The Fine Line Between Failure and Fallibilism

Equalizer

2011-07-19T02:36:00.005-04:00

The gun is the great equalizer; All are equal before God; God is a gun.

And you ask yourself, how is it that men that want to jump back to another age, when things were in their infancy, shoot guns so fluidly. How can an identity of piety be absolutely fused with the AK-47 and its crescent trigger.

It is a case of false consciousness.

The relationship to technology is indelible, unavoidable. There is no greater post-modern actor than the religious zealot. There would be no Al Qaeda without the Internet for its networking and fomenting; there would be no identity without the hyperbolic, media-myth-making in the hyper-reality of the news. These Muslims want to do away with it. The flabbiness and decadence of the Western modern world, but they fail to see the irony that their very identities, all the symbols, all the knowledge and forms of communication are absolutely dependent upon the decadence of the West.

The guns they tote, the cellphones, Internet forums and the use of the media to give their terrorist activities meaning. Even the suicide bomber is motivated more by the notion of celebrity-hood, in the terms of the inflated sense of the individual by the hyper-reality of the media, than by a true notion of self-debasement before God. The very experience of committing the act of suicide for religious reasons is informed by the knowledge and fabrications of the Western world's news sources, that slowly trickle out into these Muslim nations. They comprehend their fate by those that have gone before them, and those that have gone before them are silent, shattered bodies that are given a false voice of meaning by news agencies.

Al Qaeda is nothing without the AK-47; they have no meaning without the threat of the equalizing force of technology. Technology continues to develop and allow for levels of freedom ineffable. That a clandestine force can exist across the world through the flow of tiny, clicking sinews of bits. That a few bands of men can possess arms that make them a threat to nations, to civilizations. And they speak about the ineffable and the ever-presence of God in a book, but they are composed by the ever-presence of the ineffable freedom of creeping technology.

Truth As Sinew

2011-06-05T01:08:00.007-04:00

The strain to understand and to enter into truth and reality hangs as heavy as the weight of our very bodies. These truths maintain themselves in our lives as moral imperatives, as indelible narratives for which all utterances imply, lead back. But what is so scientific, so honest and objective about our deepest moral, cultural and emotional needs. Historically we have always needed a truth more than we have ever possessed truth, entering into the tragic and humorous hindsight of human, fragmentary "progression." Look to the harbingers of truth, the formulations of social bodies to professionally deal with knowledge, and the efficacy of their modern day institutions.

At one point, take up the domain of the human mind and its many emotions, the irrefutable truth of the etiology of malformation in the psyche was the excess and deficiency of humors (i.e. fluids) in the body. Now we talk about such world views riddled with snickers at the expense of the Ancient Greeks. The snickers ring with a certain subconscious self-doubt because the history of the eventual development of the science psychology is as needful of careful editing and dismissal as Church history. Each historical period enters into a radically different world view, an ideology that distinguishes itself from a previous period; this is the stuttering, stop-starting of historical force that allows for a history, where a fluid progression would be impossible if history is to be a real, evocative force. Fundamental contradiction is the historical norm in nearly all science, where for example Newtonian physics and the Theory of Relativity absolutely tear asunder, creating two isolated, historically disparate ideologies. These are not born from each other, but rather, like the neuroscience of psychology today and its Freudian libidinal theory precursor, one ideology becomes inert while another ideology is suddenly, without warning blooming, unfurling the gears of a history.

Each ideology looks back with a wrongheaded notion that it is in some way indebted or related to what came before them, and that it is somehow greater or the torch-bearer of something that came before. Each new ideology thinks itself to be finally at the gates of truth, and it is a foolish Christian sentiment. Each ideology is in the end times, in the time of some great revelation, where the true essence of things has finally arrived and with it the end of history. Yet, this meta-historical narrative continues to repeat itself as one giant, endlessly-toothed gear. We look back and ask how they had possibly gotten it so wrong, and how they had been so far from the truth. While self-assured, we wait in the end times, finally steps away from the truth. But we never once ask, that perhaps there was no truth before us that we had built on, and our new formulating truths are of a nature nothing like what we conceive of in the notion of a historical progression. Truth seems to serve towards the totality of the ideology, the sinew that brings together the senseless, formless nonsense of everything into a meaningful reality. We need the truth to comprehend before we even arrive at the possibility for truth. Truth resides like a blade in the hand, not as a shimmering mirage on the edge of our quiet desert; and blades can lie in their indiscrimnate cutting, the furried pace of blood-gorged fingers. Might lies be primary to allow for a cobweb of intricatly connected truths? And when that first lie, or truth as you might call it, dies as it always does, what new lie must be thrust back into the gullet of the transgression to start the game of ideology and truth all again.

