Ayin's Razor

Music of 2011

2011-12-31T09:40:00.006Z

It's been, for me, the best year for music in a long time. There's been some stunning releases. While I know no one particularly cares, I'm going to share some of the highlights because I want to give some respect to the artists involved. There's no real order here, they're just listed as they occurred to me.

HTRK - Work (work, work)

http://ghostly.com/artists/HTRK

The best of the year. This gets better every time I listen to it: black and silky, cold and jagged, simple and repetetive but deep and powerful.

Oyaarss & Friends - smaida greizi nākamība

http://oyaarss.wordpress.com/ues/

Funny that one of the best releases of the year is a free download. But this compilation demonstrates some intelligent, forward-thinking electronic music with attitude.

∆AIMON

http://aaimon.tumblr.com/

Witchhouse? Yes. I wasn't impressed by the first things I heard from this scene but it's matured quickly and this act are one of the leaders, adding a heavy dose of veiled aggression and industrial attitude to the mix. They've released a few things this year, which I can't really pick one from.

Cloaks - Versions Grain

http://3by3cloaks.blogspot.com/

Like a broken machine, this is the kind of electronic music I've been waiting a long time for. Industrial, cold, soulless - austere and beautiful. This is actually a remix album but it only just tops their own originals.

Circle Takes the Square - Rites of Initiation

http://ritualofnames.blogspot.com/

This is the first taster of the new CTTS album due to be released next year. It's great - I'm not sure it reaches the majestic peaks of As the Roots Undo, but time and repeated listening could prove me wrong. Anyway it's still miles ahead of much screamo which refuses to push the envelope - CTTS are endlessly experimental and their tracks are insanely complex.

Regis - Adolescence

http://downwards.tumblr.com/

Yes, it's another compilation. But it's awesome; ignoring it just wouldn't make this list accurate.

Swimming - Ecstatics International

http://swimmingband.com/

I saw these guys play a headphone show at a local cinema - great idea, and the music was amazing. It's unusual to make very catchy, pleasurable music which is still experimental and sounds genuinely unique - but they do it perfectly. The album's brilliant, they deserve big success.

Grouper - Water People

http://www.myspace.com/grouperrepuorg

I doubt anyone hasn't heard of Grouper this year. Without a turntable for the past few years I haven't been able to participate in the vinyl revival but thankfully this release was available digitally.

Death Grips - Ex Military

http://thirdworlds.net/

Another free download - probably everyone's already heard Guillotine but it's always worth hearing again. Mental abstract electronic hip hop.

The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and Self in Michael Gira's The Consumer.

2011-07-15T20:56:00.005+01:00

(It should be noted that in this essay I'm only examining the second half of Gira's book, consisting of short stories from the mid-80s - not the longer first half).

The Consumer is an apt title for Gira's collection of short stories and meditative self-lacerations. The consumer not in terms of consumerism, but of consumption: that which consumes, katabolically dissolving and appropriating into itself, which stops at nothing to annihilate and integrate all that is before it. The book anyway is grotesque – but in the most beautiful possible way. Austere, laconic and surreal in style, its pages are filled with violence, disgust and abuse. Recurrent themes emerge across the stories from different angles: cannibalism, castration, rape, suicide, stench and a bizarre fascination with the Ouroboros-style physical loop.

It has been easy for reviewers to characterise The Consumer as filled with self-hatred. However, it is not as simple as this. The absence of any coherent self is reiterated throughout the book. The question which one feels while reading it, is a constantly repeated refrain of “What am I?”. The narrator - who switches easily between male and female, victim and aggressor, in search of boundaries - keeps pressing, pushing and flailing, while the forms we would assume dictate the cleavage of self and other dissolve around him.

The necessary implication of selfhood, that of establishing boundaries, hovers like a vulture over every piece. The boundaries between abuser or abused, perpetrator of violence or victim of it, are constantly questioned: the one who is suffering is perpetuating their suffering as a means of controlling the other; the abuser is in fact assaulting himself. Thus everyone in the book is a victim; even the perpetrators. The victim is always complicit in their subjugation and often the aggressor is clearly not the master of the situation or even their own actions. Sometimes it seems that there are no characters at all – only situations, playing themselves out.

The concealed crux of the book is naming – or rather the lack of names. There are none, no character in the book is named, other than occasional titles: 'the cop', 'the worker', 'my grandmother', etc. This only becomes clear over time, as one becomes increasingly entrapped in the book's world where identity is so difficult to establish. We find ourselves also lost in a claustrophobic space where there seems to be nothing but the extended plane of heaving flesh. The absence of names indicates the absence of sufficient identity, and one feels that the narrator is actually in search of the containment that names provide. If only he or she could find some title other than you, me, he and she, some way of identifying individuals in a specific way, the need for boundaries would be satisfied.

In Initiate, the narrator crawls toward a furnace while being kicked and beaten by a cop. Eventually he collapses, unable even to explain his failure to move. He wakes, castrated and branded, suspended in front of a mirror and unable to look away from his disintegrating corpse. The cops slice meat from his thigh and eat it. Finally he muses, “I'm happy to have them eating me. Eventually I'll disappear. As I dissipate, they'll grow stronger. I'll feel myself pouring into them.” Likewise in Blind, the narrator's leg is painlessly hacked off and consumed before she is violated. As her assaulters bark like dogs, she is consumed, erased, by a redness, a heat into which she disappears.

Even when not consumed, the body is equated with meat, “Meat that eats and shits, moves when pushed, sleeps when tired, nothing else” he writes in Some Weaknesses, moments before slitting the cop's throat. This intrusion of the knife is the only thing which temporarily breaks the spell of mindlessness, and the cop awakens momentarily in surprise and, “For a second, he's not meat.”

Of course, all bodies are meat, and in The Consumer there is nothing but bodies: to talk of spirits or souls here would be a blasphemy. But the meaning of being eaten is more than this base physicality: it is, as the book's title suggests, consumption. The desire to be consumed, to be annihilated; to be eradicated within another - or conversely by another from within, because Gira recognises that the consumer is also seeking oblivion, seeking a state of blankness which can be overwritten by the objects he appropriates. The consumer is passive: a mere vessel, he does not merely make void that which he consumes but is himself voided by it.

The same is expressed in the theme of stench: often the narrator is obliterated by another's odour, or their own smell reaches out to infect the environment, as a virtual extension of their body. “I want my world, my body, to consist of her smell. After it has become me, I'll be held enclosed, like an insect in a huge fist, and crushed.” (The Caregiver). In A Grave the narrator acts like a disease, corrupting and consuming the space they inhabit until it is impossible to tell where the human ends and the bed or walls begin. For the lust-crazed narrator of Defeated, “The world's an immediate extension of my thoughts, my self hatred.” In lack of the simple solidity that names confer, it is impossible to grasp self- and other-hood. Without boundaries, all becomes one single, skinless entity. In the single paragraph meditation, “The Ideal Worker”, the narrator appears hollowed out and vacuous as he waits for instruction: “My only ambition is to become more pliable, more inert.” The superior dominates the worker and ultimately will “wipe my mind clean”.

“I'm malleable, shaped, soft.” (Defeated) The narrator is always pushing to find a point of resistance that never comes, a concrete wall, anything real and not fluid. Experiments with control, submission and domination are attempts to find where one begins and another ends. But this certainty is never given, and boundaries are never found. A Man takes this to its logical extreme, where physical boundaries between the body and the environment disappear, and the narrator seeks identification with another, in the process “ruining my awareness of myself.” Prior to this, the body is an alien presence, something uncontrollable, but whose very controllability reinforces its alien nature. When literally consumed by the woman's body, he can no longer tell who contains who or whether he or she ever existed, and concludes that paradoxically, “I'm using her body to kill my body.” This fluidity returns in The Boss: “He's not himself, he doesn't belong to himself. He's watching his boundaries dissolve as I control him.”. The narrator often turns in toward themselves, sealed as a kind of Ouroboros, as in Another Trap (“I'm a small thing, plotting suicide, sucking my toes.”), the heroine of A Trap who sucks her own nipples and the proposed fellatio-suicide of Bastard, (“If I had a cock I could suck it, committing suicide by poisoning myself on my own sperm.”). However, this is restated metaphorically in A Screw where “Everything else is superfluous...I need nothing, no one”. Here we can see that when as so often, the abuser experiences the effect of their attacks, they sense through the other and form an intellectual Ouroboros, the only remaining sentience and whose actions can only affect themselves.

