us with is the methadone of possibility. And this is what Capitalism sells best. I mean: who wants to be a millionaire? What exactly is reality TV selling but the possibility that your mundane life could be worth millions?
So you have every reason to hold out for a “revolution of the mind” –the very only thing that can save any addict. As any A.A. or twelve step member will tell you: until you do, nothing you do will do any good.
On the uptick though, we have to look at the significance of Bernie Sanders getting where he has. Although I have doubts about the practicality of his getting the nomination (that is though I am philosophically aligned with him as a social democrat and the belief that the only solution is an expansion of the public economy (I still take comfort from the fact that he has gotten this far while openly stating that he is a socialist. What this means to me is that the cold war tactic of saying the word “socialism” no longer necessarily follows with psycho-shrieks. America is finally growing up as for some time now, we have been the last western industrialized nation where that could happen. And this, I believe, is important to other western industrialized since it is America who has shoved our form of cut-throat Capitalism down everyone else’s throats. As I see it, until America (militarily the most powerful nation the world (gets its shit together: grows out of the adolescent phase it is in, we’re all fucked.