Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

I think Elon Musk gets a little over-fellation in the press, but this is good stuff:

http://qz.com/414326/how-elon-musk-is-educating-his-children/

Teach to the problem, not the solution.

 

[rms]

Sounds interesting, think it's wrong to say "this school is better" rather than just saying it's a different option.

He should hook his sister up with that education though instead of wasting her time and money at my school

 

[Dak]

I don't think his school goes past 12th grade.....Plus it's a fallacy to think people have to latch on to their famous relatives (although honestly it's generally the smart thing to do).

My less-than-optimal(but still better than the traditional) experience as a product of homeschooling combined with the unschooling notions and outcomes of guys like Musk as well as my own limited experience with traditional schooling within the university system has left me quite poorly disposed to the Bismarckian system.

 

[Dak]

This has progressed enough to move it:

I don't complain about texting conventions within texting contexts. I already agreed that one can write a fabulous book without constantly conforming to proper syntax, but that doesn't mean it is somehow a plus to deviate from it.

I know Pat is not a gamer, while I am, and I think there may be some constitutional reasons for this. In the philosophy of sport class I recently concluded, part of the material covered a definition and distinguishment between play, games, and sport. I think games map very well onto life in a more abstract sense, partially for the very reasons that life appears to chafe on the more speculative mind. Pre-lusory goals map with more vital ends, while the rules of play as well as skill dictate play. The parameters of the end place restrictions as do rules of play and skill. The problem for (I did not say with) the speculative mind is that is not even happy with any goal (prelusory or otherwise), much less the rules of play and skill. Once some end is merely speculated it is now worthy only of dismissal as it has been reached, even if only speculatively. While this in itself is only a problem for the speculative mind, it becomes a problem for the non-speculative mind when the speculative sort begin to set real fires because ends are an affront and fires provide an illusion of infinity.

Rules are only so arbitrary as the ends. Ends allow for only so much adjustment. Games provide an excellent example of this: Many if not all games offer the potential for and even many popular variants of "house rules". In time, some house rules even become amalgamated into the "official" rules, often to correct prior deficiencies and oversight, and sometimes merely due to sheer popularity. But there is only so much adjustment possible before it is simply not even the same game. Enough drift and we aren't even playing the same game anymore, and so it is with the non-game as well. But this doesn't bother the speculative mind because it was never playing to begin with, now or ever. It only wants the end of ends, as it were. This is both a potentially powerfully creative and/or destructive constitution.

I don't pretend to be a speculator. I'm an analyst at heart, which involves listening to speculators and then dismissing ~90% of speculated improvements as failing to improve the existing applications, and ~90% of new applications as failures inreplacing existing applications. Speculators are primarily paid for the .01% of the time they are fantastically and astronomically brilliant, and analysts are paid to mitigate the the rest to varying degrees. There's my armchair psychoanalysis of human progress and the interplay between speculators and analysts.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't game because I don't have time.

Furthermore, I'm not a "speculator" either, at least not in the work I do for literary studies; but writers of fiction most certainly are. However, they're not paid for the accuracy of their speculations. They're paid for the financial success of their speculations. As you say, literature that exceeds the bounds of the rules to a detrimental degree doesn't do as well; literature that bends the rules can do well (which is why a novel like The Road was a bestseller while your playful "WFS$#%^^*BSF =-fsvwR!" wouldn't sell any copies).

Those in my position take it upon themselves to study the patterns and processes of literary production as they occur in various cultural arenas and historical periods. It is quantitatively ascertainable that experimental literature (e.g. James Joyce, T.E. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, etc.) grew exponentially in the early twentieth century among a group of authors who we know were very familiar with the literature that preceded them. Literary scholars want to know what this can tell us in juxtaposition to the more traditionally "realist" language of novelists such as Dickens, Austen, or the Brontë Sisters.

Literary scholars and teachers of writing arrive at conclusions and practices through a means of rigorous analysis and interpretation, as well as dedicated and lengthy research efforts. I don't think you have any idea how much research goes into writing a book in the field of literary studies. You don't just read a few works of fiction, read a few works of theory, maybe a piece of philosophy (git your Marxism here!) and then publish a book.

You have to spend years sifting through hundreds of documents, reading primary and secondary sources, works of fiction as well as letters, essays, reviews... and today, we have to online conversations from forums such as this one that can tell us a great deal about cultural sentiment and atmosphere.

