Sometimes when an artist is composing, there may be a piece that he or she is relatively happy with, though it contains a flaw that disrupts the flow of the work. Like one caulks a crack, the artist papers over the flaw with another effect, adding something new to the work in the process.
Or the artist simply leaves the flaw. Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass is famous for - among other things - the spiderweb of cracks in the glass itself. He felt that a work of art was a continuous entity that went through a process of alchemy far after the artist finished it (thanks John).
I'm a sucker for these flaws. For the pops in a composition, or the botched note in a music piece (Jimi Hendrix once joked that people copied everything about his playing, even his mistakes). For the air bubbles in the glass. For the dimples and cracks in the rock, that sort of thing.
I remember when I was learning to make 3D levels in a video game, I studied other map-makers works and was amused to find that they did things like strategically place buildings or a moon or clouds in the background to obscure the seams in the horizon - graphics are much more sophisticated now but then everything was built inside a cube.
I think that is part of what makes many modern mass produced works so distasteful. There is this drive for sterile perfection. Instead of this haphazard building process (well it doesn't have to be haphazard, but you know what I mean), this organic creation of an object, there is a disciplined process of brutal repetition until each component fits together flawlessly and seamlessly, like an officer's uniform. It betrays a fetish for the object itself, a myopic vision of creation, and a profound insecurity.
The seamless monolith has no features to fall for. No flaws to love. It is the flaws that accentuate the beauty.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
A Brief Aside on Power
I suppose I need to remind myself that I am operating on a faulty conception of the concentration of power in an age of oligarchy.
Needless to say, power...especially economic and political power is far more concentrated than it was, say, 50 years ago. However there is no absolute locus of power.
This is what makes a global empire (and its relationship to a civilization) so difficult to understand.
Power may reside in a certain class. That is, if you have a certain personality and you do certain things - that is if you have a type A personality and you are interested in business and money, or politics, and given that you are from the right background and have the right skin color, gender, sexuality, and starting material base, you are more likely to wield power.
However power is constantly in flux. There are multiple factions competing for power within the US empire. And there are multiple centers of power throughout the globe competing for the position of hegemonic empire, all of which have their own inner competing factions.
An oligarchy wields great power, but they all have to share it. There are plenty of industries constantly fighting to eat each others' lunch.
The deep state, that is, those murky coordinates in which the national security state and the defense industry meet is also a creature of its own, and it is difficult to determine how involved the President is in its decisions.
The President is more a people-pleasing type, and so in the spirit of bipartisanship he kept on many neocons from the Bush administration, who have essentially handed this ongoing disaster in the Ukraine to his administration on a plate.
And so on.
If power were truly concentrating to absolute levels in a single point, the US empire would be much more responsive than it is now, though probably more brittle, if it isn't already brittle enough. If it seems like nothing gets done in this country anymore, it is because power has become so diffuse, but it still does remain concentrated in a minority group of factions.
Again, difficult to understand. Much easier to imagine a simplified model of power, but then that would fail to get at the true nature of things.
Needless to say, power...especially economic and political power is far more concentrated than it was, say, 50 years ago. However there is no absolute locus of power.
This is what makes a global empire (and its relationship to a civilization) so difficult to understand.
Power may reside in a certain class. That is, if you have a certain personality and you do certain things - that is if you have a type A personality and you are interested in business and money, or politics, and given that you are from the right background and have the right skin color, gender, sexuality, and starting material base, you are more likely to wield power.
However power is constantly in flux. There are multiple factions competing for power within the US empire. And there are multiple centers of power throughout the globe competing for the position of hegemonic empire, all of which have their own inner competing factions.
An oligarchy wields great power, but they all have to share it. There are plenty of industries constantly fighting to eat each others' lunch.
The deep state, that is, those murky coordinates in which the national security state and the defense industry meet is also a creature of its own, and it is difficult to determine how involved the President is in its decisions.
