Note 38

Spinning and reverting like a bent backed secretary on a failed project
flailing at the crumpled genepool of weakness and decay
much of misery and envy at the common stophouses and fires that consume fleetingly
much of the Moses-moustache of fishlike ice-worker's and deep-tunneled plays
the carbon wreck of a simple turnstile in a pleated cage
frothing at the columns of a watery human grave. Collapsing, and ruined,
stands a fatal tower. All is death.

Jaws clenched to a tightrope,
I observe her lips. They glow a tippery yellow,
like a sun-blocked notion of an apothecary mind.
You give chase, falling into horror of the emptiness of a caved jaw.
Much like the spinning of the pineapple juice in its industrial vat,
screaming, you drown, a fly in a blunt-edged bottle
of sensousness, death and its endlessness.

This is but hell, you say. What unearthed but roadsigns or dirt,
as you veer, crashing into disappearing treelines,
like a waterfall man, a stupid salmon, a five fingered reaching plump veined fool into the grains of the firmament.
Like an idiot, the world grins in it mirroring misery,
masterfully, you reach the road, tar in your livers,
and retrieving and releasing dirt, feeling its tension against your shoulders
a wounded, collapsing frame.

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.

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.

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?

Note 34

Italy was like a dream; it sleeps fervently; the buildings like the closed face of a coloured curtain withdrawn from the world into the hills, into the dressing-gown cupboard that locked hidden things. Shadows plague the puppet architecture of the walls; grand mausoleums of society; emptying of space but filled with directionless, decaying spirit. The inescapable foreignness of the country is an exotic starting point where one plays out one's drama of the unknown: the grotesque yet charming preservation of the spirit of the dead (Italy is its coffin), strikes one as necrophilia, while the strangely useable beauty of the shaded streets seems to remind one of the crevices in our mind that remain stuck in the past.

Note 33

Narcissism is performance's favourite decoy, and it makes one sick and nauseous. Acting that tricks oneself; a lesson. The subject as your audience; not you.

Note 31

We note that culture is essentially the underlying principles of the structure by which values systems are situated in actual circumstance.

These principles underlie the network of meanings by which significance is attributed to events.

It is my contention that an objective structural description of these principles exist and can be given.

Note 30

the flower king

sandbeds and the third eye
romping through the countryside
a taken beast, a fleeting touch,
and lilting eyes, as the sun blazed golden on
the waves drowned as they pulled ashore

fishes crammed into the sides of tanks
like sharks in the fleshy deep
but you turned left
and the curtain rose to meet the sun
but you turned again
and the corridors led to dead ends

we stood in the room of mirrors
staring at the sunlight through the window
reflecting on the dusky floor
on the images of days
there shone a blueprint
it was the bounds of sense
like a child grasping at light
you reached for the image in the mirror
but all you saw was your reaching
all you touched was the light

Note 28

The dualism between existence and essence is essentially characterized by the different modalities involved in what exists and what can be said. This dualism is the reason for the mischaracterization of the relations within the real by corresponding propositions which aim at truth, and on the other hand, the misapplication of the notion of truth of assertions into the real, which remain problematic, and which are mostly held for good reasons that when looked into, cannot be adequately unpacked, nor fully justified.

It is when these reasons lay claim to assertoric truths about the real that motivations for belief-systems merge with present utility to create the image of fact, which forms part of a mediated and coherant system of myths. This is not to deny the underlying Real: it denies in principle the conceivability of truthfulness of that Real to cognizable facts. This is also not to deny the possibility of the correspondence of the Real to those facts, that is, correspondence within the bounds of all possible evidence, since it must necessarily affirm that minimal possiblity as a condition of validity of any statement at all about what is real.

The core myth of which we are concerned is the myth of individualized objectified-subjectivity, which forms the core assumption of the core value - self-development - of the Enlightenment myth.

Note 27

Man as functional item.

All individuals are created with a unique psychological profile.

This unique profile is manifest in personal preference, personal interpretative outcomes, and personal needs.

The genetic pool of the being is evolutionarily tested by the conditions which impinge on the individual as mediated by the demands of environment, by the demands of society.

Society is a collection of individuals and their interactions with one another, reflecting both the living forces within the individuals that constantly actualize, that is, that serve as the bridge between past fact and the arbitrariness of present force, and the historical institutional agreements and unagreed coercive structures that have formed the ground on which one functions, on which one understands one's own functioning, and on which the re-interpretation of the present by living force always receives form from which to alter the present while preserving it.

Society functions as an organizational construct based on the possibility of rationalized social interactions that have been tested by the factors of power, of order, of satisfaction of mutually agreed and of granted rights.