In short, I think you think I'm a speculator because of some of the critical attitudes I exhibit here as well as some of the material I publish on my blog; but I could never publish one of my blog posts in a literary journal, and while I may use the same critical methods when composing an essay, my conclusions can't be "speculative." There must be reasonable and sufficient evidence to make a claim and support it.

 

[Dak]

I'm referring to mental orientation, not an absolute position of relation in all contexts. You may not yet be in a position to speculate in your chosen field, but it doesn't mean you don't want to.

I imagine the amount of leg or rather "eye" work in any academic field is pretty equivalent in terms of what is considered serious publication within the field. Part of it is making sure you demonstrate a sufficient amount of knowledge/agreement with (or as I would more abrasively frame it: "make obeisance to") the gatekeepers before making a deviation. If I were to have been in those art classes that my wife was in, you think I could have gotten As by eviscerating the texts? Absolutely not. I'd have to proverbially nod my head and regurgitate the crap in a way that I knew the professor would be pleased with. This arrangement is the same in nearly all social institutions if not absolutely all. That this is merely the way things are doesn't mean it doesn't mean it is beyond acknowledgement.

I know you would object and say that good teachers would grade on the quality of the criticisms but you and I both know that when positions are diametrically opposed, what counts as quality certainly isn't going to be the same. I got by defending Nietzschean ethics in a way in a Nietzsche class. I couldn't dismiss "class struggle" in a Marxist class. It's axiomatic.

Going back to this:

According to this line of criticism, all writing should look the same because syntactical experimentation is bad.

"Experimentation". "Exploring". "Questioning". These terms are the shibboleths of the art world and it's hilarious from the outside.





Where did I find these videos? These videos were used as a way of simplifying the explanation of art in one of my wife's classes. The content is equal parts amusing and sad because it's true.

"How is this pile of (literal) shit art?" "Well it's querying the sociopolitical responses to the internecine conflict surrounding the overburdening of our infrastructure within a capitalist paradigm."

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm referring to mental orientation, not an absolute position of relation in all contexts. You may not yet be in a position to speculate in your chosen field, but it doesn't mean you don't want to.

That's a pointless claim. Doesn't everyone want to speculate?

I imagine the amount of leg or rather "eye" work in any academic field is pretty equivalent in terms of what is considered serious publication within the field. Part of it is making sure you demonstrate a sufficient amount of knowledge/agreement with (or as I would more abrasively frame it: "make obeisance to") the gatekeepers before making a deviation. If I were to have been in those art classes that my wife was in, you think I could have gotten As by eviscerating the texts? Absolutely not. I'd have to proverbially nod my head and regurgitate the crap in a way that I knew the professor would be pleased with. This arrangement is the same in nearly all social institutions if not absolutely all. That this is merely the way things are doesn't mean it doesn't mean it is beyond acknowledgement.

I know you would object and say that good teachers would grade on the quality of the criticisms but you and I both know that when positions are diametrically opposed, what counts as quality certainly isn't going to be the same. I got by defending Nietzschean ethics in a way in a Nietzsche class. I couldn't dismiss "class struggle" in a Marxist class. It's axiomatic.

You have such a chip on your shoulder. I made it through undergrad (with As) without identifying as a Marxist - hell, I called myself a libertarian when I was in undergrad (I still don't identify as Marxist, by the way - and for the record, most of the graduate population in BU's English department don't consider themselves "Marxists"). The point doesn't lie in "eviscerating" the materials you're looking at! You really misunderstand the entire practice, yet you're so convinced that you get it. It's equal parts frustrating and embarrassing.

Plenty of the texts assigned in literature classes can be identified as potentially racist or gender-biased; these are opportunities for criticism and analysis, and for demonstrating how texts can reflect ideological beliefs. We don't need to say "this text is fucking AWESOME" in every paper. In fact, professors discourage you from doing so; but they also discourage you from saying "this text is fucking SHIT." Because that's not the point, David; the point is to reflect on how texts are registering cultural attitudes, and how they can offer us information on various time periods and demographics.

And for the record, a "Marxist class" - what a joke.

