Well, it depends on what's meant by awareness. A computer program could be said to be aware of its inputs. A simulation of perceptual awareness could be built into a robot.

That's different from having a conscious perception. — Marchesk

As far as I see, you differentiate between conscious perception and the state of consciousness.
Could you define both rigorously?

I accept that direct realism is the case when perception is non-conscious. I'm driving down the road on autopilot. My hands, eyes and ears are directly perceiving the environment as I successfully navigate the car down the road. — Marchesk

Anyway, you are aware of your perceptions. So, what is this awareness, if not consciousness?

We get the answers we seek instantly, we keep up with friends without speaking to them, we get the news as it happens, we watch loops of videos an algorithm chose for us, we click once and get any product in the world delivered to our doorsteps in less than two days.

Less friction means more time spent, more ads seen, more sales made. Tech companies lose customers during login screens and security verification, and as a result of slow load times. The country’s top computer science talent is paid billions of dollars to further reduce the milliseconds of delay separating our desires and their fulfillment. — Brian Jones

As was pointed out in many responses of this thread, we cannot change the course of the internet development since it has reached the point of no return. And, as numerous previous revolutionary inventions, it brings us both advantages and disadvantages. In addition to already mentioned points, the radical novelty of the internet has also been based on the construction of the interaction interface that modeling, enforcing, sustaining, and modulating the whole complexes of human behavior. Using many sites or programs, one must ultimately follow the previously designed patterns and algorithms, interacting with and programming one’s cognitive, perceptual, and volitional reactions. Probably, these tendencies will be further augmented by the intensive AI development. Of course, we benefit from and enjoy the continually growing effectiveness, convenience, and productivity. Yet, aren’t we able to find behind the conventional interface the cybernetic and informational machines’ networks, interacting not with a particular internet user, but with a set of non-individuated intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, and memory?

Is it not time to consider the possibility that the internet, like Freud’s airplane and Bell’s long-distance feeling, might in fact not be bringing us closer together (etc.), but only pretending to, and in the end doing quite the opposite? — Brian Jones

There are so many clichés and banalities about the internet – to your points, it is possible to add that there has been an ongoing and free exchange of ideas, technologies, and knowledge (in fact, you need to pay for all these). That the internet
brings people with different cultures and views together (actually, social networking are divided into isolated communities of like-minded persons). That the world has become the global village (very few people have been interested in and follow the global affairs). By the way, what is “the voice of the global village”?
Has it been the voice of few media giants, dominating the cyber-space?

we must stop being informed and start forming well, again? — Brian Jones

To stop
being in-formed, we need to better understand how we are in-formed. As internet users and consumers, haven’t we taken part in numerous machinic and automatic processes?

The basic question here is if Fukuyama is correct about identity politics or is this identity politics more of a media talking point than a change in political reality? — ssu

The entire concept of identity politics has still been based on the notions of ideology, rationally behaving political actors (groups or individuals), and political representation. Haven’t we already seen the failure of this theoretical scheme in Fukuyama’s “ End of the History”? Yet, Fukuyama himself has not cared about choosing different concepts. One could find out that the politics of identities has based on the same theoretical base as the notion of populism and Steve Bannon’s thesis and narrative that “The future of Western politics is populist, not liberal”. Yet, both should be explained using more fundamental and appropriate concepts.
There are attempts to conceive contemporary politics as politics of affect. Understood ideologically, affect is the set of means that the dominating group has applied to make the dominated ones to mislead their own interests and instead to invest into the foreign ones. Nevertheless, affect can be understood as the primary process, whereas ideology has become a secondary effect. Accordingly, politicians and acting groups have not acted and thought primarily pursuing long-term plans and programs. What are matters – an immediate effect of catching a maximum of public attention, getting a positive resonance in mass media, changing a focus of discussion to a more appropriate one, adjusting a discourse and lexicon to momentarily political needs, etc.

