The question: is facebook a fad or a permanent fixture of the internet? To me, social networking is not a fad. As its natural conclusion, it will displace google, and mobile-network services (eg. sms, calls).
Fad:
1) The social-communication functions which facebook optimizes can be performed more effectively with mobile connections. Also, it does not introduce fundamental changes in the demands of the way we communicate over the web.
- Facebook is essentially a form of entertainment, whose medium are memes, photos, quotes, and 9gag links. These are fads. Counter: Facebook shares these. It can conceivably integrate new fads.
Permanent fixture:
1) Facebook connectivity is structural. Social information-sharing will become the main engine of information-distribution on the internet. The evolution of this information sharing will depend largely on the share options provided by Facebook.
2) The internet is an information bank. Information-acquisition is either personal or social. Personal information acquisition is conditioned by individual conditions. You need to research something - go to google. You want entertainment - go to youtube, and so on. Facebook is different. You do not know what you want when you go to Facebook. So unlike google or youtube, there is no initial goal. Why? Because the information I get on facebook is socially conditioned, a forum of friends. I am part of that social condition. Joining that social condition is called facebooking.
(Anything phenomenologically 'Real' is social, or personified. Facebook personifies the Internet as lifestyle space, makes it Real in that sense. The benefit is that this personification is precisely a corresponding mimicry of the real-world social.)
So we are in conversation in an imaginary space of friends. What kinds of ideals do Facebook represent, socially? Who is facebook? A memorable conversation with your best friend? The best night out? The desire to idealize social space.
3) The oligopolisation of information over the internet. The decreasing role of Google search and small sites. Personal expression converging in public mediums and forms. The culturalization of the web accelerates with the concentration of expression in a series of facebookable forms, providing fresh principles for creativity. Very quick cycles of forms, requiring new updates and options.
Fad? No. At worst a slow decline.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Note 36
Interesting. It is precisely the cannot-be-said of the framework which rules we apply but as yet cannot uncover or identify, that constitutes the ground of thought.
Brain science as the new historical consciousness.
Neuroscience and its subset explanatory psychologies as the major force reshaping the way man develops the coordinates of the background reality that conditions his worldview. It can create new possibilities which are presently inconceivable from an intuitive standpoint from which to reframe our approaches to thinking about thought itself.
Brain science as the new historical consciousness.
Neuroscience and its subset explanatory psychologies as the major force reshaping the way man develops the coordinates of the background reality that conditions his worldview. It can create new possibilities which are presently inconceivable from an intuitive standpoint from which to reframe our approaches to thinking about thought itself.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Note 35
footloose
i feel these hands that carry the world
i feel the clouds of dust that swirl around things
moving, shifting
you fall to the ground, feeling the tracks as
the pebbles bleed your fingers,
and the train moves.
So the milky current,
like the best food you've tasted,
or the waves that seem to wash and clean,
salting your hair as it breathed
from the cool dark belly of its ocean depths
unlocks threatens like a loosing promise
sliding like madness in a dream
but the trees ring forth spring
like an absurd parody.
You dance. Footsteps on the receding floor,
the rhythms grow louder as the head
swirls in a cloud of dust.
Witness the madness! The sickness!
You say, as the fifty pence ale
gurgles like a purifier in your throat,
turning brains into wishing wells
and coins into lies.
The dirt on the floor.
Bent and broken glass stuck in your shoes,
you reach to vacuum them away.
What? It weighs a ton, like the matter in
the brain, the accumulated
sickness of thousands of years of life,
stored in a citrus moment,
burning away like acid,
emitting a sparkling glow,
a molotov personality crashing into the fashion-shop windows of truth,
before some father-figure appears and tells you
what you needed to hear but knew didn't work anyway.
Those switches!
How do you work them?
I need some transistors
these veins bleed like BIOS overloads.
He poured milk over them
like a salve, cruxifying
soaring like a pebble throw at the skydomes
hitting the ceiling of a dream.
Now the hydrants open,
and the circus spotlights are switched on.
They shine on the busloads of tourists,
children, grandparents.
Someone eats a fire-stick,
pours kerosene down his throat,
a small fire breaks out, threatens the tentage as
it shakes in the breeze.
The firemen arrive - but the lungs have been burnt beyond repair.
The clown-business fails, and the magician is severely injured.
So the illusion ends.
I draw a few cards.
They slide from my cramping hands.
I do not know what they mean.
Do they know what they mean?
I take a few red pills that seem to
laugh and chatter to themselves
with secret, knowing truths
as they rub against my throat.
And the cards seem to flutter
they speak of love, life, danger, misery,
in cliffhanger tones,
that is, universally, generally,
and i am reminded of ants that swirl around
before they are crushed by a playful hand,
or killed by cigarettes.
