Goldman Sachs is a Financial Terrorist Organization

Goldman Sachs is an organization of financial terrorists who have co-opted the American government. They have extorted the U.S congress, emptied the treasury coffers and financed the exploitation of people and markets all over this planet. They contribute nothing but fraud and destruction to the project of civilization. Why are Americans still putting up with this company?

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment banking and securities firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and is headquartered at 200 West Street in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, with additional offices in international financial centres.

Former employees include Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, as well as Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of Canada since 2008, Mario Draghi, governor of the European Central Bank, Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, and former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the current chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, despite President Barack Obama's campaign promise that he would limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration.[source]

In February 2011, the Washington Examiner reported that Goldman Sachs was "the company from which Obama raised the most money in 2008" and that its "CEO Lloyd Blankfein has visited the White House 10 times."[source]

During the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, Goldman was able to profit from the collapse in subprime mortgage bonds in the summer of 2007 by short-selling subprime mortgage-backed securities. Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with bearing responsibility for the firm's large profits during America's sub-prime mortgage crisis.[source] The pair, members of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4 billion by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and shorting mortgage-related securities. [source]

Here is Former Attorney General of New York Elliot Spitzer breaking it down on CNN: 

And Max Keiser on French TV giving his take:

  

The trailer for the documentary INSIDE JOB: 

Speculation and Confronting the Real

"It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject." — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, p 149

Sometimes we protest too much. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is essential for me because he wrote about the primacy of perception (prior to conception), and how the immediacy of the world underlies our conceptions of it. There is a pre-reflective tangibility to Being that opens up meaning as consequence. Perception prior to conception. The Real is that which remains after we shut the fuck up. Whatever story we want to tell is so much less than the primacy of this tangible reality.

“So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought, but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me', when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality, when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind.”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, p.140.

#postmetaphysics

UPDATE barely on topic:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, on the embodied mind:

"As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical... We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed." [source]

And Raymond Tallis, scholar and former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University, in response:

"Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at "the neural substrate of which we are composed". This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." [source] 

I think both of these fellas are correct. Intellectual capacity is a biological phenomenon founded in large part on unconscious functions and processes, while at the same time its higher-order cognitive operations are contextual enactments of distributed properties associated with and expressed through complex networks and communicative activities. A non-reductive materialist framework takes both irreducible capacities and physical embodiment into account when trying to understand mental action. There is no contradition in this regard. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly.

ht/dmf

The Himalayas

One of my mentors during my time in academia was a brilliant teacher, anthropologist and Hindu religion scholar who often dazzled us with stories of his diverse travels in Asia. He is an interesting and deeply knowledgeable man. Of his many tales none were more amazing than those dealing with his experiences traveling in and through the Himalayan mountains in Tibet.

Below is a BBC documentary looking at the flora and fauna of the most stunning mountain range in the world, the Himalayas. This 2000 mile mountain range is home to snow leopards, Himalayan wolves, Tibetan bears, and some of the most fascinating life-forms on this planet.

Erin Manning on Relation, Counterpoint and the Nonhuman

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where she is a professor of philosophy and dance. Her publications include Relationscapes (2009), Politics of Touch (2006) and Ephemeral Territories (2003).

Today Manning delivered a lively and thought provoking plenary titled 'Another Regard' at the Nonhuman Turn Conference currently taking place at that University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I absolutely loved this talk, and I plan on returning to it often this week to ensure I absorb as many of her amazing insights as possible. I hope to post some of the notes I have taken and will be taking if I get a chance. For now I present both the abstract and video of Manning's talk below. Enjoy:

 

Abstract: 

