Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

If I am misunderstanding you, then I would assert that the entirety of the vocal left also misunderstands its philosophical roots entirely. I cannot fault them too much though based on the level of self-inflicted "noise" in the French (why even call it Continental at this point?) philosophic writing style.

Again we have a sort of weird all or nothing. Noise isn't always productive. It can be productive but that is always determined after the fact. I would agree that "authenticity" isn't all it is cracked up to be, if we speak of authenticity in terms of seeking some Platonic perfect form. What practical applications (such as manufacturing and construction) and risk management show is that there are acceptable "tolerances" and measures of deviation without critical damage to the structure, product, system, etc. However, that cannot be interpreted to say that they aren't "bad", merely that function and stability isn't hampered up to a point. Redundancies or protocols allow for a certain measure of impurities, whether in material or labor. Design and use-fields is where we find sometimes productive deviation, not construction or application (application as in the particular deployment within a given field of usage).

I insist that we couch terms in the practical, the concrete. Otherwise the noise, if you will, renders them useless for anything other than mental masturbation. Abstract thought is an extremely valuable tool but only when there is a point of contact. Material application is the test of the abstract.
 
I'm not entirely sure what you're finding so disagreeable, but then that usually happens. :heh:

The "French" writing style is out of vogue. There's a reason why it emerged during the heyday of cybernetic paradox. It was a product of its time, and because of that it has value. Literary journals won't publish anything that reads like Derrida anymore.

And I know that noise isn't always productive. I said it was productively disruptive. There's always some production, and some disruption. That doesn't seem like all or nothing to me... Regarding practicality, I don't see anything to disagree with, so I'm not sure what you find controversial. Everything is determined only after the fact; practical matters can only proceed by acknowledging that they might fail. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I don't think that means that praxis should neglect theory altogether in favor of blind faith (which I don't think you're suggesting, but I am confused as to what exactly your issue is).

Finally, I'm not sure what the "vocal left" is. If anything, I don't think they're all that well-read on Derrida.
 
Einherjar86 said:
I'm not entirely sure what you're finding so disagreeable, but then that usually happens. :heh:

The "French" writing style is out of vogue. There's a reason why it emerged during the heyday of cybernetic paradox. It was a product of its time, and because of that it has value. Literary journals won't publish anything that reads like Derrida anymore.

And I know that noise isn't always productive. I said it was productively disruptive. There's always some production, and some disruption. That doesn't seem like all or nothing to me... Regarding practicality, I don't see anything to disagree with, so I'm not sure what you find controversial. Everything is determined only after the fact; practical matters can only proceed by acknowledging that they might fail. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I don't think that means that praxis should neglect theory altogether in favor of blind faith (which I don't think you're suggesting, but I am confused as to what exactly your issue is).

Finally, I'm not sure what the "vocal left" is. If anything, I don't think they're all that well-read on Derrida.
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"Productively disruptive" (productive disruption) means disruptive in a productive way - absolutely. That doesn't mean some of this and some of that. If a little of both is what you meant I'm fine with that, but that's not how what you said originally reads.

Axioms and laws allow us to determine things prior to particular facts. If they are correct and followed correctly no failure - within accordant strict definitions - occurs. This is one of the problems surrounding discussions of "what works". When someone says "welfare doesn't work", the type of "work" must be specifically delineated when speaking to someone who believes it does "work".

Praxis is both blind and not blind, as per Hume. For a given thing/protocol/etc, future conditions/knowledge could change to render a certain praxis no longer efficacious. But as long as such changes remain "unknown unknowns", we must proceed with such "blindness".
 
Dak said:
"Productively disruptive" (productive disruption) means disruptive in a productive way - absolutely. That doesn't mean some of this and some of that. If a little of both is what you meant I'm fine with that, but that's not how what you said originally reads.
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This right here would be an example of productively disruptive communication.

Dak said:
Axioms and laws allow us to determine things prior to particular facts. If they are correct and followed correctly no failure - within accordant strict definitions - occurs. This is one of the problems surrounding discussions of "what works". When someone says "welfare doesn't work", the type of "work" must be specifically delineated when speaking to someone who believes it does "work".

Praxis is both blind and not blind, as per Hume. For a given thing/protocol/etc, future conditions/knowledge could change to render a certain praxis no longer efficacious. But as long as such changes remain "unknown unknowns", we must proceed with such "blindness".
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I have no qualms with any of this. Instead of things like welfare, I'm simply thinking more about how relativity theory "works" until you shrink your scale to the very, very small... at which point quantum theory "works," but not when you expand it to the encompass the planetary. These theories also have significant practical implications involving engineering and computer science.