The music begins
that is, the piano music drawn from wrinkled hands
the flowers in the flower pots begin to sing
and so the leaves droop to listen.
What do they hear?
Only music muffled from the dust in the carpets
trapped in some room on the hundredth floor.
While I hear the joyful sound of motorcycles
stuttering and stopping, speaking,
like animus mundi at the roundabout,
while the caged hens in the buses look out of the windows.
Listen, listen?
Do you hear its spirit aching, singing, sighing?
Remember, breathe it into you.
Oxygen for the dead! Oxygen for the dead!
Put it into tanks, and use it for resuscitation.
i feel these hands that carry the world
i feel the clouds of dust that swirl around things
moving, shifting
you fall to the ground, feeling the tracks as
the pebbles bleed your fingers,
and the train moves.
So the milky current,
like the best food you've tasted,
or the waves that seem to wash and clean,
salting your hair as it breathed
from the cool dark belly of its ocean depths
unlocks threatens like a loosing promise
sliding like madness in a dream
but the trees ring forth spring
like an absurd parody.
You dance. Footsteps on the receding floor,
the rhythms grow louder as the head
swirls in a cloud of dust.
Witness the madness! The sickness!
You say, as the fifty pence ale
gurgles like a purifier in your throat,
turning brains into wishing wells
and coins into lies.
The dirt on the floor.
Bent and broken glass stuck in your shoes,
you reach to vacuum them away.
What? It weighs a ton, like the matter in
the brain, the accumulated
sickness of thousands of years of life,
stored in a citrus moment,
burning away like acid,
emitting a sparkling glow,
a molotov personality crashing into the fashion-shop windows of truth,
before some father-figure appears and tells you
what you needed to hear but knew didn't work anyway.
Those switches!
How do you work them?
I need some transistors
these veins bleed like BIOS overloads.
He poured milk over them
like a salve, cruxifying
soaring like a pebble throw at the skydomes
hitting the ceiling of a dream.
Now the hydrants open,
and the circus spotlights are switched on.
They shine on the busloads of tourists,
children, grandparents.
Someone eats a fire-stick,
pours kerosene down his throat,
a small fire breaks out, threatens the tentage as
it shakes in the breeze.
The firemen arrive - but the lungs have been burnt beyond repair.
The clown-business fails, and the magician is severely injured.
So the illusion ends.
I draw a few cards.
They slide from my cramping hands.
I do not know what they mean.
Do they know what they mean?
I take a few red pills that seem to
laugh and chatter to themselves
with secret, knowing truths
as they rub against my throat.
And the cards seem to flutter
they speak of love, life, danger, misery,
in cliffhanger tones,
that is, universally, generally,
and i am reminded of ants that swirl around
before they are crushed by a playful hand,
or killed by cigarettes.
The music begins
that is, the piano music drawn from wrinkled hands
the flowers in the flower pots begin to sing
and so the leaves droop to listen.
What do they hear?
Only music muffled from the dust in the carpets
trapped in some room on the hundredth floor.
While I hear the joyful sound of motorcycles
stuttering and stopping, speaking,
like animus mundi at the roundabout,
while the caged hens in the buses look out of the windows.
Listen, listen?
Do you hear its spirit aching, singing, sighing?
Remember, breathe it into you.
Oxygen for the dead! Oxygen for the dead!
Put it into tanks, and use it for resuscitation.
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Zizek's GM video quotes and Notes
1) Zizek notes that the problem of authority as played out in the King's Speech is the problem of assuming a title that is, paradoxically, a) absurd b) one which one does not feel adequate to fulfil.
The basis of authority is absurd, yet the kinds of responsibility that come with the title need to be assumed.
How is that assumption to take place? Zizek, as against the bourgeoisie current of the movie, notes that it is based on a stupid internalization of the values of the system which support that form of authority. Man is condemned into deception as a price for responsibility.
Maturity becomes a dependent on a form of ideology even as it builds the ground on which to act for the benefit for others.
Ideology is therefore a root: from it all living forces grow.
2) Fetishes can be brutal, cynical, realistic; but fetishes allow them to acquire a distance, to prevent themselves from fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. Brutal, cynical behaviors and attitudes rest on fetishes. What is the fetish?
Distinguishing subjective beliefs, and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it.
Acts embody beliefs. The father example.
A friend visited NB in his country house in a Central European home in the highlands.
There was a horseshoe to prevent evil spirits from entering the house.
Friend: Why do you have this here? Are you stupid, are you superstitious?
Niehls Bohr: No of course I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, I'm not stupid, but I have it there because I was told it works even though I don't believe in it.
