Public Journal:

Once again, I apologize to Nicolae for bogging his string down with one of my rhizomes. But points have come up in my reading of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that apply to yesterday’s rhizome as well as the original question:

“Can philosophy have any rules?”

“The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 63-64). Kindle Edition.

And I think this has application to Nicolae and Tom’s proposal that it should be about social justice as well as my proposal concerning the import of Play. Basically, Rorty starts the book by pointing towards the historical conflict between private and public approaches towards philosophy and culture in general: the private being about self creation and the public being about social justice, both of which must use language games that are incommensurable. And his solution is to simply accept the incommensurability while looking at the various language games as tools designed for various tasks:

“This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.” –Ibid (different page….

And we can apply the distinction to the revised model I offered yesterday:

Private <--------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Public
Metaphysics/Ontology<>Epistemology/Logic<>Ethics/Aesthetics<>Social/Political

And when I talk about Play, what I’m mainly talking about lies at the Private side of the spectrum. Of course, my critics would be perfectly within their right in noting the bourgeoisie nature of Play given the esoteric relation the private has with Metaphysics: that which seems to work in the ivory tower of the academic/gods eye perspective and which would seem opposed to the informal data of the personal/anecdotal. I could hardly not begrudge a Habermas their resistance to my position on Play.

What I would argue in my defense, though, is that we are an evolving species and that Play plays an important role in that process. Once again: we started as simple organisms with scattered nervous systems that coalesced into central nervous systems that developed a bud that budded into the very brain that allows us to do what we are doing here. In that process, we started with a competitive mode that worked from immediate self interest to a cooperative mode in which we began to see it in our interest to look out for the interest of others. But the cooperative mode did not displace the competitive one; it developed alongside the fading usefulness of it in the face of the negative consequences it created. Think here of Global Capitalism and man-made climate change.

It is in this need to facilitate the evolutionary gravitation from the competitive to the cooperative that I see the value of Play along with the more public uses of philosophy. Think, for instance, of the Play involved in our dreams. Our brain basically engages in a kind of inventory turned into bricolage. It randomly forms hybrids of various memories until those hybrids result in something new, forms patterns that seduces it and that it stores in order to repeat them in different ways. And let us note here the scientifically backed theory concerning the role that dreams play in brain plasticity.

So it seems no wonder that philosophers like Rorty and Deleuze would emphasize the philosophical import of the arts (a form of public dreaming/Play (like they do: to facilitate and accelerate our evolution as a species for the sake of saving our species.

Contrary to previous issues I may have had with Rorty (the suggestion that it was the equivalent of going back to Ginsberg’s Howl in poetry (I find myself fumbling around at the edges of my comfort zone in his Essays on Heidegger and Others. The main thing to put in mind here is that these quotes are from the essay in which Rorty attempts to pinpoint the pragmatic aspect of Heidegger while Heidegger, himself, attempted to distance himself from pragmatism. At the same time, it has given me a glance into the deeper implications of pragmatism.

"We change them [the Kantian categories] (as, for example, we changed from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian understanding of space and time) whenever such a change enables us better to fulfill our desires by making things more readily manipulitable.

Once we take this final step, once human desires are admitted into the criterion of “truth”, the last remnants of the Platonic idea of knowledge as contact with an underlying nonhuman order disappear. We have become pragmatists."

Starting with the simple implications at work here, I would first note the suggestion that the revolutionary aspect of pragmatism lies in its willingness to accept the role that desire (what I like to call resonance and seduction (plays in our philosophical assertions: the fact (and may the wrath of Strunk rest in its grave (that, contrary to the highest hopes of scientism and the analytics, there is simply no way around it. The nuance and subtlety of it lies in connecting this with the recognition that language is not just a signifier/signified relationship, but more so (that is if we look at it in evolutionary terms (an act we engage in with other members of our species in order to achieve certain effects. And in this sense of it we can see the pragmatic overlap between Rorty’s pragmatism and the pragmatism of Deleuze.

At the same time, I would point out Rorty’s distance from Heidegger (that is as I understand it (in that Heidegger took this model as a kind of unavoidable downward escalator from Plato to Pragmatism. Heidegger saw it as a degradation to the technological frame of mind: that which saw everything around it as something to be utilized. Heidegger opposed to this technological frame of mind the import of Being. This is why he emphasized the import of the poetic approach to philosophy. The problem was, out of his ambition to touch history, he turned the poetic approach into a kind of mystical and esoteric hierarchy in which he would serve as the high priest.

In order to appreciate this, we only need look at the uses that such French writers like Deleuze, Foucault, and Lacan put obscurity in exposition to as compared to that of Heidegger’s. For the French, it was basically a matter of writing in the language they were comfortable in based on their own processes in the hope that their readers would extract (steal even (for the sake of what they could use for their own processes. As Barthes put it: writerly text. This would be the democratic approach. Heidegger, however, was more authoritarian and hierarchal in that he saw his obscure exposition as something you had to study hard in order to reach the level he was at. In other words: he clearly had a guru complex –much like Manson and Hitler did. This would be the authoritarian approach. And as Rorty described Heidegger: a swharzhaug hick.

And he should have known better as Rorty points out describing Heidegger:

“That is to say: Being, which Plato thought of as something larger and stronger than us, is there only as long as as we are here. The relation between it and us are not power relations.”