Dak said:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/143217546751/science-proves-science-is-an-illusion

Scott Adams is great.
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Adams is funny, but his categories of "reality" and "illusion" seem much too fine. The universe as a simulation doesn't mean evolution isn't real, per se, if all we already have is some perception of it. It would just change what we see as evolutionary pattern into computer code. And of course, evolution already is a code...
 
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It looks like Peter Watts is an accelerationist...

The Democrat machine put its foot down, told its bitches how to vote, and— barring some late-breaking statistical miracle— relegated Sanders to footnote status. Further to the right, Trump’s ascension has pretty much sealed the deal. Suddenly the court jester is within a stone’s throw of the crown. Pundits on both ends of the spectrum have stopped laughing. Conventional wisdom is that no sane person has a choice any longer: unite behind Clinton, lest the country burn.

I agree with that math. Which is exactly why I so fervently hope that Trump becomes the next US president.



"I make the best conflagrations. Nobody makes better conflagrations than me."
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http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6673
 
On the one hand, I think Trump is going to be a bad president. OTOH, I don't think he is going to be any worse than any of the other options available. Maybe I've just become completely cynical about the apocalypse, it having not appeared at any of the previous forewarned junctures. Things cannot continue as they have without some pain in the future, but if the pain comes under a Trump administration it will have very little to do with Trump and more like he presents the perfect spin artist situation for TPTB. I mean, after all:

"I make the best conflagrations. Nobody makes better conflagrations than me."
 
I'm less concerned about Trump per se and more concerned about the people whom he's swindled - i.e. his constituency. And I can't entirely blame these people for their naivete either, since they belong to a demographic that has been economically and technologically cut off. I oscillate between amazement and indifference toward the attitude they regularly exhibit on topics such as immigration, terrorism, spirituality, and a plethora of social issues. If there's fodder for a diluted, media-friendly, socially palatable form of pseudo-academic/intellectual firebrand, it's the people that support Trump.

I'm convinced that Trump will back off on every issue if he's elected. He's a con artist, not an ideologue.

In other news, I attended a lecture a few weeks ago. The speaker was Cary Wolfe, author of What is Posthumanism?, and he gave a really dense (but very good) talk about the role of politics today. Interestingly enough, the topic of ethics came up only once during his talk, briefly, and associated with an entirely different theorist. Wolfe avoided the topic entirely, insinuating that politics and ethics are two separate practices...

I asked him about this in the Q&A, and he invoked Niklas Luhmann. He said that Luhmann rejected all applications of ethical praxis since they ultimately must fall back on a good/evil dichotomy, and he perceived those kinds of absolutes as dangerous (I agree, although I suppose I define ethics differently). Another scholar followed-up my question with a thinly veiled query as to how we attach responsibility in the aftermath of financial fraud (obviously alluding to the recent financial crisis). Wolfe admitted that for Luhmann, this kind of ethical prompting is untenable and that systems theory resists any "unnecessary structural coupling" (this was his exact phrase).

That very phrase, what those three words designate, is (in my opinion) a radical and potentially controversial notion for the humanities and one that I think it seriously needs to consider in theoretical discourses moving forward. Scientifically and technologically speaking, markets function in a disinterested fashion - i.e. they don't care whether they're "free" or not, whether they're hampered by regulatory measures. When we attribute "freedom" to them we load them with a history of cultural connotations that actually counteract what "free" superficially denotes. In other words, "free markets" are not free in a non-representational, technological sense, since "free" actually imposes human values onto market processes.

That being said, this doesn't equate to an argument for overbearing economic regulations - again, no "unnecessary structural coupling." Rather, it attempts to redefine the market according to more expansive parameters that allow for complex and uninhibited behaviors without ascribing to those behaviors the fulfillment of any immediate human goals.

tl;dr - modern science and technology demand a theoretical reassessment of social/market relations that move beyond the latent humanism of Marxism, but that also reject the conservative humanism of the "free market."
 
Einherjar86 said:
I'm less concerned about Trump per se and more concerned about the people whom he's swindled - i.e. his constituency. And I can't entirely blame these people for their naivete either, since they belong to a demographic that has been economically and technologically cut off. I oscillate between amazement and indifference toward the attitude they regularly exhibit on topics such as immigration, terrorism, spirituality, and a plethora of social issues. If there's fodder for a diluted, media-friendly, socially palatable form of pseudo-academic/intellectual firebrand, it's the people that support Trump.