Going back to this:

"Experimentation". "Exploring". "Questioning". These terms are the shibboleths of the art world and it's hilarious from the outside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVFasyCvEOg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb8oNlAqiLw

Where did I find these videos? These videos were used as a way of simplifying the explanation of art in one of my wife's classes. The content is equal parts amusing and sad because it's true.

"How is this pile of (literal) shit art?" "Well it's querying the sociopolitical responses to the internecine conflict surrounding the overburdening of our infrastructure within a capitalist paradigm."

Words like "logic" and "rationality" are equally hilarious when observed from the "outside." The difference is that people who like logic think they're undeniably in the right, while those of us who like art realize that there isn't always a "right."

And it's entirely true that you can have effective, helpful analysis without committing to any kind of evaluative position.

 

[Dak]

That's a pointless claim. Doesn't everyone want to speculate?

Not speaking about myself, but no. I don't know what about broad swathes of humanity would even suggest the possibility of yes in answer to that question.

You have such a chip on your shoulder. I made it through undergrad (with As) without identifying as a Marxist - hell, I called myself a libertarian when I was in undergrad (I still don't identify as Marxist, by the way - and for the record, most of the graduate population in BU's English department don't consider themselves "Marxists"). The point doesn't lie in "eviscerating" the materials you're looking at! You really misunderstand the entire practice, yet you're so convinced that you get it. It's equal parts frustrating and embarrassing.

Plenty of the texts assigned in literature classes can be identified as potentially racist or gender-biased; these are opportunities for criticism and analysis, and for demonstrating how texts can reflect ideological beliefs. We don't need to say "this text is fucking AWESOME" in every paper. In fact, professors discourage you from doing so; but they also discourage you from saying "this text is fucking SHIT." Because that's not the point, David; the point is to reflect on how texts are registering cultural attitudes, and how they can offer us information on various time periods and demographics.

Maybe it comes across as a chip, but I'm tired in many senses of the word. Tired of watching the same thing, hearing the same thing, of being put into a regular state of disappointment with the parade of lipsticked pigs and recycled banality slapped with a label "new & improved". So much fails to live up to its own hype, if the hype were even coming from a good angle to begin with (not often).

People are loathe to identify anymore (myself included), not in small part due to the neopanopticon of social media. It also makes it easier to change position at future dates.

You might read texts to investigate cultural attitudes, but I read for ideas and processes.

And for the record, a "Marxist class" - what a joke.

When you can win Marxist Bingo (bourgeois, proletariat, marxist _______ , global capitalism, means of production, etc) via reading pretty much any assignment in a given class, and one of the largest readings is by Althusser, yes a "Marxist class".

Words like "logic" and "rationality" are equally hilarious when observed from the "outside." The difference is that people who like logic think they're undeniably in the right, while those of us who like art realize that there isn't always a "right."

And it's entirely true that you can have effective, helpful analysis without committing to any kind of evaluative position.

Logic/rationality are used to some degree by most people on a day to day basis, whether knowingly or not. I think you might have me confused for an Objectivist and/or at least someone who doesn't like art. I married someone whose primary interest is painting and drawing and I like much of what she does. What has flowed from the Fountain though is every bit as nasty as what normally would flow into one.

At least a few of the art critics were in agreement with my position that (much) of modern art is not good, but for entirely different reasons. It is not good because it fails to smash capitalism like it should.

I don't believe people truly take non-evaluative positions. The person who thinks they are taking a non-evaluative position has merely already evaluated that thing as not very important.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm done with this. I'm comfortable in my delusions about academia. You're clearly comfortable with yours. Let's let solipsism have a point today.

 

[Dak]

I can let it rest, but I don't know what solipsism has to do with it

 

[Einherjar86]

I found this helpful quote from none other than Nick Land:

Bataille names writing discourse insofar as it conforms to the order of utility. When it betrays, corrodes, and liquidates utility - regressing to the burning lava-flow of its base materiality - he names it literature. "Literature is the essential, or it is nothing," Bataille writes in the introduction to Literature and Evil. Unless literature is the termination of sense, the reef at the end of words, it is a mere ornamentation of discourse. The radical inutility of literary language is not to be excused by epistemic, ideological, or moral apologetics (such as those that dominate current critical debate) but exacerbated to the point of collapse, because "literature is communication." A literary destiny that is not an immolation is an insipidity.