In other words, we cannot, as Heidegger recognized, separate our being from Being. Still, Heidegger, out of a mystical ambition, attempted to achieve guru status by recognizing it when, in fact, all talk of Being is little more than an act we engage in order to achieve a given end: guru status in the case of Heidegger.

I hope I haven’t totally fucked this up.

“To say that it [literature] is more fruitful is just to say that, when you weigh the good and the bad the social novelists have done against the good and bad the social theorists have done, you find yourself wishing that there had been more novels and less theory.” –from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others

I would first offer one criticism before I throw myself in with Rorty. This isn’t totally fair in that it seems to be the theory itself that caused the problems. But as I like to say: ideology (therefore theory (does nothing; people, on the other hand, do. And we can assume here that he is mainly reacting to what happened in communist countries under the banner of Marx. But the atrocities committed were not the result of theory itself. They were, rather, the result of baser impulses reading what they wanted into theory and using that to do what they would have naturally done without the theory. This is the result of trickle-down nature of theory –that which always involves misinterpretation. For instance, Marxism did not exterminate 6 million plus people. (Marx would have been appalled.) Stalin did. And I would note this for all the American Republicans that happen to read this. When the Russian people voted in Stalin to bring in the communist revolution, they did so for very same reason that many Americans vote in Republicans: he seemed, being an ex-military man, like the tight-fisted can-do kind of guy that could get the job done.

That said, I tend to agree with Rortys nominalist sentiment here in that, first of all, literature (as well as cinema (does tend to have more effect on the general population for the very reason he describes: it gives us an opportunity to get into the lives of people unlike us; it allows for empathy which, to me, is the only moral or ethical code we need work by. But more importantly, to me at least, it confronts the issue of theoretical inertia: the tendency of a body to resist a change in motion. This involves static inertia (a body standing still (or dynamic: a body in motion. And from a nominalist perspective we have to work in between the two as concerns social and political policy. On one hand, we have theoretical laziness (static inertia (which we can see in Stalin and Trump and his followers. On the other, we have theoretical overreach (such as can sometimes be seen in Zizek and extreme leftist interpretations in which the eight-ball being black takes on sinister connotations (I actually heard this theory posed (that have no practical application to the problems at hand. Now granted: we need people to think a little more. This is pointed out in American talk shows in which people are offered questions about actual facts (geographical, political as concerns our system (and get them wrong; or, in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, asked to comment on false information to which the respondents act as if they are true. But I personally don’t need every worker in the world to read Das Kapital in order to know they are being exploited.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the conceptual play of theory. It’s what we turn to philosophy for. Our poetry. But when it comes to social and political policies, we need to set our esoteric egos aside, give up the ether-speak, and start speaking clearly in terms of real world solutions to real world problems. We simply cannot expect everyone to rise to the level of philosophical discourse. Therefore, it is up to us to disseminate it. It’s what we’re made to do.

Some thoughts on Homophobia and Prison Sex from the Perspective of a Heterosexual Male:

We can, first of all (and from the feel of it: the hysteria involved, assume that it is a form of neurosis in a very Freudian sense. As I often like to joke: it always feels like someone so busy trying to convince everyone else that they’re not gay that you’re never really sure they have convinced their selves.
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Whenever confronted with it (homophobia in men, I’m always tempted to ask them to engage in a thought experiment:

If you were trapped on a desert island and knew there was no one around to witness anything you do and were physically capable, wouldn’t you at least be tempted to give yourself oral sex –that is assuming that you are either part of the 90% of males that admit to masturbation or the 5% who are liars.

(And I would digress here into Kant’s argument that masturbation is a greater evil than suicide. This assertion, of course, was likely the result of his neo-classicism (his rather sterile style (rooted in his likely genetically determined a-sexuality. It was not a product of will as he would prop his categorical imperative up on.)

Of course a lot of men, especially of the less enlightened kind, would break into a frenzy of denial because they would assume that I was asking them to admit they were, in some subconscious capacity, gay. But I wouldn’t. I would argue that actually doing so would be little more than a more pleasant form of masturbation. It would basically be prison sex. And there is a difference.

The point is that while heterosexual males tend to do a lot of giddy squirming around about sex between two men, they are completely oblivious to what the real problem is for them: the tender acts of love, the soft touches, the caressing, and pillow talk that they succumb to with women. This is why a lot of those same men will claim to be turned on when two women engage in such behavior. It just seems more natural. And when they claim to be offended by that, it will generally be because they don’t like the idea of losing a potential sex partner.

The neurotic aspect of it lies in the fact that those same type of men are prone to engaging in the same type of tender behaviors when it comes to their newborn sons or in scenarios of war.
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Getting back to point I previously made:

“As I often like to joke: it always feels like someone so busy trying to convince everyone else that they’re not gay that you’re never really sure they have convinced their selves. “

:we can see the neurosis at work by comparing two movies that addressed the issue: American Beauty and Bully. In American Beauty, the homophobic neo-Nazi neighbor (played by Chris Cooper (ended up attempting to kiss Kevin Spacy’s character. And as much as I liked the movie, this scene came off as a little heavy handed. The far more subtle and effective portrayal of it came in Bully in which the bully (played by Nick Stahl –in an excellent performance (took a lot of pleasure in forcing his friend to perform in gay clubs and videoing gay men while having no problem with raping women. He, for instance, shows the videos of gay men to a friend and laughs about it as if to say (given his obvious psychopathy (I dare you to call me a queer. His character basically struggled to make it seem like prison sex (it was about power after all (while showing signs of OCD, as well as conflict, in the obsessive way in which he washed his hands.

