psychoanalysis said epistemology made me morally corrupt

(psychoanalysis was a bit drunk at the time. i like to think the unfathomable depths of my subjectivity made her anxious. psychoanalysis is a she, right? at least for overly self-conscious but politically immature men?)

1.

i know some people who can only be described as that which is trying to be that which it is they are trying to be. (the worst part about people like this is that they never apologize for being so recursive). philip roth’s characters, on the other hand, always seem to be made of something else: they are always trying not to become that which they are trying to become. roth’s tyranny of the problem, unless misremembered, is about trying to get rid of that which you are trying to become. is this double-recursivity?! it is most certainly not ambiguity, though double recursivity could well be the structuring formal principle behind ambiguity... who knows

what we seem to have here is a classical case of 3 crazy-ass theories of the subject fighting for the throne. let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that structure determines meaning, and that identity has much less substance than it forces itself to seem to have. let’s also assume we’ve read enough or marx and freud to produce enough (circumstantial) evidence to convince a resistant third party that such is the case (or not convince him, as we’ll see).

[insert unequivocal demonstration here - qwantz fashion, the rules of for determine social thought. also, a point]

.

.. this could imply that ideas are, first, a means of strengthening social bonds and, on a somewhat distant second, an exploration into the nature and workings of reality

(which makes things like this cracked article, while exceedingly funny, ineffective

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying_p2/)

((it might be fun to try to figure out what ‘funny’ does, under these assumptions)

.also, comedy before thought..

…maybe horror before thought?! or maybe even motivating it

of course, though, resistance is only a resting stop before total subjective rearrangement.   form here is also structure - it is structuring (of meaning).

if, as tolstoi claims, all happy families converge - then happiness is specular in nature. so is TED-stress, especially when specularity is halted by - inequality.

(no one can not quote tolstoi given the chance? well converged)

2.

autism x dissociation: can there be only one?

i still think autism is to analytic philosophy as derealization disorder is to continental. and even though reducing things to their substanceless functional-formal properties makes me want to cry, it’s probably a decent approach

autism, as in an easily findable TED talk, is in a way an extreme form of (marxist) reification. the subject (in the other) is removed. all people (and relations?) become things.

it’s also the very opposite of reification: thingifying all people (and their relations) is the only way (cit. needed) to make visible, and understandable, their structures. it’s the very de-reifying (analytical) act.

the discussion can be shifted one subject to the left if we consider dissociative disorders. in depersonalization/derealization, it is not the other subjects that vanish: it is the observing subject itself. the effect here, paradoxically, is similar to the one produced by continental-style theoretical criticism: a disavowal of reality (and even the reality of perception) as such.

semiegoless reading and meandering: i think personally this distance from the ego becomes the dark, featureless terror of the future. it feels as if what is demanded is not this or that determined content, but the formal composition of the ego... it’s a tough pickle (if you’ll excuse the travested freudian nod - and let it be recorded that contradiction and ambiguity, not literality, is as much the meaning of sexuality as it is of class relations).

what about the fear of death? can the autistic mind not only conceptualize, but be affected by, a notion of death?

paradoxes abound here... if norwegian wood could send certain people into a 3 day long fit of depersonalized bewilderment, while remaining a straightforward descriptive work, synecdoche ny (together with the other murakamis), while more pretentious, is infinitely less effective (at inducing autistic removal, merely hinting at it). can it be that formal madness is actually therapeutic? interestingly, the most emotionally detached indie film director, wes anderson, managed to be touching while blatantly replacing people by things.

if communication relies on a certain invisibility of language, how can the gaps in the text be the site of meaning or interpretation? are they accents?

something similar seems to be at work in fashion (and perhaps in expression in general): leaving just a little too much of your t-shirt show from under your sweater, this sort of differential deviation, could also end up as a mechanism of change.

this is, at last, the very discussion of form. changes in content, or particular contents, can be taken to express particular identified subjectivity,

a change in form expresses the subject as such, the very presence of a subject!

and is in turn subject to imitation, convergence, spreading, and eventually collapsing into content.

