things that are that much less trivial than what you came to think of them as being

-- certain leonard cohen songs
-- vintage logical positivism
-- foucault
-- seinfeld

I got a weird new haircut.

I feel like shit about my place in academia. What I'm after is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term can seem in the broadest possible sense of the term to hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Don't see it happening.

[micro-poem]

strong times       red meat
    red sun
  so long

and me as a culture is over it

Trans-Atlantic Fun

Mythologie = a shortcut in the space of reasons.

I'm anti-Gilmore-Girls. But it is (was) the only Tv Show to construct characters as connexions not just of personalities and of desires but also of tastes and of knowledge.

Newcomb Problems in daily life: it's morally important to us to do some pretty epiphenomenal things that indicate to ourselves we're not racist\classist\sexist.

[technical validity of analogy: about 80%!]

how about

An essay denouncing "humour" as an artifact of hipster culture. [yes yes this "if this why not that" is vile rhetorical shtick but I'll bite the bullet ]

[this blog has gotten very 2005, with all the Derrida and hipster-discourse]

[it's just that I hate this discursive culture where ritual sacrifice -- of bands, of affects, of movies, of styles-- is offered periodically in lieu of attending to its structural predicament(s). nothing recent actually, I don't know how I ended up thinking about this again]

We can feel pain over the non-obtaining of logically impossible states of affairs. That's a ridiculously bitter-sweet fact right there.

I should stop conceiving-of-myself-as\presenting-myself-as socially apt. I'm as no good at it as I am at playing the guitar: can follow rules but no extrapolative imagination.

Why didn't anybody tell me that there's some real serious shit going on in Remarks On The Philosophy Of Psychology Part II around 650. and on?

Also, a problem with Witt: the assumption that a justification of a reaction is not good if it is not also its explanation.

On the subject of Derrida on Austin

An old Jewish joke: "How do we know yarmulkes go back to Abraham? It says in Genesis 20:1 'And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the south country'. You think a jew leaves the house with no yarmulke on?"

[the yarmulke's Husserl]

Doctor McNinja is the best so far in a new genre invented by webcomics: plots composed by creating parody\comedy premisses and following through on the premisses with an action\mystery\drama extrapolation.

A game: take any anti-inductive-scepticism* argument in analytic philosophy in the last 30 years and reconstruct it as an anti-atheist* argument. [sell the product to the catholic church, become a millionaire, buy lots of playstation 3 games]



*that is to say arguments against scepticism that is about induction, not sceptical arguments that are anti-inductive
** not intelligent-design though

medium stuff

1. Categories are useful for the coordination of conventions of interpretations ["it's presented to me as a poem so I know it is meant to be engaged with like this"] and for forming hypotheses ["it's a novel so unless proven wrong I'm going to pay attention to character psychology"], but not for norms of evaluation. There's no "good x", only "an x that's good".

2. There's always teleological reduction -- a-syntactic trivializes the production of semantics, a-semantic trivializes the production of graphemes, non-alphabetic (?) trivializes the book-form, etc etc. Ok, so, at some point there's not gonna be any teleological reduction -- carvings on tree stomps seem pretty safe from the charge -- but if you're not willing to go there and stay there let's stop talkin about artifacts "passing by" the materiality of the medium.

big stuff

Two ways of doing "destructive" philosophy, the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein :

Nietzsche -- when metaphysical entity X goes down everything we thought to be founded upon it is problematized

Wittgenstein -- when metaphysical entity X goes down everything we thought to be founded upon it turns out to not have been founded upon it


[it's cool because explicitly mixed-ancestry philosophers {e.g. Rorty, Cavell} actually do go for a mix of those two ways of going about it]

[I guess eliminativism\error-theory and Derridean haunted-mansions-of-metaphysics-past both end up sharing a category on my account? I can live with that]

Varitations on a Theme

[or: Why Israelis ought to be inherently disinclined towards identity politics]


-- "The nationalism of the oppressed is different form the nationalism of the oppressors"
--"It has less money"

__________________________________________________________________


Q: "What's the difference between the nationalism of the oppressed and the nationalism of the oppressors?

A: "20 years or so"

can't sleep, blogging instead

Observe as I discover a phenomenon: there is a strong discomfort involved in the second viewing of an episode of a tv show with a lot of immersive* plot to it. The discomfort is a lot like looking at childhood photos, or reading an old letter from an ex-girlfriend or listening to a recording of one's own conversation from five minutes ago. It's the awful discomfort of re-experiencing an instant that's autonomously meaningful from its own perspective (each "present" stage in the course of an immersive plot), but doing it in the context of its different meaning within a whole that's foreclosed to it. It's embarrassment as the transcendental ** variant of "Dramatic Irony".

Or is it just me?



* Immersive plot: plot that's process-centred rather than architecture-centred. If that seems crazy metaphorical I swear I could transform it into precise narratological definition if I wasn't so flu-struck and sleep-deprived.


** There's like a 30% chance I can seriously defend this usage.

Is there a name for my neurosis? The definition should go along the lines of "the compulsion to devote a lot of time and energy to any reasonably competent corpus that claims to trivialize everything that came before it".

