A Question?

Does any one still monitor this blog? 

Losing our Reason?

Robert Burton, a neurologist, neuroscientist and popular science author weighing in on the problem 'Philosophy' has with letting go of the concept of Reason: 

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.

Lunatic Philosophy?

It has been many years since I last considered pursuing philosophy as a profession. I like my relative stability intensely established in the funk of life sans the vertigo of managing massively inflated abstractions. I’m also not smart enough. Many of you philobros and sisters are hella slick with the intellect, and I believe overall better suited to such things - and please, people, do continue! I enjoy reading your fantasies and watching your public therapy sessions immensely. And I promise to keep scavenging and squandering all the beautific discourses if you keep generating them. That's the least I can do.

I wonder, though, in considering the kind of ecosystems (material, media, semiotic) we exist with-in if we in the Western enclaves are all just varieties of lunatics put randomly in-charge of the asylum that is hyper-modern capitalism? Academics, the avant garde, bloggers, oil-riggers, feminists, junkies and used cars salesmen - all of us. Perhaps, "philosophy" in its many iterations and permutations is just a certain kind of lunacy taken up a notch, and weaponized for use on the low-intensity battlefields of institutionalized speculation? Or, to paraphrase the anonymous commenter I quote at length below, aren’t professional philosophers just lunatics like the rest of us, rocking back and forth repeating their “notes” and inquiries, as self-affirmations and mantras, hoping to set up psychic defenses against the dark arts of the world? Coping-beings all?

This person:

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?

ADDENDUM: (more Hickman, with a little Žižek, because why not?)

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.

Even our language and significations participate; which is why Kant was wrong - or at least right in a way he didn't intend - and the endgame of our attempts to flee the correlationist circle will always result in a return to our experiences of and as the funkadelic flesh of things. Coping-with and rationalizing the world forces us into violent and productive confrontation with the constituent madness at the extimate core life. From this register, perhaps its healthier to stop hiding and just be the best lunatic we can, remaining paranoid and schizoid and nomadic in our confrontations with and as the Real?

 I can imagine Slavoj Žižek having his Joker war-paint on when he wrote:

[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.

Reconstructing Existentialism?

"Existentialism is a renewable resource... Like all resources, existentialism is vulnerable to shifting conditions." - @doctormickey

What are the semiotic and material conditions for the renewal of existentialism as an ecologically responsive mode of cognition? Everything from YouTube to that moldy Edgar Allen Poe collection buried in the basement of a neighbourhood bookstore, from the flows of monetary funding between educational institutions to the electric infrastructures that allow them provide "conditionals" where new configurations of identity and reference can be established. Existentialism is a discourse full of possibility to ask the big questions about self and experience that can lead directly to deeper considerations of human existence in a dynamical world. There is much to be hypermined in existentialism.  

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In the Introduction to the SUNY series in constructive postmodern thought David Ray Griffin writes that one can describe the postmodernism of process thinking as "revisionary, constructive, or perhaps best - reconstructive", as opposes to a "deconstructive, relativistic, or eliminative postmodernism". For Griffin, deconstructive postmodernism entails an "antiworldview" that eliminates modernist concepts and suppositions while negating the very possibility of a consistent worldview. In contrast, reconstructive postmodernism entails a reconstruction of our worldview rather than its complete destruction or elimination.

As Sam Mickey writes:

"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."

#POSTNIHIL  

Derrida always argued that "deconstruction" was not to be limited to the "negative or destructuring forms" with which it is often associated. Derrida argued that deconstruction is a process that involves an affirmation that calls for something new and wholly unforeseen: "Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all" (Derrida, "Psyche", p.43).

the archive

"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) 

These are the days shadows tease, and we need to remember that before we were conditioned we were unwritten and free from the codes that try to bind us.

random dispatch

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline… That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” — David Foster Wallace

Mapping terra incognita? “A team of researchers have marshaled a huge amount of brain scan data to create a new, precise brain map, published in Nature today. Today’s maps are not so comfortingly simple. The new map, created by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and others, draws in part on the brain’s internal web of connections: how neurons light up together in response to certain stimuli. Based on those areas of co-activity, the map divides the cortex, the layer of tissue on the brain’s exterior, into 360 distinct sections (180 on each hemisphere). Wherever neuroscientists settle on this debate, the new map is a stab at imposing some semblance of order on terra incognita. Researchers working off of it can populate it with features, dispute borders, subdivide regions—and, little by little, change the landscape of what science knows about the brain.” [more]