3.

some concerns over the transitory character of thought:

there’s a scene in the first season of game of thrones where it is claimed that one must keep reading to keep their minds sharp, same as one must continually sharpen a sword. the scene bothers me, but what it claims makes perfect sense considering my personal plight of forgetting (all but distant structural impressions) faster than i learn anything new. now this might be either a personal cognitive shortcoming or a fundamental property of human thought.

the latter would be a little unsettling, considering that someone would have to write in a day what you read on the the next and then forget, unless you also write it away etc.

the thing with things is that we know them for what they are, but not for what they aren’t.

i know, i know... that’s ontologically inevitable, it’s the very form of perception, the condition for a cognitive reality etc etc. still annoying as shit.

this is what is wrong with technological breakthroughs... or breakthroughs in general. the very possibility of something new having a huge impact on the world is actually testimony to the limitations of our consciousness as a race. it is also one of the reasons why academic work can be so infuriating... you can end up spending most of you time mining the unknown - the realm of what things are still not - for news on what things aren’t. 10 years later you know as much of what things are as a layman - the only difference is that you’ve collected tons of reasons why they are not what they are not. (this might be a bit like the fact that you can only notice bad special effects once you've seen better ones - they are either made of negativity or we really like to be fooled). the peer-reviewed journal institution can be little more than a forum for people to collectively figure out what things are not - and very occasionally also what they are.

4.

and this, in short, is why i don’t always floss

5.

qed

T as text: metalinguisitc circularity and the concreteness of the map-territory relation

Tea as Text: an analysis of 'Is tea the tenet of civilisation' in the light of the negativity of content

Ideology, goes the Nietzchean unacceptable truism, hides and shows itself in Form. Sufficd it to say that the preference for the oblative T sound betrays the author's subjection to the very deadlock he proposes to transpose.

Is tea the tenet of civilisation?

Is there a closer connection between tea and language than previously suspected? Let's consider some basic facts*

1. There are onky two etymological roots for tea: te- and chai-. A testament to the emergence of protoindoeuropeanisch and the imaginary millenarity of the east.

2. The victorian adoption of tea as the mainstay of western social order: both an instrument of sociolinguistic control and conspicuous demonstration of ociosity, in its core ambivalence tea mirrors the long, dark trek of illuminism towards the assymptotic establishment of western consciousness.

Tea: cornerstone of cultural cumulativity or self-aggrandizing imperialistic sham?
Leave your opinions here //link broken//

*for a broad definition of 'fact'

the computability of unknown kadath

the question posed by minecraft is: is a strong, structuralist notion of system required for the concept of isomorphism to work? in other words, how much are things themselves?

if you come from a technologically iffy country like brazil, your first reaction to opening google maps and seeing where you were automatically pop up might have been - “oh shiiiiet this is it, it’s true, this is where i am! it knows where i am”. isn’t there something odd with this reaction?
did you for any reason NOT know where you were? isn’t the fact that you are right there enough evidence of being where you are? and is the map not only a set of codes and symbols, some names on a picture? not only, in short, a representation?
when you see your location pinpointed there, though, it feels like you get a new sense of where you are. why does seeing a map gives form to some sort of special spatial awareness by means of which places seem to exist more? is it only the fact that you realize somehow that you belong to a system (of places), and that reinforces the spatiality of your space?
or is there a reversion somewhere in there, through which the map becomes more real - more concrete - than the very place you’re in and experiencing with your eyes?

say you’ve played minecraft and built yourself a cozy, zombie-free pyramid in the course of one of so many idle afternoons. issue number one: the pyramid you see in the screen resembles - barring socially crippling problems with your sense of space - pyramids in the real world.
hardcore mathematicians and freewilling bloggers might be tempted to call this an isomorphism: the presence of a structural relation between two separate entities.

within the strict mathematics of formal systems, argues douglas hofstadter, isomorphism is what allows some variation of meaning to arise from separate strings of symbols - meaning IS an isomorphism, it is the emergence of a relationship of similarity. apart from notoriously tuning in with strong a strong notion of relativity like simmel’s (are these concepts somehow isomorphic?), this angle forces us to contemplate the nature of consciousness, the issue posed by minecraft, and by any other form of isomorphic representation, then, is naturally that of the possibility of thought.

let’s leave the issue of meaning aside for a second though, and behave as if it is a stable, reliable reality, to consider a different side of the pyramid. it stands to modern reason that everything in the vast strange realms of information inside a computer is ultimately made up of a massive collections of numbers in particular modes of interaction with each other. the pyramid you see on your screen, then, must be represented more or less convolutedly somewhere in cyberland. is there an isomorphism, however, between the pyramid you see in the screen, the pyramid out there in the real world, and a particular string of binary digits that represent them? could it then be said, in a dash of boldness, that if a particular string of digits is isomorphic to a real pyramid, and the real pyramid to the digitstring, that one is as real as the other?

