What wouldn't you say this about, short of "I burned down my local bank yesterday"? — StreetlightX

I wouldn't say this about an ontologist or metaphysician or someone doing a dissertation on Wittgenstein. Or a dissertation on Rawls. I understand being hemmed in.

A political theory that has pretensions to changing things - I don't know. I don't feel wrong saying 'I'd know it when I see it." That's how it's always worked.

I don't particularly like Nick Land, or accelerationism, or any of that - but its very viscerally obvious to me why younger people cleave to that sort of thing. The alternatives are limp.

[ i burned down my local bank yesterday ] is [absurd thing] which yeah i agree - with the caveat 'short of [impossible, absurd thing]' has always been the charge levelled against all sorts of people contributing to certain events, events presumably important to the thinkers you mention, which would be cited in a heartbeat, in a different context

'local banks'

For the moment, I am content to live the weird life I'm living and see everything change faster that I can understand. I am content to carve out a space and wait. I'm not happy, and I don't like it, but it's what I can do now. What I am not content to do is carve out that space and pretend that it's something politically meaningful. It isn't. It gives me a gut-reaction nausea. I am open to a political leader. I'm not open to old politics in drag.

No one needs to burn down a local bank, they just have to direct people in a way that is somehow actually politically meaningful.Chalk my responses up to the hysterics of someone who thought a certain kind of political talking would eventuate in some meaningful deliverance, and the subsequent realization that it constitutively cannot.


Sure, I'm saying this and that, what do you want me to [BURN DOWN A BANK]?

I don't know dude, you're the radical. Maybe start a micropress? But maybe the truth of it is that youre gentrifying something. If not, then, no, don't burn down a bank, but what is the fruit of this Guess revelation if not just an essentialization of non-essentialization. Shit or get off the pot.

Wasn't that what my first post was about? :-\ :-/ — Terrapin Station

yep

The article explains how Reagan made use of neoliberal thought. But, you say, neoliberalism is often characterized as essentially libertarian. Reagan wasn't a libertarian. He was conservative. Conservatives aren't libertarian. So if neoliberals are often characterized as essentially libertarian, and reagan is a conservative, and so not libertarian, how could he be neoliberal?

hmmmm :chin:

If only there were a weak link or two here, the removal of which would make everything fall into place! — csalisbury

Think of it like a mystery novel. all the clues are there. Why is the article confusing? Whats the weak link?

Hmmm. What was the plot?

hmmm. the plot thickens.

I ought to say something profound about John Cage 4'33 — unenlightened

ha! thats it in a nutshell.

My take on the whole thing is: (1) society has elevated irrelevance to the point that the irrelevant have become objects of worship (all he does is catch footballs for God's sake), (2) he recognizes his worth and would rather use it to stroke his ego than to just earn a paycheck, (3) his coach would rather lose the player who will win him games than to humble himself to keep the player.

Unless it's my own kid on the field, I'm not interested in watching, and think it's weird to go watch stranger's kids play games. — Hanover

But all musicians do is just modulate air- vibrations. Whatever sports are, I guess their relevance is how they tap into emotion. I'm not big on sports myself, but I attribute that to something analogous to being tone deaf (& maybe resentment at being picked last for a stretch)

But most importantly, whether he should be in the national spotlight or not seems less interesting than what happens when someone of a certain temperament and talent is aware of being in that spotlight and how it fucks with their head.

Two flat pictures that contradict at the margins. And the third, non-picture, that is the integration of information, that 'looks like' a 3d scene... We contradict each other at the margins while agreeing almost everywhere, and see our relationship as we see the world, and perhaps it is the relationship that has the better view.

The domination of a creature's forward directed stereoscopic vision, necessitates its seeing everything in terms of seeing, if you see what I mean (no freedom there). So science takes the transcendent view and can change nothing; it takes the scientist to even construct an experiment. Like Jesus. Every good scientist comes to that moment when he has to infect himself with the disease he thinks he might be able to cure. Take up your cross and follow me...

I think if we could follow it 'all the way down' there would be a limitless limit like the dateless gate, where the integration is complete and the conversation falls into silence...

