When The Levee Breaks

The levee is not the only thing about to break. 'Time' is the Michael Jordan of catastrophic catalytics. This heat trap of clusterfukk is going down.

 "Crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good..."

"When The Levee Breaks"

Written by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy

Based on Led Zeppelin's version.

Performed by Zepparella

www.zepparella.com

U.S Senator Elizabeth Warren on the Keystone Pipeline

Senator Warren is a baddass. (Why doesn't she run for President?!) In the following short video Warren calls out the Canadian oil industry, and Transcanada in particular who recently spent over 7 million dollars on lobbying U.S politicians directly, and argues that an alternative governmental focus on infrastructure would do much more for the U.S economy and the American people than pushing through the Keystone XL mega-project. The recent intense focus on ramming the pipeline through has to do with POWER and elites doing favours for elites, plain and simple.

the violence of thinking?

Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 1933 (p.150-151):

Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking pains to make it more thoughtful. But in defining the essence of the thing, what is the use of a feeling, however certain, if thought alone has the right to speak here? Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood, here and in similar instances, is more reasonable – that is, more intelligently perceptive – because more open to Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was misinterpreted as being rational. The hankering after the irrational, as abortive offspring of the unthought rational, therewith performed a curious service. To be sure, the current thing-concept always fits each thing. Nevertheless, it does not lay hold of things as it is in its own being, but makes an assault upon it. 

Heidegger was the best among the Nazis - a horrible human being who made massive contributions to public intellectual deliberation. A thinking that opens to thought itself.. or whatever. In the passage above he points out the violence of abstraction, of making a caricature of things, without the wherewithal to understand the facile nature of thinking as such. There is a quality to the type of thinking that is a kind of mood or tone that does not aim to conclude on things and concerns. We do violence to the world when we take our synthetic compositions and projections as the texture of the world in-itself. We assault the world with our all-too-human "truths".

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ASIDE: Interestingly, I think this blog is fast becoming what it was originally meant for: a place for keeping fragments of fragments that influence me, and of which I intend to come back to and incorporate in future projects. An archive, no less, that I hope to burn in the pyre of my own creative activity.

Evan Thompson on network-relational sapience?

Evan Thompson's new book Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (2014) is a hot topic among para-philosophic types these days. I have only been able to glean bits and pieces but won’t get around to reading it until later this year. I’m just bookmarking this here as a reminder.

Here are two excerpts, with some under-formulated comments as chaser:

the brain is always embodied, and its functioning as a support for consciousness can’t be understood apart from its place in a relational system involving the rest of the body and the environment. The physical substrate of mind is this embodied, embedded, and relational network, not the brain as an isolated system.(p.37)

Understanding human sapience as "embodied, embedded, and relational" is where it’s at. Literally. For reals. But in this book Thompson seems to advance a specific (and familiar) philosophical claim: the self is a process, not a thing or an entity, generated in the network dynamics of interacting brains, bodies, and worlds.

At the same time, we can’t infer from the existential or epistemological primacy of consciousness that consciousness has ontological primacy in the sense of being the primary reality out of which everything is composed or the ground from which everything is generated. One reason we can’t jump to this conclusion is that it doesn’t logically follow. That the world as we know it is always a world for consciousness doesn’t logically entail that the world is made out of consciousness. Another reason is that thinking that consciousness has ontological primacy goes against the testimony of direct experience, which speaks to the contingency of our consciousness on the world, specifically on our living body and environment. (p. 102)

Panpsychists take note: your infatuation with your own awareness provides little justification for believing that other objects/assemblages are aware (or experiencing) as well. The most intrusive and self-centered form of ontography follows from believing animal characteristic exemplify existence broadly considered. Sentience and sapience are emergent properties generated via complex elemental materials.

The term “emergence” comes from the Latin verb emergo which means to arise, to rise up, to come up or to come forth. The term was coined by G. H. Lewes in Problems of Life and Mind (1875) who drew the distinction between emergent and resultant effects. [h/t Bill Harryman for this and much more]

Pragmatism (full audiobook)

Pragmatism (1907) contains a series of public lectures held by William James in Boston 1906-7. James provides a popularizing outline of his view of philosophical pragmatism while making highly rhetorical and entertaining lashes towards rationalism and other competing schools of thought. James is especially concerned with the pragmatic view of truth. True beliefs should be defined as, according to James, beliefs that can successfully assist people in their everday life. This is claimed to not be relativism. That reality exists is argued to be a fact true beyond the human subject. James argues, nevertheless, that people select which parts of reality are made relevant and how they are understood to relate to each other.

Pragmatism (1907), by William James

From an introduction to the book by Bruce Kuklick:

James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "cash value" was, and what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they were efficacious in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness.

In the section 'What Pragmatism Means', James wrote that the central point of his doctrine of truth is that "Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them."

