Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

I think science always needs to be interrogated the same way literature does, although I think their "findings" have different effects. Basically, science (as a field) toggles a divide between materialism and representation and it can never be divorced from this oscillation. When Bakker says that science gives us definitive answers, he places too much faith in the material conditions of that which science is targeting.

Also, I think the "inbred" notion of philosophy departments is a false stereotype. We can watch philosophers on YouTube, read their pieces on "The Stone" (NYT), The Guardian, The Independent, etc. I think that theory is more available than popularly believed, I just think people don't perceive the immediacy of its impact. It may not be as tactile as a smartphone, but it is still available.

Ultimately I agree that the products of Silicon Valley and the machinations of Wall Street are more influential than critical theory, which is why I identify myself as a "capitalist" (with all the negative implications that go along with this); but I think that if people go on believing theory is unavailable to them, then they will never recognize it when they see it and won't have any idea how to process it.

 

[Dak]

I think science always needs to be interrogated the same way literature does, although I think their "findings" have different effects. Basically, science (as a field) toggles a divide between materialism and representation and it can never be divorced from this oscillation. When Bakker says that science gives us definitive answers, he places too much faith in the material conditions of that which science is targeting.

Well I don't think you have to get that abstract to object. I like to point to the "what is healthy/unhealthy" oscillations over the last hundred years. All "current science" at some point. That doesn't even need to get into the issue of conflicted interests based on who funds the research - which is a real thing. IE, studies commissioned by the "Institute for Sugar" will find sugar has no damaging health effects, etc. Scientists have bills too.

Also, I think the "inbred" notion of philosophy departments is a false stereotype. We can watch philosophers on YouTube, read their pieces on "The Stone" (NYT), The Guardian, The Independent, etc. I think that theory is more available than popularly believed, I just think people don't perceive the immediacy of its impact. It may not be as tactile as a smartphone, but it is still available.

Ultimately I agree that the products of Silicon Valley and the machinations of Wall Street are more influential than critical theory, which is why I identify myself as a "capitalist" (with all the negative implications that go along with this); but I think that if people go on believing theory is unavailable to them, then they will never recognize it when they see it and won't have any idea how to process it.

Im not sure about the first paragraph, but the latter is certainly true - what you can hold is going to almost always win out. Time preference! Bird in the hand.

There are competing analogies for time. Is it linear, as our narrative constructions of history perceive? Is it merely cyclical, as some eastern and other ancient cultures perceived? I have thought of perhaps another option. Conservative thought argues vehemently that history does not support a "progressivist" notion - that we are not "progressing" through history in really anything more than a strictly technological sense. I agree with this. However, history does appear to "move", but also reveals cycles, yet the "seasons" of the cycles are never completely identical.

What if time is like spinning top, weaving and dipping all over the place? As this is a new idea, I haven't had time to flesh anything out about it, but it has a certain appeal.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well I don't think you have to get that abstract to object. I like to point to the "what is healthy/unhealthy" oscillations over the last hundred years. All "current science" at some point. That doesn't even need to get into the issue of conflicted interests based on who funds the research - which is a real thing. IE, studies commissioned by the "Institute for Sugar" will find sugar has no damaging health effects, etc. Scientists have bills too.

Sure. Science is still subject to financial incentives.

Im not sure about the first paragraph, but the latter is certainly true - what you can hold is going to almost always win out. Time preference! Bird in the hand.

Of course, I wasn't speaking in psychological terms, but merely in terms of material influence. I think theory has an impact but it is far more wide-reaching and expansive (and therefore less easily identified); technology and other material products have a far more immediate influence, which is both constant and consistent, as well as identifiable.

There are competing analogies for time. Is it linear, as our narrative constructions of history perceive? Is it merely cyclical, as some eastern and other ancient cultures perceived? I have thought of perhaps another option. Conservative thought argues vehemently that history does not support a "progressivist" notion - that we are not "progressing" through history in really anything more than a strictly technological sense. I agree with this. However, history does appear to "move", but also reveals cycles, yet the "seasons" of the cycles are never completely identical.

What if time is like spinning top, weaving and dipping all over the place? As this is a new idea, I haven't had time to flesh anything out about it, but it has a certain appeal.

Not to be pretentious, but you're preaching to the choir. This is something I have focused on quite a bit. Stephen J. Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle is a great start; but also Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End; Lukács's The Historical Novel; Foucault's The Order of Things and essays like "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"; history as a boomerang in African American scholarship; history as rupture in Deleuze...

Also, the "conservative" notion of history as non-teleological and progressive only in a technological sense is in traceable to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin's influential essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

 

[Dak]

Certainly someone outside of the Continental contingent has to have addressed the topic. I find it ironic that a "Marxist" critic would reject a teleological explication of time. "Rupture" just sounds Schumpeterish rather than Deleuzian, and in either case I don't know if it works any better than a "boomerang" theory (which is to say not at all).

 

[Einherjar86]

Is it any better than a cyclical theory? All philosophies of history are representations of history. The idea of history as a boomerang applies specifically to African Americans - a demographic that has been ideologically excluded from history. The image of the boomerang is meant to convey a temporal logic that standard histories can't account for. None of these images perfectly captures any entirety of history because a history will always exclude certain subjects whose history will, inevitably, appear different to those subjects.