As anyone who reads the book will know, I have not been completely truthful. The book has one named character: Jennifer, in Daydreams. The shock of encountering a named person is jarring and conspicuous among the other texts and the effect of it is immediately obvious: Jennifer is a person, she is someone, not just a body, not just meat. We assume that 'Jennifer' has a life, friends and family and goes on holidays abroad. The recognition of Jennifer is shocking too for the reason that she is distant: all the other characters have appeared in claustrophobic proximity, slippery and in a constant state of flux as they perpetually violate and compromise each other - but Jennifer is contained and withdrawn. She is impenetrable, the name seems to form a wall between her essence and the narrator. She does not extend beyond it yet exists in projection behind it. Because she retains this integrity, actual interaction is possible - if unwanted: she repeatedly asks, “are you alright?” to the annihilation-seeking narrator who deflects her attentions. He had returned to the reality of his office job to find himself standing cruciform on his desk, staring into the fluorescent bulb centimetres from his face.

The absence of names on the other hand reduces characters to the behavioural moment. They have no history because they have no identity, and they have no internality because there is no criteria of differentiation between them and other bodies. The fluidity which is often expressed physically is also mental, as the narrator in A Contract finds it impossible even to tell whether his emotions are his own or are manipulations, whether his desires are natural or implanted and whether his memories are accurate. “When a thought comes into my mind, it warps and stretches out of its initial shape, changes into something else before I have a chance to recognize it as something I've made. I presume that I remember things but I'm not certain. I don't know if what I'm thinking is random (mine) or what I'm supposed to be thinking in order to satisfy their desires, to fulfil the prescribed influence of the environment they've put me in.” Thus while the other is often experienced as self, self is also experienced as other. Not only have boundaries disintegrated but internal consistency and integrity has broken down, because there is no external pressure to keep it together as a unity: “I have to second guess myself as well as them”, the invisible them who never appear but must be presumed to be in control of the environment and actions of the creature with whom he is locked into a destructive and sadistic performance. So, the boundaries of the self are constantly challenged, and while the self is always compromised and disempowered, it yet extends beyond its own confines. The I consumes everything and yet this I is an alien even to the one who should claim it. The relation between action and intention are endlessly questioned and reiterated, as the narrator questions whether they could have instigated their own, or asserts that another's are under their control. The desire for separation is made explicit in Money's Flesh, which claims “I want you to hold me down, keep me back, keep me away from the part of yourself where you exist.”, and yet “I want you to annihilate my perception of myself when you fuck me, treating me like flesh between your fingers.” This is the logical end of the desire to find boundaries: membranes are damaged in the search for some solid, impenetrable thing, abuse is sought as a method of locating that which suffers it and ultimately the questionable selfhood must be annihilated if that is the only way to prove that it ever existed. Boundaries are so fragile that even a glance is experienced as rape (Caregiver and Some Weaknesses).

The search for self is the search for other, because for one to have any meaning it must be contiguous with the other. The role of naming in this is very interesting: A name is meaningless if no one knows it. A name can only be used of another, it requires multiplicity, and effectively creates identity. The paper I submitted for Bamidbar will investigate these issues of the magical power of naming further.

Regarding the burning of sacred texts and double standards

2010-09-12T16:56:00.004+01:00

I'm beginning to think there's something a bit strange about the west's relationship with Islam. Forgive me if that's a truism. Like a lot of people I was insensed by the stupidity of Pastor Terry Jones' intended Koranic bonfire. Because I consider myself a liberal, and someone who believes in respect for other cultures, other belief systems and just in not pissing people off for the hell of it.

But then I heard about this: Military burns unsolicited Bibles sent to Afghanistan. Obviously this is not a simple inversion; the Bibles were burnt not out of malice, and not even by Muslims but by (nominally) Christian people who were concerned with protecting themselves and their colleagues.

I also don't think, as I've heard others say, the issue is that the Christian world has a greater intrinsic tolerance. I don't think this is true. History simply doesn't bear it out - Christian nations have committed at least as many massacres, forced conversions and human rights abuses as Muslim nations, and probably much more (the Second World War alone would probably settle this matter).

The real issue is the bizarre passive-aggressive stance the west takes. Western countries meddle in others internal politics, cripple them in abusive trade agreements and declare war when they can't see any other way to get what they want (and to remove leaders who they've groomed, who have got too big for their boots); but we are very eager to put on a show of not disrespecting their religion. So, the American government makes public pronouncements against a tiny Church burning the Koran for fear of upsetting Muslims. While quietly in those Muslim countries, the Bible is burnt, for fear of upsetting Muslims. "Burning another peoples' holy scriptures is completely unAmerican" says Obama, while his military burns their own.

If the (post)Christian west was so concerned with actually being disrespectful, wouldn't fair foreign policies be more to the point? Or would that be too subtle for Middle Eastern Muslims to understand? Isn't it more likely to be the perpetual political meddling and economic imperialism which are causing people to want to revolt in the first place, and the surface symptoms of intolerance such as Koran burning are only sparks which set off a tinderbox?

I've heard a few people argue that Christianity forms the most humanistic expression of religion, because of the Gospels' emphasis on love for humanity and freedom over dogma or a specific, strictly-defined culture. I'm quite dubious that this is really the case, though certainly there is a less deterministic ethic in the Christian paradigm; by concentrating on people's internal attitude rather than their external behaviour, by concentrating on the universal of humanity rather than cultural stability, the individual is given a higher value than the community (and the mind rather than the body but that's -ostensibly?- a different argument). This notion seems to have conditioned our society for both better and worse, such that all individuals are given equal moral value but at the expense of any respect for culture, for the whole of a society.

Christians of course are not up in arms about the Bible being burnt in Afghanistan. Part of this is because of the reasons I mentioned earlier (it wasn't done maliciously by an 'other' intent on defamation); part of it is also because because such a reaction is no longer part of our culture. We no longer see the text itself as holy. Rather it is the spirit behind it, the moral lessons, separated from any theological principles. A third factor is that of power: the (post)Christian west exists inexorably in a dominant relationship to the Islamic Middle East, and therefore events are always skewed in our favour. The fact that there is an American/European military presence in the Middle East, while there is no such Middle Eastern military presence in Europe or America means that the west is in an undeniable position of superiority, and knows it. Inexcusibly awful statements are made on a regular basis about Jews in the Islamic Middle East, because of this fact and perceptions about the relationship between the west and Israel (it's not the issue here and I'm not commenting on the correctness or otherwise of the perceived relationship - only that it is perceived); quite possibly defamatory statements or actions are made about Jewish or Christian scriptures in the Islamic Middle East (it seems unlikely they are not); but the public judgment will ultimately always be that they are not as dangerous as western defamations of Islam, for the same reason that the rhetoric of the Black Panthers or Nation of Islam was never seen as quite as awful as the KKK (despite at points being almost identical); the oppressed have a right to retaliation whereas the oppressors do not have the right to continue their spiritual whitewash.

If you're wondering what my point is, then you're in good company. I'm still trying to work it out
myself. The tendency to think in black and white rather than shades of grey is incredibly seductive and presents a challenge to us all. This is particularly true in terms of the Middle East, where oppression is conducted in almost every combination imaginable, but where people are often quick to shout about rights and wrongs. Interestingly, I've seen little (in fact, nothing) on Facebook recently about the plight of the Roma evicted from France. A people without a nation, expelled from the country they've made their home - where have we heard that before..? Has even Europe really learnt its lessons?