“Marx’s theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself. Harold Rosenberg illuminates this point in some fine actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past. In this sense, history is theater: ‘their action became a spontaneous repetition of an old role… It is the revolutionary crisis, the compelled striving for “something entirely new”, that causes history to become veiled in myth…’” – from Gille Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

I first note here how Deleuze is at his most accessible when he works in the domain (that is in terms of the philosophical spectrum (of the social/political. And as I have pointed out, he seems to have worked from the more superficial of the social/political to the more metaphysical/ontological (that is via the epistemological/logical (which, as I see it, gives license to work in a similar manner as concerns Difference and Repetition.

That said, and at the risk of taking this off topic (that is as concerns Deleuze (and bogging it down in the more superficial: the social/political, I would like to focus this on the phenomenon of Trump in America.

As I have said before, while rock stars seem to have Anti-Christ complexes, demagogues tend to have Christ complexes. And to give you a sense of what I’m getting at, I would point to the semiology of the concert. A rock star (that is when they have reached rock star status (will give a show that involves a lot of pretty and expensive toys. It is as if they are saying: look at my toys, look at my power. At the same time, given the negative associations attributed to rock stars (the idea that they may be worshipping the devil (there is always room for question. And it is always as if they are asking you to question it: that antichrist aura they take on.

Now compare that to country music which uses the same technology. Same message: look at my toys; look at my power. But in this case you’re expected to look at it as the American Dream fulfilled. And should you question it (much as the Dixie Chicks did (you will be rejected from the in-crowd.

Trump, of course, fancies his self a rock star. He is the guy shooting straight from the hip and to which everyone is listening –by which I mean his fans: likely a lot of displaced tea partiers. But his main appeal is that of a beer table demagogue: the loud mouth at a bar table telling everyone what he would do if he had (like a corporate CEO (control of the country. Of course, fancy is, at this point, already playing a role. But where the Christ-complex comes in to it is in him thinking he has broken through the veil of deception and having seen the simple answer to everything. And this is common among republicans. I mean what was Bush Jr. but a frat boy with a Christ complex: he thought he was going to save the world from the evil of the middle east and Islamic radicalism. But in Trumps case, the evil he is going to save us from is immigration. He thinks of himself as a kind of revolution. But:

“According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short -that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation.”

Trump is basically in the same Land of the Lotos Eaters as his followers. He avoids (a kind of denial (the real issue at work in the world: the fact that you cannot have a handful of people feasting at the table and expecting everyone else to fight for the crumbs and not expect the problems we are having. He, basically, offers more of the same –as most republicans do. And, granted, Hillary is also in the land of lotus eaters. But of the two, who are you more likely to change their way of thinking: Trump who is so immersed in Capitalism as to not be able to see beyond it; or Hillary who actually tried to create a healthcare system that acted outside of Capitalism?

I would first point out a point made in D&G’s A thousand Plateaus (or was it Anti-Oedipus?(:

A book does not mirror the world. It forms a rhizome with it.
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In my present immersion in Gille Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition which has been a process of bouncing between not only Deleuze’s book, but Joe Hughes and James Williams’ reader guides as well, I am starting to see (or crystallize (two distinct takes on the book. It’s like what I have described before: several writers describing different books under the same title.

Hughes’ book seems to focus on the doctrine of the faculties: Deleuze via Kant’s description of how we move from immediate experience to thought: the genesis of understanding. Williams, on the other the other hand (and this is the most telling), seems to be looking backwards from Logic of Sense. His main focus seems to be on the interaction of series, events, and individuation (that founded on chancing. This, in turn, leads me to believe that Hughes, as well, cannot offer a PURE interpretation of Difference and Repetition: that is pure of the other books that Hughes has read and the concepts from them that attach their selves to his interpretation.

And Deleuze, himself, has referred to the deferred systems of meaning involved with any given system as well as infinite regress. And I’m guessing this is exactly the dynamic that Deleuze hoped to spread. He, having never been certain or clear on what it was he was approaching (that is given the evanescent nature of it), wanted to disseminate that experience of uncertainty: that experience of being almost there while never truly having it: like that French Mademoiselle who seems to be within your reach yet pulls away when you try to approach her. Think Kafka chick here.
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The main point here is that if anyone is to hope to get a taste of understanding as concerns Difference and Repetition, it must, by its very nature, require an acquaintance with other books Deleuze has written as well as books written about him AND books written by those who influenced him. It is as if he is inviting us to look for the overlaps (the individuations (that occur between the series and events attached to Difference and Repetition. Once again:

A book does not mirror the world. It forms a rhizome with it.

“In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan elaborates the distinction between two types of contemporary intellectual, the fool and the knave….