Power and Rights

2011-03-02T15:07:00.006-05:00

First feelings of power, of volition are the replications of initial, external power that submit us. A child is scolded for wetting his or her pants; the paternal force disciplines the child. The child then soon enters into this force, appropriates it and in delusion believes when he restrains his own body, he is doing it by his free volition. The first feelings of power, the emergence of the free self, is the exercising of control and power external to ourselves.

From this base, psychological condition of humanity, larger structures of political and social construction occur. Democracy and liberalism, understood in a broad sense, is the appropriation of power that submit disenfranchised groups. What are the pillars of democracy and liberalism? Universalized human rights, the notion of a common good stemming from the construction of a concept of humanity -- of what a human is and therefore needs. Looking carefully and anthropologically, it is apparent that the creation of the human idea is an act of separation, isolation and justification. The Ancient Greek's believed that only men, of particular greek families had status as humans, and every person outside of that restrictive, elite group were sub-human, something more akin to animals in their availability for use; humans have a right on a ground of superiority to exert force and dominion over groups outside of themselves.

In subordination, these subhuman groups enter into numerous psychological complexes. One of them being their inability to assert their force, robbed of an identity, a position in society that allows for the expulsion of bodily and mental force. At times, their resentment and anger turn inward, escaping from the world, giving rise to metaphysics, to a new world of insubordination that can be turned on their one of powerlessness. This is the birth of Abrahamic religions with its clear and hidden progeny. At times, being unable to assert their power, they appropriate power, but power as defined in terms of the elite group's notion of what is human and what humans have rights to. This is the paradoxical universalization of human rights. How can there be an encompassing of all into the one notion of what is human which is defined by elites to distinguish themselves from the subhuman and give them the right over all people? This is the birth of liberalism and democracy. The initial power held over subordinate groups is appropriated, but ironically, the robbing of the elitist notion of humanity allows for the preservation of that power permanately, outside of the hands of its creators, floating between people in senseless self-discipline.

Western formations of government and religion are both born of powerlessness, resentment and revenge; their subterranean texts fester, where the bubbling up of these hidden words and feelings results in an obsessive need to association these institutions as harbingers of freedoms.

What We Do

2011-01-30T01:17:00.003-05:00

But we are omnivores! Yet so is the dog an omnivore, and you -- an ardent and steadfast dog! What of these spirits that seeks the most base for definition? But we are humans(?) and by what distinction? Not in our shared baseness of animality, but humanity is birthed in relation to godliness, to divinity. But we are omnivores? But we are gods! -- of unending restraint and justice.

Bodies

2011-01-08T01:02:00.003-05:00

When I walk around the marketplace, I find it to be the greatest call to have children. As this brain sharpens, my mind bears witness, the cloth of presence is torn open to reveal truly the unbearable. I look out into the marketplace, and I realize how tremendous the psychosis of humanity is. To have children would be the most selfish act, to force any being to live in the age of unspeakable spiritual decay where carcinogenic poison and idolatrous fetishism for buzzing plastics has replaced all sustenance and the exemplar of a god would be immoral.

But the birth of a child even in the asphyxiating web of pointless wires is one of the last acts of beauty humanity is capable of doing; there are moments where beauty must usurp morality, as we would allow thousands to die to save a beloved or kill ourselves in the name of an ideal. It is the last act, the last engagement with the transcendence of the uncovering of the other, the you; from such a baseness, such primordial energies something truly presuppositionless and wonderful can come -- you. And it shits on the Church of progression that is really a church of death that annihilates the vitality of the body while pointing to the specious grace of its omnipotence of rotten grain and omniscience of mass media.

I hear it. How can you throw it all out? Look at our ability to accumulate knowledge, to transmit such a knowledge, and from this knowledge, manipulate and construct reality toward a more ideal environment for humanity; is this not all progress and is it not good?

Knowledge serves the purpose of action in a world. All knowledge finds itself as a blueprint for power, for energy in a subject to unveil itself like a splintering lightning strike. True, the knowledge acquired through technological advancements has allowed for an unprecedented celerity in growth. Decade after decade computer capabilities explode with new potentials, the genetic structures of things are being mapped and beginning to be manipulated. The sciences root deeper than ever before and have seemingly near-atomistic structures to work with. But growth cannot be confused with progress; the growth witnessed in our time reflects the new body of humanity -- the polluted body.

