"2008: The gate begins to open; transformation accelerates."

I know three in a row might be excessive but I couldn't pass up this opportunity. Jenny just got her most recent (unrequested) "Wise Woman Center Gazette" a newsletter run by herbal wise woman/forest goddess, Susun Weed. This was the headliner.




"I've always believed that global warming is Mother Nature's hot flash. Menopause is transformation, and we are just beginning our wild ride. The gate begins to open.

When kundalini energies rise up the spine, the body feels like it is on fire. This stunning, searing spiritual energy pushes open the gates of consciousness at the top of the head. (Represented by the halo.) It is thought that this process will be completed in a planetary sense around 2012, the end of the Mayan calender.

Nature's menopause is carrying each one of us into spiraling vortexes of energy. As my mentor Elizabeth Kubler Ross was fond of telling us: "In the tumbler of life you have two choices -- Be broken to bits. Or be polished."

We dedicate 2008 to polishing until we gleam! Our beloved Z Budapest returns to rub us into luminescence; the gracious White-feather also returns to buff our luster; Marie Summerwood shines us into chants; and we will explode with fourth of July orgasms and laugh with the baby goats. Do join us."

Democracy, Authority, Narcissism: From Agamben to Stiegler

Democracy, Authority, Narcissism: From Agamben to Stiegler
from Contretemps, an online journal of philosophy.

In this exciting essay, which draws on the work of Agamben, Freud, Heidegger and Stiegler, Daniel Ross attempts to uncover a technological movement which he argues should be understood as having its own evolution independent of those who are presumed to control it (that is, use it as a means to their purportedly self-determined ends). What is suggested is the reversal of our common understanding regarding the relation of the human to its tool. He argues that given the nature and direction of technology, we should reassess ‘democracy’ as a concept in crisis. On the horizon he sees a destruction of the distinction between law and life, and the loss of our collective and individual individuation (perhaps akin in spirit to the ambition of National Socialism though certainly more invidious). I highly recommend reading through this relatively short essay (11 pages) if not just for the excellent background knowledge it provides on the work of these important thinkers.

Daniel Ross is an Australian philosopher and film-maker.

American Astronaut

Just finished watching this Cory McAbee film again and it remains my favorite in respected genre of Sci-fi western musicals. It aims at the goofy-profound which seems appropriate to its subject matter: the sexual solipsism of American masculinity. This particular scene shows the moment of contact with the women of Venus - the first tangible encounter following the single celled 'real live girl' in a box and the boy 'who actually saw a woman's breast!'

First Post: Why Linux Doesn't Spread

A good essay from a psychologist's point of view on the conflict between what is best for people and what people want... as it relates to Linux. It's complete with an analogy to Tom Sawyer and the phrase "dog's bollocks", so what more do you want?

http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/02/why-linux-doesnt-spread-curse-of-being.html

Class Structure

I think there is a lot of truth to this:

It is sufficient to argue that the class structure constitutes the central mechanism by which various sorts of resources are appropriated and distributed, therefore determining the underlying capacities to act of various social actors. Class structures are the central determinant of social power. Consequently, they may determine what kinds of social changes are possible, even if they do not functionally determine the specific form of every institution of the society.

- Erik Olin Wright, Classes : p. (31-32)
(You can read the book in PDF form here: link)

Further Notes on “The Desire of Philosophy”: Hermeneutic Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, or Postmodern Philosophy? No, Thanks!

To continue the reading of Badiou’s “The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World” in relation to the question of the future of philosophy, we must outline and interrogate the dominant modes of philosophy today (hermeneutics, analytical, and postmodern), in order to come to a point of caesura, or a point of interruption of these, and create a future for philosophy, without limits, unbound. We would, of course, err in assuming that any one thinker belongs to any one of these particular orientations, completely disjointed from another; nevertheless, in interrogating them we can locate the crucial points where they meet. This crossroads, if you will, between the three orientations marks the fundamental obstacle which any new philosophy must radically dismantle, overcome, and continue on, elsewhere, indefinitely.

The vicissitudes of philosophy today

Badiou outlines two common tendencies in these three orientations. It is notorious that these three orientations fail to adequately overcome the counter-facts (maybe naming them countering facts is a better expression, or, even better, concrete obstacles) of the world as it is, and, hence, are unable to step off their merry-go-round, repeating the same experiments over-and-over and falling into the traps of sophistry, nihilism, and obscurantism. What marks the contemporaneity of these three orientations are: the theme of the end and the predominance of the question of language.

The End. For all of these philosophies share the negative theme of the end of metaphysics, and some even go so far as to posit the end of philosophy itself (and, along with it, the end of history, the end of politics, etc.). In other words, what all three orientations share is a negation of thinking universality itself, a giving up on the desire(s) of philosophy to a limited domain of particular relativisms. Giving up on truth(s) we are drowned in the sea of the plurality of meaning. And so it is that these philosophies have given in to the obstacles countering the desires of philosophy. A sense of closure, finitude, and completeness mark these three orientations, and, along with them, a lack of hope for the future of philosophy. What does this or that mean? is the only fathomable questions these philosophers can pose in their relentless declaration of ends, while the question of truth is judged dead and sent to the gallows.