….In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the left on account of its ‘utopian’ plans; which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publically displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech.” –From Slavoj Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies

Now as most of us of the boards (those of the intellectually and creatively curious kind (know, a philosophy is only as useful to us as it is useful to us: in other words, it only works to the extent that we can apply it to our everyday reality at whatever level of advancement that happens to be at. And this is one of those instances in which Zizek is exceptional in fulfilling that criterion –especially as concerns the type of dynamics and M.O.’s (methods of operation (we see on the boards .But I would start by first pointing to the two jokes that Zizek uses as analogical to the two dynamics.

That of the fool is about two peasants, a husband and wife, walking along a dirt road when they encounter a tarter. The tarter tells the husband he is going to rape his wife while the husband, at the threat of death, will hold his balls so that they don’t get dirty. After the tarter does what he said he would, and rides away, the husband laughs. The wife, indignant, asks how he could laugh when she had just been raped, to which the husband responds that he let the tartar’s balls drag in the dirt.

That of the knave is about a man who goes to a bar and has a monkey that keeps running up on the counter and dipping his balls in his drink. When the man questions the bartender about it, the bartender refers him to the singing violinist there for entertainment. The man asks him:

“Do you know why that monkey keeps dipping his balls in my drink?”

:to which the entertainer smiles, says ‘sure, starts strumming his violin and sings:

“Why does that monkey keep dipping his balls in my drink….”

Corny jokes, I know. But they do capture the two dynamics at work here. But in order to crystallize here, I would offer my own analogy (or joke if you will (as concerns the Democratic and Republican politicians. When a democratic politician approaches you and tells you to bend over, they at least give you the promise of a reach around –which they will eventually have to fulfill in some lesser capacity if the promise is to hold any water. The Republican, on the other hand, will simply tell you to bend over because, if you don’t, everyone goes horny. Corny joke again, I admit. But while fashionable cynicism keeps making the argument that there is no difference between the two, I would argue that it is a difference (given the political system we have (between putting up some resistance to the emerging aristocracy/oligarchy and just bending over, pointing to our asses, and saying “just put it there.”

And we see the knave dynamic all over FOX News. I see it especially in shows like Red Eye which, in all honesty, I have only seen (my friend at work always has it on (and not actually heard what they are talking about. But I can see it all over it (and I may be wrong but doubt it: this kind of in-crowd dynamic in which all efforts at actually making things better are dismissed based on what the commentators can make snide remarks about, a lot of misdirects (straw men and red herrings (from the very real sufferings that leftist fools are attempting to address.

I always miss Maj…

Unfortunately, for me (maybe not so much the unfortunate souls on Politics Prime who have had to deal with my rants), tonight’s run ends this particular immersion. And it is unfortunate for me in that last night’s debate seemed to offer quite a lot of material for exploration: a reading of what seems to be going between the lines as concerns Trump’s arguments that skirts the line of semiology.

What I would mainly focus on is his attack on her about the fact that regardless of what policy she supported, she seems, after 20+ years in politics, to have failed to implement them. Now what we mainly need to note here is that Trump was at a decided advantage in that while we have a public record as concerns Hillary’s political accomplishments, we have none as concern’s Trump’s. This is always (and inherently (the incumbent’s disadvantage. Of course, what it always fails to acknowledge is how likely it is that the newcomer (in this case Trump (due to systemic imperatives (will likely fail to do everything they promise –that is if not more so. This came to the surface when Hillary pointed out that the reason she didn’t pass a particular policy is because she was Senator under a Republican president that had “veto power”. But really telling of how clueless Trump is was his response: she could of done it if she really wanted to.

Now I really need you to think about that and how indicative it was of Trump’s either ignorance of how the political system actually works or the fantasy world he is living in, one in which everything is simply a matter of the will to do it.

The latter seems the more likely to me. And the reason I say this is that Trump’s main appeal is to the fancy of his followers. If you look at it, it has basically been a kind of Quentin Tarintino revenge fantasy in which those nasty immigrants finally “get theirs”. But more important here is the fantasy he is appealing to of the so-called “career politician” (a buzz-term that career politicians tend to throw at other politicians) in order to make himself seem, somehow, more pure or authentic. He basically paints Hillary as someone sitting around in private, twiddling their fingers, and croaking:

“First I’m going to tell them what they want to hear. Then when I get in, I’m going to do whatever I want.”

It’s a popular notion. But that doesn’t make it true. Basically what Trump is attempting to do is paint Hillary as purely self indulgent (based on a mythology (when he has shown himself to be as about as self indulgent as any politician could possibly be.

But Trump is not as problematic to me as his followers. They, for some absurd reason, consider him an advocate for the working man when the only solution I’ve seen him offer for outsourcing is tax-cuts for the rich (to draw jobs back to the states (and deregulation. In other words: Trump’s only solution to the problems created by globalism is giving the rich more of what they want:

To basically reduce us to the same conditions as third world countries.

One of the most important questions for the intellectually and creatively curious (especially since the advent of NAZI Germany (has been what it is that will drive some people to seek out their own oppression. This is especially pertinent in America where many cling to the republican platform. We basically have a lot of people who, for all their tight-fisted bravado and claims to be the true rebels, see the only solution to our problems in dropping to our knees and sucking the dick of every rich man that comes along. And I’m sorry if that seems crude and a little harsh; but it is pretty much what every policy they offer amounts to. This includes Trump who claims he will undermine free trade agreements, but only offers the solution of tax-breaks for corporations and deregulation. Once again, the same thing: maybe if we suck their dicks a little harder, maybe they’ll give us more of what we want. But all it really amounts to is reducing America to the same state as other third world countries so that we’ll be more attractive to them.