I'm convinced that Trump will back off on every issue if he's elected. He's a con artist, not an ideologue.
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I would say his constituency will be disappointed, but if we see Trump as the anti-Obama, we can certainly see a mirrored constituency. So for every failure to follow through on campaign promises, either ignorance or excuses. Merely seeing a "take charge feller" behind the Presidentially sealed podium will provide a sort of fuzzy comfort to "middle America" that Obama currently provides to western and northeast coastal whites.

I agree that Trump is no idealogue, but I do think he is different from previous Republican offerings in that he really believes "America First". I'll go out on a pretty thick limb and say he is likely to be better than either Bush proved to be.

Einherjar86 said:
In other news, I attended a lecture a few weeks ago. The speaker was Cary Wolfe, author of What is Posthumanism?, and he gave a really dense (but very good) talk about the role of politics today. Interestingly enough, the topic of ethics came up only once during his talk, briefly, and associated with an entirely different theorist. Wolfe avoided the topic entirely, insinuating that politics and ethics are two separate practices...

I asked him about this in the Q&A, and he invoked Niklas Luhmann. He said that Luhmann rejected all applications of ethical praxis since they ultimately must fall back on a good/evil dichotomy, and he perceived those kinds of absolutes as dangerous (I agree, although I suppose I define ethics differently). Another scholar followed-up my question with a thinly veiled query as to how we attach responsibility in the aftermath of financial fraud (obviously alluding to the recent financial crisis). Wolfe admitted that for Luhmann, this kind of ethical prompting is untenable and that systems theory resists any "unnecessary structural coupling" (this was his exact phrase).
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Trying to divorce ethics from politics is wishful thinking. Additionally, "responsibility" can be assigned without pearl clutching or over-the-top moralizing. The market has mechanisms for assigning responsibility and punishment, and would have done so had there been no bailouts. Punishing the bankers isn't nearly so big an issue when their banks are all bankrupt.

Einherjar86 said:
tl;dr - modern science and technology demand a theoretical reassessment of social/market relations that move beyond the latent humanism of Marxism, but that also reject the conservative humanism of the "free market."
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Land would like a word :lol:
 
I've identified this trend in Land's work for years; but in more recent posts he seems to oscillate between all-out market complexity and some weird residue of humanistic improvement.

He's at his best when he suggests that uninhibited market functioniality may spell human extinction, since he's at least being consistent; but then he also seems to want to argue that uninhibited market functionality is the best thing for humanity. That confuses me.

And for what it's worth, Niklas Luhmann was already saying these things in the 1980s, as my most recent research has revealed to me. He was just saying it without the post-Deleuzian flair that Land invokes.
 
Einherjar86 said:
I've identified this trend in Land's work for years; but in more recent posts he seems to oscillate between all-out market complexity and some weird residue of humanistic improvement.
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I still believe this is a side effect of having kids. Easier to be disinterested with no "skin in the game".
 
Not sure how I feel about all of the logical acrobatics happening here, but I do at the very least agree with Brassier's diagnosis of the problem. In effect, he charges contemporary intellectual thought (and I mean that in an all-encompassing sense) operates according to a divide between affirmative and critical methodologies: on one hand, affirmationist philosophies that attempt to construct models of the world or the subject (traditionally pre-Socratic philosophers, but also Plato, Aristotle, and more recently Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze, Badiou, etc.), and on the other hand, critical theory that basically offer de-constructions of reality (mostly post-Heideggerian figures, the Frankfurt School, and French late structuralism).

Brassier wants to explore a means of methodologically unifying these two side of intellectual thought that drives through a Nietzschean model into a kind of negative Platonism. This is all really, really abstract to me, and I'd like to see him do it, as skeptical as I am. Either way, I'm buying his next book. :)

http://stasisjournal.net/all-issues...osophy-as-entwinement-of-truth-and-negativity