Technology, fragmented scientific knowledge, the biologists, the physicists, the chemists, the psychiatrists are growing in numbers and societal significance at an astonishing rate, and many believe that this is reflective of their usefulness to humanity and the inevitability of the progress and success of Western thought. The growth is not progress, however, but rather, a cancerous tumor that is draining and exhausting the vital energies of society. Genetically modified food has the potential to cause significant damage to the human body, especially in the manipulation of food items natural formulation, depriving them of all necessary nutrients that sustains the human body. The modern body is tainted with the specter of sustenance. The exhaust, runoff and noise pollution of the carousel gears of modern industry increases the prevalence of asthma, destroys the immune system, causes you to ingest toxins and poisons in the drinking water and air. The modern body is alive, burning with the latent tumors ringing out to the carcinogens that float like an apocalyptic dander through everything. Consider the parallels of the limited notion of cancer in the biological view: a cancerous cell turns on the body, begins to grow off the resources of the host, and then sends out cancerous cells through the blood stream that can cause malignancy. Everywhere there is pollution, and this pollution is growing at an alarming rate. Our bodies are riddled with hundreds of man-made substances from the sole act of existing -- is that not metaphysically significant!?

The sinuous, knotty, gnarled mass of industry sits somehow inconspicuously as part of this world, breathing a death we know we are all connected to. Progress? Knowledge? A cancerous cell's genes are a form of information, and it is a basic type of knowledge from which like a lighting strike, a tumor can unveil itself.

If it were progress, we could say most definitely, as claimed earlier that a depth and breadth of knowledge is increasing. But, let us return to the idea that knowledge is only knowledge in its ability to allow a subject to act in a world. The knowledge that would be most vital to us is a knowledge that would allow us to act in this world, this given reality. One could have an extensive knowledge that allows them to act, but if this knowledge is divergent from the world one wishes to act in, that knowledge would be illusory. The question needs to be asked, is the knowledge that technology, the harbingers of a supposed progress, of the fragmented sciences and its new mass media, a knowledge that allows for true action in this world? It absolutely is not. These aspects of our society are cancerous growths that have leeched our strength to act in this reality. They contain knowledge, but a knowledge like the cancer cell's genes that allows for a dual world to be created that absorbs the first. What aspect of industrialized agriculture has allowed humanity to act beyond what they were originally capable of doing? Industry's endless pollution? The ever shrinking, broken worlds of rigorous science that can do nothing but obsesses over fabricated points in their cartography and can give the average man nothing from which to act upon, to move towards.

Humanity has never been fatter, weaker and more culturally insignificant than it is today. Morbid obesity is not just a societal issue, the failing of a State's health departments, individual laziness or some other provincial view of the matter at hand. Morbid obesity is an absolute metaphysical crisis. Humanity finds itself less and less in this world as its body is robbed of its physical meaning and capabilities it begins to crumble and disintegrate. More and more technology and science are becoming insular worlds where the knowledge derived from such tasks serves the purpose of the technology itself rather than action in the real world. News is more about news than reality, the internet becomes more about the internet than anything else. Reality television presents an artifice of the real world that is actually just the appropriation of the real world by television. For anything to claim knowledge and thus progress it has to give a subject an enhanced ability to act in the world; being that the human body is the original, primary and presuppositionless way for humanity to exist in the real, material world, anything that degrades the body and reduces the body's ability to act in the world is not a thing of knowledge and not a thing of progress.

And as the creatures who were once humans ontologically deconstruct with their bulbous, functionless bodies breathing in tune with their personalized pieces of industry, slowing melting into, being absorbed by and giving birth to the lecherous tumors of technology producing a culture of buffalo wings and ranch dressing, I will mediate upon the body. The real world waits in the form of knowledge only available to the body, the most primary mode of being in the world. Only by the most base acts of our body do we engage in the truest aspects of the purest world that birthed the ontology of the human body; for a little while, though our bodies are still polluted some form of health arrives to us when we are mindful in our breathing, our eating, our fucking and our shitting; we are in the world. And faintly the bleeding in of other bodies in touch and presence arrive to us, and we find the transcendence of the you -- the child, the lover, the friend -- that remains so far beyond the insular sciences and the dissecting technology of a cancerous growth.