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we... — unenlightened

Silence appeals to me, maybe just because I can't stop talking, but if we use stereoscopic in the way you mean, then 'all the way down' could also mean conversation and relation all the way down.

I don't really understand the article. "Neoliberalism" is often characterized as essentially libertarianism, but libertarians aren't conservatives, and by no means was Reagan a libertarian. — Terrapin Station

The article explains how Reagan made use of neoliberal thought. But, you say, neoliberalism is often characterized as essentially libertarian. Reagan wasn't a libertarian. He was conservative. Conservatives aren't libertarian. So if neoliberals are often characterized as essentially libertarian, and reagan is a conservative, and so not libertarian, how could he be neoliberal?

hmmmm :chin:

If only there were a weak link or two here, the removal of which would make everything fall into place!

Chomsky, Banksy, Amy Goodman, and if you like professional comedians, Bill Hicks. I've got a few others on my mind, but why wouldn't any of these suffice? (Or was the mold-breaking you referred to that of not engaging in extra-scholastic efforts while still effecting change?) — javra

Chomsky is an exemplary air-conditioned modeler. Banksy is an aesthete, and made shrewd use of an anti-corporate aesthetic that gibed with the radiohead-era zeitgeist. Now he does gallery shows and stunts at Sothebys. I don't know Amy Goodman and will look her up.

First, I agree with the sense of political powerlessness. Secondly, darn it but stifling talk about how things could improve is the biggest means of creating hopelessness in people. Not knowing what ideals to aspire toward is like being a chicken running around without a head that nevertheless wants to get somewhere meaningful. And there's no way to find and then agree upon these ideals if individuals don't talk to each other about them. The more people start talking about politics in big picture terms, the more empowered they become by comparison to not so talking about politics. And in light of things such as global warming, I'd welcome more big picture political talk. — javra

I don't mean to stifle talk about how things could improve. What I'm trying to stifle is a threat I see lurking in the OP. That threat is a move from identity-based concept-webs to distribution-and- participation-based concept-webs. It's not the loss of identity-centric politics that worries me but the carrying over of the same conceptual doubling of the world. A stately and magisterial double, with the spice of paradox to enliven things.

The insinuation is that this conceptual spirit is meant to keep change and consequence at bay, and will continue to do so, but under the banner of the thing it evades.

The reason is obvious : mastering a certain way of talking is a way of belonging, which is privileging identity, which is, (see @StreetlightX's post above mine) a barrier to action.

Everything in the OP signals belonging to a certain stratum of discourse. I see it as belonging to the realm of recognition and identity.

"In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."

It's not even parody. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason :

"In southern Italy, the agricultural day labourers, the semi-employed bracciante, eat only once a day or even, sometimes, once every two days. In this situation, hunger ceases to exist as need (or rather, it appears only if it suddenly becomes impossible for the labourers to get their single meal every one or two days). It is not that hunger has ceased to exist, but that it has become interiorised, or structured, as a chronic disease."

I understand that the OP is not meant to offer any particular, positive suggestions. It's supposed to be a conceptual clearing, freeing a space to focus on other aspects of politics.

I understand that, but - that is the leftist gesture since at least Negri & Hardt (now 20 years old.) Reconceptualization.

The invocation of Wittgenstein (via Guess) . "What is politics? Well, look!"

This is the final conceptual twist. It says focus on what's in front of you instead of finding an essence. This itself can be essentialized. So that it becomes a gesture. But to avoid that, and actually focus on what's in front of you, requires, as you say, tactics.

Because it's hard to look, right? I'm so far from the levers of distribution I don't know where to begin. And feeling that far from it, it's also hard for me to understand what participation is, or could be, for me. Everything is gauzy and multiform and I don't even know what you do to get to close to power.

I think probably most people feel this way. Definitely on here. I mean let's be honest. Free-think all you want on forums, we're not the most politically potent group of people. This is probably also true in (most of ) academia, to an extent. At least the humanities, I mean. Science is different. Some theoretical physicists might get a pass, but, through institutional pressures, you - hypothetical and didactic avatar/aspect of the manyheaded corporate flow - can goose a biologist to p-hack and cherry-pick to satisfy your darkest desires. Movies are so dumb they're right here. The bullied remain susceptible to bullying, rare willful feynmans nonwithstanding. At a fundamental level, everyone goes home at night and assumes the utilities are working. You can be objective when it doesn't matter to power. When it does, it gets really messy.