The Question of Language. Language today is the predominant positive field of inquiry in all three orientations, whether they be in the domain of speech acts, linguistic rules, or the fragmentation of discourses. Zizzy notes contra Russell that he doesn’t think that we can transcend the limits of language. The absence of metaphysics, then in these philosophies becomes a kind of linguistic anthropology. Linguistic anthropology, or, the logic of the finite human animal in relation to the limits of its language(s), where language is the transcendental term, and, yet, which cannot itself be transcended.

Logical Revolt

Badiou proposes two ideas, which are the names of starting points, for a new style of philosophy without ends and without obscuring thought by the question of language:

1. “Language is not the absolute horizon of thought. The great linguistic turn of philosophy, or the absorption of philosophy into the meditation on language, must be reversed. In the Cratylus, which is concerned with language from beginning to end, Plato says, “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things.””

Which is to say, to begin to think from the things themselves, and not from the words which we have attributed to those things. Thinking must not be limited to the language of its inscription. The fact, without being a fact, that there are things in the world which do not (yet) have names is enough to warrant the dismissal of the language rules and games we’ve created for ourselves. There are things in the world which words cannot describe. Any poet worthy of the name knows this very well. So, we must begin again from the things without words, from the unnamebale things which (are non)exist(ant), but which are not limited to their inscription in the closed domain of language, even if language is the necessary means by which we must interrogate the things. Of course, we cannot simply do away with language, but we cannot place limits upon language to express in a new style the thinking that philosophy is; philosophy is transmissible through language, it is address through language. On a side note, does not this excerpt from Plato indicate, precisely, his materialist thinking contrary to all those who wish limit him to being the philosopher of the Idea?

2. “The singular and irreducible role of philosophy is to establish a fixed point within a discourse, a point of interruption, a point of discontinuity, an unconditional point. Our world is marked by its speed…Speed is the mask of inconsistency. Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speed, will constitute a time of its own. This thinking, slow and consequently rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point, whatever it may be, whatever its name may be, which we need in order to sustain the desire of philosophy.”

It is to bring truth back into the praxis of thinking. Why is it that we scour at such a word as “truth”? Truth has nothing to do with the facts. Let the truth be told, no. Truths are not fixed, nor simply defined. Truths cannot be looked up in a dictionary nor in an encyclopedia. Truths are not simply the opposite of the lie. We are assaulted on a continuous basis every short and fleeting moment we yield to, without actually yielding, since we are rather trapped in, the violent discourses of mass communication. The first step, therefore, must be to radically distantiate from these discourses, to not let the speed of information, and the fetish of the cut-and-flash, shock-and-awe, of your preferred daily news show, distract from the desire of philosophy. To relax for more than just a second and think.

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And Badiou’s objective, of course, is nothing short of the unconditional foundation of a new doctrine of the subject upon the ruins of metaphysics and its criticism, coinciding with the positive demands that the world is asking of philosophy. Philosophy must not continue falling; it must, demands the world, “get up and walk”.

Notes on the Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World

I shamelessly copied this photo and text from a shameless copied photo and text from a shameless blogger of another shameless blog:

"Philosophy has been defined as “an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly”; I should define it rather an “an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously”. The philosopher’s temperament is rare, because it has to combine two somewhat conflicting characteristics: on the one hand a strong desire to believe some general proposition about the universe or human life; on the other hand, inability to believe contentedly except on what appear to be intellectual grounds. The more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be in order to produce in him the desired state of intellectual acquiescence. That is why philosophy is obscure." - Bertrand Russell

The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World

Alain Badiou’s essay “The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World” – translated as the first chapter of a collection of his writings, in English, Infinite Thought, from the French by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens – is an infinitely demanding, yet clear and consise, if, nonetheless, rigorous and unforgiving, address to contemporary philosophy and to the world; it may be read as a response to the plea not simply from one of the founders of empiricism and logical positivism, but from the world, and for logic, or, if you prefer, for a clear thinking. But what is a philosophical address? And to whom is philosophy addressed to? The philosophical address is an address to all, or, better, it is address to nobody in particular, devoid of any specific address, to the void that it itself is.[1] Here I will give a summary of the first part of this essay, and if you so desire to read further you can do so.

What is the future of philosophy? We can only speculate; but, to address what philosophy can think, here and now, we must first consider what philosophy wants, or, rather, what is wanted of philosophy, what the world demands of philosophy, today, in our contemporary multiplicity of situations. The first step in the procedure, for thinking which desires logical consistency, must, henceforth, be a declaration of axioms, from which one can logically proceed, must decide upon what is and what takes place. What does philosophy desire? What are its axioms? For Badiou, the desire of philosophy is four-fold:

1. Revolt : “there is no philosophy without the discontent of thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is”; i.e., it is the world which takes place, and we must ourselves assume full responsibility for the consequences of revolt: logical, destructive, negative, creative, subtractive.