Remarque "All Quiet on the Western Front":
"For us lads of eighteen, they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress--to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.
They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards--they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.
...we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a wasteland. All the same, we are not often sad. "

Millions of people, whole generations had been sucked into the enormous vortex
of the WW1. Can we understand their experiences?

You say two contradictory things - or at least two things which appear to be in tension. On the one hand, you seem to claim that discourses involving certain words, and things featuring in our forms of life, interact with one another. That's not surprising, since the way we talk and what we do are intimately related. How I think and talk about chairs partly determines what I do with chairs; what I do with chairs partly determined how I think and talk about chairs. But on the other hand, you claim there is an "abyss" between the two. — Welkin Rogue

Thank you for your point.
Seemingly, both of us, discussing the word chair, have in our minds kind of an image
of our own home chairs, and our habitual actions: to move the chair around, adjust it, etc. The meaning of the word accurately corresponds to the regular usage of the item. There are no problems, no abysses… The problem can appear if your company decided to allocate you with some money to order a chair for yourself. You remember that in the similar situation your colleague made a wrong choice, and, after sitting some while improperly, got severe back pain. So, to choose an appropriate chair, you start doing research, reading articles, watching YouTube – just to find out that there are entirely opposite views and options!
Moreover, you start to doubt in your definition of the chair, the right chair, and the most appropriate chair. You do not know anymore how the chair was designed and produced, what materials were used, how long it can serve you (comparing with old furniture production). Even after careful deliberation, after you made your choice and ordered the chair, you may find that it does not fit your body completely. And, when you decide to come to a store in person you may be stunned by a tremendous variety of chairs – some of them are similar to beds, other ones to stools. In most cases, when one says the world chair, she does not realize the enormous complicity of the real functioning and interrelations of the word and the notated item in society. Yet, they are definitely present even in the most habitual and naïve usage of the word. The gaps and abysses compose the necessary conditions of any linguistic act.

The “things” have their own form – the state of things, or all actually existing separate bodies with their use, means of production, use, dispose of, etc. So, the word chair, as well as I, have been used simultaneously in two separate registers.
— Number2018

Is 'thing' just the ordinary sense of 'thing' here? What does it add to say ""things" have their own form"?

What are the two registers of use for the word 'chair'? — Welkin Rogue

One may think that there is no difference between the word “chair” and the physical item that she sits on. So, there is a naive, routine, and automatic use of language when words have been identified with things. Yet, there are many situations where this practice becomes problematic. A poet, a writer or a marketing specialist may find it more appropriate to apply a chesterfield instead of a chair. Or, if one works in front of computer 8 – 10 hours a day, experiencing back pain, she may start looking closely at her chair, doing research and even asking for an advice, applying to ergonomics’ specialist. So, if we do not take for granted the encounter between the word and the physical item, we can realize that they have entirely different nature. The word belongs to the world of discourse, spoken or written. One could trace the etymology of the word chair, the use of it in different texts, dictionaries, situations, manufacture, marketing, and ergonomics instructions. On the contrary, the physical item “chair” does belong to the world of practical and aesthetic use, design, and production. Therefore, when one is in front of this given chair, it is not just about visual and tactile perceptions of it, one deals with a set of implicit cultural, economic, and social practices. Finally, it is possible to find out that indeed we do not deal with the encounter between one particular given word and an opposite single physical item, but there are the complicated interactions between the two heterogenic registers – chairs as words and chairs as things. “Words” have their own discursive principles of organization and existence, whereas a network of functional, informational, and material processes creates the states of things. Maybe, the case of the chair is not the best example of how Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of expression can be applied. Yet, when one looks at the multiplicity of political discourses, competing for a better compatibility with the same society; the speed with which explanatory narratives and theories appear, flourish and vanish; the enormous intellectual and material resources, applied for maintaining the realm of the words; – one may start to understand better the abyss between words and things.