In a recent piece entitled “The Silence Between,” Dawn Prince writes of an encounter with a Bonobo Chimpanzee. Known for her earlier work on gorillas, especially Songs of a Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, Prince already felt a deep connection to gorillas, who, she writes, “regarded her.” In “The Silence Between,” Prince returns to this “regard,” recounting an experience of playing with the Bonobo Kanzi by running along the fence on all fours: “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew, a language of body, mind, and spirit. Kanzi and I played chase up and down the fence line, both of us on all fours, smiling in a sea of fun and deep breaths.” Then something uncanny occurred: “He stopped suddenly and grabbed his word board off the ground. He pointed to a symbol and then pointed to me and made a hand gesture with his eyebrows raised. It was clear that he was asking me a question. He repeated this series of words and movements over and over, until I said, out loud, "I'm sorry, I can't understand, Kanzi. Let me get Sue and maybe she can help me." At first, she was at a loss. Then after asking him to point to the word again, she realized he was pointing to the word "gorilla" on his board and making the American Sign Language sign for question after pointing to me. It was clear he was asking me if I was a gorilla.” 

This paper takes this occasion as a starting point to rethink the question of regard in terms of Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of concern. Where regard often extrapolates the terms of the encounter from their eventness -- setting the human/animal relation as primary to the event and creating expectations based on the presumed differences between their species -- concern does not take the relation as pre-composed. As Whitehead writes: “The occasion as subject has a ‘concern’ for the object” (1976: 176). This concern “for the object” is not about the already formed but about the affective tonality, the edgings into experience of an occasion’s coming-into-itself. This concern for the event in its concrescence is a regard for what cannot pre-exist it: an affective tonality which will always be singularly tied to this or that occasion. “Concernedness is of the essence of perception” (Whitehead 1967: 180). Concern is never added on to a perception -- it is the very how of perception: “It must be distinctly understood that no prehension even of bare sensa, can be divested of its affective tone, that is to say, of its character of a 'concern'” (Whitehead 1967: 180). 

This notion of concern has deep implications for the rethinking of a field of relations such as that generated in the example above. Rather than departing from a narrative of identity politics (which takes the “human” and the “animal” as given), I will explore how this singular example’s concern for the event in its eventness provokes a emergent fielding (a motif, as von Uexküll would call it) that creates an excess of species (what I call a speciation) that ties in with Whitehead’ work on nature.

#c21nonhuman

Nanobots Replacing Neurons?

On the topic of potent materials and nonhumans, the following CG animation visualizes one of the possible future applications and uses of nanotechnology. The video depicts a nanorobot at work replacing human nerve cells with artificial nerve cells:


 

source: CG4TV

When we finally get around to developing a nuanced materialist understanding of the cosmos who knows what might be possible?

Potent Materials, Whitehead and Onto-Specificity

Continuing our conversation on A.N Whitehead and materialism (here) Matt Segall writes:

“Part of why I find Whitehead’s “panprehensionism” to be such an important contribution to metaphysics is that I have not found any way of explaining the “emergence” of feeling, or sentience, or mind out of otherwise dead, insensate stuff.”

I think that is exactly the problem with most arguments against materialist philosophies. What contemporary materialist would argue that matter-energy is “dead, insensate stuff”?

For example, Levi Bryant (see here and here) and I share the view that all objects and all materials are active systems. In fact, for many of us ‘to be’ is precisely ‘to act’, or to be active, alive and expressive. An ‘object’ is characterized by what it can do, its capacities or powers. Even the most basic materials are assemblages of energetic, moving, vibrating systems (cf. string theory). This is what I refer to when I use the term potency. All materials are complex assemblages of potency. Matter is in no way “dead”.

The interesting issue here is that potent materials can take on emergent properties as they become more complex (through catalytic reactions, complementary powers as combining in such a way as to enhance or emphasize each other's qualities, amplifications of capacity, etc). In this view it is not difficult to image how micro potencies could be organized into macro complexes of sensitive operation. Like Whitehead I share the idea that the cosmos is inherently sensate or potent. But ‘experience’ and sentience are emergent features of compounded and complexified potencies arranged and evolved in particular ways, and not present from the start.