 

[Dak]

I think the cycle absolutely works better than a boomerang. The spinning top in the portion of its spinning where the dips and erratic wanderings happen certainly has more explanatory or representative power. I specifically found that representation appealing because I don't see it leaving anyone/thing out, and that of course doesn't mean that leaving someone out is predicated upon their recognizing the representation.

 

[Einherjar86]

Part of the reason why African American writers have assumed the image of the boomerang is because the spiral has been insisted upon by white historians. Sometimes the source of the representation itself is reason enough to seek an alternative representation.

There's absolutely no justification for privileging one purely representational image over another. History isn't cyclical, and it isn't a boomerang; the image says more about the paradigm than it does about the abstraction of history itself.

 

[Dak]

Part of the reason why African American writers have assumed the image of the boomerang is because the spiral has been insisted upon by white historians. Sometimes the source of the representation itself is reason enough to seek an alternative representation.

There's absolutely no justification for privileging one purely representational image over another. History isn't cyclical, and it isn't a boomerang; the image says more about the paradigm than it does about the abstraction of history itself.

Well a set cycle isn't accurate obviously, but that doesn't somehow mean the boomerang is equally viable, or unviable as it were.

There is certainly something loosely appearing as a cycle within the pattern, but it isn't exact. This is why they erratic nature of a whipping and dipping spinning top appeals. The spin is the cycle, bu the whip and dip accounts for the difference.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think the top metaphor is good, actually; but even the proposal of a metaphor immediately and automatically implies alternative metaphors. It always already occupies a perspective within history and thus cannot but propose a representation formed by the conditions of history.

History, if there's any such thing, may look entirely different one hundred years from now. Just like the hard problem of consciousness, there's a hard problem of history.

EDIT: just for good measure, here's a quote from a scholarly article titled "Octavia Butler's Parable Novels and the Boomerang of African American History":

In the Prologue to Invisible Man the Invisible Man remarks, “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy” (5). Ellison, thus, uses the scientific principle of the boomerang as a metaphor for the destructive nature of the spiraling of history. In his conception, the cyclical nature of history has devastating consequences for African Americans, and therefore one must always be prepared to experience its effects.

 

[Dak]

Matt probably doesn't look in here, but anyway:

It seems like you're one of those people who live in a bubble - if something doesn't directly affect you/help you, it doesn't exist or doesn't matter. Without the ACA I wouldn't have healthcare and the student loan changes that were made have been extremely beneficial to me also. Elections are extremely important. They directly impact the health and economic well being of anyone who isn't extremely wealthy. The Republican party is also directly undermining the democratic process every chance they get in order to win elections. There's a reason why voter turnout is so low and it can be at least somewhat attributed to all of the gerrmandering and voting restrictions created at the local levels of government.

Krig is one of those people that Faux News has brainwashed into voting Republican year after year. From what I've gathered over the years of reading his posts on here, he's in the lower-middle class tax bracket and Republicans have made it clear that they want to destroy that demographic completely, under a guise of patriotism, religion, and family values. Most people like that are either stupid or willfully ignorant.

This whole thing is so chock full of irony I don't even know where to start.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Foucault and social media: life in a virtual panopticon
http://philosophyforchange.wordpres...nd-social-media-life-in-a-virtual-panopticon/

 

[Einherjar86]

I just recently taught Foucault's panopticon model to my students. Lots of them dug the idea that power doesn't derive from any particular person, but rather is an effect of various social systems.

Also, that piece is helpful in understanding how a subject isn't inherent to a body, but is an artificially constructed institution.

 

[Dak]

While Foucault's idea here may or may not be correct, I suspect that the ease of acceptance has a lot to do with the usefulness for justifying apathy.

 

[Einherjar86]

That could be, but it just isn't the author's concern. He/she wants to demonstrate that social media function as a kind of decentered, interpersonal network that both allows for preexisting subjects to enter into discourse, and contributes to the discursive construction of those subjects. This is true with brute language as well, but with something as mediated as online discourse social construction becomes far more layered. Apathy figures into this as a material component of alienation itself; but the driving force of this author's argument is that social media is a means of constructing subjectivity.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Jimmy "likes" this

 

[Dak]

UBS admits/doesn't admit to rigging precious metals market.

the FT reported that alongside admissions of rigging every other market, UBS - always the proverbial first rat in the coalmine, to mix and match metaphors- is about to "settle" allegations of gold and silver rigging. In other words: it admits it had rigged the gold and silver markets, without of course "admitting or denying" it did so.

 

[rms]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viKEpo93Txs&list=UU2Xd902w9u5_2oa7SHFSvZw

America as a fascist state, not sure I agree with any of this though--you guys bored, what do you think, do you care?!

 

[Dak]

Depends on what you mean by fascist.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Dak, when are you going to have your own YouTube channel?

and I hate your new shitty name

 

[Dak]

Haha why would I have my own youtube channel? I prefer writing, and don't even have time to keep up with my blog.

I liked Overwatch but oh well. I think NoumeGnon is quite clever though.