The issue here is not merely that of salvaging the ideality of truth from its materialist depredations—to characterize it as such is to invite the predictable charge of reactionary protectionism—but to rehabilitate truth’s critical potency with regard to a postmodern materialism whose reverence for what is oscillates between cynicism and inanity. It is to do so, moreover, in such a way as to subvert the facile opposition between critical materialism and conservative idealism. It is not news to observe the dialectical complicity between the materialization of the idea and the idealization of matter. What is new, however, is the revelation that a genuinely critical materialism requires acknowledging the way in which the non-being of the idea is entwined with the being of matter. This is an insight we owe to Plato. Sometimes, old ideas reveal their proper depth only when measured against the actual contours of their successors. What I wish to do here is underline the persistent critical salience of Plato’s discovery of non-being, in contrast with the pathologization of the negative promulgated in the name of a post-critical—both anti-Kantian and anti-Hegelian—metaphysics. The names most frequently associated with this post-critical metaphysics are Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze. Among the implications of the view I wish to propose is that it is precisely those who inscribe ideation within the immanence of material being who find themselves endorsing the substantive equivalence of thinking and being, whereas those who follow Plato in defending the transcendence of the idea substitute formal correlation for substantial equivalence, thereby preserving the autonomy of the real. So I agree with those who, like Badiou, think it is a mistake to reduce Plato’s dialectic of essence and appearance to a two-world metaphysics of phenomenon and noumenon. Plato’s is a formal dualism of eidos (idea) and soma (body), rather than a substantial dualism of mental and physical. And such formal dualism provides the necessary precondition for materialist monism. Conversely, it is in the varieties of metaphysical materialism, including dialectical materialism, rather than in Platonism, that the ostensibly idealist fusion of thought and being is consecrated. Thus, one of the most interesting consequences of Plato’s suspension of the Parmenidean axiom is the winnowing of substance from idea: concomitant with Plato’s metaphysics of negation is a certain negation of metaphysics understood as tautological iteration of the equivalence thinking: being. What does this negation entail? Simply that in acknowledging that what is not, somehow is, we are also bound to recognize that what is, somehow is not. Plato’s exposure of the entwinement of being and non-being in thinking about what is, remains the most authoritative rejoinder to those who would subordinate the autonomy of thought to the immanence of being. It is hardly surprising, then, that the overturning of Platonism remains the indispensable prerequisite for reinstating the unity of mind and nature. This unity is the ultimate figure of reconciliation and the desideratum of all metaphysical idealism. Yet dialectics, from its Platonic inception onwards, is a method of division and an antagonistic medium (antilogikon) within which every temporary resolution is haunted by its unreconciled remainder. This negative remainder is, of course, the phantom twin of every affirmation, and Plato’s invention of dialectic is the first and arguably most decisive step in honing the logos to the point where it can puncture the otherwise impenetrable opacity of phusis, or natural being.
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His first book (which he admits was ultimately flawed) was an effort to do just that. He argues that Nietzsche's philosophy presents us with contradictions that shouldn't be abandoned, but should be pressed through beyond their (nihilistic) conclusions. I have no idea what that would look like, by the way. Brassier contends that nihilism is the greatest problem facing intellectual thought today, and that it doesn't deserve to be abandoned but needs to be thought through, basically. That's what I meant by a "drive through."

Brassier has a somewhat different take on Nietzsche than most contemporary philosophers, from what I understand, and that has segregated him from the contemporary school of Western affirmationist philosophy, and aligned him more with critical schools. But he really resists this association, and his writing partakes of a very traditional, rigorously precise analytical style. Unfortunately it's also very dense and presumptuous (i.e. it assumes that its readership is familiar with the nuances of philosophical tradition).
 
Einherjar86 said:
His first book (which he admits was ultimately flawed) was an effort to do just that. He argues that Nietzsche's philosophy presents us with contradictions that shouldn't be abandoned, but should be pressed through beyond their (nihilistic) conclusions. I have no idea what that would look like, by the way. Brassier contends that nihilism is the greatest problem facing intellectual thought today, and that it doesn't deserve to be abandoned but needs to be thought through, basically. That's what I meant by a "drive through."
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Nietzsche said nihilism was the greatest problem facing humanity in general over a century ago. :p Taking nihilism as a sort of central focus of an area of philosophy, Nietzsche's philosophy could be construed as having contradictions, and not dissimilar to Landian contradictions ( and Brassier doesn't like Land). So I don't know what Brassier wants to do here.

Einherjar86 said:
Brassier has a somewhat different take on Nietzsche than most contemporary philosophers, from what I understand, and that has segregated him from the contemporary school of Western affirmationist philosophy, and aligned him more with critical schools. But he really resists this association, and his writing partakes of a very traditional, rigorously precise analytical style. Unfortunately it's also very dense and presumptuous (i.e. it assumes that its readership is familiar with the nuances of philosophical tradition).
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I don't know in what way Brassier differs in his take on Nietzsche, especially since I don't know what the contemporary take is. I had a whole semester on Nietzsche but we spent no time on other's interpretations.
 
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