This could lead me to talk about Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh as describing the elemental sensuality and tangibility of reality, but I’ll leave that for now. (see here)

Matt continues:

"As Deacon put it himself, not only do we not have a theory for how sentience might emerge from dead matter, we don’t even have an understanding of what such a theory might involve. His work in Incomplete Nature is an attempt to explain the emergence of form, not so much feeling or consciousness.”

At the very least I think it will entail giving up the notion that matter is “dead”. In fact nothing in this cosmos is dead. Compositions come and they go, and matter and energy are arranged, implicated and evolve then decomposed and re-implicated. But nowhere do we find completely impotent materials. I believe understanding how this is so is the fundamental insight necessary for enacting truly ecological thoughts and action.

Matt writes:

"Whitehead doesn’t think we can explain feeling by offering some theory about it, since feeling (like value) is simply a fundamental fact about the way things are. The reality of feeling is the condition of the possibility of explanation and so cannot itself be explained.”

I disagree. I think you are right to imply that the condition for the possibility of explanation is that feeling exists, but this in no way means that we cannot (or should not) explain historically and in detail how rudimentary sensitivities evolved into the capacity for cognition , speech or explanation. The fact that we live in a cosmos of active influence and causal potency should not necessary lead us to conclude that those primal vibrancies should be characterized as anything like “experience” or sentience or feeling in the original sense of these terms. Sentience and experience are emergent capacities and we should not assume their existence prior to their advent, in the same way a bird’s emergent ability to sing shouldn’t lead us to argue that atoms or individual molecules have an inherent capacity for song.

Matt writes:

"Whitehead’s panprehensionism is a direct consequence of his process ontology. There are no bits of dead material existing at an instant in his cosmos. There are durations, aka actual occasions, which, since they exist as temporally thick moments (remembering the past as they anticipate the future) are necessarily experiential. Experience is not the same as “mind,” for Whitehead, but rather the most basic form of temporal existence.”

Again, I think one of my main issues with Whitehead is his terminology. I can’t get past the way he anthropomorphizes the cosmos. Even if his ontology is in many respects close to the kind of story I want to tell about reality (e.g., occasions of emergent forms of potency), his discourse seems very misguided. I can’t imagine why we would argue that a hydrogen atom “remembers” or “anticipates”? There has got to be a better, non-mentalistic way to describe the interactions between non-sentient complexes?

Whitehead seems to build in the role of consciousness from the start as a way to explain its latter elaboration in humans without, in my limited opinion, taking care to address the particularities (onto-specificities) of its emergence. “Mind” emerged from primordial processes not the other way around. And saying that experience is everywhere seems to me the same as saying experience is nowhere. It just doesn’t explain. Whereas, for me, the term “experience” refers to a particular kind of operation and not a general property and so must be reserved for entities with the capacity for recursion and some kind of memory. I find the term potency is better suited to constructing a more nuanced description since it signals a primal property rather than a bio-specific operation.

Disclaimer: To be sure, my understanding of Whitehead's whole system is less than adequate to the task of critique in any meaningful way. Many of my issues with his work have to do with what I perceive to be his most general claims as well as his terminology. At this point I guess I could simply say that his philosophy just doesn't seem to resonate with me. Oh well.

Bruno Latour - Reenacting Science

Bruno Latour gave a lecture titled 'Reenacting Science' at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland on February 20th 2012:


 

 h/t Adam Robbert

Bruno Latour - From Critique to Composition

From DCU:

Bruno Latour visited Dublin City University on Friday, February 17th for a special seminar on interdisciplinarity, the arts and the sciences, entitled 'From Critique to Composition'. Prof Latour is a leading figure in contemporary anthropology and science studies, but the reach of his influence is truly interdisciplinary.

