Does any one still monitor this blog?
Maybe I should start blogging here once more?
Uh oh.
Going forward, the greatest challenge for philosophy will be to remain relevant while conceding that, like the rest of the animal kingdom, we are decision-making organisms rather than rational agents, and that our most logical conclusions about moral and ethical values can’t be scientifically verified nor guaranteed to pass the test of time. [source]Professional philosophers will always fear variants of nihilism, claiming that if “Reason” were abandoned chaos would ensue and moral reasoning would fail. Rationality is about careful selection processes in decision-making. Semantic reliant certainty is dead.
There are people who ask about reality and go into the laboratory or go the route of high level mathematical abstractions, and there are those who work from the nihilistic constraints of Darwinian axioms and are happy to remain within more or less modest statements. The particular problem of the philosopher seems to be his fundamental autism. He doesn’t for a second even begin to understand the world. The world itself- or words like the Real or Being or what have you- are his problem because, holy shit, he hasn’t got a clue what it is or how to operate in it. Philosophy doesn’t begin in wonder or in disappointment or in the discovery of systematic error per se, it begins in the traumatic horror that I don’t know how to live- I’m a sick man, a maladjusted animal, I mean, look at the others, the millions of others, who seems perfectly content to get on with their lives without ever once really getting stuck on the question of consciousness. The philosopher is sick, damaged, wounded. And not in a romantic swooning way… This is a time when ISIS is as seductive as Socrates and we’re all trying our best to keep up beat in the face of our own irrelevance and probably annihilation. The end of a cycle? The next stage? I’m sure there is a clever way to talk about it. We’d be just as well calling it what it is: self-induced catastrophe. We’re like the suicide who has jumped from the bridge and changes his mind on the way down. Too late- better make the fall pass more pleasantly, better survive while we plummet and plunge. So we see a resurgence again of that idea of philosophy as a way of life, we see the continued appeals to mysticism Western and Eastern, we see the religious fundamentalisms and their soothing solutions. [source]And here we are playing in the cyber-muck attempting, with variable effort, to augment “the happy madness of everyday deludedness and self-deception”. But for what ends?
Harold Bloom, an old gnostic fabulist – if there ever was one, once described our universe as a Cosmic Disaster Zone, that the moment of creation was a catastrophe from which we’ve never recovered. For Zizek this catastrophe is an ontological fable of our brokenness, all the up and down. We exist in a realm of pure antagonistic chaos, caught between the mesh of a Lacanian Borromean knot of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real; and all our systems of finitude are but the apotropaic charms of the Human Security System (Land), our ideological and fictional safety net we’ve constructed around us, a flimsy film against the monstrous truth: a system that seeks to stave off and defend us from the incursion of the Abyss of the Real. To ‘traverse the fantasy’ is to become like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost a navigator of the Abyss. Call it madness, call it Chaos and old Night, call it what you will: the bottom line is that the open wound and trauma of this catastrophe is what drives us onward, our creative and inventive power we so lamely term the human condition hides the inhuman core of our non-being. The spur to our creativity is this very death-drive, both our glory and our sorrow. [source]I'll call it Χάος (Khaos), with its dark flesh creeping out into an expansive hyperverse, creating pockets of cosmos with tiny strains life coping, and struggling, and fucking, and speculating their way through existence. And I'll embrace it because it is me (the very material of 'I am-ness'), and because there is zer0 that can escape the wild pre-conscious immanence of being.
[A]t its most radical, the unnamable Unconscious is not external to Logos, it is not its obscure background, but, rather, the very act of Naming, the very founding gesture of Logos. The greatest contingency, the ultimate act of abyssal madness, is the very act of imposing a rational Necessity onto the pre-rational chaos of the Real. The true point of “madness” is thus not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage to the Symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real… If madness is constitutive, then every system of meaning is minimally paranoiac, “mad.” [source]This is the way of things; a creeping unknown that requires a khaotic embrace with new identifications.
"Existentialism is a renewable resource... Like all resources, existentialism is vulnerable to shifting conditions." - @doctormickey
"While it may be the case that the reconstructive postmodernism of Whitehead or other process thinkers is opposed to deconstructiye postmodernism, this opposition does not properly account for the revisionary elements of deconstruction (a term coined by Derrida) or French poststructuralism in general. Deconstruction and poststructuralism are significantly different from any of the other philosophies grouped under the name "deconstructive postmodernism." Rather than being merely eliminative, poststructuralists express many ideas that are analogous or complementary to revisionary ideas expressed by Whitehead and other process thinkers.
Accordingly, in her introduction to Process and Difference - a collection of essays about poststructuralist and cosmological postmodernisms - Catherine Keller reflects on the disputed nature of these terms as she suggests that Griffins account of deconstructive postmodernism "suffers from a 'fallacy of misplaced opposition'" (3). Philosophers like Deleuze and Derrida are not opposed to reconstructive and revisionary efforts such as those inspired by process thinkers, nor do poststructuralists seek to destroy science or to eliminate the possibility of a consistent worldview."
"The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture." (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p.43)
“Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian … Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” – Nietzsche, Ecce HomoWhere does power come from? It congregates, co-habituates, coagulates, and reverberates via the expressive modes of existing assemblages as they express their structural relation. Affect writ large, and distributed according to whatever field of possibilities it negotiates in the making of bodies without limits other than those set out in the generative dynamics (historicity) involved in each and every specific ontic composition. To affirm the will to life is simply to acknowledge the facticity and potency of existence however ex nihilo it may seem from within.
In his book The Philosophy of Living Experience Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much as to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy. Philosophy is no longer an end in itself, but a kind of raw material for the design and organizing, not quite of what Foucault called discourses of power/knowledge, but more of practices of laboring/knowing. The projected audience for this writing is not philosophers so much as the organic intellectuals of the working class, exactly the kind of people Bogdanov’s activities as an educator-activist had always addressed. Having clearly read his Nietzsche, Bogdanov’s decision is that if one is to philosophize with a hammer, then this is best done, not with professional philosophers, but with professional hammerers.To write and speak and work for those that might ignite their own passions towards revolutions in lifestyle and polity..? What a fantastic idea. But are there those willing to read, hear and work with us among the precariat classes and marginal peoples? The "hammerers" I know are more interested in getting more vacation time and keeping their lousy jobs than struggling against authorities or sparking an "organic" uprising. Capitalist realism runs deep as the masses sooth themselves in entertainment and major to minor intoxicants.
Addressing the Anthropocene is not something to leave in the hands of those in charge, given just how badly the ruling class of our time has mishandled this end of prehistory, this firstly scientific and now belatedly cultural discovery that we all live in a biosphere in a state of advanced metabolic rift. The challenge then is to construct the labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time. What would it mean to see historical tasks from the point of view of working people of all kinds? How can everyday experiences, technical hacks and even utopian speculations combine in a common cause, where each is a check on certain tendencies of the other?
Technical knowledge checks the popular sentiment toward purely romantic visions of a world of harmony and butterflies—as if that was a viable plan for seven billion people. Folk knowledge from everyday experience checks the tendency of technical knowledge to imagine sweeping plans without thought for the particular consequences—like diverting the waters of the Aral Sea. Utopian speculations are that secret heliotropism which orients action and invention toward a sun now regarded with more caution and respect than it once was. There is no other world, but it can’t be this one