Powerful stuff. I think this speaks fairly well to the esteem we grant fictions that prove themselves experimental - whether they do so via their content, their form, or their popular venue.

 

[Einherjar86]

New, and long, blog post on "postmodernity, horror, and the legacy of the outside."

This felt good, but it took up way too much time. At least it relates somewhat to my theoretical research. Back to orals prep for the foreseeable future.

http://borrowingfromthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/08/mad-black-deleuzianism-postmodernity.html

 

[Dak]

Probably the most interesting, at least to me, works you've done on BFTF. The bit about paranoia as an egoist defense against what I will paraphrase to simply "the uncomfortable realizations and their implications" is really starting to click as I watch people who grew up with and mentally cemented a sort of rigid, limited/partial understanding of "historiocultural" relations have what I perceive as breakdowns, as their applied frameworks are breaking down insofar as they were means for synthesizing information about their own pasts and their prospective futures. Presented with what appears to be a choice between retreat and a coherency with their understanding of their self, and a sort of schizophrenia, they choose retreat. The rhetoric becomes stronger and the engagement intensifies with every failure.

Other bits about our horror at not only our own mortality, but about the mortality of thought (death of the sun etc) are all things that I believe, even maybe just subconsciously, drive the unique human demand for narcotics.

Of course what would a review be without "buts". You can probably guess my quibbles, and it's going to be with references to the free markets and NRx, respectively and together. It's been discussed before that Land's philosophy and NRx have inconsistencies, and this is taken to be some weakness in Land's thought. I find this line of thought because of a misunderstanding of the community regardless of whether there is a misunderstanding of Land's philosophy, although an understandable error due to Land's stature.

Although there's a lot of talk about Exit, the subject of exit offers a poor starting point for understanding NRx. There's a one liner that Land either coined or made popular that says something along the lines of "neoreactionaries are libertarians mugged by reality". What is that "reality" that is referred to? I think that would depend on which portion of the "trichotomy" was polled. In any case, at least philosophically, reality consists of the "outside". Reaching for the common metaphors of either space or the ocean as representations, sociopolitical constructions can be seen from one perspective as spaceships or submarines, which both work with and against their respective outsides, and to which the outside is both indifferent and acting with/against.

Land and other representatives from the trichotomy want a better sub or spaceship if you will. Of course, as has been noted, to "truly" exit would mean a death now rather than later, both materially and metaphorically.

I know you've bounced between referring to the "free market" in the common fashion ("the west consists of free market economies") and in saying that a free market is impossible. I wish you'd stick with the latter. Statements or quotations pushing the line about "excesses of the free market" is a contradiction from either side. Either a free market is impossible, and so then excesses of it, or we have a free market, which by definition cannot have excess. Of course we do have excesses but do not have a free market. There's not even an "ideology of deregulation" in capitalism. Advantages for me, hindrances for thee is an "ideology" that probably (does*) predates language.

Ending on a positive note: I have grown weary as well with talk of "rights". Show me a "right", and don't point to a piece of paper unless you want me to pull out a lighter. Excluding some elements of the religious portion of the NRx triad, NRx gets this where libertarians/conservatives/progressives do not, and I think this is where some advantage lies.

 

[Einherjar86]

Thanks for that really good response!

You're right that I probably don't do NRx full justice, primarily because I focus on a particular aspect and ignore others; but exit is my primary concern here and mainly because I think it overlaps with significant postmodernist concerns. According to a rigorous systems-theory logic, I would suggest that the notion of exit is more complex than NRx-ers want to admit, although I'm not sure if that results from a misinterpretation. It may definitely be true that Land deviates from some of the more, shall we say, ideological aspects of NRx.

Your comment on my use of "free market" is well made, and deserves clarification. I would say that I do persist in my belief that free markets are impossible, and in hindsight this perhaps should have been more explicit. When I mention free markets and free-market ideology, it's usually in reference to another theorist's work. Basically, I maintain that the concept of free markets is an illusion brought upon by the complexities of our current world system, and finds a great deal of ideological support in the fantasies of neoliberalism.

So when I talk about the free market in a more conventional sense, I usually am referring to the beliefs about, and support for, the free market in our contemporary global climate, even though I wouldn't what exists is actually a free market. I would say that free-market ideology has measurable effects as much as any legitimately "real" free market would. I should make this distinction clearer. In fact, I would say that where I do make critical claims against the free market, you could supplement "neoliberalism" - and that is probably an unfair equivocation. Neoliberalists may not actually support real free markets, but they like to claim that they do.