I am struggling to make sense of the distinction that seems to be assumed in such remarks between matters of language and matters of fact, as it is sometimes put. So again, I ask, what does it mean to be interested in (or to investigate) X, rather than in the meaning of ‘X’? Or to be talking about X, rather than talking about the meaning of ‘X’? — Welkin Rogue

The mysterious version of the <self> concept doesn’t refer not because there is nothing in the world that satisfies its conditions, but because its conditions are unspecified! — Welkin Rogue

There is a linguistic theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and developed further
into the philosophy of expression by Deleuze and Guattari. Accordingly, an
Expression/Content relation has been radically reformulated. Simplistically, both
words and things have their own expression (form), and content (substance).
The form of expression on the most general level is composed of words and their combinations. The substance of expression is the phonemes of speech, or the letters
on a printed page, etc. – all possible material means of the medium. The “things” have their own form – the state of things, or all actually existing separate bodies with their use, means of production, use, dispose of, etc. So, the word chair, as well as I, have been used simultaneously in two separate registers. There are no cause and effect relation between both, neither “words,” nor “things” have an advantage or a privileged status. To make this entire scheme working Deleuze and Guattari added
the concepts of the encounter, diagram, field of forces, actual, and virtual. So, there is nothing mysterious or controversial when somebody says I. You’ve heard (or read) somebody saying it; and you have your particular, but recognizable and similar to somebody else state of mind. So, saying I, you actually repeat the other, who had been already done it. The encounter between the I as a word and me as a definite state of mind/body has been facilitated/forced by the whole assemblage of discursive and non-discursive relations and forces, acting in this particular social field. An individual who says I can possess certain beliefs, emotions, and feelings; nevertheless, all of them are secondary. Yet, the theory proposes the continuum of variations due to the unstable conditions of the encounter between heterogenic components of the enunciation.

One of the definitions I use when referencing what's an objective fact, for example, is that which is mind-independent. This definition doesn't cover every use of the word, but generally covers a large swath of uses. — Sam26

Is the synthetic a priory proposition 7 + 5 = 12 mind-independent?

You can only find a language useful if you already are aware of your self as seperate from others and that others have seperate minds need to be informed of something that you know but they don't. When we realize that other people have minds too, we find language useful. — Harry Hindu

It would be a mistake to represent acquiring language by babies as the result of fulfilling a recognized need. (Does a child grows up because she wants to become an adult?) And, in the first stages, the acquired language is too weak to serve as a simple mean of communication. So, your point is just a simplifying presentation of the real process of acquiring language as well as the use of language by adults. Yet, you are right that the existence of preverbal self is an absolutely necessary condition. The preverbal self possesses self-awareness and means of communicating with others. A non-verbal child or adult can be aware of her inner states and differentiate them from other minds, as well as inform them through gestures, facial expressions, etc. So, what is the main difference between a non-verbal awareness and mediated by language consciousness? Verbalized thinking, or so-called inner speech does not necessary have explicated grammatical and syntactic structure.
In most cases, it uses not even words, but amalgamated mixture of symbols, quite often not translatable, a creation and possession of a particular individual mind.
Nevertheless, an inner speech is the result of a process of internalization of an external language. The inner speech has become an important component of thinking, will, memory, and attention. Mediated by language, conscious psychological processes and acts have become voluntary and non-compulsory, in contrast to impulsive ones.

Language doesn't make us self aware. It allows us to express what is already there. It allows us to express ourselves in greater detail and with better efficiency than simply using hand signals and noises. — Harry Hindu

we have selfhood prior to learning a language. Words and grammar simply allow us to use shared symbols to refer to what is already there. — Harry Hindu

Definitely, babies have kind of selfhood before learning a language. Psychologists even differentiate few different selves, acquired by a preverbal child. Accordingly, we can propose the existence of various kinds of self-awareness. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate
the importance of the emergence of a verbal self. Vygotsky showed that the appearance of a verbal -social self profoundly changed the performance of the child's leading psychological faculties – will, memory, attention, and thinking. So, taking Idefonso for conducting psychological tests would probably demonstrate the difference in completing even simple tasks. Your main argument is that Idefonso was able to fulfill essential human social functions. But what about more complicated ones? Could he successfully orient and perform in our digital society?

Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.
But every language serves that purpose. — apokrisis

It looks like you try to represent one particular moment in human history as the universal one. In the vast majority of known cultures “awareness of self as an individual actor” never existed. It is a relatively new Western invention.
Individuals knew themselves as members of different communities, so their awareness was rather collective than individual. Accordingly, language had not functioned as an individuating and personalizing tool.
.

We say, there "I" go, experiencing certain qualia, having certain thoughts, feeling certain things.
Our mentality shifts up to a sociocultural level where everything is happening to a spectating self - a self that is understood as a contrast to the collective. We now see ourselves living in a world of the like-minded, and so see ourselves as "one of that kind of thing". — apokrisis

Even in our individualistic culture, acquiring language and saying I do not necessarily mean that self automatically begin possessing mirroring – spectating qualities. No doubt, that “I” is socially generated and effectuated, but the equation “I am the other” should never be taken for granted.

understand what that means for the relationship between consciousness and language. — Harry Hindu

Could you expand? How do you understand the relationship between consciousness and language?

Is a new-born baby conscious? — Tim3003

Daniel Stern in his book The Interpersonal World of the Infant proposed a theory of emerging Self and related states of developing consciousness -
he denoted the sequence of consecutive stages as the Senses of the Self. They include the Sense of an Emergent Self (birth‐2 months of age); Sense of Core Self (2–6 months); Sense of Subjective Self (7–15 months); Sense of a Verbal Self (15 months on). Each stage has been composed by the unique combination of a child’s cognitive, emotional, affective and kinetic attitudes.

without language that is the limit of our capabilities. — Tim3003

There are different states of consciousness, where individuals are able to do well without
language: when one attends a concert of symphonic music, her mind deeply immerses into a nonverbal aesthetic experience. Or, when Napoleon observed the field of Austerlitz, he immediately grasped the winning strategy of the battle.

Walking on the street
is a good introductory example of an acting subjectivity. Next example could be driving a car, when a driver is not just interacting with external road conditions (in a similar way as a streetwalker does), but also composing a part with a variety of a car’s technological systems and mechanisms. There is no “individuated subject” that is in control of the driving. If one knows how to drive, one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive consciousness. Her actions and subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are “automatized.” Driving mobilizes different processes of cognition and a driver’s engagement, one succeeding the next, superimposing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according to the current events of driving. To reflect on this situation and to shed light onto the nature of contemporaneity subjectivities, there was proposed the notion of machinic assemblage. One could ask a question if
this notion can be successfully applied further. When our driver arrives at her destination, and (as a customer or employee) enters an office, hasn’t she taken up
by another machinic environment? If for Tailor and his followers there were humans that had executed the optimized processes, today’s agents of execution
have been split between entirely heterogenic levels, maintaining interdepending and mutually supportive relations.

Now that I think about it, to drive the point home, one might even consider taking into account the subjectivity of a cooperation, or the subjectivity of a state: what is the range of action of a state? — StreetlightX

According to Manuel de Landa, the author of “Assemblage Theory,” it could be more productive to conceive they are assemblages of assemblages.

Subjectivities are more than roles, they become integrated capacities of a person which are exercised in how they live their life. — fdrake

The “old,” personifying discourse (roles, subjects, objects, etc.) has not been appropriate today. Nevertheless, intersubjective, conscious relations have not entirely disappeared; they have been transformed and incorporated into contemporary subjectivities.

Their habits and personality were formed in the wake of their trauma, and only later did it catch up to them; when they felt things were normal, and suddenly they were not.