Salvation and Christian typology in Philip K Dick

2010-05-22T11:55:00.001+01:00

Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the most powerfully - and genuinely - Christian books I've ever read. I don't say this lightly, not being a Christian myself but as someone who has on occasion felt the raw power of Christian mythology. I read it in a little under a week, and probably affected me because of the depression I've been in myself recently, one I saw evocatively echoed the descent of Isidore (the subhuman, mutated by the poisonous atmosphere of the earth) into the tomb world. As the real world collapses around him - literally it breaks apart at his fingertips - he finds himself in a subterranean place of bones, spiritless and unformed. But after an aeon life begins to emerge again, and takes him with it, and he realises that the origin of the person Mercer, this new world's popular messiah figure, is unimportant - the fraud has just been revealed as a conspiracy based around an unwitting and unknown actor - whether Mercer actually lived, or experienced any of the events people go through when they 'fuse' with him. He lives in human beings, in the people who look to and rely on him.

The androids, conversely, don't care. When media celebrity Buster Friendly exposes the fraud, they mock human empathy (typified in the fusion with Mercer provided by the ubiquitous 'empathy machines') as a hoax, one proved false by the swindle of Mercerism. But the final proof of Mercer's 'untruth' is negated by Isidore's experience as a result of the androids' mutilation of a spider he found outside. Wild animals are extremely rare in the poisoned earth, and cherished by the philosophy of Mercerism. Just as Isidore is saved by the false messiah of Mercerism, so is all reality; all of creation is resanctified, death is defeated and life returns.

Just as in this process, even the tomb world is essential (the appearance and experience of death is necessary for the salvation, when death is revealed as conditional), so the bounty hunter Rick finally realises his wife Iran's meaning: Iran had claimed that depression was a healthy human reaction to some conditions, one necessary to a full human life. The absence of such a correct reaction to the sterile world, abandoned and devoid of life, that surrounded them, she identifies as an archaic mental illness. This flattening of affect typifies the androids as well as the pathological bounty killer Phil Resch who is consistently mistaken for an android; an absence of any emotional depth or resonance which is in fact the problem of the novel's world.

Rick identifies in himself a defect: he has begun to identify with some androids. Phil Resch has no such problem. Although Rick initially feels this overactive empathy as a horrifying mutation, a symptom of dust-infection, it slowly becomes clear that it is not him but the world which is wrong: the cold world, devoid of compassion, involved in a constant struggle to tell androids from humans when even some humans are pathological. Even Isidore, a cripplingly mutated chickenhead, demonstrates his superiority to the androids in his response o the spider - he is terrified by their curious desire to experiment on it, and it is Mercer, the false prophet, who saves them both.

Philip K Dick lived during the last half of the 20th Century, the period when Christianity began to be popularly reduced to the status of a falsehood under speculations about the historicity of Jesus. Dick's own interest in the early Gnostic mythology of the Nag Hammadi texts evidences a belief in the power of myth to guide our lives, and reimbue reality with a sense of meaning and purpose. In Do Androids Dick fully realises the potential of myth as an element of human thought to again bring life to a dead and cold world: Rick finally realises that, in his own identification with Mercer, he has become immortal, identified with an archetype who, despite his literal falsity, is imbedded in human consciousness. Mercer, as the name suggests, is a personification of mercy - mercy to all life, and to that we may call the soul of reality.

The problem of understanding meaning in postmodernism

2010-02-14T16:37:00.002Z

Pascal Boyer's recent critique of deconstruction is worth reading. In it he challenges the often breathtaking statements of postmodern thought, claiming that these represent an elaborate bait-and-switch intended to ostentatiously cause shock while in fact masking a profound lack of meaningful claim.

I have sympathy with his attack and feel that these criticisms should be heard by those who jump eagerly onto the confrontational bandwagon of postmodernism. The reason I fel this is because they make the same mistake as Boyer. Thus, Boyer serves to highlight an easy and all too common misunderstanding, committed by advocates and enemies alike.

The interesting problem here is that Boyer's central argument - that postmodernist claims never mean what they say - is correct. Postmodernism should never be taken literally, for this is not its aim. Postmodernism seeks to disrupt the priveliging of literalist interpretations of reality; it attempts to disfigure that which claims a single truth which overrides the individual, and instead re-empower the human being or human consciousness over and above the material truths of science. The mistake comes when its own claims are understood as having the same meaning as those scientific truths. For, the attempt is not to dislodge and replace a literalist materialism with a different system. Rather, the attempt is to provide an alternative which can sit alongside the literalist convention, contrasting with it without the need to ascribe one or the other the sole criterion of value.

Lacan's statements that there is no such thing as sexual intercourse, or that the challenge to women is that they are not, should obviously be heard as metaphors which instigate a new appreciation of the categories society gives us, and a questioning of the relationships with people, events and objects which we tend to fall into (and even: the ideas we have of ourselves). If this is obvious for the kind of things Lacan says, it is more difficult to grasp in the case of other thinkers; and I have cause to wonder whether sometimes those thinkers themselves forget not to take their doctrines as literal statements about reality. I know I have often fallen foul of this, especially in the heat of debate.

It is a problem of dull, unsubtle thinking which can only take words as describing an objective, as-it-is world. Thinking at its most powerfully sublime, that which informs the practices of religion, art, philosophy, works precisely against this method. Instead of constructing valid descriptions of the world, it helps to dismantle invalid or constricting world-views. It allows people to question and reinvent their relation to the world, people, events and society in order to re-validate their lives.

The power of Derrida denying objective reality is lessened and devitalised when he is forced to admit that, in scientific terms, this is not correct. Both Searle and Boyer claim this as a victory, but I concur with Derrida himself that they have failed to correctly understood Derrida's project or intention. Admittedly, this failure is not a difficult one. Derrida is not talking scientifically, and should not be understood as doing so. But Searle seeks to place his thought within the scientific (which is the common-sense outlook of the 20th century west), thereby instantly negating Derrida's project by priveliging the literal description of reality over the poetic.

But we need the poetic to help us live. We need myths, we need the emotional power of new, human-centred narratives. It is my own opinion that this endeavour is what has informed the religious urge in humanity, as well as much of what we call philosophy - both the existential seeking of continental philosophy, and much of what came before. Thinkers such as Plato, the biblical prophets, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Zarathustra, et al have sought to reconfigure the human understanding of our world and our place within it by constructing new metaphysical systems which privelige human values and ideals - of a specific kind - over the ossifying systems dominant in their own societies. I've attempted to argue several times in previous posts that religious doctrines are never meant to be understood in the same way we understand scientific claims about the world, but instead depict mythologically an approach to living which is meant to be used to enable us to live better; happily; more ethically. Therefore, these systems should be understood as a manifestation of the drive not toward literal truth, but toward authenticity as living beings.

To sum up, a quote from Keith Devlin's book I've just finished reading which I think illustrates this very well:

"In real life, who best understands a flower? The person who sees it with her own eyes, growing in the field? The photographer who chooses the best light and the best angle in order to transfer its beauty onto film? The painter who captures its subtleties on canvas? The poet who captures its beauty in words and likens it to aspects of the human condition? The blind person who perceives it by scent and touch? The musician who sees it swaying in the breeze and captures its motion in a melody? The botanist who knows how it germinates and grows? The biochemist who understands the chemical processes that keep it alive and give it colour? The biologist who knows what insects depend on the flower in order to breed and survive? The mathematician who writes down equations that describe the flower's symmetry? Surely, there is no one way to view and to understand a flower, nor even a unique 'best' way. There may be ways that are suited to a particular purpose, but that is another issue. In terms of understanding an aspect of our world, the more ways we have to understand a flower, the greater will be that understanding. The poet or the painter who remains ignorant of chemistry, biology, and mathematics is as deprived in his or her vision and understanding of the flower as the scientist who is blind to the flower's beauty."

(Goodbye Descartes, p.281)

Horror and the European

2010-02-07T21:18:00.004Z

Well it's been quite a while since I posted here, having been concentrating on my other blog. One issue I thought about though while Israel was race. Of course, this was prompted by the writings and thoughts of the African Hebrew Israelite Community. Ben Ammi's typifying of 'Euro-Gentile' culture, stemming from Greco-Roman culture and being essentially corrupt, damaging to the human spirit, in contrast to their own very positive and forward-thinking (and essentially holistic) lifestyle made me contemplate whether there are indeed any essential differences between white and black or European and African patterns of thought and approaches to the world. I wouldn't want to make any such statement myself (because such massive generalities would be intrinsically false and bound only to mislead) but while at Neot Semadar I had the time to read Collapse IV, the first article of which is George Sieg's article on the self-referentiality of horror. In this he analyses Zoroastrian traditions and HP Lovecraft to argue that horror is inseparable from the Aryan racist drive to purity. This article struck some chord with the thoughts I'd been incubating for the previous month. I'll record here what I wrote in my journal for posterity, not as a statement of any formulated belief or position I'd necessarily want to be associated with - just as an example of where some ideas can lead.