it gets worse - mostly, and as usual, because meaning won’t stay put in the corner of self-reliance we tried to stick it into. suppose you are looking at the pyramid in your screen - or at the real pyramid near that dirty final subway station in cairo, for that matter. how is the image you see processed by your brain? is there an isomorphism between, say, the real pyramid and some sort of brain-configuration that allows you to call that thing a pyramid? is isomorphism the center of meaning in this wider sense as well? damazio would seem to suggest something in this direction. it’s commonly claimed that the concept of Zero is the greatest single accomplishment of the human mind apart from Guimarães Rosa’s book Veredas. behind that claim lies the insight that the zero is only such a big deal because the only place it can be strictly said to exist is INSIDE the human mind, and not in reality at all.

if we consider ‘existing’ as mere relative replicative stability - and the case can be made if you’ve gone on without sleep for long enough - every consistently imagined scenario exists in a very material sense. let us not forget that many things we take for real - words, banks, technology, -
are already simulated reality! (albeit socially simulated, which might take up some different processing power)

some lovely odd things can come out of assuming that the answer is yes. a wyrd relationship between representation and ‘the concrete’ is what simmel, in all his loosely paraphrasic neo-kantian charm, argued for. objects are an abstraction from complexity, a set of imposed relations over the real. he goes as far as not quoting someone who said all reality may as well be numeric, making the mind a mechanism for transforming numbers into qualities (colours in the electromagnetic spectrum being the prime example). it might go without saying that computers are, by construction, a way of doing exactly that.

what basis have we got to argue that the represented has any precedence in relation to ‘reality’ when trying to establish whether something can be called real or not? let’s call this uncertainty the keynsham principle - that there are no coincidences, but that sometimes the pattern - or the isomorphism - is more obvious.

following the now well-established approach of judging text not on its literary merits but on whether or not it deals with concepts interesting to a certain moderately well-informed reader consensus* (call it the io9 school of criticism), we could say that there’s a large chunk of cool contemporary writing that seems to have made its nest right on top of these issue. neal stephenson’s Cryptonomicon makes a strong case towards seeing cryptography as merely a sequential shuffling-layering of abandoning and preserving of isomorphism. not only that, it explores at leyman length the connections between cryptography and computability in the realm of pure numbers - a dreamland on its own right.

scarlett thomas’ The End of Mr Y, however, is probably the one that wallows the deepest in this very issue. the thing it makes us ask ourselves, in fact, is this: if there’s any reality to representation, how can we still keep calling it representation and not reality?
the issue, or perhaps the confusion, is this: is information made of the same thing as the universe? scarlett thomas argues at lenght that it may as well be. hofstadter - together with an entire school of thought on artifical intelligence - goes even further, though, and hints at the fact that the materiality is not the central issue here as much as the arrangements that materiality provides. consciousness is not then in the substance, but in the patterns that complex substances allow to emerge. not in the neurons (or in a string of zeros and ones), but in the synaptic networks, or in the recurring movements of digits in orderly procession. it’s a funky notion. and weirdly temporal. and finally, if pattern is consciousness, all representation is pattern, and what we previously called reality is actually just mostly representation - in fact, all-ish reality was already fictional, turning our problem upside down.

or, from a slightly different angle: blood tests. imagine a disease that used to be detected, with moderate accuracy, by smell. now if at a certain point of cumulative medical advancement a certain blood test is developed to make a more accurate measurement, it's only reasonable to assume that the test is based on some sort of material reaction that we have learned to signify as 'that smelly disease'. that is, testing in this way is only making some things react with some other things in a consistent, fairly predictable way. won't we have to conclude, by reversion, that the sense of smell - perception as such - is in fact no more than a consistent, predictable material reaction? isn't an oscilloscope, in this sense, just an extension of our neural network - allowing us more strict perception than before it was invented? when does the spider's neural network end and the spiderweb begin?

either way, these general feelings are echoed in every single narrative that postulates an autonomous realm of experience divorced from the regular world. the earliest one i’ve stumble upon is lovecraft’s dreamlands in ‘the dream-quest of unknown kadath’, but the ghost in the shell, paprika, of course the matrix, serial experiments lain, all of the twilight realms in white wolf’s storyteller rpgs, charlie kauffman’s fluid-recursive synecdoche new york, Air’s Kelly Watch the Stars music video, and even Twin Peaks, at the least, hover around this problem.

as might be intuitive, this is made even more pressing by the evolution of computability. mankind has suddenly found another place besides the brain to create its realms in. suppose the universe collapses and all that’s left is your pyramid stored in the hard drive of some computer equipped with anti-scatological firewalls. how real is your pyramid now?

or suppose we were able to program a large, detailed and real enough simulation of kadath...