I would suggest that similar things happen even with walking, seeing a child playing in traffic produces an involuntary response; run to help or freeze in terror. This is because we know the norms and know the dangers... But not just know or feel or experience, we only have those attitudes because we live in way which affords them. — fdrake

Is that possible to try to broaden farther the notion of trauma to explain child’s integration into pedagogical institutions? When a child for the first time brought to a kindergarten, she finds herself in the entirely new environment, has been forced to adjust her behavior and habits to a set of institutional norms and rules. Outside of her house and family, she has been learned new ways of talking and playing with her peers, as well as expressing her concerns and interacting with pedagogical staff. This transition is quite challenging, and a failure to adapt causes a series of corrective disciplinary interventions. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to attribute the notion of trauma a status of a general explanatory principle. Disciplinary and panoptic spaces and institutions do not play anymore a unique and privileged role in forming and in-forming subjectivities. There is no outer space or position, out of which one could isolate processes of subjectivization. If subjectivities are indiscernible from our social and living environments and actually proceed avoiding conscious representations, the new thought and philosophy are required.

For a long time the so-called “Russian roulette,” a dangerous, deadly game, has been an extreme way to recognize the value of life and start thinking differently.

So, the novel isn't eternal. The Elizabethans didn't write novels. Other forms had popular preeminence--verse and drama.

What cultural forms will be most celebrated in 20 years is uncertain, let alone what will be most celebrated 200 years from now. Who in 1940 would have anticipated the beat movements of the 1950s? Or the 'psychedelic art' of the 1960s? What will the state of (big C) Cinema be in 20 years?

Cultural Cassandras are always wringing their hands and bemoaning the decline of [music], [art], [manners], [writing], [you name it]. With some justification, of course. Culture, like a glacier, is always declining. It always heading down and ending up in the sea. But at the other end it's always being renewed. — Bitter Crank

You are right in everything, no doubt that new generations will be doing well without the serious novel and other cultural forms will be invented. I just try to figure out how “the death of literature” affects my talking and writing.
“Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story” (Hamlet V,2).
What is the way of telling a story today?

The judgments psychology make determines the individual and precede all experience.
How could a knowledge attain that status? — Blue Lux

It could be more productive to narrow down an overinflated field of contemporary psychology to attempt to trace the genealogy of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. A scene,
where an individual comes to a specialist (psychoanalytic or psychotherapist) to get qualified help, advice, and/or got been judged, labeled, and identified is still quite common and has numerous interrelations with general psychology. It can help to expose an authoritative, arbitrary and forcible character of psychological knowledge. Starting from 19 century, the new, restrained and nuclear family (father/mother/children) had been invented and constructed to replace the old, traditional one. There was a set of political, judicial, civic, pedagogical, and scientific measures applied.
During the creation of the new family, parents were encouraged and instructed to watch, control and appropriate the child’s sexuality, in parallel to the submission of all the process surrounding the infantile body to the disciplinary dressage outside the family. The capitalistic power needed permanent support from psychological and pedagogical knowledge, and vice versa, the new knowledge would be impossible without powerful and institutional support. The establishment of the new family had caused an intensive circulation of incestuous desire so that an
incest had become a result and an instrument of these politics of family. Later, when Fried and his successors have asserted the incestuous Oedipal child’s desire as the founding knowledge of psychoanalytical theories and practices, they have actually incarnated and reactivated the 19-century’s power-knowledge dispositif.

it seems to me that scientific knowledge is based on certain postulates and premises of which are supposed to be capable of giving one insight into the nature of the human, but these premises are saturated by the same very human intentions they lay claim to. It seems that psychology has no foundation, but rather that the foundation is set apart in its own, according to its own set of rules, namely the understanding of human intention, drive, volition, etc, which are fundamentally centered around univeral human experiences and desires. These aspects of the human are premised, and the unintelligibility of their metaphysical constitution is rendered obsolete. This is precisely what Nietzsche speaks of. A seeing through the abyss and overcoming Man. — Blue Lux

It looks like you try “to catch up” psychology, to point out its
inconsequence, to attribute it some “intentions.” Nietzsche’s “will to power,” Foucault’s “will to knowledge.”
- are these illustrate similar attempts? You are right; it is possible to single out the set of premises which composed the scientific foundations of psychology. Nevertheless, it would be just an abstraction. When somebody, as amateur or professional produces a psychological statement, she does not think about this abstractions – she takes part in complicated institutionalized practices, producing herself as a particular subject of enunciation – most of which
she applies automatically, almost unconsciously. So, according to Nietzsche’s philosophical tradition, it could be more appropriate to discuss not the hidden intentions of psychology, but its diagrammatic functions and mechanisms.