Horror, Sieg argues, is fundamentally dependent on reason: its emotional power depends on fixation upon more than what is currently present. In this it is an abject suffering based on the possibility of thinking beyond the immediate. It depends on concept-thought, on the capacity to abstract. Animals, he argues, cannot be horrified, only terrified. Horror, as the film genre can best suggest, is based on that which is not present but implied.

It occured to me while reading this that European culture could be typified by these qualities: the drive to abstraction, to concept-thought over and above contextualised or humanised thought. Ever since Greek times, Europeans have automatically strived to disassociate thought from matter; divine from life; pure from impure. This is precisely what Ben Ammi and his followers set out to address. Their lifestyle firmly relocates thought and holiness within the world and life as lived. Separation is the crime which European society has created. In religious studies we call this immanence.

In the dark pagan underbelly of western, Aryan-caucasian society, we have always had a clear and vivid conception of the horrific, of evil. Often this has been projected onto other humans, and has allowed us to treat other humans in ways unthinkably evil and horrifying. In our fear of other cultures, the unknown, the other, we have objectified them and sought to cartharise our fear onto them.

If the Aryan-caucasian is defined by abstraction, by logic and intellect divorced from the world and life, our capacity to feel, intuit and create horror is a part of our racial make-up, inseparable from our minds and thought-processes. To objectify the world, to think in terms of death - the Living God compartmentalised, boxed out of existence as the Shi'ur Qomah tradition (a Jewish one, oddly enough - though Bem Ammi would argue not Hebrew) does so beautifully. The holistic world disappears, that of life and action and emotion, surrendered for a thousand classifications, philosophy, science and reason, new methods to kill either physically or intellectually. In our science, life itself becomes an accident; consciousness an illusion and free will and morality anachronistic dreams from a long forgotten adolescent innocence.

'Judaism', Christianity and the origins of 'religion'

2009-08-23T11:23:00.003+01:00

A lot can be learned from Steve Mason's article on the origination of the term Judaism. I was unaware for instance that the term Judaism stems from a Greek word Ioudaismos which is almost exclusively Christian in its usage. Prior to the 337 appearance in Greek Christian texts, the only instances in Jewish literature are 4 in 2 Maccabees and 1 other in 4 Maccabees. (2nd and 1st century BCE respectively).

The author argues that the instances in 2 Maccabees demonstrate not a 'religious' use of the term but rather a practical cultural one. He compares the term Judaism to the term baptism - the latter meaning to baptise, the former meaning to Judaise. I.e., Judaism is used initially to mean the promotion and inculcation of Judaean culture and practice, in opposition to Hellenism (Hellenismos; also a term 2 Maccabees uses).

Of course, we are wise to remember that 'religion' is a relatively modern invention. Previously a peoples' 'religion' was inseparable from their culture. It was not a facet of life, but completely integrated into day to day and year by year living. The author argues that not only is 'paganism' as a religion or ideology a Christian invention, but so is Judaism as a religion. For writers such as Philo and Josephus, what they were describing was not an ideology but a living civilisation which contained and embraced philosophy, politics, commerce, festival, ritual, marriage etc.

Another interesting sideline that the author throws in is that Christianity faced much trouble during its first two centuries, precisely because there was no convenient social category as 'religion' - the Christians were a way of life without a history or homeland, more akin to a private club than the other cultures we may now characterise as 'religions'. Modern terminology makes invisible the vast categorical differences between these systems. Christianity thus appears to have been one of the first fully 'transferrable' ideologies (it occurs to me that Buddhism shares in all the same esential qualities also - predating Christianity by 600 years or so). Whereas nowadays we can easily comprehend what a 'religion' means in our society, and understand how it operates as a factor within multicultural society, a new ideological movement springing up from nowhere two thousand years ago would have been met with bewilderment by the populace. The same is clearly true in the early history of Islam, when Muhammad renounced the tribal practices of his forefathers in order to promote his monotheistic vision. 'Religion', it was claimed in both cases, was not something portable, not something that could be detached and passed around between individuals but a tradition and way of life that we inherit from our culture.

Of course, one is wise to know the difference between 'Christianity' (the ideology of the early church) and the teachings of the prophet Jesus. Jesus never intended to begin a new 'religion' (as we have seen, there simply was no such category in those times). His attempt, as best we can reconstruct it, was to refresh and revise the practice of Judaean culture in the face of the challenges from the Roman empire and Hellenic culture. The ideology of Christianity is largely a creation of the apostle Paul and the church which he made from the Jewish-Christian sect.

Wittgenstein on Plato

2009-07-19T11:34:00.001+01:00

I read "...philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got...". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?

(Ludwig Wittgenstein - Culture and Value p.15)

Wittgenstein of course talks explicitly about other philosophers very little. This brief nod in the direction of philosophy's founding father should therefore be treated with great care in order to understand what is really being said.

I can see two interrelated issues for Wittgenstein here. The first is a criticism of Plato's own project. The second is a criticism of our own understanding of 'progress' in thought.

When Wittgenstein exclaims, "How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did!", he is mocking the notion that by thought we can approach an understanding of the 'real' world distinct from the everyday world we live in. What is this reality that we are seeking? 'How extraordinary that someone should even begin to understand reality!' The question not asked often enough for Wittgenstein is, what is this 'reality' we are seeking to understand? Philosophers often use the term as if it were something different from the actual world we live and breathe in, the world we see before us now and forever.

Similarly to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein inverts the antiquated western metaphysical tradition which places the essential before the actual: the abstract is an abstract from the present material world. Thus the task of attempting to reach the real via a process of intellectual abstraction, or via an examination of linguistic forms, is doomed before it starts. The real is present before us - in analysing it and refining it into its (apparently) general essence we are not approaching the truth of the matter, the "real" which is concealed by the corruptible form of the actual, we are in fact becoming increasingly lost in the sterile imagination.

Wittgenstein has often been understood as standing counter to the Cartesian tradition which separates the mind (the essential self or soul) from the body (the corruptible material presence). His own picture, which we can glean from his various writings, is thoroughly integrated. The self is not an ethereal gaseous substance hidden from the world by this dumb robotic body through which it must attempt to make its presence and wishes felt...no, the self is that which is made manifest in and through one's actions. The self is not squeezed into expression via the body, the mouth, one's speech and actions but is given life, made real by these potencies. His comments such as "The face is the soul of the body" (CV23) and "The human being is the best picture of the human soul" (CV49) serve to make clear his own approach to 'essentialism'. The essence is that which is realised (literally, made real) by the contingent. If we want to see a person's soul we should look at their actions - then we will see where their heart lies. If we want to see a person's experience of pleasure or pain, we watch their face and words through which these are expressed. These are not some phantom noumena which struggle to find their representation via the maze of body, they are naturally expressed, acted out; in a Hegelian sense, the phenomena is the final stage of 'becoming real' of the object. In two separate metaphors, Wittgenstein says "the work of art does not convey something else, just itself" (CV58), meaning there is no feeling which is the meaning behind the work, which the work exists to transmit; and "A picture cannot...depict its pictorial form; it displays it" (TLP2.172), meaning that the form or essence of a picture does not exist behind it, represented by the picture but exists in the picture, it is displayed in the picture itself.

How does this relate to Plato? Plato's attempt to essentialise the world and perceive the 'real' behind the phenomena is, to Wittgenstein, fundamentally misguided. It is the phenomenal which is the real and if we desire to understand it we cannot subsume it under some abstract system. The abstract can only be an etiolated version of the real; it is the real, once we have nullified the differences, the vibrancy, the temporality of actual existence. What we consider essential in things is in fact a statement of human value, and should not be mistaken for a quality in things themselves. The attempt to do so confuses and denigrates both the nature of scientific enquiry and the role of human value in thought.