-- --- ----- ------- ----------- ------------- ----------------- -------------------
disregard the fact that the information is jumbled (the same could be said of reality’s information)
and avoid the answer that it wouldn’t exist unless it was represented by some sort of consciousness, because that is more or less the point i might be making.

(results may vary)

when deep blue anticipates every single possible outcome of a move in a game of chess, is he effectivelly looking into the future? into a tiny cross-section of the future isomorphic to a chess game, ok, but still a future? is he creating one? if time is even the tiniest bit material, it is!

on the other hand, maybe all of this - this endowing mental scenarios with a reality supposedly beyond themselves - is just some animistic leftover. maybe, lacking both a reliable perception of The real and a working, well-structured notion of reality, we still can’t accept lies for what they what, fiction without some invested reality. crap!


*let’s call this, for lack for anything better to do, the keynsham-otaku effect. the effect is convenient, at least, in that it probably saves the otaku from dangerous disinvesting self-awareness, a trick that The Literary seems to be constantly trying to pull.

LOVING THE ALIEN

((play the videos while reading)) 

In Spanish 

"Just gonna have to be a different manTime may change me

But I can't trace time" David  Bowie - Changes

Ever since David Bowie is my idol, I've been looking for a funny, complex, intelligent and a little weird guy, or maybe was my hunger for dysfunctional freaks  what attracted me to Bowie in the first place. I don't know for sure, is the chicken-egg dilemma. But here, as in multiplication, the order of the factors does not affect the results: David Bowie is my hero, and he embodies my love for eccentricities.

He is not my idol because he manage to create the widest range musically speaking: that goes from the invention of glam-rock, the use of synths before the 80's, really exquisite soul, 90's mainstream, some electronic, experimental, to industrial rock. Neither because he is a brilliant composer, and a pretty good producer (f.e. the Idiot), or because his artistic persona covers some Broadway, acting, painting and sculpting; all of it matters, of course! and is part of the package, but there's so much talent out there, that Bowie is my special one because he knows when and how to change, switching styles trough time, as often as he feels like it, proving that he can be as versatile as his imagination, holding to his personal brand: style, quality and edgy elegance.

David Bowie is a  sophisticated skinny dude, with sharp sense of humor, and exquisite weirdness (as his eyes). He made me magnify my taste towards androgyny, and is because of him that I can't connect with simple minded dudes. I don't like the GI Joe kind of guys, in other words I'm not attracted to typically alpha males whatsoever. Bowie has taught me that guys can be as softy, freaky and gentlemanly as they want without being less of a man.

Each single time that Bowie thinks is enough of his image, as Felix the cat, takes out of the magic bag a brand new character, a reinvention of himself, other stage to explore, so he spend his time creating soundtracks of each stage, until he decides is enough and start all over again. David Bowie is a genius and in today's world in which everything is being replaced by newer versions, let me tell you something: Bowie is a living example, of continual improvement. Otherwise who would have thought that this junkie of the beginning of the 70's, that looks like a character of a Wes Anderson movie, with the freakiest marriage, is nowadays quite normal: he is married with Iman, and a committed father. 

David taught me that is not "reason" or "conscience" what makes us special, is the ability of reinvention. He said that when you find out that you are far from what you want, the only thing to do is wake up the next morning and change, the spiders from mars are the limit. 

 

Bowie's reinvention is a prove that change is a right, you have the right to change your mind, to change your ways; he said that his constant transformation was also a way of not fit in any stereotypes, because we are use to classify and label others just with a sight, but complexity means different facets, with more information and possible combinations in between. 

That's why  David Bowie is a kaleidoscope, is an example of how we don't have to be black, white, red or blue, we are allowed to have as many  refinements as we want without wear down. David Bowie knows how to change, sing, perform, write, and overall inspire me, that's why he is my hero. 

there are not enough dimensions