The President is more a people-pleasing type, and so in the spirit of bipartisanship he kept on many neocons from the Bush administration, who have essentially handed this ongoing disaster in the Ukraine to his administration on a plate.
And so on.
If power were truly concentrating to absolute levels in a single point, the US empire would be much more responsive than it is now, though probably more brittle, if it isn't already brittle enough. If it seems like nothing gets done in this country anymore, it is because power has become so diffuse, but it still does remain concentrated in a minority group of factions.
Again, difficult to understand. Much easier to imagine a simplified model of power, but then that would fail to get at the true nature of things.
The Movement of Energy within Structure
I guess I've already written about this sort of thing, but it drives me crazy when people talk about this "law" of supply and demand like it is some objective measure of an eternally just, good, wonderful mechanism that provides sublime order.
Mercifully, there has been a lot of push-back concerning market fundamentalism in modern political economy. Modern market fundamentalism, often synonymous with neoliberalism, is the belief that markets are generally perfect and will provide spontaneous order over time - through various homeostatic mechanisms and price signals - if they are left alone. The idea is that a society of self-interested actors will aggregate optimal social outcomes, via the invisible hand, if they are left to act freely in the market with minimal government intervention, which is something Adam Smith himself had doubts about. Again, mercifully, this attitude is increasingly being marginalized by a growing group of actually-rational heterodox economists, though it continues to hold sway in the mainstream, due to its appeal to concentrated capital.
But the concept of supply and demand still manages to escape scrutiny more often than not. That is because as a general mechanism it does a decent job at solving the information problem in economics...on a mechanical level. If you are merely setting out to do economics, that is, solve the issue of how to distribute goods in a society without needlessly complicating things or wasting energy on convoluted bureaucracies and procedures, supply and demand works as a useful distributing component, something that produces useful mechanical functions when combined with other processes.
If a lot of people want something, and you only have a little of it, you raise the price and see how much people really want something, how much they are willing to pay to get it. It is an elegant way to distribute goods. However, when you begin to talk about distribution as connected to other factors, and over time no less, it ceases becoming a mechanical issue; it becomes a moral issue.
That's because when it comes to wealth, power, and accumulation, we are more like animals than these posited rational, self-interested machines. When you begin to study distribution over time, you have to go beyond the mere isolated mechanism, because we still act like animals with our economic goods.
Accumulated wealth and power have a sticky quality to them. They clump. They stay. And you always have a proportion of people in a society that want more. Many collectivist societies do a good job at reigning in these types, though there are limits, while many individualist societies tend to let these types run roughshod and accumulate.
You hear "economics" used a lot more than "political economy" these days - though the latter term is making a comeback among lefties - for good reason. Over the last century organized capital has been working diligently to obscure the moral dimension of economic distribution. The idea is to posit supply and demand as some objective organizing principle that we are subject to, which implicitly replaces the moral dimensions of political and economic decisions, and sheathes the looting in a glistening gloss of false objectivity.
So more simply, you have some health insurance rep parroting off the cliche that it is the law of supply and demand that is determining their exorbitant prices and you'd better get used to it because...markets. But what he is really saying - while obscuring the true nature of what he is saying with a false symbol of objectivity - that his industry is run by a bunch of selfish bastards that have gained too much economic power. This is what makes health insurance particularly immoral in its current state (and plenty of other things infiltrated by markets). If you gain enough power to monopolize a given economic good that everyone needs - in this case health care - you can charge as much as people can possibly pay, sometimes more.
More fundamentally, and speaking in moral language, the concept of supply and demand itself communicates a selfish impulse. It is generally thought to be messed up of someone to sit in a desert selling dying travelers bottles of water at cutthroat prices, because our moral drives respond to context: that is, depending on the situation, we can act in our own self-interest or selflessly. Supply and demand says this: if you really want something I have, I can take as much as you are willing to give me for it. It reflects a set of values.
