On the wrong side

I am on the wrong side.  In the wrong place.  At the wrong time.

Grab a bit of Graeber here:

Interviewed by Bloomberg 2009.

Lecturing at Oxford last month.

( . . . )

If agreement is not reached at Durban and consequent action  is not initiated immediately thereafter then everything, and that really does include everything, dies with you, behind your eyes, as you watch all you ever cared about perish.

I have little to 'lose,' and I don't care about your mockery and nay-saying or "it's all good" cretinisms, because I have endured these things for four fifths of my life, but it nearly brings tears to the eyes to imagine you watching the children lose their futures, and shortly afterward their lives.  

I loved you lot.  All of you.  Even the bad ones.  And I know a number saw this coming and loved the more for the sight of it.

I hate the organisms that kept you all immersed in petty darkness, though.  How I hate them.  And pray to everything that ever merited being named sacred that I am mistaken, that miracles might happen.

Geist!!!!!

I don't know how to express my shock at this. (Reposted from Printculture and filed for safekeeping.)

(loosen)

For another year then, perhaps, my goateed innocent wanders out-through the places that should not ever have needed to have been.   

Its last words before the fabric folded fast were a sigh, then "Do you see now?  I mean, what a thing to lay on even the burden-beast's back.  You know?  

(F#)

神無月

Fifteen

Today is important. 

Hopefully people are civil and any violence is suppressive. 

Turn the other cheek. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. This way lies change. 

Any other path leads to defeat or victory: both of which are failure.

Few chances arise.  Be careful.

(a tone)

When it comes to atonement, I admit to being tone-deaf.  One tries to learn the relationship between notes, still.  

There is no atoning.

When it comes to atonement, I admit to being tone-deaf.  One tries to learn the relationship between notes, still.  

Reith Lectures 2011

Listen.

Randomlings

I have an intense dislike for the word 'monetize' and derivatives thereof.


I feel that I am on the wrong side of the fence as many Germans must have felt in the five years preceding the declaration of war in 1939.  

Apologia

Sorry about the content warning.  It's because there are really quite disturbing images to be found by following the links herein which I, as an infant, would not have wished to have seen.  

What we do to ourselves.

This is part of what we are.  Watch without blinking.


PLEASE KEEP LITTLE ONES AWAY FROM THIS FOOTAGE.

Hardy's "The To-Be-Forgotten," backwards.

Hear it.

This is how it happens.

Reflections on two Cultural Revolutions, H Saussy in Printculture.

((c) H Saussy et al.)

This is analytically angry, a powerful combination.  It is also frighteningly truthful.

Rambo's Green Road

‎"The child Progress runs roughshod without humanity." - Anon
"Shorn of humanity, progress hurts its young feet." - Anon
"Humanity would bind the feet of the infant progress." - Anon
"Progressing unshod, humanity might mature." - Anon
 "Humans would hamper any innocent who outruns them." - A mon
"The fastest need no shoes." - A cobbler
"The horse has no need of iron weighting its hooves." - A horse, to Nietzsche
"Yes. It is sad, but I do." - Nietzsche, to a horse
"What use have I for old skin?" - A child
"Now you have shoes it is unseemly to remain unclothed." - A human
"Nay!" - Nietzsche 
"Neigh!" - the reply.

Haun Saussy on "Interplanetary Literature."

Saussy on "Interplanetary Literature" (and communication, weaving, trinary (is that a word?), nascent media, epochal models, the nature of personhood, Turing, 'failure,' multidisciplinarity, creation, communication and, I hope, hope.)

Copyright in the linked material is not mine: please contact the author if you wish to reference this.

Miscellanea Absurdum

Can there be such a thing as an 'untainted' good? Health care is a good, albeit a tainted one; the more that good is made equally available to everyone, the greater the good becomes and the less resources it takes to maintain. And what really taints it? I propose that money, in itself, does.


‎"After all, there's less money to be made from a healthy population than in a sick one."

Degenerative diseases such as AIDS, Diabetes, immunological failures, etc., are the most profitable of course. One of the things which ruined the NHS was the introduction of the idea of the "internal market" as a means through which to maximize efficiency. The notion that a market system will always produce optimal results is idiotic; it very rarely will.