Social constructs are innately unstable if not based on a certain set of real needs and the common interpretation of those needs. It is the commonness of the need, and the commonness of the belief system which re-interprets these needs without removing them, but securing and re-inforcing them instead, that forces the individual to define his role in terms of the functions he can play with regards to the Other. He conceives of his needs socially, and not only that, the solution is social - he has no sustainance from the environment itself.

That is, all thought is functional by working through intersubjectivities to create an interpretation of needs that functionalizes the individual, that applies his understanding and his capacities, and shapes his development, for the purpose of fulfilling common needs.

We interpret things in our ways, and the contrast in interpretations correspond to the needs that exist and want to be felt within the society that nurtures a sensitivity to those needs in the first place.

Of course, the point is that the individual is a means to a single end, the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective. The subjective need is a seperate existence for which all else is means. The outer always exists as a canvas for something to exist in terms of the inner. Insofar as the outer has been manipulated, has been made the object of attention, and the object of agency, the outer exists as an extension of the inner, and the advance of power consists in shaping, re-distorting, and increasing the variety of configurations of symbols of power to allow for the flourishing of individuals over the scarcity of bounded objectivity. Of course, the democracy of human needs provides an ample, and a sure insurance, for the satisfaction of absolute power over many human lives - but humans have thrived precisely because of the variety of powers which they have been able to pursue. In fact, it is precisely the creativeness of man that is required and has allowed for the flourishing of power over things that are mental, over conditions that are constructed and over tastes and nuances which have been trained so as to allow for the increasing complexity of the conditions which will generate outlets where none in fact is needed. Opinion leaders will continue to spur development: it is by defintion a competitive exercise. This understanding within a paradigm of power.

But what about the notion of a society with needs of its own? That is, the reverse view, where intersubjectivity is not only a fog of opinion, but is in fact, a living force which shapes the individual and gives him bearing? Here we have the picture of man as society - the tribal man - here we conduct an exercise of anthropology of oneself, at least within the limits of our understanding, on the basic premise that the living force of the meanings through which man exists in relation to his self-understanding is based on his relation to his external environment, and by definition, the living force of society.

Note 25

So there is something deeply wretched about this country, a hopeless yearning. Is this a residue of Christ without an object? Or a projection - mine?

The average Briton wraps his world in optimistic garbs and images to protect himself from the collapsing world of paternal institutions and maternal faith.

Economy, beer, and the collective spirit of reasonableness - culture as morality, the wreck bending in upon itself.

How can Europe live without Christ? A return to Rousseau's ideas, reformed and repackaged in hedonist covering, but in an inevitably perverted form? (ie, the development of neoliberalism as a possible branch of this general direction.) Note that this actively destroys, if slowly but surely, the substance of the ideal, which remains a guard against the basest submission. The danger of mouthing words without knowing their meanings may therefore threaten.

More likely outcome: The continuation of the dialectic between ?

Note 24

Selling yourself on a dime

So the fences to the world are craved to brokenness, and beds are filled with homeless houses of men, pouring forth to the cycle of dreams that are made stone, gliding with a skinless breath, taped to the sound of your name, your stage.

Note 23

Identity games:

a) Animal
b) Computer
c) Animal-computer
d) Computerized-animal

Note 22

Chase the resident gulls of Lanyard Common, or lift the chains of dog-bound men. Seek the treasury of the earth, or loop forwards in uncertain ends. Trace the steak-filled wooden coffin or the scar round your twisting back. Stave the bleeding from sanctity of life, or pervade through the empty fields of forgetting, unknown men.

The insanity of the springtime sunshine falls across the jutted walls, brick upon brick yielding to the yellow beam that drapes its endless sparkling cloth over the mold of the pondering, retreated earth.

I walk with my head axially lowered from the gravity of time, that rushes up to meet and consume us all. So the past peels like a layer of rotten fruit, revealing the kernel underneath as less is extracted from more, little by little, and the swirling deception of images, like a protective bark of a trunkless tree, falls into the nothingness that presses the material chains, which clink loudly with the sounds of society's bells, keeping time till the soul drifts upward, inward, into crypts and into the falling trellises of loved time.

Note 21

What if the constitutive powers to execute the action of the right is dependent on the individual and the social resources which establish the condition and the rules for the exercise of the rights. Think of a traffic light system where the arbitrary rules of the game allow for the constitutive configuration through which the possibility of orderly movement through the space of concepts is enabled, with the coordinates of actuality as it is reinterpreted by the concept in societal forms being the specific rules as actualized in the operation of the traffic lights.