My answer to the question has thus far been the evolutionary competitive mode that has been with all organisms from the beginning which eventually evolved to a cooperative mode and that now it is a matter of making the complete leap to the cooperative mode. In other words, what we’re dealing with, as concerns the republican platform, is an evolutionary backlash that refuses to make the leap from the competitive to the cooperative evolutionary mode.

But in a kind of Deleuzian engagement, I saw something in the HBO series West World that brought in a little more depth and subtlety. In it, Anthony Hopkin’s character was describing an ex-partner of his who took on the extra ambition of actually trying to create consciousness. He drew up a pyramid which, at one level, consisted of self interest. This was kind of a revelation for me in that I realized how deeply embedded self interest is in the very phenomenon of consciousness. It basically goes back to a debate me and some friends had on LSD back in the 90’s: whether insects had a sense of self. I argued that they did. I based this on the recognition that the very notion of self preservation required that the organism has to have some sense of what it is they are trying to preserve. If the more mechanistic view was true, then the organism would only kick into self preservation mode when the neural system was broached. But insects anticipate threats to their self preservation. I mean if that weren’t the case, it would be a lot easier to swat flies.

Now imagine how this self preservation (self interested mode (and anticipatory subsystem must be working in the republican sensibility.
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In terms of Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizomatic epistemological system, we can see its advantage over the aborescent in some very practical and accessible ways. Take, for instance, the police shootings of African Americans in American ghettoes. Under the old aborescent model, there is a tendency to look for first causes: racism, poverty, lack of monitoring of police activities, etc., etc… And let us not forgot the most obtuse and insidious argument: the laziness of African Americans and their refusal to “get a job”. But under the rhizomatic model, we see, rather, a complex feedback loop. We have a group of people in a desperate situation who, in response, act more desperately thereby putting police officers in dangerous situations which reinforce whatever racist tendencies they may have and thereby cause them to over-react which puts African Americans in an even more desperate situation to which they react and so on and so on.

Of course, the natural human tendency towards capture leads to over simplified root causes (the arborescent (on both sides: systemic racism on the side of African Americans (which can’t be denied (and the propensity towards desperate behavior on the part of African Americans in distressed environments for white cops (which can’t be denied.

And we see the same dynamic at work with a lot of other things such as Islamic terrorism.

Theory, like most soft sciences or soft expressions of the academic/god’s-eye perspective (social sciences: psychology, sociology, History, etc. (has a unique advantage in that, like science but unlike science, they can explore the molecular aspects of the human experience (the human experience being, for the most part, being off limits to science due to the subjective nature of it (while not being beholden to the molar aspect of it as the arts are. Literature, for instance, may attempt to approach the complexity (the molecular (of the human experience, but it is always returned to molar means of getting there –that is in order to resonate with and seduce the reader.

To approach this from a different angle, we who embrace theory tend to demean the molar superficiality of political rhetoric (which is a kind of literature. But how effective would it be (language, from a pragmatic perspective, being a tool that gets things done (were we to tailor it to the more molecular understanding of theory? Say, for instance, a politician were to argue that there were certain things they wanted to do but, given the complexities of the system they were attempting to gain access to, there was no way of knowing they could actually achieve them. How far would they get in the average electoral process?

Such a molecular approach would be as effective as a comedian backtracking after every punch line.

Poetry, even, may point to the molecular, but must do so by molar means. It’s just the way of language.

Last night, in the not-so-organized stream-of-consciousness way I tend to work, I came across a variation (a stretch if you will (on one of those riffs that, via natural selection, has stuck with me for some time: the relationship between facts, data, and truths. It’s a subtle distinction, but it goes a long way towards distinguishing data from a fact, a problem that has become all too prevalent these days. Plus that, it allows me to jam in my comfort zone while working beyond it:

Facts are basically things we can hardly disagree on. They’re just there. For instance, while I may have written this post at a past point for you, it is still a fact. I mean how could you deny it given that you are reading it right now? And like most facts, if we were standing together and looking at it, we could both agree that it is a fact much as, if we were standing before cat on a mat and one of us said “There is a cat on a mat”, we could both agree that what had been described was a “brute fact” to put it in Searle’s terms.

Where it gets a little more complex is data in that data is a collection of individual facts MEANT (not destine (to give us a general understanding of how individual facts are working together. For instance, when surveys are taken, there are always the individual facts of how individuals answered the surveyors questions. The problem with Data is that it is always as interesting for the facts it leaves out as those it includes. For instance, note the Truman/Dewey election in which surveys showed Dewey winning by a landslide. The problem was the individual facts based on phone interviews which generally consisted of people wealthy enough to own phones and who generally voted Republican. On top of that, we have to look at the distinction between formal data (which I described above (and informal data which consists of the facts of individual experiences –experiences always being facts in themselves. But we only need look to racism to understand the folly that informal data is vulnerable to. This would consist of the argument:

“All black people I have met tend to be pushy. Therefore, all black people are pushy.”