The Void and Shit

2010-12-04T02:24:00.010-05:00

Creation myths in most cultures share a common structuring. There is the void, formlessness or chaos that offers itself as space for the creation. From this shared mythological heritage, one could ascertain that such a myth serves to the peculiar structure of the human psyche that, regardless of any context, a similiar story will be expressed. Such a narrative offers an etiology for what exists so humans may comprehend, and also, at the same time parrallels the creative vigor that emerges from the human engrossed in metaphysical engineering of civilization; it deifies and justifies it. The first act of creation is the first act of the human thought.

There is a psychological clockwork that allows for a true world to exist, to be comprehended before the first breath or shock of matter to the senses. The frameworks that allow for human sense and faculty are like the nervous system or circulatory system of the human; they exist as necessary qualities for the animal to be human. The eye exists before the eye, and all its potential sensory data has been fully built in; there is nothing in the universe the human eye has not seen as there are limitation on the number of potential combinations of stimuli. All potential visual realities exist in the eye beforehand. The first act in the creation story is the first act of the psychologically possible world for the human.

The creation story is the primary act of rarefication; rarefication being the process by which consciousness takes initially physical experiences and removes the blood, bone and sinew; something finer, lighter and more theoretically maleable reveals itself -- a concrete to build a metaphysics. The first act is the act of civilization, is the act of rarefication that in the bedlam of a tumultuous cosmos in a myth or a rabble of tribes in history, that initial violence of creation asserts itself. The first act forces humanity to lie to itself to allow itself a presumptuous, forceful knowledge, to begin building, to justify and hide an alarming reality of no utility. It is the act of language, the first articulated word, the gradual formation of a proto-literature in the spoken myths that formulates a culture and builds an overarching ideology that permeates everything. The first act, which is an act locked in our psyche, is the lie that serves the world to us in use, as humans grab, rape and put their seminal ideas into the stuff of the world.

Society spends the rest of its time after the first lie, the myth of creation, to repudiate and further hide that which was covered in the first act. Religious work, the cultivation of civilization, moves on from creation to ethics or the right way of thought, of living. Nonsense, the noise and explosiveness of the human tongue is demonized; to use the emotionality and expressiveness of the mouth in the utterance of noise is witchcraft, demonic possession or psychosis. Civilization wants to hide the animalness of the human mouth, the rawness of the physical body, the fabrication of rarefied language as the highest expression of reality. A society will give up every fiber of its existence to legitimize and deify its first lie, and yet, this rarefication, and its attempt to hide the body and animality of humanity with great works of literature and refinement of action are still boiled to nothing in the red blood of white mollars screaming of a person incensed.

A Body of Science Without The Body of Science

2010-11-23T14:20:00.016-05:00

Atheists irk me, and any sort of allegiance I feel with them is really just a mutuality of our omnipresent enemy -- Christianity. Many atheists think that their "aspiritual" nature, as they might term it, is a justification for their lack of belief in anything transcendent, but most don't realize the naturalness of their inability to believe in something like a god is more an expression of a zeitgeist; they cannot believe because they are so comfortably enmeshed in a post-capitalist ideology.

Though there are some more creative types, maybe more deceptive types, that use various analytic explanations for why the belief in god is absurd, illogical, untenable or ignorant of anthropology, of a science, there is the curious position: which came first, the argument against a god or the feeling that there is nothing of the sort? And so ensues the creative sophistry to undermine those that leave space for the transcendent and the feeling; the style is so sickening sometimes -- what a bunch of politicians that would be content to make a god stillborn on the smallest trivality of logic.

But logic! is the cry as if atheists were self-flaggelating monks depriving themselves of so much by the confines of a logic. What thoughts are unacceptable? What is acceptable? Can logic not take on the role of an ethics of what is allowed to be thought, to be said? If I say no to your logic, am I excommunicated and no longer available for legitimate conversation?

But the earth, the eyes -- all that is seen! The postivism bleeds out of their scientific stigmata as if Francis Bacon were meant to be a saint. This relationship to the world becomes one of use. The world exists and has meaning by the essence of my faculties; the relationship between the human and the Earth continues to be one of use and exploitation just as the earliest myths of the Bible justify. How sickeningly clean and orthodox that world view is and how useful it is for bashing the heterogenous thinker against stones. Bacon needs to be made radical, and science needs to be stripped of its purple robes to reveal the red human body.