In this case, the potentiality of individual man itself serves as an underlying factor which gives substance and meaning to the operation of the rules, but which remains dependent, causally and cognitively, on the resources of established concepts, associations and rules. If one then applies Paine’s method of establishing criteria of distinguishing between natural and civil liberties, one asks, simultaneously, a few key questions. In what way is the establishment of the toolkit and the content of the concept as a resource constitutive of the powers which are enabled and expressed through individual initiative? What is the set of criteria for determining, in this situation of reciprocally-conditioning dependence, the kind of capacities and therefore abilities that are crucial for the actual operation of the concept, or the aspects of the concept that are deemed to be productive of claims to right? This itself necessitates a series of value judgements that allow us to interpret what the action is for, and what it is, and therefore what is important in it. Therefore the competing accounts of the nature and ends of human agency come into play. (Or rather, the ends and therefore the nature of agency.)

Note 20

I think a developing understanding of the meaning of the term mental health is the starting point of selfconstruction.

What is the concept of mental health in society?

Why are some forms of mental health encouraged, promoted over others, and what are the levers of its promotion?

What opportunities do immense interpretive/cognitive wealth of society bring?

Real? There is no Real. The concepts that create arbitrary order. But also mental health.

What reflexivity? How does the belief in the true create illusions?

I believe in the Real, and the real has existence. But the existence of the Real has no extension beyond my existence.

Theres the nub - the narrative Real as transcendent, and the "I think, therefore I am" point as the precondition, the existence of the concept as the prerequisite for the thinking state of my existence.

But my existence is itself a meta-real.

Real is used in contradistinction to what is, in the use of concepts. What is, is , but isness is structured; always existing in ordered relations to other possibilities.

Kant: What is, must. But does the mustness constitute isness? Is Being constituted by a form of all possible "mustness", Being as necessity referring to itself?

Is all language the possibility of its necessity?

But that means that its necessity is redefined by their individual Being. Language contains the collective experience of the past in dealing with conditions shared among previous peoples.

(Unoriginal language is therefore the failure to fully interpret the significance of the present moment, but the nature of the associative set...)

Of course, individual psychologies use language differently to interpret different states, and the collective state of a group or crowd is the necessary condition of the applicability of language...It is the modality of translation of concept into existence that is shared yet subjective that constitutes a group.

What are the constituents of this modality of interpretation?

Well, first, it is precisely the ability of the group leader to appreciate the collective modality of interpretation and to adopt the responsibility of developing its substantive content.

"This is absurd. How could you call this responsibility?"

What is the meaning of a word?

It is its difference from its similarities, and the word...it does not need family resemblance, its the resemblance of collective experiences that form complexes of associations which are tied to the negotiative pillars of taboo, excitement, reality-function, to inform the purpose of conversation.

Feeling-toned complexes and their significations, when tied to underlying narratives and meanings - yes, there are master narratives, narratives of the order of mental health - ...

Know these narratives, subvert the tragedy inherent in them by re-expressing them in perverted form, ie. reflect how much we actually desire them, make fun of it in any way you can, preferably by conjuring circumstances that turn its aspects against itself, through the incongruity of the simultaneous application of two tragic values - this is the work of the comedian.

So wherefore the specific horror of a failed joke, which sounds like a bad lie, all-too-earnestly told? Are all jokes clownish masquerade of the truth-complex? The belief in the joke is the essential condition of its success. So a joke obviously has a shadow in a tragic truth.

"Laughter is freedom from order - it shows us how much we secretly want to be mad."

Note 19

Institutions as systems of reproduction of process: material process factorized - ?

The analogy to self-interest, with need as base but in a purely functional immanent sense.

Post-material process. Institutionalized symbolic order as the facilitating process, the shortcut of agreements in matters pertaining to societal-individual scope.

We are actors in society's endless cinema that's the definition of our existing but existence is empty without reference.

What about the fundamentalization of functionalism?

Access breeds utility precisely because increasing areas and aspects of our experience can be categorized in relation to the externalized function-form - a form that commodotizes experience and consciousness-time by increasing its productivity and profit per minute.

The individual as the crucial myth, Real, and necessity that holds up the form.

Note 18

Jung 98: The individual as a resource-based ordering concept. It redirects the problem of subjectivity into a duality that can be reconfigured and understood reflectively in terms that are continuous with the recognition of other individualities existing in the world. It deproblematicizes and justifies interpretation of morality and existence. The subject as myth based on the standpoint of the Real: subjectivised affectivity.

Note 17

Individual as a set of enabled conventionalized intersubjective experiences, given arbitrariness.

Order becomes an important resource: individual as an ordering resource-concept.

What is the economy of concepts?
As opposed to their theoretical reason?
That is almost THE question.

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.