New Years Eve

A year? Its an administrative unit of measurement based on a consistent orbital period and climatic phenomena. To attribute significance as such to a year is tantamount to an astrology about units of time.

An anthropomorphism of time: we say it proceeds by ordered units of measurement, and turn that order into an absolute

Don't tell me that we do not take a year seriously - it is a fundamental and neccessary concept. The importance of the administrator, as artist.

Christmas Day Reflection on Kim Jong Il and Power

A Hitler, a Stalin, or a Kim Jong Il is NOT as pathological, in terms of drives, as we are usually led to think. Assuming a relative equality among persons, I'd like to think of us as repressed versions of them.

It is the relative order of significance to which we attribute certain aspects of our lives as they do to theirs which characterize the huge differences in consequences.

In fact, the inflation of the significance of the tiniest details and trivialities of our daily lives can be understood best as the same function acting out on a much smaller scale, but with no less absoluteness.

So it is the factors which affect the positing of significances to events which is the crucial difference here.

It is the capacity of the tyrant to overlook the factors that limit his desire for power that distinguishes him - and it is his interpretation of the world that crucially cannot be accomodated because of its real effects.

Ultimately, like us, he needs to sustain a view of the level of significance of the obstacles which lie in his path in order to locate his identity within the coordinates of control and power over significant things. But his approach differs: as we elevate the value of the smallest things, he consumes and destroys greater and greater amounts to sustain a level of said satisfaction.

Of course, the former approach is to be preferred to the latter, while 'successful people' are characterized by the enviable ability to cultivate and balance the two approaches.

Note to Self 5

The interpretation of becoming according to language, logical and narrative.

Utility as causative acknowledgement of role of praxis as inadequate because becoming cannot be reduced to notions derived from agency.

The Commercialisation of Development

Each society forges new paths through certain mediums of development searching continually for new forms, technes and technologies: gamechangers of the ways in which we perceive reality as it were in which to express our relation to the world and acts both real and perceived. New forms bring new possibilities and configurations of agency and its correspondent image of symbols. They can take on the forms of vertical product creation or facilitation of cross product exchanges. The question of the nature of evolution may be traced to the forces identifying and facilitating the creation of new forms and the consciousness that must attend it, both individual and social. Commercialisation has made it a question primarily of access with market as the dominant arbiter and referent of taste and development, although opinion leaders play major roles. Marketing has a reciprocally conditioning relation to the underlying forces, defining the imagic represented content based on the underlying forces, while modifying them also.

Note 16

I consider upon these carcass of days, of futile sunrises and dread filled mornings. Pursuing the darkness that lies beyond my curtains my eyes chance upon a golden glow of forgotten shadows brought into flesh once more. The rooms of walls fall away revealing gardens with paths we were to tread together to the sounds of the winds in the loosing trees.

Emerson

The point is not to choose to see all as divine but to be able to see in all particulars the representations that make them so. For Nietzsche the overriding narrative of development and growth celebrates the present as a necessary and grand organic element of becoming. Hence the Emersonian vision is defined as the ability to see the future in the present and thereby elevate it into what it truly is. Therefore the paradox of eternal recurrence takes its place as the final barrier within the Nietzschean project of affirmation by subverting the illusion of progressive growth, in individual or societial consciousness. It is Nietzsche's thought experiment for the creation of a post-historical philosophizing that succeeds his historical and genealogical project - one that again reorients the interpretation of the present, within, or built upon, the wider system of consciousness that developed from the irreversible incorporation of historical reality.

Culture 1

The nature of culture as an ordering device that relates a complete system of social science as the underlying presumption functioning as praxis through its solidification as initiations, as collective protocols of normalcy.

Note to Self 4

What Nietzsche hopes to do. Whether or not science is true is besides the point; what is the psychological function that a belief in the truthfulness of science plays? A psychological inquiry into the nature of beliefs and the act of believing, as revealing the cognitive assumptions that underlie the way we think, live, and react to the conditions in the present, in our lives.

So the psychological, historical revolution hopes to overturn the conception of truth as something that belongs within the first order relation of the world to itself. Instead, from a perspective of a second-order system of truth, where all perspectives are subjectively embedded, one criticizes one's experience, and therefore all its contents, as a contingent possibility, something where practical and pure reason each have to face problems and reconcile them in possibly conflicting ways. Nietzsche builds on a system of truth to critique its presumptions and to show them to be hollow, and posits a higher order truth pertaining to the nature of perception and experience, and how it must be, to show that these are themselves functions of practical reason, qualities in actual relation to life as a problem in its broadest sense.

This itself reflects a nominal philosophical realism as against the competing propositional realism. Or does/can it?

Note to Self 3

Given the role that mentality plays in defining the ways in which we conceive of and react to conditions, it may be posited that the character of intersubjective experience consists of interlocking webs of psychologically-based interpretations. This implies that facts, symbols and truths are positive expressions of negativity with regards to agency and possibility, and are reactions to limitations conceived within that realm of possibility. But they are contingently so because only experience reveals their limitations; and because they only take on meaning in relation to what is in fact possible. Therefore, truthfulness defined as what is the case, as opposed to what might be the case, returns with a vengeance.

Puzzle 1

How can we contextualise an understanding of the critique of modernity as such if one cannot even grasp the full import and depth, and not merely in simple descriptive terms and theroretical categories, the actualized totality of the ideas endlessly replayed, reinforced and reinterpreted in connection with the world in its dynamics? How is one to begin an understanding, within understandings, of the nature of a thought-act, their embededness, their emergent meanings and consequences? What is the content of all critique?

This conditions a reminder that any act of deproblematicizing, any sitting back in the chair of imported images with a self-satisfied smile is so much religion, a slip of the mind.

In this sense, the history of the world is so much the history of praxis - as always, negatively defined? To repeat, why is utility-evolution so popular nowadays? Because its conveniently true. But then, truth didn't matter so much in the past.

Quotes 2

"Theoretical resources are always already distorted (esp. social, ie psychologically-based), and something of them fails to represent or capture adequately the world they take root in. The question is not merely how some ideas come to be possible in certain social conditions as if we were then explaining them away, but how to develop an analysis of how certains sets of concepts are put to work to grasp conditions that have reached points of impossibility, breaking points. We are really outlining the conditions of impossibility for how the theories were put together."