So what are the tactics? To understand power, I think, requires that you go beyond concepts. It can only be understood experientially. Exactly because power is always the guessian thing. When you get close to actual distribution and participation things get reallll affective, to the point where you have to let 'affect' fade from your mind. (e.g, people love the 'the wire' because it simulates, or models, a flow they can remain distant from, yet feel in control of, having seen it modeled. the 'encounter' becomes high-level entertainment. This is the 'vox' model.)

What haunts me (& what I think should haunt everybody) is submitting in order to be allowed a well-air-conditioned room, where we conceptually 'world-build' a new, ideal order - or second-order world-build the conceptual contours of how to think of first order ideals.

If you're going for the actual source of distribution and participation, you have to go underground. If you're doing it publically in published papers, well, what's actually happening, from the distributionist/particpatory lens?

If we need an emblem of where we are now its, as I've said before, columbia grads ranciering themselves into meaninglessness at Zucotti.

If we really mean the guess thing (invitation) lets post about how to actually affect distribution, specifically. But of course we can't really do that on here, so what is this?

Its identity. and not even politics.

As @Snakes Alive said, all of this bottoms out somewhere at someone with a gun. That may only be one aspect (the same thing can be seen in many different lenses, with multiple linchpins) but the gun is a big one. Maybe not the master-knot, but at least one major part of it. And you can almost sense the invisible presence of the gun, mediated by however many concentric, distancing, circles of political impotence, in what we say on here. For us, it seems to come down to saying what won't get us in hotwater. We can say what we want about distribution so long as it doesn't fuck with Nestle. It's easy not to think about that when we're posting in innocuous places nestle doesn't care about. I don't know what sustains you economically but I sense you won't bite the hand that feeds (this is a provocation & invitation to prove me wrong thru [examples].) And what else is there politically real besides that biting?

There's a legitimate way out here and its to focus on philosophy or literary criticism. Or gardening, or religion, or meditation. But focusing on the political, as a theorist, is fraught, and has to be sustained with extra-scholastic efforts, otherwise it's just building models in a designated model-space, safe and away.

Or: who's a good exemplar of 21st leftist who has broke this mould?

I'm sorry I was a dick upthread. I objected to the question you posed because it seemed like the only outcome it could lead to was an old and interminable debate, and then I went ahead and ensured it did that, in needlessly personal attacks.

More soberly, this time: I think the question is misplaced. So, for example, Newton thought that absolute space was God's 'sensorium' but the weirdness of this doesn't mean we now discount Newton. In fact, he's taught to this day. We see his understanding as partial, and we can even see why he thought it was God's sensorium, and how this wasn't simply an error, but a precise conceptual knot which would be disentangled by later physicists. I don't agree with Schopenhauer but my disagreement isn't based on the fact that some of his terms seem spooky. If you see him from 'within' the immanent logic of his thought, you can understand why 'will' is still a valuable way of thinking about things, in the same way if you understand Newton from 'within' you can understand 'God's Sensorium' in a fruitful way.

Two paradigms

(1) paths of thought traversing the same terrain in different ways, with various missteps on the onehand and helpful trailblazing on the other
(2) Foolishness (worshipping spooky idols) and clearheadedness (seeing things as they are)

I think (2) is likely to become the thing it worries about.

responding to the edits. I mean, huff all you want S, you entered the thread trying to negate the whole thrust of someone else's point. Breakfast cereal and piss, nonwithstanding, if your approach is negating you're gonna get negated. Don't aggressively invoke 'physics books' and then complain people are being aggressive to you about 'physics books.'

Just read some before attacking, everything will get more interesting

Think of it this way.

There's a guy in a small town and he's hemmed in by this and that. Regulations, mores, all of that stuff. People are asking him to adhere to bullshit things for no reason.He's sick of it, and isn't going to put up with it anymore.

Now, how is the guy going to do this? One option is full-throated rebellion, fuck you, I'm doing my own thing. The other is to seek the protection of a third party. This will allow him to rebel, but with someone he can call upon. 'Fuck your god! ...Science, are you there?'