In case Laruellean "non-philosophy" ever gets big, I want to be one of the first to mock it. Here goes non-philosophical proof that P: "When philosophy says P it is auto-positioning. When non-philosophy says P, it is acknowledging P as already-given. So: P "

Or, for definition (and covering the other way of construing non-philosophy): "Non Philosophy is any sentence with the words ' and this was not a Decision ' added after it".
This one is not a joke, actually -- I can rigorously defend that.

My turn

to take a shot at defining the analytic\continental divide:

continental philosophy is that which takes those things that "stand out" in\for human life to also "stand out" metaphysically.

My inability to write essays will be the death of me. Shit.

I realize now what sounds so familiar about Lukacs' argument that things can only be understood in the context of their relation to the totality of the dialectical process. It's the same as the argument of my kinda- mentor Meir Sternberg that one cannot meaningfully cut the ontology of fictional worlds against the grain of the artistic teleology, that "event" or "element" or "explanation" receive their parameters only according to their participation in the overall artistic structure of a given work. And the argument is in fact cogent in the case of fictional worlds, which means that, yes, given that the world is teleological, Lukacs is right about "facts" vs. dialectical understanding and all the rest. I don't think the world is teleological though.

Three Recycled Notes

1. So about the poetics of bad personality -- the problem is I can never believe it's an actual complaint I'm being presented with. Self-hatred is as good a whatever [premise, subject matter, procedure, emotion, theme, excuse, object of study, I don't know] as any, just don't be that guy\girl in middle-school's art class that goes around saying "oh man my painting came out so ugly didn't it?".


2. You don't have to think eliminativism regarding folk psychology is correct or coherent or a real thesis to be concerned with how far down does folk-psychology turtle. I'm really concerned with how far down does folk-psychology turtles. If you go a-self-exploring, how quickly are you going to run into a rock layer?

3. My sense of Wilfrid Sellars' importance: the idea that our epistemological\ontological hierarchies needn't correlate with our transcendental\grammatical ones: post myth-of-the-given, sensorum still has cognitive primacy over everything else, although grammatical subservience to pretty much everything else. Ditto with thought being the source of speech's meaning in any particular case, even though thought is grammatically\transcendentally parasitical on speech.

A thing I actually learned -- self-made empirical discovery and everything -- during life: you can count on other people for a lot, but not for making their role in your life a priority in managing theirs.

I want to say -- there's an issue of the past's hold over the present that's a line in the sand for "any number of" analytic, aesthetic, ethical stuff.

There should be a correlation between one's attitude towards conceptual art of a certain sort (object's-causal-history based) and one's opinion of Davidson's Swampman.

I (\/) Cavell cause

he's not trying to win an argument against anyone actual or hypothetical and so can go places where others can't

Last one for the week: "Reality Porn" as proof that whatever oils the cogs of capitalism, Commodity Fetishism ain't it no more.

My Utopian edge: trying for a critical language bare of mythologies.

The reporter really should have asked Stein:

"Why don't you talk the way you write"

How about this:

Modernism = complexity in the composition of high-order phenomena

Avant-Garde = complexity in the composition of low-order phenomena


[programming fucks with my mind]

I'm gonna call it "Peli's law of context-dependence": the wider the intended audience of a work is, the less it has to be multi-functional to be good.


[assumption: "abstract", "disjunctive", "reflexive" are forms of multi-functionality]

3 hypotheses re: meditation

1. It does you good because trying-to-avoid-boredom is the indirect root of most (\many) bad behavioural patterns but meditations makes boredom exciting.

2. It does you good because prejudice about the appropriate response to a given situation or feeling are directly what keeps most bad behavioural patterns going but meditation effaces these.

3. It does you good because sentimental attachment to your bad behavioural patterns is what guards bad behavioural patterns from revising but meditation alienates.

Enough with the poetics of having a shitty personality already.

At times you do something because you feel a compulsion to do it and choose not to oppose this felt compulsion. This fact is fundamental to a lot of how I'm trying to "make big changes" these days, so I'm taking extra care to remind myself that this doesn't mean that desires are feelings you react to.

A quick one: if we read Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box section concretely -- we got hard evidence that de-facto private is private enough for whatever Wittgenstein has to say about private objects\languages\whathaveyou.


[Ok, now to bed, to bed]

I've started doing walking meditation. Suddenly my relation to the world is not one of panic. Refreshing!

I'm trying to make (!) an interactive fiction of inner monologue. Trouble is the user's position vs. the interactive text will inevitably end up implying a Cartesian divide of "self" and "input", but what I want is a philosophically neutral (kinda), non-categorical divide of "deliberate" and "symptomatic". I need to find a way to make the user's position unstable, to make it unfit to be interpreted as a reflexion of a categorical divide.