The actual use of the word 'reality', how we use it in our language, does not denote something outside experience, but merely something outside clear delusion or confusion. To seek a non-subjective reality seems like a meaningful quest, but as the concept is analysed it disintegrates before us. Reality is this very world we live in together.

Similarly to 'reality', Wittgenstein sees 'progress' as a term which requires justification before we run in pursuit of it. It is easy in this age of technological and scientific progress to believe that progress is inherently beneficial, that it moves us ever only forward and upwards. To Wittgenstein, this is not at all clear. Progress implies a steady march, but this may not be in a direction which is good to pursue. Indeed, when a civilization has lost its sense of direction, 'progress' can seem like an end in itself, and the effects of such an ideal can become masked by the unquestioned perception that we moving 'forward'. He says, "that the idea of great progress is a delusion along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known...It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are." (CV56)

Wittgenstein's own aim in his philosophy is not for movement at all, but for the kind of clarity which can only be found in perfect stillness: "Where others go on ahead, I stay in one place." (CV66). Instead of blurring the world by dynamic movement, he seeks to bring everything into sharp focus so we can see what surrounds us. Instead of building giant houses of cards, he examines the ground beneath our feet.

In this sense, we can see Wittgenstein's exasperation at our constant need to improve and develop our thought, as if we were progressing toward an actual understanding of reality. We have always been here. True understanding is not something we strive towards, but something we should stop in order to appreciate. We will not soon break through into truth, into truly perceiving the world or ourselves as they are...we must instead learn to see carefully and without self-imposed delusion what is right here. Through thought we can lead ourselves astray, through winding paths further and further from the actual world which should be obvious to us.

The Individual as Socially Constituted

2009-07-07T13:19:00.004+01:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about how we form our sense of what we are. There are certain things about being an individual, a person which we view as inalienable. But this very concept of personhood is not, I think, innate - rather it is something which we infer from our environment and interactions, the way the world treats us. Thus, selfhood seems to be intimately related to socialisation. The construction of the individual is therefore a socio-metaphysical process. It happens in the spaces between people, in the space between a word and its meaning; in the fabric of society that gives meaning to gestures, that establishes bonds between people and confers property, rights, responsibilities.

We now live in a very 'self'-centred world - the self is seen as the basic unit of society, rather than the family, the tribe, the kingdom, etc. We are conditioned to think of ourselves as highly autonomous, having a wealth of rights and priviledges which constitute the functions of an individual in this society. Because we are treated like this, as a legal and moral Person, we internalise that notion: we become an autonomous individual. We can only be free, autonomous selves to the extent that society guides us into that role - it does not emerge naturally, which is why it has taken five thousand years of evolving culture to reach a state of such high autonomy and individuation. Humans 100,000 years ago had probably the same neurological capacity that we do to think and operate as we do, but without the cultural acclimatisation which provides our root concepts, and the relatively recent millennia which have developed the concepts we think with, without this we would be as feral, primal and undistanced from nature and its cycles as any animal.

For, an animal, in the wild, is never treated as an individual; it is never given the opportunity to develop a dynamic sense of selfhood. A domesticated animal will often develop a much more sophisticated (at least in the human sense) awareness of itself in relation to other beings, as a social entity. Because such an animal is treated as an individual with the dignity, respect and duties that entails, it will approach an understanding of itself as such an individual.

Some animals (humans, for example) have greater internal capacity for such an understanding - but it is still only a capacity. Such an intricate sense of self and what that means can only be inferred very very subtly from the environment, by society. One must be treated as an individual in order to become one. One does not begin having all the functions and mental processes which determine an autonomous control over oneself and ability to locate oneself within the matrix of sociality; rather, we develop this because we are embedded in the social matrix from the moment we are born. Now, in the 21st century west, our world is almost entirely human: we have very little space outside the world conditioned by human culture, very little contact with a de-individualised nature (or even other social models). So, the intricacy with which our selfhood is articulated is very high. But we would be very wrong to think such an intricacy (or such a sense of individuation) is the natural state; rather, it is a product of the dense interactions which inform our atmosphere, the air we breathe all our lives, the concepts inculcated into us by society (i.e. automatism; self-determinacy, etc). These are brought out of us by a society which subtly infers and emphasises them - we absorb this understanding of ourself, and a sensitivity to our own boundaries and roles, by a process of osmosis.

This is what gives us our freedom, our sense of freedom, and our moral responsibility. The culturally provided metaphysics we are indoctrinated into reaches into the very root of our being. We as individuals in fact seem to be largely constituted from outside; we are formed in the moist air of society, the pattern of our thoughts are generated by the culture we are born into. We do not realise how much of our self is formed outside of us, in the spaces between ourself and other people. This runs counter to a certain way of looking at consciousness as a highly individual process, reducible entirely to brain-states. I am not proposing an ethereal spirit-mind or ghost in the machine. But it seems to me that we have to and can only understand the self as a continuum which is completely integrated into society. A single individual has no meaning. They exist as an individual only to the extent that they operate within society. Personhood happens from the outside in, and not the other way around.

Of course, the gestalt is only one way of priviledging structure. We must understand a whole and its parts as interrelated. To view the whole as the focus, and the overriding determiner of its elements is just as wrongheaded as to view it as merely a conglomeration of elements, with these latter being the important determiners. The level of viewing must be flexible. We can view an individual and their neurology as different orderings of the same information; but we would be committing a heinous crime in reducing the individual to just brain operations; we would be performing a category error. Likewise, we can view society as constituted by individuals yet society does take on a life of its own which often seems to override individuality. This is neither good nor bad, but a simple admission of fact. We would be naive to ignore this fact solely for ideological reasons.

The Angel of History

2009-06-16T22:26:00.000+01:00

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History IX

the dual role of photography

2009-06-16T17:16:00.003+01:00

A couple of recent articles on photography have made me think about the way we use the photograph to both represent and deny identity.

The first is a review article based on a Swiss exhibition, which explored the social contract of photography. One particularly moving element of the article is the description of the forced unveiling of Algerian Muslim women by French occupying forces in the 1960's, in order to photograph them and record their identities. Most of these women would have spent their entire adult lives veiled, whenever outside their homes. This forced exposure seems voyeuristic, abusive - and indeed that is what it is. The photographer was well aware of the nature of his role, promising that he would use the images gained to testify against the rule (we are left unsure as to what - apart from exhibitions such as this - such testifying amounted to).

The second addresses Vogue India's photoshoot from August last year, where "average Indian people" (i.e. the rural poor, most of whom are among those living on less than $1.25 a day) are adorned with designer goods whose price tags range from $100 to $10,000. Amounts which are more than these people earn in a lifetime. In these images, the individuals are not named - they are identified simply as a "man" or a "woman".

Strikingly, while in French Algeria the subjects were photographed in order to capture and record their identity, the role of the images in Indian Vogue is the opposite: they deny the subjects' identities. While the French authorities sought access to the private individual behind the veil, Vogue are attempting to conceal the very real social circumstances of these people by depicting them wearing classy consumer items, those designed specifically for people with finances beyond necessity. By not even acknowledging their names (in favour of the names of the goods), the subjects are dehumanised and removed from the sphere of individuality.

In all cases, an image - a representation - has a dual role. It is a gatekeeper, it both guards and allows access to the object in question (that person signified by the image); the representation seems to stand in our way, such that we are severed from the actuality of the object. By representing, it reinscribes the distance between us, the viewer, and the actual which is merely depicted (and therefore denied) before us. Representation speaks of the absence of that represented. It reduces to two dimensions, a static picture is the object derealised.

Yet it also permits, in a way; it brings the actual closer and by a curious dialectic seems to present an essence while denying its presence. Paul Tillich claimed that, unlike the symbol, the sign partakes in the essence of that to which it points. In communicating a meaning it realises that meaning; thus, it provides passage to its signified by not only pointing toward it, but making it happen. Thus while negating the actual, the sign acts as a vessel for it, bringing it into our reality.