In a provocative discussion with academics and students from many disciplines, Prof Latour signalled that the old certainties of science that have existed since the 17th century are under threat, both as a work of knowledge and an institution. By referencing how current environmental crises are placed under categories of study such as 'Gaia theory' and 'the anthropocene era', Prof Latour asked that the concept of 'nature out there' with its 'matters of fact' no longer be the only goal of ' the sciences' but rather to address our common world by identifying 'matters of concern'. Prof Latour continued his Irish visit with a public lecture in the Science Gallery on Monday 20th. 

The seminar, and Prof Latour's trip to Ireland, was organised with the combined efforts of the Celsius interdisciplinary research group at DCU, the French Embassy and the Science Gallery, with special thanks also to Trispace, DCU.

Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at the London School of Economics and in the History of Science department of Harvard University. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris where he is also the Vice President for Research. After field studies in Africa and California, Prof Latour specialised in the sociological analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies on science policy and research management, influencing the fields of Science and Technology Studies and political ecology. His books include Laboratory Life, Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies and Politics of Nature. 

h/t Adam Robbert.

Evolving Eternity

“Art is Lies that tell the Truth” — Pablo Picasso

One of my favorite things about blogging is getting the chance to communicate and exchange ideas with so many intelligent, aware and educated people. As a non-academic I don’t believe there would be any other way to exchange the thoughts, information and research I do here. I am so grateful for this opportunity.

I was reminded just how true this is last week in debate with Adam, Matt and Jason about eternal objects, form, universals, philosophical concepts generally and the nature of ‘mind’. To be sure, there are many notions and positions each of us defend which overlap and/or complement each other, but there seem to be some important divergences as well. I am fairly certain that we all share a naturalistic understanding of consciousness and human life, but our points of reference and discursive aims tend to act as barriers (at least for me) to commensurability and agreement about some of the key issues at play. No doubt we will continue to work through these issues as we go along our individual ways, but I truly appreciate all the comments and enjoy the time they afford me to reflect.

A great example is Matt Segall's recent response to my previous post on matter and contingency (here). Matt's response continues our discussion (started here) about Whitehead, eternal forms and materialism with a beautiful post (here) about the “becoming of being” and the eternal. Matt’s words overflow this post with the kind of wisdom that becomes possible only when genuine inquiry and mythopoetic intelligence meet.

Fortunately Matt's post also reminded me of a special piece of wisdom I hope I never forget: that every story we tell about the world and how it works remains simply a story. Some stories are crafted to tell us a whole lot about natural facts and scientific objects, while others are created to help us interpret those facts, and move us beyond our meager technical perceptions into expanses of imagination unencumbered by the contingencies of physical existence. And so any story I might want to tell will ultimately leave out much of what someone else’s story is capable of telling.

So what differences exist between the stories I want to tell and those Matt wants to tell? Quite a lot as it turns out, but not in a way that should disparage what either one of us are up to. Overly simplified, I would characterize our interests as moving in opposite theoretical directions while seeking to end up covering the same cosmological grounds. That is to say it seems to me that Matt wants to think the Absolute (unity), with an eye towards cultivating the existential implications which flow from an acquaintance therein, while I want to think the Possible (multiplicity), with a wonky fish eye towards negation and the positive mutations that come from reigning in our animal speculations. (I wonder if a Tibetan Buddhism vs. Zen Buddhism analogy might be apt here?) Both orientations are positive and inherently worthy of exploration, and both projects seek to understand the cosmos as a living, evolving and mysterious process. Our differences, then, can only serve to amplify a broad curiosity shared by both, while also animating our discussions and debates with many critical considerations. And for that I can only be thankful.

Matt writes:

My process philosophy is rheological, like Michael’s; but it is not just that, not just a scientific study of the flow of matter in the world. It is also a love of the way of wisdom in the world. Philosophy–at least as it was known when the word, and the way of life, was brought forth and developed in the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers–is concerned not only with contingent flows but with the “becoming of being,” the way of eternity, the living unity of the temporal universe.