Can you explain Kierkegaard's conception of Xhristianity? — Blue Lux

As far as I see it, Kierkegaard’s tremendous effort and genius, aimed
to save Christianity were not productive – especially after Nietzsche. Kierkegaard said that he was a poet of the faith rather than a knight –he knew he was not up to the task of being a knight of faith, which requires absolute commitment and detachment from what he called hereditary sin. Such a person could be on the surface entirely ordinary, but within she had made the essential qualitative leap of faith. K didn't really know what this was himself, he could only talk about it in his endless "nights of inwardness." So, he rather played, performed zealot of faith instead of he actually had been one. Yet, paradoxically, this Kierkegaard’s failure has become his most successful invention of contemporarily and philosophical ways of being.

The narcissist is who assumes himself too much significance — Blue Lux

It is a common sense definition. One could apply it to Nietzsche himself, or to Dostoevsky or Kafka’s heroes,(are they narcissists?)
asserting that they are entirely absorbed into their own
hyper-intensive conscious. Yet, what was your intention when you brought narcissism as your primary example?

Is there a philosophy that can firmly, for instance, characterize someone as narcissistic? — Blue Lux

It is possible to attempt to apply some of Kierkegaard’s
concepts from his book “Repetition, the essay on experimental psychology,” as well as Deleuzean ones from “Difference and Repetition” and “1000 Plato”. Narcissism may be understood as staying at one of the stages of the emerging subject. Kierkegaard stated and demonstrated that Repetition is the main force of contemporaneity. There are two kinds of repetition - the subject explains and understands universal as repetition, while his own conscious is a repetition in a different sense, has been doubled and become a repetition of a second degree. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari proposed their notion of “an abstract machine of faciality,” so that the two different repetitions, significance, and subjectivization work simultaneously, producing the particular subject with narcissistic characteristics. There is the necessary doubling of the conscious when “I“ has converted into the other and vice versa, maintaining close interdepending relations. At the same instant, signifying provides this conscious with the familiar, universal and unlimited world, so that the reflective doubling may endlessly project itself.

The rift between psychology and philosophy is now distinct. Is it? — Blue Lux

It would be a mistake to represent philosophy vs. psychology relations anthropomorphically: patronage, partnership, divorce, and competition; experimental philosophy and existential psychology show that they are much more complicated.

Psychology completes what philosophy cannot, which is, define the individual. Psychology objectifies the human as an objective fact. This is the greatest leap in logic. It is true, is it not? It is true that we are an objective fact... But nothing could designate this by virtue of reason or logic alone. — Blue Lux

Intention. The intention of a psychology has as its object something philosophy can never base. — Blue Lux

Nevertheless, one could argue that “intentions of psychology” are quite the opposite to “objectifying of Man," converting human being into a scientific fact.
By founding an individual as an objective fact, in spite of logical and analytical leaps, psychology nevertheless supports a whole humanitarian discourse. Thus, asserting that somebody is a narcissist implies the existence of psychic instances of the self, id, and superego. Furthermore, it facilitates the production of the individuated subject with a representational conscious and personological unconscious. Next, economics endows the individual with rationality that establishes him as a person free to chose and decide, while political science makes him the agent of individual rights. All these operations lead to a direction, which is quite the opposite to Nietzsche’s project -instead of deepening and exploring the abyss, discovered by Nietzsche, psychology tries to cover the gap, to disguise it, and to facilitate “the return of the Last Man.”