The scientific method has become as bloated, decadent and useless for the individual body as the Catholic church. We laugh when the Church talks about sexuality because it is ultimately an expression of the cobweb doctrine of two thousand years of impacted failure. (Apparently male prostitutes can wear condoms now?) The scientific councils and bodies that laud the scientific method developed by Bacon emerged from the Modern period in a professionalized, organized collection of efficent, rarefied social machines. Suddenly the experimentation with our own beliefs and bodies became foolish, dangerous and amateur; only definitive truths could come from the exacting methodologies of one of these scientific organizations. But how ironic is it that the tools, such as the scientific method, scientific bodies use come from or are inspired by Enlightenment thinkers, who developed their fields of knowledge in a much more individualistic way, not to mention in a holistic fashion pre-dating the professionalization of subjects of knowledge. In spite of these groups, of these limiting judges of knowledge, inspired individuals continue their work engaging their own perceptions, bodies and life revealing far greater truths born of creativity.

It is nauseating to me how many atheists are comfortable with their relationship to science. They attack loudly churches and the religious as if these organizations and people were in some sort of exploitative control. Though true, religious groups do have much power, they still in most developed Western nations remain on the outskirts for the structuring of our societies. The state now turns to the professionals and their high councils for the most accepted and rigorous studies on given subjects. Atheists think that science and scientist are benign, outside of social influences, outside of power relations, and always deeply invested in the absolute truth overall. Though this investment in the absolute truth, an irrefutable truth was the position of most religious organizations. The Catholic Church, being the supposed possessors of Christ on Earth, engaged in exacting, brutal political and military campaigns at various points in their history. What they did was justified with the semblance that they were beyond the simple, petty needs of earthly desires, they were serving the ultimate truth of Christ. Do our scientific councils ever participate in petty earthly desires while claiming to be working in the grand cause of scientific interest?

Yet how lucrative is their position in our society now? Nothing true can be said without the presence of a given professional or expert. Even judges cannot judge without the presence of a psychologist to determine the true essential being of somebody's mind -- criminal or insane? Nothing can be done until we consult the interests of a given scientific council. Who is our ultimate judge now? I would rather be labelled a petty criminal than be considered a potential schizophrenic; the judgements of the state are passing and many regard them with a scathing impiety (that man was innocent, the court is corrupt!), but there is absolutely no space to question the authority of a doctor, unless by another doctor of the same vein. Pyschologist are the vicious arbiters of the contemprorary man's soul.

And their ideologies and beliefs become impacted, though they claim a plasticity to their organizations because they are founded on the scientific method; if the evidence speaks against what they believe, they have an obligation to alter their ideology. But when an organization is large, impacted and spread throughout society in an advantagous position, it becomes increasingly efficient at slowing its plasticity and adaptibility. Nobody acknowledges that homosexaulity was only taken out of the DSM in 1973 -- only a couple of decades ago quite sane people were put in the psychologist's "Bible" next to people with severe mental disorders. It wasn't the scientific method, or the self-analysis of scientific councils within psychology, but rather, the political work and actions of gay activists.

Atheism for me has to have an idiosyncratic definition if I am to group myself into it. It has never been about the opposition of the Church and the laboratory, the implausiblity of a god or a metaphysics, or ignorance and enlightenment. Atheism, a good atheism that captures the essence of its dissidence, is an extension of a more primary goal; the goal of anarchism, which is to make clear power relations, see how one is exploited and to act accordingly to stop it. One needs to understand such a goal on many levels, not on a literal one that envisions cliche political action. Every act, every notion of self, every real and virtual structure reflects an ideology, a mode of existence that exerts force; one's body, one's consciousness is either in accordance with such an overarching force or power, and it is made healthier for it; or, one's being is degraded by such a power and one must act to destroy or undermine such a power. This is my atheism, which is the purest form of atheism that says little about god or metaphysics. It is the nebulous atheism attributed to Socrates by the Athenian government for his social agitation. It cannot allow itself to become complicit with the new religioisity, new power structures that limit creativity, undermine our own truths and degrade the individuality and health of each person.

Adverts

2010-11-23T14:14:00.003-05:00

I put advertisements on my blog to see if some of the traffic I get from image search losers would maybe turn into a couple of dollars a month. Most likely it won't since it seems that I need to have hundres of daily viewers to make anything. But now the advertisements have a new quality to them. I'm kind of obsessed with the insanity and hilarity of reading a post about the endless destruction of factory farming while at the very end there's a giant picture of a cheeseburger -- "Get awesome discounts on local restaurants!" Yeah, I think I'm going to turn off these adds... it's just a little too depressing.