 I wonder if corporations can possess the necessary attributes to allow them to be 'alive'?  Or to think?  I wonder what a corporation might think.  I mean 'thinking' in a very legalistic sense.  I believe it is the case that the 'corporation' is a separate legal 'entity' from the owners and / or executives of the corporation. Those people (CEOs and stockholders), are agents 'on behalf of' the corporation which is required by law to have a purpose, a 'function.' The corporation must, though, fulfill its duties, whatever they might be. I like the analogy with an AI: though I would dispute that corporations are presently sapient, that they possess some of the properties an AI must possess is perhaps a safer statement.

Towards a New Morality

"Do not do unto others what you yourself would not want others to do unto you."

"Do no harm to another person."

"Always help other people less fortunate than yourself."

"Never act out of ill-feeling or malice, no matter how much you want to."

"Always treat other people as your equals."

"Always assume intelligence."

"Do not deceive."

"Do not seek power over other people."

"Remember that the only arguments which count as arguments are those expressed through civil discourse."

"Always assign more valency to similarity than to difference."

"He had forgotten what it was to feel this much." -- Anon.

I am still touchy, yes. 

I appear to be going through some process which I imagine people call 'grief.'  I sometimes imagine that this surprises me.  It's not as it had been with my father, whom I slightly disliked for reasons I won't go into publicly.

'Publicly,' yes. I speak from the viewpoint of a typical member of a certain subset of society, that is the "communicational elites"; for they could be so named.  I, like so many who might be reading this, have grown up with electronic networks, to the point where the intricacies of various levels of information transfer protocols and thinking in binary had become transparent (which is easier than you'd expect, a hell of a lot easier than trying to think in unary, anyway!).

I also speak from the perspective of the curmudgeon and more precisely from the point of view of displaying a Scrooge-like miserliness when it comes to friendship: I'm out of fashion in this, no doubt, but I don't care much for fashion.  I never have.

At the time of writing I had 'flu.  Rhinovirus or Swinovirus? Awkward. I may be incommunicado for a while. H5N1. Sounds like a chess move or a neurotransmitter.

Anyway, I have had an aberrant level of involvement with the development of the social aspects of what became the Internet (version 1.0 as the fools would perhaps call it) and the still-evolving milieu which is supposed to be Web 2 or 3 (those who'd assert that there even is such a thing as "Web 2.0" are mistaken in my opinion).  I was even paid money for futurological stargazing:- somewhere in the vast document archives of Computer Sciences Corporation, and/or the non-existent archives of the now-dismembered NHS, there might still exist monographs on such nonsense as: "The Social Impact of Developing Digitally-based Communications Technologies" or "Thought Viruses: Exploiting Fear and Anxiety" - there was even a colon followed by a fashionably obligatory qualificatory statement about the title.  I don't like orthodoxy though and that particular convention is one I instinctually dislike, though it's a dislike born of some Rococo ambivalence about regret at not having jumped through many of the hoops which others somersaulted with athletic grace, combined with an aversion to jumping through hoops at all.  Add a dash of feeling that even if I'd tried there simply wouldn't have been the subject areas that I'm obsessively interested in now.  

An unforeseen consequence of Moore's Law I suppose though I hoped that that would be overcome, and that that Turing tape point would be reached. I'm not talking about any hypothetical 'Singularity,' by the way.   I guess I've always been a kind of Pythagorean or 'Constructivist' -- as the word applied to the interpretation of the relationship between 'Pure' math and what I would ignorantly call "the foundation of percept" or "basal nominality" or something pompous, but by which I mean the "physical world" on which we, apparently, live. (:: kidding about apparently: I think there IS such a thing, there are those that don't., they rust in the darker corridors of what I most disliked about what was then proudly parading itself as "post-Modern philosophy" during the seventies and eighties. They rust there still, spouting the same exhausted language). I have more time for some of them now: the originators, but it still seems to me to be a way of describing which consists in some interesting but obvious ideas (a nod to Mark and to Joyce here, as I think these obviousnesses float about in the same head-space as does that beautiful sentence: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." Beach-bloom born.)

I think a lot was said "by mistake" in that time. Much was rubbish then and is still rubbish now, at least when its application shifted from analysis of the arts to analysis of the real world. The problem of course arose out of language, as the best of them saw.