Posited as an objective fact, this principle seeks to multiply instantiations of itself across the land. Adopted throughout culture, mutual self-interest fastens an iron band around a society which elicits a dependable behavior. It is in this way that an economic structure develops in which energy moves within a society.
Everyone must take from someone else. "How much can I get?" becomes the guiding instinct. Systematized through law and institution, this principle establishes a highway in which goods flow. However, over time objects of pleasure gather at the polar end of power, while objects of pain, or simply the absence of objects of pleasure gather at the polar end of impotence. Why?
Now of course human beings are many more things than mere selfish robots. Just as people can behave as the exalted capitalist, people can also behave as the - I'm going to say it, the bad dirty curseword - communist. Families, friends, and lovers share with another or even diminish their own selves to give to the ones they love and care about. Strangers do it to each other too.
However there is a negative side to human behavior. People also hesitate to share with those in outgroups, or those less close to them. Some can go so far as to deprive or even seek to harm those they fear or don't understand. For many, people fear losing what they have acquired. And so our tribal nature circulates wealth within closed circuits, which accumulates through fear and ambition in a select few families, passed down over generations. Wealth and power concentrate because of individual differences and the behavior of people and wealth in concentrated groups.
There is a reason libertarian capitalists and many white conservative males call for freedom. They call for freedom to exercise the power they already have. "Free markets" is code for the rule of powerful businessmen.
This structure takes its shape from the aggregate of mass psychology and the exercise of political and economic power. This state of affairs will continue until enough people begin to think differently and act on it.
Mercifully, there has been a lot of push-back concerning market fundamentalism in modern political economy. Modern market fundamentalism, often synonymous with neoliberalism, is the belief that markets are generally perfect and will provide spontaneous order over time - through various homeostatic mechanisms and price signals - if they are left alone. The idea is that a society of self-interested actors will aggregate optimal social outcomes, via the invisible hand, if they are left to act freely in the market with minimal government intervention, which is something Adam Smith himself had doubts about. Again, mercifully, this attitude is increasingly being marginalized by a growing group of actually-rational heterodox economists, though it continues to hold sway in the mainstream, due to its appeal to concentrated capital.
But the concept of supply and demand still manages to escape scrutiny more often than not. That is because as a general mechanism it does a decent job at solving the information problem in economics...on a mechanical level. If you are merely setting out to do economics, that is, solve the issue of how to distribute goods in a society without needlessly complicating things or wasting energy on convoluted bureaucracies and procedures, supply and demand works as a useful distributing component, something that produces useful mechanical functions when combined with other processes.
If a lot of people want something, and you only have a little of it, you raise the price and see how much people really want something, how much they are willing to pay to get it. It is an elegant way to distribute goods. However, when you begin to talk about distribution as connected to other factors, and over time no less, it ceases becoming a mechanical issue; it becomes a moral issue.
That's because when it comes to wealth, power, and accumulation, we are more like animals than these posited rational, self-interested machines. When you begin to study distribution over time, you have to go beyond the mere isolated mechanism, because we still act like animals with our economic goods.
Accumulated wealth and power have a sticky quality to them. They clump. They stay. And you always have a proportion of people in a society that want more. Many collectivist societies do a good job at reigning in these types, though there are limits, while many individualist societies tend to let these types run roughshod and accumulate.
You hear "economics" used a lot more than "political economy" these days - though the latter term is making a comeback among lefties - for good reason. Over the last century organized capital has been working diligently to obscure the moral dimension of economic distribution. The idea is to posit supply and demand as some objective organizing principle that we are subject to, which implicitly replaces the moral dimensions of political and economic decisions, and sheathes the looting in a glistening gloss of false objectivity.