The photographs of these people remain a document of the event depicted. They are not 'natural' photographs: they are designed, posed. They exist specifically for the viewer, as the individuals were manipulated into place forthe viewer. Marc Garanger's dual objective in photographing the Algerian women provokes a poignant sense of confusion: he continued taking the photographs, with ever-increasing fervour, in order to unmask the horror which he felt at the regime's demand that he take these photographs. The horror which he is complicit in (as we, the viewer are too) in attempting to rebel by obeying; he wants to unmask the French powers by carrying out their desire to unmask the Algerian women; and in preserving them, he has preserved a record of the occupiers' abuses. He wants to preserve a memory of their cruel arrogance by being the vessel by which that arrogance happens. We are left wondering, does this mitigate his actions, does it abrogate his complicity? And by viewing with the knowledge that this is wrong, are we somehow less involved in the people's humiliation? It seems in wanting to admonish him of blame, we are seeking to free ourselves.

But we are left knowing that we cannot reclaim the identity of the Indian peasants; nor can we remask the Algerians'. The photographs have happened, those depicted in them have moved on and resumed their lives. The document of the events are now present in a world far removed from that in which they originated. Strangely, it may be we the viewer who is most changed by the events, of which we are the final stage.

Credit where it's due: the New York Times' review was first commented on by the excellent photo-blog subjectify. The dubbagol link to the Vogue article was provided by my friend Cerisa (but not on this blog).

Internal vs. External Definitions of Selfhood

2009-05-10T10:32:00.003+01:00

Recently on the Extropy-chat email list there was (another) series of posts regarding the nature of selfhood/identity. This was begun by one correspondent as a challenge to other members of the list that their reticence regarding uploading and various other self-replication technology possibilities (eg some teleportation scenarios, etc) masked an underlying - unrecognised - belief in some kind of soul or self-essence.

The basic point being, that any argument which centred on an "it just wouldn't be me" claim is scientifically unsupportable.

The point of view which this correspondent is following is one which either A: denies any meaning to the words 'self' or 'identity' (regarding them as mere social fictions); or B: reduces these to a pattern of information or behaviour, either of which can be formally replicated from a material substrate other than the human body, and thus the same "self" will be present...
this substrate could be silicon (computer), machine, anything you like...the important thing is that if the precise set of information (memories/thoughts/behaviours) for a subject, say...Bruce Dickinson (why not?), are made to appear in something other than the original manifestation (Bruce's own original body and brain) then this new information-carrier will still *be* in any meaningful sense of the term, Bruce Dickinson.

The challenge then is this - if this is *not* any longer Bruce Dickinson, then what do we mean by these words? What in fact is the *self* of Bruce (or anyone else) which allows us to attribute identity to one manifestation of those thoughts and behaviours but not another?

There are several possible answers to this problem, and it is one hotly debated in philosophical circles at the moment.

I wish to deal with one particular angle which was present in the discussion on Ex-I. Why is it, the initial correspondent asked, that many people consciously commited to a materialist world-view still have an intrinsic hesitancy in allowing their sense of 'self' fluidity enough to include such uploaded versions? If there is no metaphysical essence or soul, then we must define identity in terms of thoughts, behaviour, memory. As one respondent put it, "the inescapable answer to the "but it's not me" objection is "well then, show us this me". It's just not possible; whatever you point at that might be you leads to absurdity". This is indeed the case. If we refuse anything non-material, then it must be something bodily which we are defining as the self. Yet (as Descartes argued all that time ago) the body can be almost entirely mutilated while still retaining this elusive 'self'-hood. Cybernetics theory has demonstrated the permeable boundaries of the individual to the extent that what we understand as 'self' in different contexts can include technological components (from a walking stick or a pacemaker to the computer through which we interact with other humans many miles away), while psychanalysis has succesfully allowed us to deconstruct the self into many separate and competing drives.

It has been argued that the defining element of self then is usually related to consciousness: it is the sense of self which most usefully confers selfhood. If there is no intrinsic link between 'me' as I sit writing this, and 'me' ten years ago, apart from the memories I have of being that person, then how would some other body (or even computer program) having the same memories and same capacity to think of itself as descending from that person ten years ago not also be me? How can this be a logically consistent position?

It should be noted that there is no real issue of transference of consciousness involved here (as some have been at pains to point out): consciousness itself does not get transferred, rather it gets split like a Y or a road which forks into two. Two bodies can then have the 'same' consciousness at the instant the copying process is completed, but will also instantly diverge as they have slightly different experiences etc. Because selfhood is not an essence there is not an issue of transferring the self - it can be precisely duplicated.

And yet still, to the dismay of the rational arguments' proponents, still many refuse to accept that another such upload could actually replace them or be a desirable future state.

It seems to me that it is not an anachronistic belief in a soul which prevents this acceptance, inherited in our subconsciouses from the religious heritage we have only recently begun to move beyond. The reason is rather a very subtle metaphysical implication present within our grammar, a grammar which is exposed both in our language and thought. People will not accept this because what we mean by the word 'me' can never refer to something outside of oneself. The word necessarily encompasses a sense of interiority. Anything which one can point to and say "that" cannot, logically, be "me". This is the only reason the acceptance of uploads etc is so problematic, and it's not because of a belief in some metaphysical self, it's because our conventions about the word and the concept of 'I' don't allow us to use it in reference to something oneself does not inhabit. The self that can be referred to in the third person is not the self, our grammar of thought doesn't work in that way.

It could be argued that we can think of a photograph or video as being 'me'. However there is a slight of hand in this process, for the image is only 'me' in a past sense; it is not the me, for precisely the reasons above. If pushed most people will see this and admit that in fact the photograph is not them, but a representation of the past-them. Just ask yourself, if that picture is 'you' then why does it not think or feel; why do you now not have access to its thought processes?

Of course, the flipside to this is that we do not have the same conventions regarding 'you', 'she' or 'he'. Therefore, it is perfectly permissible (and comprehensible) to say, "that (simulation) is her in exactly the same way that this (body) is her". This is because the second or third person is always necessarily external. We do not define others in terms of their internal states for we do not have access to these. The rationalist of course may argue that internal states are always describable in terms of externally available information (brain processes, etc). But to define something by this external information is to instantly remove it from the intrinsic definition of I-hood. It makes it an other by virtue of this very externality.

We can rationally think through our notion of self and work out why there is no essential difference between me and an exact copy of me; but the gut will always reject attempts to assign my selfhood to some other being.

A "that" can never be "me"...it will only ever be a that, he or she. (Or you).

Hekhalot Rabbati - Morton Smith translation

2009-04-28T09:57:00.005+01:00

A couple of days ago I noticed - pretty much by accident - that Digital Brilliance are hosting a document purporting to be the translation of Hekhalot Rabbati by Morton Smith. This is a text I have seen referred to often, but only ever to mention that it exists and was never published. The translation itself was carried out by Morton Smith over several years and then corrected by Gershom Scholem. It remains the only full translation of the text.

So, you can imagine my surprise. Since then I have contacted Jacobus Swart (moderator of the Kabbalah Concepts group) who advises me that, based on its matching with the fragments he has seen published in Scholem's own work, the document is "assuredly" what it claims to be.

The caveats mentioned by transcriber Don Karr in his preface are not to be take lightly; further it is advisable to digest the implications of David Halperin's article reviewing Schafer et al's Synopse zur Hekhalot Literatur. In this rather lengthy review Halperin is at pains to stress the lack of definable boundaries to Hekhalot "texts"; if it is indeed the case that there were at one point single units such as Hekhalot Rabbati or Hekhalot Zutarti the mauscripts we now possess make impossible the task of correct delineation.

The PDF is available here: Hekhalot Rabbati (Morton Smith translation)

Introduction to the Enoch tradition

2009-04-28T09:35:00.003+01:00

This post is basically the (very short) review of scholarly opinion on the Enoch tradition, and David Jackson's book Enochic Judaism: 3 Defining Paradigm Exemplars. I originally posted this to the Yahoo group Kabbalah Concepts (also a very useful source). My message there was in response to a request for information regarding heterodox calendars during the Second Temple period.