3) Does philosophical totality lead to political totalitarianism?
Critical theorists show how society necessarily undermines its own basic premises.
The distortion of a noble idea, its falsification and misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself.
4) What we are witnessing (in higher education reform) is an attempt to change university as a space of freedom into a factory of experts. Post-industrial transition.
A true intellectual dosen't solve problems posed by others. It is to re-formulate and critique the formulation of problems.
The privatization of public space. The changing function of ideology.
Market power replacing education and law as a moral instrument.
Self-commodification; other-directedness the behavioral norm.
Passionate, narcissistic, solipsistic behaviors discouraged.
Spontaneity and love of self and animality as a necessary condition of freedom.
6) The innate bureaucracy (Platonic-Legalist totalitarianism) of the Asian.
Europe as true narrative flux. The arbitrariness of power, and external authority in that context.
Power as a negative notion of agency. Negative notions of agency as conditions to which maxims of inviolability adhere. Maxims as adopted, chosen, habituated, deemed useful or neccessary.
What kind of power as the pre-condition of Order is being recognized in the structural features of the phenomenological landscape of the Asian?
How are conceptual constituents of Order to be conceived, and in relation to what?
Specifically, the relations and order of the principles which underlie beliefs.
What are the parallel or differential understandings of features that condition orientative-being (of which power is one) to the organization (of which no discourse as yet exists to elucidate) of the mind of the European?
How is the societal instrumentality of individuals to be understood in relation to the underlying systems of beliefs?
7) The injunction to enjoy.
The reproach to psychoanalysis: it is only a theory of individual disturbances; applying psychoanalysis to other cultural, social phenomena is illegitimate.
But psychoanalysis asks in what way you as an individual have to relate to the social field, not just in the sense of other people, but in the sense of the anonymous social-as-such, to exist as a person. You are a "normal individual person" in being able to relate to some anonymous social field.
Everything is to be interpreted.
When Freud says, "civilisation and its discontents"; the uneasiness in culture, he does not just mean we socialize ourselves normally, and that there are some idiots didn't make it, and they have to be normalized.
No; culture-as-such, in order to establish itself as normal, what appears as normal, involves a whole series of pathological card tricks, distortions, so on and so on.
There is Unbehagen, an uneasiness, we are out of joint, not at home, in culture as such, which means that there is no normal culture, culture-as-such has to be interpreted.
"It is this paradox which defines surplus enjoyment; it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some normal, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus-value, because it is constitutively an excess."
"Systems cease to exist if they stay the same, if it achieves an internal balance."
"The surplus-value is the cause which sets in motion the capitalist process of production, and surplus-enjoyment is the object-cause of desire."
The merging of Marxist surplus-value, Lacan's objet petit, and the paradox of the superego.
What are the principles underlying the evolution of a phenomenology and psychology of the systems. Hegelian dialectics?
"A thousand people cannot have the same interest in Lacan as I do."
How is culture a disease? How is God a disease?
The basis of authority is absurd, yet the kinds of responsibility that come with the title need to be assumed.
How is that assumption to take place? Zizek, as against the bourgeoisie current of the movie, notes that it is based on a stupid internalization of the values of the system which support that form of authority. Man is condemned into deception as a price for responsibility.
Maturity becomes a dependent on a form of ideology even as it builds the ground on which to act for the benefit for others.
Ideology is therefore a root: from it all living forces grow.
2) Fetishes can be brutal, cynical, realistic; but fetishes allow them to acquire a distance, to prevent themselves from fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. Brutal, cynical behaviors and attitudes rest on fetishes. What is the fetish?
Distinguishing subjective beliefs, and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it.
Acts embody beliefs. The father example.
A friend visited NB in his country house in a Central European home in the highlands.
There was a horseshoe to prevent evil spirits from entering the house.
Friend: Why do you have this here? Are you stupid, are you superstitious?
Niehls Bohr: No of course I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, I'm not stupid, but I have it there because I was told it works even though I don't believe in it.
3) Does philosophical totality lead to political totalitarianism?
Critical theorists show how society necessarily undermines its own basic premises.
The distortion of a noble idea, its falsification and misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself.
4) What we are witnessing (in higher education reform) is an attempt to change university as a space of freedom into a factory of experts. Post-industrial transition.
A true intellectual dosen't solve problems posed by others. It is to re-formulate and critique the formulation of problems.
The privatization of public space. The changing function of ideology.
Market power replacing education and law as a moral instrument.
Self-commodification; other-directedness the behavioral norm.
Passionate, narcissistic, solipsistic behaviors discouraged.
Spontaneity and love of self and animality as a necessary condition of freedom.