2. Logic: “a belief in the power of argument and reason”; i.e., it proceeds from a fidelity to axioms and seeks verification through deduction, consistency, and the most devoted rigour.

3. Universality: “philosophy addresses all humans as thinking beings since it supposes that all humans think”; i.e., presupposing the “equaliy of intelligence”[2] and the void of the address itself, in order to verify what is valid for all thinking.

4. Taking Risks: “thinking is always a decision which supports independent points of view”; i.e., it must reach a point whereby it makes a decision to continue to follow through on specific position(s), even if the choice is not absolutely clear from the very beginning; but, the decision must not, nevertheless, be forced (especially when we encounter a false choice between a synthesis of two disjunctive positions (the case of State representational-parliamentary democratic politics today)), without an ethic of patience and persistence: in other words, thought is a slow and difficult process, yet it must continue; a forcing of a decision, then, is of the highest risk.

Denying the possibility of the four dimensions of the desire of philosophy, in the world as it is, today, are four counter-facts (i.e., facts which run against and pose as obstacles to the commitment to these desires of philosophy – remember Lacan’s ethical injunction: “do not compromise/give up on your desire!” –so as to, perhaps, extend our discussion of information served to us, shrink-wrapped and on a hot plate, and the facts, headed to the wikis), which Badiou names, but doesn’t name them as such (i.e., as counter-facts):

1. Freedom: because we live in a world that is free, a commercialized world, we no longer have the necessity to revolt. After all, who needs to revolt when we can shop online, travel to exotic lands, and have all our basic necessities for basic human survival a few steps away?

We clearly see what kind of world this is. It is, of course, the “Western” world, the “free world” where the market and the superego reign supreme, where everyone has their human rights and humanely gives them to those who have none: enjoy, be happy, healthy, and fit for the world of goods! No need for despair , because we have none, we are free as the stars in the sky! Of mechandise, sales, and profits; goods, commodities, and fetishes. And, of course, it is important to underscore in this beligerency of freedom the primary contraction between the world as such, and the world as it really is.

2. Communication: illogical; the reign of information and the renaissance of the encyclopedia – to quote at length, because this concerns some of the questions we are posing here on this Great Machine:

“Communication transmits a universe made up of disconnected images, remarks, statements, and commentaries, whose accepted principle is incoherence. Day after day communication undoes all relations and all principles, in an untenable juxtaposition that dissolves every relation that it sweeps along in its flow. And what is perhaps even more distressing is that mass communication presents the world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory, a spectacle in which new images and new remarks cover, erase and consign to oblivion the images and remarks that have just been shown and said. The logic which is specifically undone here is the logic of time.”

The world of news, opinions, and polls. The world of votes, conferences on anything and everything that can inform, debates, interviews, debates, interviews, and oh so many more debates, blogs, wikis of vast amounts of edited and unedited information, of Hollywood stardom, reality television, and commercial sales, music videos and YouTube for the kiddies and Reader’s Digest and National Geographic for the elders, Al Jazeera for some, Fox News for others, and Democracy Now! for the free. The world as it is everywhere, flowing freely across airways, and regurgitated from space, the world where it really is as it takes place, floating in space without logic, nor any trace of the past, nor time to think, and the speed of waves and frequiencies.

3. Fragmentation: via abstract economic and technological configurations, a multiplicity of forms of production, monetary distribution, a seemingly limitless diversification and the specialization of particular functions. No validity anywhere.

4. Calculation: a world full of probability theorists, statistics junkies, and risk management and insurance brokers, the probability of a terrorist attack (red-orange-yellow-green), what is the probability that my apartment will burn down? What is the probability that I will get in a car accident?

We must refuse to be objects of this calculative eruditism. Calculation is needed only in so far and ever because we are insecure, hence calculate and calculate, secure, secure, secure, so long as you are happy and free, the world will remain the same and we can die in peace.

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[1] See Badiou’s “What is a Philosophical Institution? Or: Address, Transmission, Inscription” in The Praxis of Alain Badiou, Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett, and Justin Clemens, ed., Open Access publication.

[2] Badiou doesn’t explicity state this anywhere in his work, although he does take equality as an axiomatic condition necessary for any form of militant, emancipatory politics. It is, rather, a position taken by an early 19^th century exiled schoolmaster, Joseph Jacotot, whose verifaction of this principle in the concrete, experimental situation of the classroom, does away with reducing “intelligence” to the capacity or ability of cognitive faculties, the distinctions of social class, or any other predicate for that matter, one has - “has” here inherently implying possession - to think. See Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Kristin Ross, trans., Stanford UP, 1991. See also, if you read French, Sylvain Lazarus’ L’Anthropologie du nom, Seuil, 1996, the first statement of which is: “Les gens pensent.” (“People think.”)