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It is acknowledged that Judaism of the Second Temple period (i.e. up to 70CE) consisted of several groups all vying for precedence in regard to religious/cultural/political ideology. There is a body of evidence and scholarship suggesting that one such movement favoured the patriarch Enoch as revelator (in precedence, particularly, over Moses). The so-called 'Enoch literature' promotes a solar 364 day calendar as a major part of its revision, with Jubilees tying this in to the preordained harmonic structure of the cosmos which has since become corrupt. The group behind these texts, who appear to have some relationship to the Qumran sect, seem to have believed that only by following the divine solar calendar could festivals and sabbaths be accurately timed so as to concur with the heavenly ordinations; merely observing the movements of the planets would lead to error as the material world had fallen from grace. This Enochic tradition thus pulled away from much of the orthodoxy of the Temple practice, feeding into alternative currents such as Essenism, Qumran and, eventually, Christianity (the Enoch literature in particular was much used by the early Church, and much of their mystical/speculative/revisionist/anti-law thought also fell on glad ears with early Christians, many of whom were Jewish). After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE and the emergence of Christianity as a religion in its own right, the Rabbis (emerging from the Pharisees) began restructuring the faith, emphasising what they believed were the correct and original principles. This included a definite movement away from the heterodox and apocalyptic ideas which had caused so much strife in recent history: the Enochic being one example. Due to the lack of central Temple, the faith had to find a new central focus which became the Torah, i.e. the Mosaic law. Clearly the challenge presented by Enoch could have little place in this.

As regards heavenly ascension/Merkavah Mysticism, Alan Segal in his book 'Two Powers In Heaven' makes a good case for this tradition also relating to the ascension of patriarchs and prophets (including Enoch, Jacob, Moses et al), something which the rabbinic normalisers saw as particularly dangerous for general consumption, although not ineffective in the correct hands.

Hopefully this provides an adequate summary. There is much current scholarship on the Enochic tradition: Andrei Orlov's 2004 book 'The Enoch-Metatron Tradition' is very good (but very expensive); in relation to the calendar, David Jackson's 'Enochic Judaism: Three Defining Paradigm Exemplars' provides much interesting information.

Jackson analyses the Enochic tradition according to three separate 'exemplars' which he feels are defining features and shed light on a prime motive in the writings. These are:

Shemikhazah, the Watcher (fallen angel) who led his followers into sexual liaison with human women, siring a race of Giants. This is an example of deviation from the separation of human-angelic.
Aza'el, the Watcher who taught humans technologies of war and beautification which brought great suffering and wickedness; this is breaking the rules by bringing heavenly secrets to earth, and humans going astray from what is good and proper.
Finally, the cosmos falling out of sync with the divine plan due to the disobedience/laxity of the spirits responsible for the movement of stars and planets. This is calendrical deviation.

So, all three examples relate to straying from the prescribed divine course. As such, jackson argues that the Enochic tradition is largely concerned with returning the people of Israel to the true course, i.e. back to proper observation of the divine commandments and away from hellenism. It has often been noted that there is an overarching emphasis in the Enoch literature on regularity: it presents a minutely ordered, clockwork universe where any deviation is seen as sinful. The 364 day calendar is understood to be so perfect that it must be the way God ordered the universe; the irregularity of either the lunar, or even a 365.25 day calendar can only be the result of the natural world going astray from God's plan. Of course, this all relates very clearly to the transmission of this knowledge in these writings, from the most righteous patriarch Enoch, from before the destruction of the flood. Jackson of course goes into the specifics in very great detail which I won't recount here...the book's available on Amazon and not too pricey, though I'd warn anyone considering it that it is written by an academic for academics and I don't doubt that it would be almost impenetrable to anyone not already aware of the fundamentals of the Enochic literature (he provides zero background).

How the Future Used to Sound

2009-04-09T10:32:00.001+01:00

"Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men."

The intonoromuri is an instrument created by futurist Luigi Russolo. It functions by vibrating a piece of catgut or metal string. The operator (or 'noisician') cranks the internal wheel by a handle on the rear, varying the pitch by the speed of cranking and by a topmounted switch which alters the tension of the string. The vibrations are amplified through a frontmounted speaker. A large variety of sounds can be produced, depending on the initial design of the instrument and its internal diaphragm.

27 different kinds of intonarumori were created, named according to the kind of sound they produced. Examples of these are:

Gracidatore (the Croaker)
Crepitatore (the Crackler)
Stroppicciatore (the Rubber or Scraper)
Scoppiatore (the Burster)
Sibilatore (the Whistler)
Gorgogliatore (the Gurgler)
Ululatore (the Howler)
Ronzatore (the Hummer)

As well as buzzers, thunderers, exploders, rattlers and roarers.

Taking as his starting point the apparent orchestrations of everyday urban life he sought to emulate the "crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffle of crowds, the variety of din from the stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways". This emulation is one that could only take place - indeed only make sense - in the twentieth century.

He first performed with his intonarumori in 1913 but the public had to wait until 1914 to savour its unheard sound. The performance was almost halted by police worries that, having experienced the afternoon rehearsal, it would likely cause a riot.
Sadly all the original intonarumori were lost or destroyed during the second world war.

Luigi Russolo's six families of noise according to which he designed the individual intonarumori:

1	2	3	4	5	6
Thunder Roars Explosions Hissing Roars Bangs Booms	Whistling Hissing Puffing	Whispers Murmurs Mumbling Muttering Gurgling	Screeching Creaking Creaking Rustling Humming Crackling Scraping Wheezes Sobs	Noises obtained by beating on:) Metal Wood Skin Stone Pottery etc	(Voices of animals and people:) Shouts Screams Shrieks Wails Hoots Howls

A better Explanation of the Fallacy of Solipsism

2009-04-09T10:30:00.001+01:00

After my last entry was published on MySpace I was asked to explain further my reasoning with regard to solipsism. I also realise I wasn't very clear ion expressing my ideas, so hopefully this will give a clearer picture.

Solipsism rests on a subject-object ontology. It depends on 'I' being here on one side, interacting with, experiencing, the 'World' on the other side. This articulation of life is what leads into the problem of solipsism. In fact, it seems the fallacy of solipsism itself makes apparent the flaws in this conceptual approach to life. If life can be made to present this problem then the criteria we are approaching it through must be wrong.

The correct approach is to see 'the world' as not something out there in opposition to the 'in here' of the conscious self. The self happens, occurs, through the world. It is not 'in' the world. 'Life' is a network which includes and is constituted by different levels of interplay and relationships. 'Life' is not a category within material reality, material reality is a category within Life. Likewise, objects and subjects do not exist 'in' a Real System: a System articulates itself into objects and subjects. To say 'Life' is much the same as to say consciousness, for this is the sine-qua-non, that which must be the principle axiom of any discussion (even though in discussions about truth and reality we often forget that reality is only reality subject-to-consciousness).

This may be tricky to explain due to the way we are taught to think of the world. But the world is 'shot-through' with consciousness. Nowhere can we point to something and say "that is independent of consciousness". What of a stone? Well, how is it that we see it? It occurs as an element of a conscious, sensory panorama. It is embraced, enabled by, the world of consciousness. Consciousness is not 'in' me, passively apprehending the inert non-conscious world. We are a system. 'I' am a category within this conscious panorama just as the stone is. We both 'exist' (to the extent that we do exist, that we are manifest in form), by virtue of, as aspects of, a cohesive holistic system. It is only by analysing that we fragment the system into parts and claim they are independent and singular entities in themselves. It is by this process that we assign consciousness as a predicate of individuals, instead of seeing individuals (and all 'things') as a predicate of consciousness. It is by this process that we create the notion of an 'ego' which then separates itself from the 'world' and begins to wonder whether the world it is part of actually exists at all.

Stupid really, but then no one said the ego was clever.

The Problem with Solipsism

2009-04-09T10:29:00.000+01:00

It is possible to translate life into a question of solipsism; that is, we can interpret all the day-to-day events of living in such a way that they pose the question,

"is there an external world to my sensations?"

We can push and pull life into making this seem a valid question. But to do so is really a misuse of our powers of interpretation. It is in fact not a valid question. We misunderstand the source data when we try to frame it into a question like this. Just like asking "what is a question?" and expecting there to be a sensible answer is a misuse of language, even though it may seem valid and logical when posed. Life, like a question, is a doing. To look for set meaning, facts, an underlying structure, is not a valid endeavour. To understand the living of life as phenomena, as a surface appearance to which there either is or is not a "real" causal substrate is to misinterpret the action of living life and being conscious.