Okay, I'll  admit that, had the 'condition' been 'understood' at the time and if had had any interest in such categorisations, I'd be very much on the "autistic spectrum" as it's fashionable to call it these days. Another issue with what seemed orthodox thinking at that time was/is 'psychoanalysis' and Freud. And, for that matter, Jung.

The damage to individuals that has been done over the decades in the name of "psychoanalysis" is truly appalling. Simplistically cretinous and grossly misogynist with it, it really amuses me that in the Eighties almost every art critic would have been proud, were the genes to have permitted it to be 'true,' and were 'truth' to actually exist in the first place, to call themselves "feminist psychoanalytical theorists"! Psychoanalytical ways of thinking are the modern world's alchemy, based on a misunderstanding of a kind so seductively subtle that the human brain seems almost hard-wired to gleefully fall for it without even noticing.   You see, I am so old-fashioned.

For me, the science of the nature of mind cannot consist in the existence of any kind of "psyche' whatsoever, period. It is not amenable to 'analysis' because there is nothing to analyze. It's the ineluctable modality trope again, in a better disguise.  Wittgenstein or someone once stated that philosophers 'proper' were the "inheritors of that part of what used to be termed 'philosophy' that hadn't yet fallen under the Aegis of empirical science." Doesn't matter who said it, what matters is that whoever it was was correct.   Also concluded was the thought that all of what had thitherto been conceived of as 'Philosophy" consisted not in the rigors of symbolic logic at all, but consisted entirely in what I think he called (in German, where it seems to be easier to neologize, "language-games"). Very, very clever entity, old Ludwig. Very relatively able instance of the human phenotype. He was right there, too.

So, having established that with one simple back-formed Greek non-signifier, 'autism,' which is a pointer to a referent which isn't understood and for which no clear definition exists, anyone who doesn't get what I'm trying to say can dispose of me as 'disabled' or go even further and dismiss it all,  with the typical eloquence of the English, with the patronising remark "fuckin' nutjob, mate!"  I am freed from stigma, misunderstanding and malice, thereby, freeing me to try and get to some point.  The weight of forty years of systematic de-education, a word which doesn't exist even though it should, as it's better than the self-referential "dumbing-down," which I henceforth decree in my communicationally-challenged autistic way to be Anathema.

Yes, friends. Curmudgeonliness therewith.

I am, and long have been, passionate about languages and texts. I mean to the point of obsession were there not an infinite variety of knowledge to be soaked up, mixed in and, in some cases, simply to be put up with.   And so little time to do it, with such awkward tools as language and writing, which are NOT the same thing, just in case anyone was wondering. If anyone is even reading this by this point, that is, and whether or not anyone reads this is of only peripheral interest to me.

Only the ideas I am attempting to articulate are important.   I simply do not care.  You see, according to popular misbelief, being 'autistic' is supposed to 'disadvantage or disable' by means of reducing the person's "innate empathy."   True, in a vague kind of way, but not a disability.   Big mistake, that one. Only sometimes is it disabling to understand what it is like to not-care; in many contexts it's an advantage and it is very advantageous to me.

In part, because it allows an element of dispassion to be applied to such questions as "what is the nature of what people label 'care' or 'empathy' in the first place?". In a peculiar, oblique way, people who are very empathetic are 'disadvantaged,' 'disabled,' by the likelihood that they care about what 'care' means and this allegedly 'natural' understanding of caring's signification must be preserved, for not to do so would be aberrant at least and inhuman at worst.   I would venture that not knowing the "ineluctable modality of caring" is a necessary pre-requisite for understanding what the phenomenon of "human empathy" really consists in. I believe that such concepts have been misunderstood. Language-games again and who cares about them, mate?

Well, I do.   In fact I care very much about us humans.   Even though we're so very, very slow in picking up understanding of ourselves. Even though vast swathes of us are riddled to the core with speciesism and other miscellaneous forms of express or implicit prejudice and bigotry.   Despite the fact that many of us have such a high level of this precious "unavoidable human quality of concern for our fellow human beings" that we have enslaved billions of those very same human beings, knowingly. We know of our complicity and yet berate those who would dare to suggest that, in light of the facts, our seemingly limitless capacity for 'caring' has been entirely invisible of late.