So more simply, you have some health insurance rep parroting off the cliche that it is the law of supply and demand that is determining their exorbitant prices and you'd better get used to it because...markets. But what he is really saying - while obscuring the true nature of what he is saying with a false symbol of objectivity - that his industry is run by a bunch of selfish bastards that have gained too much economic power. This is what makes health insurance particularly immoral in its current state (and plenty of other things infiltrated by markets). If you gain enough power to monopolize a given economic good that everyone needs - in this case health care - you can charge as much as people can possibly pay, sometimes more.
More fundamentally, and speaking in moral language, the concept of supply and demand itself communicates a selfish impulse. It is generally thought to be messed up of someone to sit in a desert selling dying travelers bottles of water at cutthroat prices, because our moral drives respond to context: that is, depending on the situation, we can act in our own self-interest or selflessly. Supply and demand says this: if you really want something I have, I can take as much as you are willing to give me for it. It reflects a set of values.
Posited as an objective fact, this principle seeks to multiply instantiations of itself across the land. Adopted throughout culture, mutual self-interest fastens an iron band around a society which elicits a dependable behavior. It is in this way that an economic structure develops in which energy moves within a society.
Everyone must take from someone else. "How much can I get?" becomes the guiding instinct. Systematized through law and institution, this principle establishes a highway in which goods flow. However, over time objects of pleasure gather at the polar end of power, while objects of pain, or simply the absence of objects of pleasure gather at the polar end of impotence. Why?
Now of course human beings are many more things than mere selfish robots. Just as people can behave as the exalted capitalist, people can also behave as the - I'm going to say it, the bad dirty curseword - communist. Families, friends, and lovers share with another or even diminish their own selves to give to the ones they love and care about. Strangers do it to each other too.
However there is a negative side to human behavior. People also hesitate to share with those in outgroups, or those less close to them. Some can go so far as to deprive or even seek to harm those they fear or don't understand. For many, people fear losing what they have acquired. And so our tribal nature circulates wealth within closed circuits, which accumulates through fear and ambition in a select few families, passed down over generations. Wealth and power concentrate because of individual differences and the behavior of people and wealth in concentrated groups.
There is a reason libertarian capitalists and many white conservative males call for freedom. They call for freedom to exercise the power they already have. "Free markets" is code for the rule of powerful businessmen.
This structure takes its shape from the aggregate of mass psychology and the exercise of political and economic power. This state of affairs will continue until enough people begin to think differently and act on it.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Sharing the Room with a Cat
Suddenly, the scratching of sand is heard. A white cat emerges from the litter box. Not long after, a foul odor spreads throughout the air...
Scattered Notes
Well, because I'm scattered:
- What is all this business with these Hegelian concepts of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? It seems as though the thesis is what organically forms - arguably forming from a past synthesis. But as it forms, and as it seeks to expand, it produces an antagonism to its surrounding environment, an antagonism in which the antithesis forms.
- A proportion of life identifies with and hardens around the thesis, while another proportion identifies with and hardens around the antithesis, an antagonism that lays the grounds for mutual destruction.
- To escape destruction, a synthesis must occur in which the thesis and antithesis are combined to form something new. A new thesis emerges, which begins the process anew. So it is in this way that history progresses.
- So in this way, some form is birthed through converging forces and takes its shape from those conditions, with a state or shell or supportive skeletal structure spidering throughout which seeks to hold this form into place as it disintegrates. This is an old conception that needs updating, so more investigation is needed.
- On pathology: there will always be different types of people. The impulsives drift past the regulatory patterns set by the ocds and etc.
- Inner pressures take their power from greater outer pressure. So, talking about social dynamics, social pressures exist because of how we generate meaning. Much of the intersocial pressures are generated through the apprehension of a system of mores and mythology, through which the self eventually emerges in a struggle for individual glory.
- Each individual seeks a self placed over the selves in the image of the respective archetypal mold, which generates pressure. To escape inner pressure, the subject must affix his or her attention to a greater constellation of meaning beyond the mythical self and its relation to others, which has to happen naturally.