And this offers us a good segue into the relationship between data (formal and informal (and truths. The important thing to understand here is that I am using Rorty’s pragmatic understanding of truth (that which seems sufficiently justified (while departing from his more optimistic understanding of it. My point here is that, like the relationship between data and facts, truths are a cumulative effect of data. And I would hardly have to elaborate on the precarious nature of truth here –that is as I’m describing it.

That done, the stretch I arrived at last night involved a clarification of the difference between facts and data. Facts just are. There is no way of getting around them. They are, as Searle describes them: brute facts. Data, on the other hand, must strictly deal with probability: these many people told us on the phone that they will vote for Dewey, therefore Dewey will LIKELY win. However, there is a kind working data that must lead to a truth that opens my system up to a kind of anomaly: the tautology. Think, for instance, of the argument: all bachelors are single. One can hardly get around it. Still, this doesn’t make data a fact. The risk here is that some, through a kind of intellectual razzle-dazzle, may attempt to make data seem like it is so.

Faced with, at least, four years of Trump, and having knowledge of the insidious tactics he used to get there, we might take some consolation and hope in the complexity of human nature, especially as concerns the distance between fancy and reality that was at play in his campaign.

I would go back to a true believer who stood outside of a Trump rally and, in front of a reporter, waxed romantically about a day when you could go to the border, buy a 25$ permit, and get 50$ for each confirmed kill. He then retracted by saying he was just being “ironic”. And we should put in mind here that this suggested that he recognized that his statement was not socially acceptable: the very source of of the superego, This, of course, does not absolve him of the pleasure he seemed to take from that particular fantasy. And I would also note the connection between what people fancy and what they will eventually do. For instance, if you are in love with someone who constantly expresses a deep seated identification with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”, your best bet, likely, is to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Still, breaking someone’s heart is something quite different than killing them. So you have to ask if that individual outside of the Trump rally, appealing to fancy and the radical strictly for the sake of radical, would, put in the situation he fantasized about, actually be willing to shoot Mexicans trying to cross the border –that is even at 50$ a head. Note, for instance, the difference between the fancy involved in listening to a hardcore rap song and actually engaging in the behavior it describes.

And I think we can apply this same understanding to Trump who, throughout his campaign, was like a beer-table demagogue spouting out his “if I were dictator for a year” wish list with the reinforcement of others around the table. And as Coleridge argued: it’s alright to build castles in the sky; the idea is to build foundations under them. We can only hope that Trump builds foundations under those castles that involve the American worker while actually facing the reality, as compared to his fancies, of those he would choose to exclude from his personal and phantasmal utopia.

Now that I have gotten my Trump rant out of my system (which I fear will be a daily thing (I want to address a more philosophical issue: one that passed through my stream of consciousness (and which I caught like a true fisherman (that lies at the core of my process.

What came to me (as if out of nowhere (was an issue with an argument that hardcore materialists like to make concerning the existence of mind: the Casper the Ghost analogy. Their argument is that, since Casper can pass through walls without problem, it would be a contradiction to act as if Casper could have any real effect on the material world. The analogy, of course, is that the mind (being of such ghostly stuff (would have no way of affecting the body. But what is conveniently left out of the argument is the issue of “command”. For instance, if a ghost with less humility than Casper could command a knife to fly through the air and stab you in the heart, there would be a very real cause and effect relationship between the ghostly stuff and the material.

And can’t we make the same argument for the relationship between the mind and the body? While the mind may not directly affect what the body does, it can still issue commands that the body is too dumb to defy. Think, for instance, of suicide. The body, in an unthinking way, wants to keep going. Still, the mind (in its complexity) can work in ways that will make the body (command it) to work in ways that work against its own self interest.

Here we need to turn to the computer analogy as concerns the mind/brain relationship: that between hardware and software. While software may not actually change the physical nature of the hardware, it can change the way it works.

“Some of the people I met in grad school with supposedly the highest IQ’s were without a doubt some of the dumbest people I have ever met.” –Lewis Woodford​

Yes, Lewis: all one would have to do is look at what goes on among the elite (the decision makers: most of which have either masters or PhDs (to see how clueless such people can be. Or as I like to joke: some people can be intellect abundant while being wisdom deficit. Hardcore materialists and libertarian economists often fit that bill to me. Plus that, there has been research that has shown that the ability to predict things does not correlate with education or knowledge. This is because more intellectual people tend to commit more to their given systems –their egos being as invested in them as they are. And make no mistake about it: I, myself, have embraced the view you are offering.

That said, I would ask you to consider a more complex model that addresses the issue you are presenting via a book I have been talking about lately, Arthur Lupia’s Uniformed: Why People Know so Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It. It’s basically a pedagogical manifesto with hard science behind it. And I must confess from the start that my embrace of it is a blatant exercise of confirmation bias. But the main thing I found useful was his model of information, knowledge, and competence.

Information is our stock and trade here in that it is the ONLY thing we, or anyone else, have to offer. And we offer information in the hope of affecting the knowledge of other individuals: the cumulative effect of the information the individual, via the limits of working memory, chooses to assimilate –that is from a variety of sources of information besides us.

But it is in the domain of competence that we get at the complexity of your point. Competence is the manner in which one’s body of knowledge (that is built on the information they have (is applied to a given and valued task. And it is Lupia’s concept of Competence which was a bit of revelation for me in that it proves more useful, that is in terms of complexity and subtlety, than that of intellect which is what you are addressing. (And please do not take this as condescending or trying to “correct” you! I am just offering another model.) What I would suggest is that you are, as we all often do, conflating intelligence (which is hierarchical in nature (with competence: which is democratic in nature. I would argue that what you see as a lack of intellect in people is actually a lack of competence in tasks you value.