What's the psychology of this? well, you idealize the third party. It's less about what they are, then the capacity they have to intervene on your behalf.

What gives them that power? Well. It works. You can see the results. The same way a feudal lord is visibly powerful based on his estate. You can call on him, when need be. But unless you get close to the source of that power, and understand it, its just vassalage.

And its clear when an invocation of a lord is just that. It's derived power. Which is a trope in movies. I offer no fealty to Rovelli, though I like reading him. But when you meet someone claiming power from science in this way, you gotta say, ok, you're invoking something - but do you even know what you're invoking? What is going on here? Stand on your own. You claim the name of your lord, though your lord seems not to really be down with what you're doing. So what can you say without giving the answer to implicit high school physics questions?

Why would you listen to Schopenhauer when Physics knows already.

I don't even like Schopenhauer mostly, but this kind of appeal is lame. It's cheerleading essentially.

I don't think so. He seems to be more preoccupied with Kant.

The vector quantity stuff might be above his paygrade though.

Go on then, what's the Mahabharata supposed to be? The capacity for doing work, which exists in potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, nuclear, or other various forms?

And the Ding an sich, let me guess. That's how fast an object is moving, a vector quantity that indicates distance per time and direction? — S

I don't know, I guess you'd have to ask the guy who cites it. I couldn't say if he's knowledgable enough to list all those types of work, that's pretty hard-sci and anyone would struggle, but maybe he gets close.

No it's a kind of joke. 'It's not 'will' but 'force', as S said, is just exchanging one word for another. There are many nuances to bring in here, but in the relevant post, it was simply that kind of exchange.

(aside: it's not 'will', it's 'force'. )

You're suggesting that I'm "fetishising" science, just because I'm questioning why you'd turn to Schopenhauer over matters which seem to pertain to physics? Clearly I value philosophy, too, but not to an unreasonable extent. I don't fetishise philosophy. — S

Good. Don't fetishize anything. Rovelli didn't and that's why, if he were a poster, and other posters were discussing, say, the Mahabharata, he wouldn't jump into say -- 'yet I won't find that in any physics book.' Instead he integrated it wonderfully.

I don't know. The way you ask that question makes me think you'd shut down Augustine and Heidegger as well. Yet Carlo Rovelli, no scientific lightweight, cites both favorably. It seems that well-trained physicists are able to see different tacks as approaching similar phenomena through different lenses. In short, real scientists don't need to fetishize science.

Physicists do this thing where they try to explain laws, like gravity. Why does gravity work as it does? What's the explanation? You must have come across that in your physics books, somewhere.

The general basics of physics, as taught in school, don't purport to give an explanation of their cause though, so why would you bring them up as though they do?

We need to be careful here. Are 'physics books' mediums of knowledge or are they signifiers, like magic cards, we can lay down for this or that argument. Cards we don't understand yet summon, as the magician's apprentice did. Again, I ask, what physics books are you thinking of?

Not will. Newton attributed it to God. I don't know what most modern physicists attribute it to. What do the physics books you've read say? The most recent one I've read, attributed 'time' to humans, citing Heidegger favorably. I can link you, if you like.

I mean you literally would find that in a physics book. That's a pretty standard idea in physics - the nonvariance of physical laws across huge spatial distances. But maybe we're not reading the same books. Which 'physics books' are you referencing? Or is this just more 'common sense heroes throwing off the chains of obscurantists'?

I think what I've always objected to in Schopenhauer --- and not even 'objected', it's not really a theoretical quibble --- it's that I never understood what he meant by saying the Will was 'one.' I agree with the breakdown, where there is not a single thing (humans) with this power (will) and it extends beyond all of us. But Oneness historically has implied unity, cohesion (often spherical representations.) To say that the One is prism'd out into self-clashing, makes me wonder what work 'one' is actually doing?

Yes. I don't believe in randomness or the supernatural or miraculous because I believe everything is within the purview of nature. — BrianW

Fair, but what is 'nature'?

Not a batsignal, but an appreciative nod.