- Elitism and puritanism seek to freeze their own definitions, denying the autonomy and power of other agents
- So let's not argue for an elitist conception of words and their corruption. Granted, words that become too corrupt become meaningless, but words whose meaning is frozen contribute to a curtailing of creativity. This leads to a naturalistic conception of words, whose meaning can drift and change due to the endless plurality of their use, while still allowing for some calcification for purposes of clarity and accuracy.
- It is true that we are traveling in the wrong direction, but to deny the humanity of the agents caught up in that wrong direction is to sow the seeds for a future wrong, going only in a different direction, for direction is the momentum of egos striving. Better to have patience and allow for a plurality of interests and worldviews, while holding the dignity and inherent worth of person, and other life forms for that matter, to be inalienable.
- This is not to say that one should necessarily tolerate sociopathic and criminal behavior without defending oneself. But to turn away in sadness is a far more effective reaction; to meet force with force is to inflame both sides.
- Neoliberal propaganda seeks to decouple the individual from interconnected reality, to isolate the individual and to extinguish the propensity for collective action, and ultimately render the individual - and by extension the group - socially and politically impotent.
- An extra burden of unnecessary complexity arises from attempting to balance or mitigate the effects of inequality. Inequality can only grow if not addressed, and its effects percolate into every sector of society. Overcomplexity grows worse and energy is lost as effective action grows diffuse. Simply: inequality must be dissolved.
- The instinctual basis of fascism is: let me do it, with the subsequent fetishization and worship of the archetype of the mythological father, or the original actor behind the image of the society the fascist is seeking to restore - however illusory that image may be.
- For a game to be successful and fun for all players, each player should be equally able to grow in power and expect to win, at least until the very end. Otherwise if one is doomed from the start - or conversely, sure to win - why even play?
- Wittgenstein was absolutely right about language. One of the chief problems with philosophy is the language barrier implied with the deeper exercise of any given school of thought over time. But he was pointing to an aspect - in this case, language - of a greater force, of which language is a part of. The language arises out of not just a given subject's fixations and areas of study, but the very state the subject is in. For example the language of a cerebral, rational person differs, sometimes radically, from the language of an expressive, emotional person, or even a spiritual person.
- However the Buddhists - and also the Hindus - were right that this is something that happens all the time. It is happening now.
- To elaborate, when you are interested in something and it excites you, you are more motivated to pursue it. You absorb the language and logic of the discipline. As your comprehension progresses, you absorb more, and learn more in turn. You can create your own working model to situate words and meaning. The deeper the thought goes, the more transformed the very structure for communicating that thought becomes. This is how language separates us.
- The truly talented manage a plain yet profound language, to communicate to as many as possible, and over long periods of time so that the language itself manages to escape expiration.
- What you may see as a cyclical pattern could be universal, or it could simply exist within a larger historical formation, and these patterns could change over time. One has to be very careful.
- So, the danger of cyclical thinking is that a given cycle could be occurring in a truly linear system. For example, the revolving seasons may appear to be eternal but are slowly changing insofar as they occur on a changing planet. Conversely, the danger of linear thinking is mistaking a linear process for something that is in fact cyclical, so that upon thinking that "this time is different," one is actually witnessing a pattern that will repeat.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Fires 2
The fires - both literal and metaphorical - are increasing in frequency. Hell, a good portion of Southern California seems to be ablaze and summer is barely about to be underway.
So it goes.
Photo credit: The Los Angeles Times.
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
Animals
Dogs in Colorado and a psychotic bird in Montana:
The bird was somewhat of a tragic figure. It was a female, some type of bluebird which continuously fluttered into the closed sliding glass door, either to get inside or to perhaps do something about that strange alter ego reflected back at her in the glass. The male partner stood off to the side near the end of the deck, looking on. He was always with her. They carried on this behavior for weeks, coming by several times a day to engage in who knows what. It didn't seem as though she was hurting herself, and the two looked like they were keeping healthy.
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