Even though we have collectively brought the interwoven systems and processes which permit our own existence on this planet to breaking point and most likely beyond, thereby jollily denying our own descendants the "right to life," we applaud ourselves for stumbling upon such notions in the first place. For even with certain knowledge of what we have collectively done, the near-certainty that we are collectively committing true genocide every day, some of us still make claims such as one made on "Any Questions?" last year by a discussant: that ten dollar flights from London to the Costa del Sol were a "basic human right."   Perhaps it is.

Despite all this and much, much more I still care about us. About people. Both at an individual level and at the level of the genotype.

A Few Clarifications

It is important for anyone who happens upon this text to be aware of a few things and these are they:

Firstly, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves!  Sorry, no excuses, no rationalizations, but we ought to, and of course I include myself in the group who ought to be ashamed, and am ashamed, though I am still complicit.

Secondly, I don't care whether you consider any or all of this a futile endeavor, and I don't have time for any such concern.  If you think I'm delusional or deluded, I don't have time for that either.  If you are 'concerned' for my mental state or fail to understand what I am trying to say likewise, no time and no inclination: your concern is misplaced and irrelevant so take it elsewhere: there are plenty who are in need of help.

Thirdly, I don't really give a hoot about how many or what letters you might have following your name: that is not to say that such information isn't useful or that the letters are insignificant: of course they bloody are!  They are a useful measure, out of many useful measures, and are achievements in and of themselves: it's just that, in the present context, they do not matter to me.   What matters is what is said, how it's said and the integrity of the thinking underlying it.  

Fourthly, at present I do not know what good this might do, or what it might end up looking like, or who might contribute to or redact from it.  I do not pretend to know because I think it might help not to, to instead allow a sort of 'evolution' to occur.  If anyone follows this or picks up a ball from it then, at the time of writing, they are more than welcome to do so, as long as it is not for money.  Which it couldn't be, as I hope we will discover.  

(I was originally toying with the idea of the overtly hostile approach.  Simply coming out with a few assertions and opinions which hardly anyone would give the time of day to at first glance, and then trying to win the reader, if there ever are any, round to seeing why I said these Unthinkable Things.  I'll try this first, though, as nothing is presently off limits, or out-of-play.)


Fifth and finally I would like to put on record that I am an fool.  This is important.  I'm hoping at least a few who are not fools might be interested, and those who know who I am already know this.  If I get things wrong and you notice then please point it out to me in a comment or something: as I keep repeating, there is little time.  I fully aware that I will be mistaken during this dubious process, so if you know better than I do, please let me know.  


This is done because I have to try.  That is all.

Never Publish The Unfinished Piece

Words I would like to see redacted from my language as misleading: 'sustainable,' 'green,' '-friendly,' 'recyclable,' 'free,' 'democratic' [or I would like a precise definition], 'closure,' 'ethically-sourced,' 'eco-' without great precision,

(It's interesting, but any word ending in '-able' is one with which I have misgivings. The same is true of the suffixes '-ism' and '-ist.')

If our languages in part determine the modalities of our thinking, it surely follows that those brought up speaking different languages will think in different ways, the degree of difference being a function of the degree of difference in the internals of the languages, amongst other factors outside the current scope. And if language influences our ways of thinking, might it not be advisable to be a little careful about the precision with which we use it? And, when assessing the actions of the speakers of other languages, the differences between theirs and your own should be scrutinized.

If imprecision arises inevitably from the language itself, is it not a good idea to remedy this? (A particularly salient example is presently perplexing me, on which any help would be welcomed, and that is this: in order to say many things precisely, I need a word which carries all the connotations of 'human' and its relations, humanity, humanitarianism, humane, etc.. What I don't want to suggest by this word is any connection with the biological species homo sapiens sapiens. I can't think of anything that really does the job.) This is one of the reasons I have such a hangup about the 'is' / 'are' mistakes (e.g. there's a lot of people, that one) as the laziness causes the loss of an important distinction. Let this lie for a while though: 'person' will do for the time being.

If one excludes the supernatural (or, more precisely, includes what is called the supernatural in the natural) then in what lies the authority to assign us our rights?

Likewise from what stems the moral foundation of civility?

What is the cause of greed? I have real difficulty with suggesting that it emerges 'naturally' from the combination of systems and norms which people call 'human nature.'

This is an eminently recommendable article, and informative, and scary.

Beating Up on Teachers, For Spare Change