6) The innate bureaucracy (Platonic-Legalist totalitarianism) of the Asian.
Europe as true narrative flux. The arbitrariness of power, and external authority in that context.
Power as a negative notion of agency. Negative notions of agency as conditions to which maxims of inviolability adhere. Maxims as adopted, chosen, habituated, deemed useful or neccessary.
What kind of power as the pre-condition of Order is being recognized in the structural features of the phenomenological landscape of the Asian?
How are conceptual constituents of Order to be conceived, and in relation to what?
Specifically, the relations and order of the principles which underlie beliefs.
What are the parallel or differential understandings of features that condition orientative-being (of which power is one) to the organization (of which no discourse as yet exists to elucidate) of the mind of the European?
How is the societal instrumentality of individuals to be understood in relation to the underlying systems of beliefs?
7) The injunction to enjoy.
The reproach to psychoanalysis: it is only a theory of individual disturbances; applying psychoanalysis to other cultural, social phenomena is illegitimate.
But psychoanalysis asks in what way you as an individual have to relate to the social field, not just in the sense of other people, but in the sense of the anonymous social-as-such, to exist as a person. You are a "normal individual person" in being able to relate to some anonymous social field.
Everything is to be interpreted.
When Freud says, "civilisation and its discontents"; the uneasiness in culture, he does not just mean we socialize ourselves normally, and that there are some idiots didn't make it, and they have to be normalized.
No; culture-as-such, in order to establish itself as normal, what appears as normal, involves a whole series of pathological card tricks, distortions, so on and so on.
There is Unbehagen, an uneasiness, we are out of joint, not at home, in culture as such, which means that there is no normal culture, culture-as-such has to be interpreted.
"It is this paradox which defines surplus enjoyment; it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some normal, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus-value, because it is constitutively an excess."
"Systems cease to exist if they stay the same, if it achieves an internal balance."
"The surplus-value is the cause which sets in motion the capitalist process of production, and surplus-enjoyment is the object-cause of desire."
The merging of Marxist surplus-value, Lacan's objet petit, and the paradox of the superego.
What are the principles underlying the evolution of a phenomenology and psychology of the systems. Hegelian dialectics?
"A thousand people cannot have the same interest in Lacan as I do."
How is culture a disease? How is God a disease?
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Quotes 4
"Breaking out of an established framework of thinking or perceiving occurs in creating a theory or artistic object, yet it is not restricted to these; it is important to be able to "break frame" in our everyday lives also.
Sometimes the breaking of frame will be a direct action violating a previous framework of expectations that defined which actions were admissible or were allowed to occur, but which excluded the most functional actions or even effective ones.
The pieces of the frame - other's expectations, cultural traditions, our own habitual patterns of behavior resulting from past reinforcements, our own rules of thumb for acting - affect what range of choice we perceive, which alternatives are salient, which ones come to mind, which ones get excluded immediately, even whether we think we face a choice rather than simply a direction we must move in."
- Robert Nozick
1) Exploration begins from a framework, or "home base", of contours of significances and beliefs, and consists in the harmonic synthesis of new experiences, and therefore the reorganization of the meaningful interrelations among these frameworks, within the bounds of the affective and cognitive principles underlying the attachments to these frameworks. A three-level re-orientation takes place - phenomenology, belief, relation to principle.
2) Interestingly, while non-contradictory by necessity, these frameworks tend to be irreconcilable, and creative acts function to draw links between them that alters their place in a larger whole.
3) Rules of harmony differ according to the situational, and hence functional, context of the synthesis. Different principles reflect different approaches.
Sometimes the breaking of frame will be a direct action violating a previous framework of expectations that defined which actions were admissible or were allowed to occur, but which excluded the most functional actions or even effective ones.
The pieces of the frame - other's expectations, cultural traditions, our own habitual patterns of behavior resulting from past reinforcements, our own rules of thumb for acting - affect what range of choice we perceive, which alternatives are salient, which ones come to mind, which ones get excluded immediately, even whether we think we face a choice rather than simply a direction we must move in."
- Robert Nozick
1) Exploration begins from a framework, or "home base", of contours of significances and beliefs, and consists in the harmonic synthesis of new experiences, and therefore the reorganization of the meaningful interrelations among these frameworks, within the bounds of the affective and cognitive principles underlying the attachments to these frameworks. A three-level re-orientation takes place - phenomenology, belief, relation to principle.
2) Interestingly, while non-contradictory by necessity, these frameworks tend to be irreconcilable, and creative acts function to draw links between them that alters their place in a larger whole.
3) Rules of harmony differ according to the situational, and hence functional, context of the synthesis. Different principles reflect different approaches.
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