 

[Dak]

Exit in sociopolitical terms is always local on some scale and never refers to exiting the sociopolitical "plateau". The Final Exit is death (cue Fear Factory), and I think only hardcore anarchocapitalists haven't figured that out. While there has yet to be anything smacking of functional anarchocapitalism in practice, and as far as I can tell will never be, Singapore is held up as something of a proto-NRx sociopolitical entity. Whether or not a Singaporean model is desirable or replicable outside of the tip end of an WestPac peninsula is a subject ripe for discussion. Edit: On that note: http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/07/cities-as-platforms/?ncid=rss

Edit#2: Haha, and of course Singapore pops up as the subject of the day today on XS.


Neoliberalism is just progressivism for strivers.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

New, and long, blog post on "postmodernity, horror, and the legacy of the outside."

This felt good, but it took up way too much time. At least it relates somewhat to my theoretical research. Back to orals prep for the foreseeable future.

http://borrowingfromthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/08/mad-black-deleuzianism-postmodernity.html

I'm about 1/3 through this so far, and will have more feedback when I'm done, but I just wanted to throw you some praise for now. Your literary studies are epic and eye-opening. The fact that we live in a world of such frightening and beautiful ideas is never lost on me, but I rarely get such breadth of perspective on that world as I do when I read your blog.

The issues you explore in modern philosophy are fascinating, and all the more so when you tie them in with other disciplines (i.e. systems theory) or look at cases in pop culture where a previously obscure academic interest has transitioned to a mainstream interest. It's a great writing style, and I'm jealous that you get to be an expert on this subject matter through your work.

 

[Einherjar86]

Thanks for the kind words, Grant. Always appreciate your feedback.

 

[Einherjar86]

It's difficult to extract much from this considering it's a transcript of what appear to be concluding remarks; but the ideas are suggestive, although not entirely surprising:

[These are] based upon, and we can choose our vocabulary with great freedom, but I’ll start with a very traditional one: spontaneous order, spontaneous organization, self-organization, emergence, auto-catalysis, catallaxy in economics. And everyone knows this stuff – it’s occasionally critiqued precisely because of its continuity. We saw it in the early Nineties, where I first started really picking up on this type of thing – that there was an overt ideological thesis, that was at that time called the “Californian Ideology”.

Now, I mean, I’m probably going back into people’s influences at this point, so I apologize for that, but this was really provoked by certain things, and I would say a very key individual in this case was Kevin Kelly, who wrote a book that was, I think, quite influential, called “Out of Control”. Well, he was joining very explicitly a set of analogies across a whole bunch of fields, and he was inspired by research conducted at the Santa Fe Institute, which is still doing very interesting work on complex systems today.

But it certainly included market economies, very explicitly on one end, and problems in fractical, computational research at the other end. Some other good examples would be things like Stuart Kauffman and his ability to generate almost totally randomized circuits, or distributed robotics stuff, which really comes from just bolting together very simple robot components and actually getting computative, emerging behavior out of that.

http://incrediblemachines.info/nick...ty-of-capitalism-and-artificial-intelligence/

 

[Dak]

I admit I'm a little surprised you're not taking the Brassier line and junking it on the outset for discussing teleology.

 

[Einherjar86]

I suppose I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I don't think he means that technology has been evolving necessarily toward a convergence between capitalism and machinic intelligence. I'm inclined to believe that he means capitalism and machinic intelligence partake of a singular attraction, and that material conditions have contributed to this attraction.

But that's a generous interpretation. It could also be that he intends something more like capitalism as the historical manifestation of an intelligence that has evolved over time, and that is only now revealing its true nature. I can sympathize with this interpretation, and I think that Brassier gives us a means of doing so - it is Brassier's contention that thought is not an instrument of human consciousness, nor even an effect of living systems. However, I'm hesitant to say that simply because economic systems are complex, and even emergent, they are also agential (or intentional). I think that complex systems can make distinctions for organizational purposes without being purposive organisms - the purpose is not located in any pre-meditative consciousness. In other words, they can "think" (in a certain sense). This is the notion behind artificial intelligence.