It is difficult to find out why Plato chose this literary form of his works, where the author is entirely hidden, overshadowed by his hero. Yet, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche showed effectiveness and actuality of this philosophical discourse: it is dialogic not just by its form, but it also applies an essential inner dialogic relation with the other. This new way of thought has been a true philosophical metamorphosis, opening a space for a new sphere of being.

I think that you contradict yourself. From one side, you provide a long list of supposedly real facts and motivations regarding Kavanaugh vs. Ford situation. From the other side, you bring good quotes from Debord, asserting that in Society of the Spectacle, images, and presentations -the power of the false, overshadow and substitute so-called “real.”

Unwiring yourself from the sea of representations, bobbing your head above water to scream truth from your vantage. That's exactly what Debord was trying to make room for; how to orient yourself towards the real when everything around you is false, even your own image colonised tongue.

He says it right at the beginning of the book:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. — fdrake

So, why don't you try to apply all these to the Spectacle of Kavanaugh vs Ford situation?

"What is important here is not truth itself". Truth is the most important thing here, even if it is not treated that way by politicians. Truth is non-partisan, and we should encourage our elected representatives to keep that in mind. — Relativist

Definitely, truth plays some subordinate role. Debord: “the truth is a moment of the false”.

The role of the philosopher is to examine and challenge any group consensus from the outside, not as a flag waving loyalist of any particular team. Any group consensus by anybody anywhere has the potential to be dramatically wrong, and so the philosopher provides a valuable function by kicking the tires of the group consensus, any group consensus, to see if that group consensus can withstand a determined assault.

Imho, philosophers diminish their role by simply repeating a group consensus being endlessly repeated on every cable TV channel, whatever that group consensus might be. While the polarized partisans chant their memorized slogans in the public square, the philosopher should be looking to explore some angle which is not already being examined. The philosopher should be looking to add something to the conversation. — Jake

Thank you for the good points! I think what deserves our attention and analyses is the situation when both Kavanaugh and Ford acted, played and performed as actors; yet, in comparison with theatre, they played and represented their own lives and biographies. (By the way, while playing a role, is an actor honest?) The real facts of their lives were entirely overshadowed by the quality and persuasiveness of their performances, and most commentators were talking just about who made a better impression. What is important here is not truth itself, but the condition of the whole game, which make some enunciations looking more or less truthful.

My take is that (at least democratic) politics has likely ALWAYS been about the spectacle, — Erik

Indeed, in Periclean Athens, leading politicians (including Pericles himself) took part in a kind of spectacle, political theatre. Yet, there was an entirely different regime of truth; direct democracy functioned without the medium of mass media. In Society of the Spectacle, it is absolutely impossible to find out the truth. If you compare CNN with Fox News, you will find the two utterly incompatible (but extremely plausible) versions about Kavanaugh vs. Ford.

Is all this just about a better performance? Debord pointed out in the Society of the Spectacle: “the truth is a moment of the false.”

That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority. — csalisbury

It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the different semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside.” — Number2018

:sad: :gasp:

There's a way of discussing Deleuzian philosophy that fails. It provides the 'content', but is not effective. It doesn't express it, precisely because it is still trying to possess it. What's expressed is not the purported content, but the will-to-possession itself. The will-to-possession is expressed in a kind of triangulation, which is legible in the form. There is the writer, the content, and a specific didactic form: the authority of one who speaks what is known to be true. The content is approached and handled in the way that form dictates. Its a kind of ownership. — csalisbury

I agree with you, just want to add that the constellation “There is the writer, the content, and a specific didactic form: the authority of one who speaks what is known to be true” is actually constituted by what Deleuze and Gvattari call “an abstract machine of faciality”: “Significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise
that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly
enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject”

The 'content' of Deleuze is something like immanent self-authorizing expression. If the form is not as much a part of this self-authorizing expression as the content, then the speech will fail. It will be read, correctly, as a kind of insular self-authorization.