 I would like to think my philosophy is not "just" a minor riff on scientific studies of the flow of matter, but also a speculative pragmatism working with the raw empirical conditions of the cosmos to generate alternative modes of being, knowing and doing – at least on a personal level. The task I have given myself is to try to understand as much and as deeply as possible about the world we come from. For me this task entails a fierce refusal of the myths and lies that surround us, until such time as those myths and lies reveal ‘truths’ that can no longer be refused. My interests also deal squarely with the “becoming of being” but in a way that allows being’s becoming to intervene on the conceptions I am willing to make of it-them. So, in this spirit, to decide too strongly on the character of that which intervenes of-itself prior to the interventions themselves is to allow a symphony of accumulated human concerns to drown out the possibility inherent in the world itself.

Of course it would take a lot for me to cash such statements out in strictly philosophical terms, but I do believe such values require some sort of theoretical minimalism governed as much by the darker implications of the ecological sciences (method) as by speculative probings of interpretive innovation (theory). Moreover, the stories we want to tell about matter, energy, stars, planets, creatures, etc., need to embody a radical appreciation for all those humbling, visceral, morbid and raw facts and realities of material existence at their foundation. To think the cosmos and the planet as responsible earthly creatures we must think earthly and creaturely thoughts. We must not only think and talk about ‘matter’, but rather start from our perceptions and realizations of the reality that we are thinking-matter. In this context,  anything less than a critical, yet careful and rigorous, reevaluation of all existing myths, poetics and discourses seems to me un-thinkable.

Matt writes:

Natural science itself already assumes the unity of the universe, that it is cosmos despite its chaos, even where it seems to methodologically require that intelligent freedom be kept distinct from a contingent and purposeless reality (i.e., that some mixture of mentality not be assumed to exist already in all materiality). This seeming methodological requirement of a modest witness to objectify neutral matter cannot be metaphysically justified. Philosophy, if it is to be anything more than an apology for nominalistic materialism, is the attempt to think the complex unity of intelligence and nature, to participate in the One Life organizing the whole.

I certainly agree there is no reason to assume we could ever deploy a completely objective perspective in the world, but I also do not believe it is reasonable to assume that subjectivity already exists in “all materiality”. It seems to me that both positions deal in extremes and are equally ruinous to creaturely thinking (or what we might call wilderness thinking) because both assume far too much. The objectifiers assume neutrality and the subjectifiers (panpsychists?) project experientiality; the former fails to recognize the potency or vibrancy or inherent activity of matter and energy, whereas the latter fails to circumscribe their own functional capacities and attributes.

As for philosophy, some would argue it has a propensity for apologizing for whomever wields its intellectual authority, or for whomever creates the most fashionable set of arguments. Philosophy is whatever we make of it. In an academic setting it can be a set of commentaries on a canon. In a personal context it can be a value-system and guide for living. On the streets it can be a means of survival or style of communication. In a stratified class-culture it can be a weapon or a means of oppression. There are no solid boundaries with philosophical thought. The genre is thinking as such, and the actions are always decidedly human. “Alchemical hermeneutics” and “anarchic re-engagement” indeed.

Matt writes:

Eternity’s participation in time does not imply the erasure of contingencies or the permanence of physical laws. Laws are cosmic habits. They could have been otherwise. What couldn’t have been otherwise is that cosmic memory (i.e., intelligence as it acts in time) would form habits of some kind.

Eternity evolves and surprises itself in creative acts of novelty; our thought and our deeds are no exception. I don’t know if it could be otherwise and I don’t think we can assume. I only try to know what is. And we can only speculate about what could be by intimating ourselves as much as possible with what already is. We are expressions of a world as primordially potent as it is complex. Figuring out how this is so, what can be learned from it, and how best to live in/as it is the real challenge and opportunity before us.

Dorothea Tanning - Family Portrait (1954)

Dorothea Tanning passed away on January 31, 2012 in New York City. She was 101 years old. This painting says so much about the American family circa 1950s:

Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait (1954)