It should be understood: we can interpret "I am walking" as "it feels as though I am walking", thus presenting the question of whether I am actually walking or not. But this creates a divide in the middle of life which is not present until we begin, after the facts, analysing and misinterpretting, and thereby drag life away from the normal patterns of thought. The differentiation of sensation and actuality is one not based in life, but in human analytical thought. Life is an activity. The problem occurs when we start analysing the activity and attempt to define it with too strict certitude according to granular criteria; then we are mistaken from the outset in imposing the forms of abstract human reason onto something not created according to those criteria. The truth of life is in the doing and partaking of its functionality.

On Culture and Fluidity

2008-12-22T14:08:00.001Z

The city: neon and plastic, alienated, the temporary unsustainable pleasures of capitalism, commerce, the movement of money made material. The human disappears, indeed seeks disappearance in consumption, seeks dissolution in brand names, a plastic imitation of the eternal.

And it is because so much in our culture is transitory, temporary, that we seek meaning in symbolism, in the "added value" of conceptual branding, that give us an intimation of the eternal: the logo, as the word implies, is a manifestation of an ideal. Thus, we approach the eternal, the transcendent-conceptual via its form, the logo.

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The reason the world seems impermanent, and that we are so troubled by impermanence, is because we objectify everything - we attempt to create discrete, persistent entities, concrete objects which are outside of us... but persistence demands dissolution. For, by its very nature extension in time must come to an end.

So, our attempts to inject or present the eternal (that which is perceivable in the human mind, the ideal, the abstract-transcendent), in the actual (the material-temporal world) lead always to disappointment for the condition of the real, material world is precisely fluidity - to impose (to interpret) a solid, persisting nature on any part of it, to understand it as an object with walls, that can be separated and understood in isolation from the environment of which it is a part, makes inevitable the eventual, apparent disintegration of that 'object' as the flow pulls apart the elements which happened to coincide long enough to be given that form by us. There never was an object, just different cycles momentarily in unison.

Understanding this should not pose a problem: persistence is found conceptually, in the realm of thought; in ideas and principles, i.e. in the abstractions that humanity is capable of. We only encounter problems when we forget this and try to reclaim it by applying it to an external material world.

Lacunae

2008-12-22T14:07:00.000Z

If it were possible to solve the riddles presented by language, one feels we would be close to solving most of the uncertainties and disagreements native to humanity. If this were possible. But this would presume there were an actual resolution, a visage behind the masks. An expression not distorted by grammatical form and semantic nuance. This would presume there were actual thoguhts prior to being shaped into words. Perhaps there are, perhaps there is some formless, void material that the semantics of culture and thought make into particular utterances. But this prima materia is prior to any possibility of expression, even to oneself. Experiencing it and making it meaningful, pulling it into the social sphere in which the individual consciousness is formed means dragging it through the conceptual filters that make it thinkable.Further: If these riddles were solved (if) we would find all that is valuable in human life torn asunder. For it is the lacunae of meaning which provide for romance, art, magic, love, all that is beautiful and makes life worth living. This scientistic search for an absolute truth, this negating of the individual by locating life 'within' a grander, concrete material framework, is what I am most opposed to.

Aesthetics and Selfhood

2008-12-22T14:06:00.000Z

To wonder why we cannot "perceive perception" is a fallacy based on a linguistic misunderstanding: it is like asking why we cannot paint red red, or eat eating. Perception is not an event in the world, or a relation between two objects; it is a transcendent, and it is what constitutes the world. It is perception which gives the world its form and shape, and what makes objects what they are (i.e. gives them their object-nature).

This is why perception can never happen within the world. To perceive someone preceiving would place their world, their selfhood, entirely within mine - and they would become a function of myself, an object of mine rather than a subject in their own right. They would be a figment of my imagination.

The corollary of this: although the self is transcendent, it does not transcend other selves. Selfhood itself is transcendent. It can never be contained in a world for it is the condition of a world, the canvas on which a world is drawn. Selfhood is the boundary condition of a world, and likewise we may understand God as the boundary condition of the world (I speak metaphorically - this is not supposed to be taken literally or mapped in any way on to reality). Just as 'I' cannot be proved (subjectivity cannot be established within the world for it is only that by-which a world exists), God too cannot have a presence within the world, as it is the limit, the boundary by which world-ness is defined. God is never object but only subject, the subject of subjects, the boundary condition by which subjectivity is possible.

As such it is undefinable, it is that by-which, i.e. Being. It is the sine-qua-non of life.

The Rebirth of Metaphysics

2008-12-22T14:03:00.002Z

If modern philosophy has seen the end of metaphysics (as is often claimed), everyday life will see its rebirth.

As AC Grayling postulates in last week's New Scientist unless we subscribe to a very narrow view of what we mean by 'mind', i.e. equating it with brain activity, then actually understanding how the mind functions will also embrace, also extends into, language, society and history. This means we can only understand thought (what we use the word mind to mean) by extending this beyond subjectivity, and into the web of social life with which the self interacts and finds definition. So, just as Saussure claimed about language, that the units (words) which comprise it are not understandable in isolation; in fact, lack any meaningful content outside of their relation to other words, so the units of society (people; minds) are also not understandable in isolation. The symbols we use to designate a person (i.e. their name) do not refer beyond themselves to any entity whether spiritual or physical, neither to immaterial souls nor to biophysical bodies and processes. A person is a prolonged social event which only has meaning in terms of its interactions with the rest of the world: we are defined by our social role and by our activity. We are happenings, not objects.

And this is why I say that in fact we are now witnessing the rebirth of metaphysics - for this extended concept of selfhood is nothing if not metaphysical. It involves a reassessment of the previous 'spiritual' or supernatural implications of the word, but I have a strong feeling that those associations were always misinterpretations of these complex concepts anyway. It is easy to mistake subtly shaded meanings for bluntly literal ontological ones.

(none)

2008-12-22T14:03:00.001Z

I worry sometimes that there's too much truth in the notion that one cannot separate the philosophy from the philosopher.

God and Existence

2008-10-04T10:50:00.000+01:00

The problem with discussing religion (or God) as something which is true or not, is that this places it within a universal context of truth. In fact, for many (especially the more mystically inclined), God (or their religion) is the universal context within which factual truth is one subject. The debate on the existence of God attempts to make God not context but subject within the context Truth (or Fact). Such is to vastly misinterpret not only the role and nature of religion, but also the nature of human epistemology.

Because we have the words 'God' and 'exist' which we use meaningfully everyday, we think we can combine them in a way which meaningfully maps onto reality and can be judged either true or false. But this forgets that all thought (and language as an expression of thought) comes from the context of an individual mind in which God either is or is not part of the context which defines the qualitative nature of all other, contingent, truth. Those attempting to prove God's existence regardless of individual consciousness seem to be on a false path from the start. They seem to pose a question such as "How does the world look when everyone is blind?" Those attempting to place a conditional on the context of God (i.e. agnostics) so they don't affirm the conclusion within their axioms are likewise doomed to failure. God is simply not an objective fact. It is intimately bound up with subjectivity itself - they are inseparable. One is condition of the other. For the religious (the monotheist) this should be clear: scripture never talks of God in separation from man. God and man exist solely in relation to each other, for each other.

Aphasia

2008-10-04T10:49:00.000+01:00

Philosophers use words too much. This is why the field is so often devoid of any real insight.

Beyond Logic

2008-08-22T15:02:00.001+01:00

Of course, what I have recently been primitively grasping at is the fundamental notion Wittgenstein was expressing the Tractatus: I have come to understand that the only truths that matter (and thus, the only accurate aim of philosophy) are the personal; the subjective. The truths of logic (which are what all external, or scientific, investigations lead to) are essentially meaningless: they every one reduce to tautology. Leibniz's A=A. Logic, science, mathematics...all are investigations of different ways of expressing this single principel which is their sole axiom. The arts (in the broadest sense) however, refuse any requirement of axiom. They begin from the individual, that is, life, with all the contradictions and irresolutions that implies.

This is why the philosophy that matters has to be carried out as an art. I want, I need, to say more than A=A.