A Meta-Methodological Parable That Really Happened

When I was 14 I went into a quasi clinical depression after reading Ecclesiastes. I read Ecclesiastes weird* -- I took it as making a good case that that there is no such property as "significance" to be had by things, open-question style. To me it was an ontological essay proceeding by demonstration, going through the constituents the world one by one showing them vacant of any such property.
I reconfigured the world through an absent-of-significance. A necessary absence of significance. I had a bad year. It took me Hume to stop figuring significance as something that's supposed to be in things yet can't be, and then took me Wittgenstein to figure out why Hume did that for me.

I'm getting hungry, so let's cut to the chase: this is about Derrida and his "absence"s .


*Or not so weird -- closer to the orthodox religious interpretation than to the contemporary default in a way.

I always (wrongly) believe manic manic-depressives about their successes.

I often think of how dramatic his own existence must seem to Peter Hacker. It must be a lot like "I Am Legend". Truly if I were a charcter in a Tom Stoppard play I would have been a character writing a comedy about Peter Hacker.

Possible title for a book I would have written in another life about why I can't go fully Wittgensteinian: "Motivating Our Grammar". It's got that not-actually-evocative-but-close-enough-that-we-can-pretend-that-it-is-evocative ring you want from the title of an academic book.

-- Every one of the 7 blurbs on the 4th edition of "The Elements of Style" violates at least a single rule.

-- What's great about teen-snuff*-oldie Tell Laura I Love Her is that when Tommy dies and his dying words make for only a second reiteration of the refrain you really freak out because a refrain that comes in only twice is structural madness, and so when Tommy's spirit comes to console (approximately) Laura and set the song structurally in order you are really relieved.


*I really don't care for the non-literal use of the term "snuff". Any alternatives?

New tag-line for the blog, as most of my time nowadays seems to go into not-discussing-things-on-their-own-terms.

[I've been reading Gordon Baker's 'Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects', which offers some good encouragement on this front]

Every 6 months I give Derrida another try. This time it's Structure, Sign, Play. It's a good essay. It's crisp and clear, also, kinda. But it gives me more of an idea why continental philosophy can't work for me: the laws of the land are such that an observation may only be challenged by placing another observation on top of it. "No" isn't a playable move, only "yes but".

[Blame Hegel? I wouldn't know]


Update:

Ray Davis notes -- "I figured it was just a matter of temperament, and also figured that
was why he did poorly at school and why I immediately took to him.
People who don't like Walter Benjamin seem similarly irritated by a
"lack of seriousness." "

I feel a need to reiterate this.

More Langpo notes: I'm pretty into this belated manifesto by Andrews. But it also reveals some symptoms I didn't observe before. That the single text must be a utopia unto itself, accommodating in a single stroke the dialectics that constitute a life-time of frolicking in the fields of culture.

What are the truthmakers of the propositions of symptomatic readings of the cultural studies sort? Are they causal? In particular "analogical" symptomatic readings: when I say "The Lion King is really about white supremacy", what am I claiming regarding how it was made and how it is watched?

I no longer think any medium, genre or format [including "art" or "literature"] comes with built-in specialized teleology. I no longer think "art' or "literature" are much more then family-resemblance type things within the domain of rhetoric of even of human action [I hate turning out sentences with "human" in them but what can you do], so I don't think one can talk about the way art or literature should be unless you're gonna offer universal rules for rhetoric or action [which is not impossible to do -- this isn't an apagogical argument against programmatic aesthetics].

I used to think my trouble with non-academic, non-blog, non-commercial projects was exposition. Now I'm thinking it's all in the objectivity: academic work is objective to the extent it involves no active division between things and things as I want to show them. Anything that's not objective in this sense I gotta sprinkle with "I"s or my stomach turns as I scribe.

Reversed Akrasia -- you know you can flick a mental switch and do away with moral pressure X with no pangs to follow, but can't bring yourself to.

I'm so tired I started hallucinating non-existent idioms.

Is it criminally jackassy to say Wittgenstein had a lack of imagination for situations where you're gonna have doubt about appropriate criteria (that is to say doubt about grammer, that is to say asking justification for grammer)? What would have happened if robots, aliens, scifi-brains-in-vats were part of his cultural vocabulary? Or, you know, vegetarianism (Cora Diamond has something 'bout that one I think). Now yes, Wittgenstein provides notes towards understanding divergent grammers or even "disagreement", but not for doubt or not knowing how to proceed.

Is there any non-pathetic time of day? Like, any x that wouldn't work as well in "it's x o'clock and I'm in my underpants eating fried chicken"?

Note to self: the case against verisimilitude in the arts [or rather the case for the redundancy of verisimilitude for anything of intellectual value the arts can achieve] rests on shaky cognitive\philosophical\psychological assumptions about a subject's ability to foreknow his\her opinions and reactions to anything. Now rephrase that in a less dopey way when you have energy.

I complain a lot so I should talk about how awesome it is that we as a culture stopped discussing hipsters.

There's something not totally honest to the "teenageification" (let's call it) of scepticism in late 20th century anglo-american philosophy. It's the closest mainstream analytic philosophy got to the American-deconstruction tactic of argument from uncoolness-of-opponent. [was that ridiculously cryptic just now?]