And this is where my confirmation bias (and a little ego stroking (forgive me if you will! (comes into it. To me, there are 3 means by which we collect information in order to become the intelligent creatures we think ourselves to be: the personal anecdotal (that which we experience ourselves), the social (that which we get via others such as friends, artists, or journalists), and the academic or god’s-eye view which we achieve through traditionally established methods: technologies. Now the popular doxa would support the hierarchical/ vertical/Platonic model in which the academic stands at the top of the INTELLECTUAL ladder –like some corporate hierarchy or something. My position, however, is that the relationship between the three is horizontal with a slight upward lean towards the academic. This is because, in terms of competence, intellect is always relative to a given task an individual finds themselves faced with. You could, for instance, be a quantum physicist but still look like an idiot in front of the small town mechanic in the town your car broke down in. For myself (that is with all the knowledge I have accumulated), if I were dropped into a ghetto and found myself with a thug that was willing to get me out of it, that thug would always be the most competent and knowledgeable person in my space.

“…and we have the massive mouth in the White House of your beautiful country and europe in ´lets play the 1930’s again… …” –David John

Having, myself, experienced the five stages of grief post Trump’s election, I find myself returning to where I started: denial. The latest manifestation has been, having seen Trump act a little more “presidential”, maybe this will all go like a typical Republican presidency, that which I have gotten through before. I have to take pause before becoming an alarmist.

But from what I have seen lately, David John is right: we are facing something that, in its frenzied nature, may turn out to be every bit as traumatic as what happened in the 30’s. And it’s not just Trump. It is, rather, the feedback loop he is playing a part in. Note, for instance, the rush to deregulation going on in Capitol Hill, much of which could end up creating irreparable damage such as allowing coal miners to dump coal waste in rivers and streams. We have Paul Ryan (Trump’s new lapdog (rubbing his little rat paws in hopes of privatizing Social Security and Medicare (basically give stockbrokers control of our retirement money to risk on the market (which Trump said he wouldn’t do. But he also said he wouldn’t backtrack on policies implemented by Obama on transgender people. And we see how that went.

Everyone acted as if “well, what harm could he do?” And we can take some consolation in seeing those who supported him (either directly or indirectly through indifference or the pop cynicism of not supporting Hillary (get their just deserts for failing to read the small print. The so-called alienated white middle class male is really going to get it up the ass when they realize that Trump’s (that is in the context of the Republican platform (solution to bringing manufacturing jobs back to America has always been the typical Republican one: sucking the dick of the rich a little harder in the hope they’ll give us more of what we want. This will basically find expression in tax cuts and deregulation which pretty much amounts to reducing America to the same labor and environmental standards as most third world shitholes.

As for the 52% of the Millennials that, in their pseudo-enlightened pop cynicism, failed to vote for Hillary: I recently saw something that suggested that Trump is about to intensify enforcement of pot laws. And as I recall, he said that pot was not a gateway drug. In other words, during the campaign, he took a casual attitude towards it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Trump (as well as many so-called “state’s rights” and “small government” repugs (go after Colorado within the next couple of years.

For myself, the consolation will come from letting the many republicans I encounter (and have listened to (actually see the fascist potential of the republican platform they embrace. We can only hope that we all come to our senses, set aside the misdirects, and recognize the problem for what it really is: the fact that a handful of people are feasting at the table and expecting the rest of us to fight for the crumbs. And hopefully we’ll do it before it’s too late.

Look, nobody voted for that cunt Hillary because we were all afraid she’d not only ban our guns and everything else, but also nuke us to death.

Trump is the garbage radiation we have to clean up after the shitshow debacle.

Actually, all 5 political parties are insane. Its all rigged.

“I think you should choose a grad program that has reasonable success of placing their PhDs in gainful employment. Think about what you want to spend your time researching for your dissertation, about what languages you’ve learned and how they mesh with the content of each degree. Choose a path that will make you a versatile instructor and give you a good foundation for the research you’ll be doing for the rest of your life. As someone who comes from a predominately analytic background, I suggest reading Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont (if you want to borrow the copy from my bookshelf, you are more than welcome) just to get an idea of where post-modernism goes wrong.” –Khristy

“Thanks for the advice. I’d be happy to borrow your book sometime.” –Brandon

Okay Brandon. I mean it’s all fuel for the fire. And I would encourage you to read anything you might find useful: both in the positive sense of what you can adopt and in the negative sense of what you can add to your process by rejecting the other. But I would like to offer a continental counterpoint (not reject or dismiss (to Khristy’s analytic lean, especially as concerns Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense. And I would start by quoting Heather De Lancett’s impressive point:

“No jobs in Continental. No soul in Analytic. Just a practical perspective.”