It's insular because it's really speaking to an absent third-party. It can neither fail nor succeed because the third party isn't present. That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority. — csalisbury

I would like to question what you call “insular and solipsistic” characteristics of “self –authorized, possessing expression.”
Your analyses are not entirely Deleuzian since if one starts looking for the foundations of this conceptualization, it could lead
to closed off or transcendental conditions.” Particular assemblages of power impose significance and subjectification
as the primary forms of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there is no significance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the different semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside.”
So, according to Deleuze and Guattari, there are no entirely insulated utterances, and if the statements or discourses are spoken in the regime of faciality, they are determined and conditioned by the concrete socio-political assemblages.

For all that novels only reach a minority of the population, and perhaps a smaller proportion now than it was forty years ago, I don't think any medium has replaced it as the closest in people's minds to that ideal. — andrewk

I think that most of my disagreement with others about the situation with literature, the novel, and reading has been rooted in the incorrect use of the critical terms applied here.
We do not have the same art, literature, authors, readers as it was in the past.
The cultural practices have changed dramatically and applying the same signifiers
just lead us to confusion and misunderstanding.

So literature, or print, as we conceive of it now, is actually a relatively recent and brief phase in the history of human civilization. Already, if we group together all the new forms that came to prominence in the 20th-21st centuries, this new age is comparable in length to the age of print. — SophistiCat

You are right in stating the objective facts as they are. Much more difficult to imagine the world where the book (you call it" print") was the primary source of knowledge, meanings, and values and to understand how the disappearance of this world affects our thought and the way of being.

If people were even remotely paying attention these days, they would realize that the vast majority of what gets posted on the web these days is pure bullshit on steroids, as life and the problems we face, just aren't so simple that they can be resolved with a 100 word post on twitter, google, or facebook. — LD Saunders

I think that the explosion of texting and social networking chatting as the smooth, familiar and enjoyable way of communicating and expressing one’s immediate thoughts and feelings deserves our attention as an essential socio-cultural phenomenon of our digital time. (Curiously, isn’t it the highest chain in the evolution of the epistolary genre, at the beginning of which one could find Seneca’s Letters to Luciliius?) Some thinkers assume that behind this phenomenon there is an imperative to force one to expose herself, to speak incessantly, to take part in numerous public and normative communications.

There are still plenty of Writer's Festivals around the world, where lots of people turn up just to hear authors talk about their work, their views on life, the universe and everything, and maybe read from their books. — andrewk

Furthermore, the directors and actors are so carefully stage-managed by their media minders that there is scarcely any opportunity to get an authentic thought about the world out of them publicly anyway. — andrewk

Authors are not able to compete with the directors and actors in shaping people minds, regardless of the authenticity of their thoughts.
Jeffrey Nealon in his book “Post-Postmodernism” takes the point that "media images have taken over the very resistant, interruptive power of the “thought from outside,” that for so long was the privileged territory of literary language, that has made literature a privileged ethical discourse within modernism and postmodernism… writers have become the last believers – not in any positive content or anything as predictable as “meaning,” but writers are the lust believers in language’s ability to be the primary driver in the interruption and reshaping of subjectivity (which is also to say, the resisting and disrupting of so-called normative subjectivity)"

I'm sorry, but I don't see the fine literary novel ceasing to be what it was before — Bitter Crank

Don DeLillo lays out in his novel" Mao 2": “The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the tremendous secular transcendence. The source of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something more extensive and darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.
This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel.”
Yet, it is not just that the novel cannot compete with other media, which are using more intensive means affecting human minds. “Crime and Punishment” or “In the Search of Lost Time” were neither written nor read for pleasure or satisfying some intellectual or emotional utility needs. They were true experimental laboratories of human existence for both writers and readers, where writing and reading constituted the ways of becoming with the unknown outcome. When DeLillo and Self say that the novel has no future, they probably try to express their intuition that it loses its fundamental functions.