Hyperrealism and mediated experience. “The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a pervasive digital layer mix seamlessly according to the logic of software and the richness of highly contextual data. This is mixed reality (MR) — and it will soon simply be reality.” [more]

Is there is such a thing as being too connected? “Nokia wants to make this physically impossible by patenting an electronic tattoo that would vibrate, on your body, whenever someone calls. It would work like a body-based caller ID system, vibrating in a specific pattern according to the caller or the type of message.” [more] 

Is Elon Musk the futurist we need? And more importantly is he our Tony Stark? Musk revealed his new master plan for Tesla yesterday in a blog post published on Tesla’s website: here

Will designer children with decrease cost of healthcare and make for smoother social relations? “Human reproduction is about to undergo a radical shift. Embryo selection, in connection with in-vitro fertilization (IVF), will help our species eliminate many genetic diseases, extend healthy lifespans, and enhance people’s overall well-being. Within 20 years, I predict that it will supplant sex as the way large numbers of us conceive of our children. Over time, many genetic diseases will come to be seen as preventable parental lifestyle choices rather than bad luck.” [more]

Nanotech “smart” stiches? “A team of researchers from Tufts University in the US have successfully tested a “smart stitching” prototype thread using nanotechnology, which allows medical sutures to diagnose infections and then communicate the information to doctors in real time.” [more]

Bernstein on Pragmatism and Philosophical Horizons

Richard J. Bernstein was the 2013 Selzer Visiting Philosopher and gave a lecture on "The Pragmatic Turn" (also see his 2010 book by the same name) on Feb. 13, 2013 at Beloit College. In it he argued that many philosophical themes, both continental and analytic, from the past 150 years are derived from classical American pragmatists. Enjoy:

Ecological Politics Beyond Moralism?

The more I encounter Leftist political ecology the more I realize the ubiquity of cognitive biases prioritizing the human. So often such anthropocentrism operates via a deep conceptual and emotive coding for an anesthetizing moralistic frame.

If we genuinely seek to enact ecologies of sufficient practice for human and nonhuman nonzero flourishing it may be required to drastically reduce the intensity of certain cherished humanistic assumptions regarding design-as-politics. For example, hypersensitivity to self-ascribed cultural essentialism may de facto block required but admittedly radical public interventions into existing socio-economic habits and structural relations.

Yet, generating ecologically sufficient practice may mean making very hard choices that may not preserve locally desired or fetishized modes of living and generate much tension and conflict. Traditionally this clash between supposed necessity and self-conservation that seems inherent in complex animal social systems directed such tensions into the activity of war. But if we are going to develop radically divergent and ethical futures that are noncompliant with the thanatologics of capitalism and/or war we are going to need to reframe the context of our deliberative focus and pragmatic actions.

It seems more and more to be the case that we need to intelligently (re)design and (re)build processes of deliberation and negotiated prioritization within technical, expert and citizenry spheres (in everything from personal conversation to academics, media and official institutions) in order to diffuse conflicting tensions as they arise and channel them in ways that allow us to better utilize productive differences for enacting social innovation. Anthropocentric moralism – with all its documented anthropocenities – will never be a substitute for an ecologistics of sensitive negotiation between modes of existence indexed against different scales of complexity ranging from the subatomic to the existentially charged social experiential.

What I seek as an alternative to the self-justifying anthropocentric politics of the contemporary is a cosmopolitics of intelligent design that acknowledges and skillfully adapts to the functional imperatives of complex biosocial niches without over-prioritizing the ideologically coded and arranged/deranged desires of humans at the expense of entire ecosystems.

Nietzsche on 'the will to life'

Entangled materiality as potency - without the awkward vitalisms of previous discarded attempts at explanation. An inherent potency as relentless as it is undefinable..

  “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 Homo

Where 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.

Organic Intellectualism among the Working Class?

McKenzie Wark on salvage philosophy from his newly published Molecular Red (2015):

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.

Wark thinks the "labor perspective" is a point of leverage, but I'm not so sure.

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