  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy :: LINK

  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy :: LINK

William James Studies (org): HERE

the legacy of William James in American politics?

William James may be the greatest influence on my attempts at thinking outside of Nietzsche. I always return to his concepts and arguments when I need reminding what philosophy can be in practice, and how to think about things sensibly. I will be posting a boat load of stuff about that guy going forward.

The following informative but extremely boringly lecture was delivered on May 26, 2007 by one James Kloppenberg, a Professor of American History at Harvard University. Apparently he's all about "theories of democracy" and American philosophy in society. Fancy. He the author of A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell, 1995).

James's Pragmatism & American Social Thought 1907-2007

Goffman on Real Definitions?

Frame Analysis (1974) is Erving Goffman's attempt to explain how conceptual frames act as ways to organize experience and structure an individual's perception of society. A “frame” is a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives that organize experiences and guide the perceptions and actions of individuals, groups and societies. Frame analysis, then, is the study of the organization of social experience.

Goffman from Frame Analysis:

"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the Veil can be lifted. That sort of line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic. (What can better push a book than the claim that it will change what the reader thinks is going on?) A current example of this tradition can be found in some of the doctrines of social psychology and the W. I. Thomas dictum: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." This statement is true as it reads but false as it is taken. Defining situations as real certainly has consequences, but these may contribute very marginally to the events in progress; in some cases only a slight embarrassment flits across the scene in mild concern for those who tried to define the situation wrongly. All the world is not a stage-certainly the theater isn't entirely. (Whether you organize a theater or an aircraft factory, you need to find places for cars to park and coats to be checked, and these had better be real places, which, incidentally, had better carry real insurance against theft.) Presumably, a "definition of the situation" is almost always to be found, but those who are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even though their society often can be said to do so; ordinarily, all they do is to assess correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly. True, we personally negotiate aspects of all the arrangements under which we live, but often once these are negotiated, we continue on mechanically as though the matter had always been settled. So, too, there are occasions when we must wait until things are almost over before discovering what has been occurring and occasions of our own activity when we can considerably put off deciding what to claim we have been doing. But surely these are not the only principles of organization. Social life is dubious enough and ludicrous enough without having to wish it further into unreality."

READ THE ENTIRE BOOK: HERE

to build from the actions of others?

Resonating bodies connect and coordinate through the mutual involvement of powers and capacities, intensifying and expanding, becoming more than parts and sums - carving niches and generating socialities from the actions of others. It's not about individuals or collectives, agency vs. structure, but about interdependent actions at multiple levels and with differential rhythms. Thinking the particular modes and movements of any existing ecology is about thinking the 'in-between' of individuals and groups via an ongoing engagement with the specificity of things.

Although I find the distinction between exteriority (the physical) and interiority (the mental) unhelpful and a bit distracting, in the quote below Adrian seems to clearly discern the importance of thinking how entities are always being and becoming-with other things as assemblages.

"An ant colony builds itself from the actions of its members: gathering leaf litter, sticks, bits and pieces of the environing world, tunneling, communicating, building, nursing. None of these ant “individuals,” not even the queen herself, could act in this way without the rest of the colony. Both the body and the mind of the colony—its “objective” parts, those we can see, describe, dissect, and measure, and its “subjective” parts, which are the moments of felt decision that turn an ant this way rather than that way in its crossing of a trail in a forest, or those that bring a team of ants together to haul a large leaf or dead grasshopper—these are all dispersed in space, they are spaced, detached from each other physically (or so it appears when we observe them), but mentally, in terms of the interactive processing of signs and relations, they are networked together into a coordinated collectivity. The network of the colony is not only made of those ant bodies, but also what they are capable of and what they do with things—with soil, leaves, sticks, pieces of food. By most objective measures, anthills are cities: they include complex systems of transportation, communication (pheromone-based), ventilation, sewage disposal, food production (the farming of plants, the growing of fungus, the raising of aphid cattle), cooperative labor, warfare, and slavery." - Adrian Ivakhiv

Scorpion Crown

I'm out of breath and blood,
Having dropped my electric trick
In its lanky grave.
My cheeks only spit dust now,
While scorpions gather round my head
In a crown of dark defiance.
I'm not meant for your fabricated world, or yours -
I'm its mangled death knell.

#poetry

The Cruelest Animal?

Are humans the cruellest animal in this unfathomable kingdom? Perhaps; but only because we are the ones who created the codes that inflate our typical affective capacities enough to even posit cruelty in the first instance. We are cruel because we created the speculative realm in which cruelty can be judged. This takes nothing away from the significances we mount and share and value in relation to each other's fabricated transgressions. We concern ourselves with what is and what registers in our dealings with each other and ourselves. Are we the cruelest? It seems so. But a more fruitful question might be: 'what are we willing to do about it?'