First of all, I will admit that I have not read the book. I have, rather, encountered it often in the secondary text on the continental philosophers I tend to read. So my understanding of it is limited. But what I do know about it is enough to put it pretty low on my reading wishlist. Secondly, given that you seem a lot deeper into formal training than I ever got, I would have assumed you had some knowledge of Fashionable Nonsense; so I offer the following description IN CASE you haven’t:

What the book came out of was an experiment of Sokal’s in which he published a falsified science paper with false information in a magazine in order to see how postmodern and poststructuralist philosophers would respond. And some did as if accepting it as legitimate scientific data. It was those missteps of the philosophers that Sokal and Bricmont based Fashionable Nonsense on. But we need to look at what the whole scandal really tells us.

First of all, it tells us that Sokal was an authoritarian and pompous individual who engaged in the pettiness of publishing a false article in a legit science magazine, that is as compared to just publishing his own models and letting them compete with those of the continentals. His only concern was to maintain a vertical and hierarchal model of knowledge in which the position of “expertise” would legitimize an assertion as compared to just letting the legitimacy of assertions come out in the wash of cultural natural selection. And I would note here the role that an increasing need for corporate funding (as state funding decreases (is playing in the dominance of the analytic approach which APPEARS to be more functional –that is when scientists are no more interested in what analytics have to say than the continentals. Here I would return to a point made by Khristy (that is to give you sense of the cultural context she is working in:

“I think you should choose a grad program that has reasonable success of placing their PhDs in gainful employment."

This comes down to the tyranny of the functional that comes with corporate influence. And the only way that the analytic approach seems to be fulfilling it is through (see Dennett, Searle, Pinker, etc. (students learning how to write marketable books.

Secondly, all Sokal showed us is what we all should have known in the first place: that philosophers are not scientists. Therefore, they have to depend on the authority of scientists who publish in legit science magazines. So if there is fault, it lies with Sokal’s schoolyard prank.

I would also note a point made in secondary text on Deleuze (it was either Hugh’s or Buchanan –I can’t remember which and haven’t the time to look it up(that much of Sokal and Bricmont’s argument against him was that they didn’t understand. And being a Deleuze fan, I get that. I mean it: that fucking French Man and damn the French and their weird obscure philosophies anyway. But I’m a little confused as to how Sokal and Bricmont could read a misunderstanding of science into text they clearly couldn’t understand in the first place.

“Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all. As an advocate for the rights of the reader, I could explain agreement only by positing an ideal (or informed) reader in relation to whom other readers were less informed or otherwise deficient. That is, agreement was secured by making disagreement aberrant (a position that was difficult to defend since the experience with which one had to agree was mine).” -once again: from Stanley Fish’s intro to his Is There a Text in this Class…

I mainly bring this quote in to emphasize the overlaps at work between Fish’s literary criticism and philosophy, as well as to redeem myself to my Deleuze and Pragmatic habitations (or playgrounds if you will (which I have been pestering with it.

It’s all there. And the mention of the subject-object dichotomy pretty much cues us in to it. But I would note how in this quote:

"Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all.”

:Fish basically turns to the same solution as both Deleuze and Rorty did: resorting to the materialism of thinking of humans as nodes in a complex system. And as this quote shows:

“As an advocate for the rights of the reader, I could explain agreement only by positing an ideal (or informed) reader in relation to whom other readers were less informed or otherwise deficient. That is, agreement was secured by making disagreement aberrant (a position that was difficult to defend since the experience with which one had to agree was mine)."

:he did it explicitly for the perfectly democratic purpose of undermining the old Platonic notion of knowledge being some kind of corporate hierarchy justified by some transcendent criteria. However, here he is more Deleuzian than Rortyan in that he is looking at the relationship between text and reader and their given interpretive community as a kind of interaction of systems whereas Rorty worked in the more superficial, accessible, and practical expressions of that interaction of systems. Still, we must admire Rorty for his ability (in the sense of a generous teacher: much like Jaspers (to explain that expression in historical terms.

Had a thought tonight:

It may well be that one of the biggest failures in the analytic’s sometimes smug dismissal of the continental approach is its failure to see its common ground with it. I mean whatever you are pursuing, it always about understanding systems to the extent that, because of your comfort with them, you are able to (via creativity (to adjust them in new ways. In this spirit, the analytic first pinned its hopes on language then turned to science. This is demonstrated in Wittgenstein who started out with full faith that truth could be fully approached via the logic of language only to eventually recognize how reality always seems to overflow the language we use to describe it. This is why he eventually recognized the value of language games.

Now I would note how Deleuze and Guatarri, in What is Philosophy, paralleled Wittgenstein’s earlier work in recognizing the import of conceptual play for the sake of creating yet more concepts. In other words, the main difference between D & G’s model is their focus on concepts as compared to the analytic’s focus on language which is, by its inherent nature, beholden to mental concepts.

Granted, I’m fucking this up: this writing at the edge of what I know –as Deleuze suggests I do. But let me try a different approach. Take Stanley Fish’s approach that brings Temporality into the issue of text which is static in nature. The text is always changed by the moment in time it is being perceived. And this is laid out as well in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in which an object we are observing in space is always the same thing at different points in time. And we can see how this could all lead to the postmodern blur that we experience with postmodern and poststructuralist thought: the Lacanian Real overflowing the symbolic order.

The thing is, in order to arrive at these understandings, we have to surrender to systems of thought that get us to them. This means that whether we are taking the analytic or continental approach, we will always be dealing with conceptual schemes overflowed by reality. We can only see the object as different at each point in space and time because we understand the concepts of space and time and their effect on our perception.