The article makes sense to me. The summary sounds like german idealism + neurocomputation. Instead of a worldspirit, theres a world-computer. I'd only object to the (implicit) claims to newness, as you did. There's additional experimental verification, of course, but there's the itchy feeling theyre verifying things in a certain self-confirming way. Like what's being chosen to be measured somehow, through that choosing, is already smuggling in the conclusions it advocates. do you get that vibe too?

As to to stereoscopy, what if its stereoscopic all the way down?

that's fair. All I know is it's something to do with cycles and swerves. And how cycles can only modify themselves from within, by swerving. And then something about free will being the ability to nudge a swerve in one direction, rather than choosing freely from many options.

But those quotes are incompatible. Did Paul or did Augustine or did a 2nd century thinker invent the idea? The only reading of that collection of contradictory quotes that makes sense to me would be to see them all as instances of a contemporary attempt to tie the concept of 'free will' to christianity, linking [accepted thing] to [bad thing] (presumably doing so in a attempt to shift focus from the individual to the collective, in alignment with a certain political outlook, sanctifying it with scholarly conceptual archaeology.) And then shotgun results when trying to do that.

Would I be reading you wrong, if I said it sounds like you're saying that the 'spookiness' of QM (a human model of an extrahuman thing) )is due to an epistemological, not ontological, gap? As in all the weird and wild theories are the adult equivalent of filling in the alphabet?

If so, I'm inclined to agree. only my gut tells me its even weirder than we think. Maybe at the limit, though, the weird and the familiar converge.

Pearl necklace! — S

hey thats somebodys daughter!

I'm glad you brought up entropy because, tbh, the OP is an explanation - the first true explanation - of entropy. Though of course the scientific community will, irritatingly, never admit it. Pearls before swine.

(fave example of yours btw is german mittens. Read any thinkpiece in a reputable newsorgan about the current state of whatever and its almost always a clunky collage of old concepts, meant for another era, awkwardly trying to express something currently inexpressible. And all with the stolid know-how of those who have so symbiotically made a career with those concepts, that the very idea of new concepts is unthinkable. Like a european anthropologist translatig another culture into the actual truth, not realizing their objects of study are consciously feeding them bad info because its funny. I'll edit in a link to one good example once I find it again.)

Lucretian swerves? — StreetlightX

Yes, definitely. But not only. I've been trying to wrap my mind around Rovelli (halfway through The Order of Time) and the idea that even though time is one thread of the physical everything, still the physical everything can change. And how to understand that in my scientifically illiterate mind without introducing a illegitimate higher-order timeline in which the everything is embedded. So its not the swerve as big bang, I'm trying to think, but as an inherent part of it, thats constantly in play. Thats why the 'potters wheel.' In this self-contained space which is quasi-timeless, something shapes itself and emerges. Only the potter has to be part of the wheel now too.

This is all slightly manic, of course, and not rigorously thought out by any stretch, but for the moment I'm just letting it play out. I'll show my gnostic cards, a little, and say Zizek's (recycling of the) idea that christ truly forgets he's god on the cross deeply intrigues me. How does the everything modify itself if it can't be modified from without? It contracts time. ('contract' with all the zizekian-schellingian resonance.)

These ants always walked single file to the pumpkin patch when one day Crazy George veered off, leading the colony to eventually discover Australia. — frank

I'm listening to the audiobook of Sapiens and it's funny he just mentioned the conquering of Australia by prehistoric sapiens as a momentous event that changed the course of human development (the first time we ascended to the top of the food chain) Though he also described the cultivation of pumpkins, obliquely, as equally momentous (one agricultural revolution, independent of others, involved pumpkins.)

On an even more crackpot, mystic note, Gurdjieff's law of seven purports to show how a kink is built into any straight line and deviation is inevitable - the twist is , in deviating, we think we're following the same line - new things always emerge under the banner of something old.

Ignorant view of jazz.
Better view: cooperative improvisation. — Galuchat

Totally ignorant, for sure. I do agree that jazz is cooperative improvisation. My thing was a tongue-in-cheek theory of the origin of jazz, along the lines of the Lucretian swerve @StreetlightX brought up. In the beginning all standards were played perfectly in the void until one fateful moment one swerving musician fucked up. And instead of him, embarassed, correcting himself, the other musicians said 'yes and' and a beautiful tradition of cooperative improvisation was born.