Now Featuring More Pictures

2010-11-22T03:02:00.003-05:00

Must history cruelly repeat itself? As Socrates, the progenitor of Western philosophy, was condemned to drink the Hemlock for his "atheism" and corruption of Athenian youth, so too shall I be dealt a similar fate for my transgressions against my society.

Watermelon(?) Four Loko!

My Fair Blog

2010-11-18T01:35:00.005-05:00

Not all of my posts need to be so serious, yeah? Though as I find myself updating this blog on fewer and fewer occasions, I suppose I want to make my small contribution as mentally lucrative as possible; that is why I stick with the pregnant weightiness of philosophy. There was a time when this blog, now going on its 2.5 year mark, was a broader project -- or maybe aimless is more appropriate. I wanted to do something as a midway point between philosophy, social commentary, creative writing and comedy; basically a cathartic melting pot of ideas at a time when the semblance of indefinite school had finally shattered. This blog was born out of a minor crisis in my life; I had been trained towards scholarship, but with only a BA, I am stillborn with a society that offers zero opportunities to continue an academic life without going on to a graduate school. I needed to do something, and with no money and the networking skills slightly below the great apes, I was isolated. Hmm, the internet and its midwife: desperation.

Why not take a moment to take stock of what exactly all this nonsense is about? As things go, the blog evolved on its own more to the pressures of my own life and interest in this endeavor than to any real evolutions that took place on the blog. Mimicking aspects of my real life, it too is stillborn in many ways. Any goal or plan, any hope for even the smallest audience, was long ago abandoned and not too far from when it started. It took on more of the role of intellectual dumping ground rather than anything that could be considered a whole or a piece moving towards some goal or serving some function. And to be completely honest, I'm not sure I even ever envisioned a blog like that.

Much of my traffic is from google image search because I "borrowed" some pictures of famous buildings for a post about Brutalist architecture. They come and go as anybody does using an image search. I often wonder what their initial response is to my blog in the context of what they're looking for. I suspect a mixture of fatigue and horror when they hit the walls of white text that are observable from space.

This blog in all honesty really is just one of the archetypal guilty pleasures of our generation. It's a bit of journal keeping, letter writing and the nasty shit you spew against your enemies that typically, before the internet and the widespread use of personal media, wouldn't have left the bedroom, basement or cave. Everybody who writes, whether privately or publicly, writes with the secret desire that it will be read by somebody other than yourself. Technology has taken the virtual reality of desire and turned it into something that can be reflexive; now the imagination feeds into the machine that orchestrates an experience that can be felt by our senses. Why is so much of the internet pornography? With a click the desire is fulfilled, brought into reality before you. With the blog post, so too goes the same process, with the secret desire for your writing to be read being fed immediately. And with such decadence and hedonism, what kind of disease might grow? I often think about what kind of posthumous material will be uncovered for our generation while I read letters scrawled by the insane Nietzsche kept by his friends in the late 19th century. What simple technologies to immortalize what maybe we would have wanted dashed from our personhood. I am nauseated to think about what prolific writers might have their facebook at the age of 18 dug up, brought into their legacy.

Are animals animals?

2010-09-27T02:20:00.005-04:00

When a dog interacts with the world, he is only capable of understanding it, or more tersely, responding to it by the makeup of his physical being. Even beyond perception as a sense, the pressure, the physicality of the body, in its various forms, places awareness in a tensile state. A handle is seemingly real and external to myself, but the handle is absolutely formless to a dog. Within the handle is written the language of our bodies, the reciprocal dialogue of externality and localized qualities, and so in the world, we find it composed of the same composition of human bodies. -- With the hand I grip, pressing the handle, understanding, and also creating or enlivening, the meaning of the thing with the presence of the body vibrating, coloring awareness.

A handle to a dog is entirely alien; a dog is incapable of empathetic understanding and cannot project itself as a non-dog body. The dog experiences the handle as a part of the overflowing of generic mass, meaninglessly tortuous stuff. Stuff -- an experience of bird calls through the everydayness of life. Everywhere mired in vibrations, the birds, these bodies tell us nothing; the body experiences stuff indifferently, unaware, while birds understand, create and enliven meaning into a world. We do have the intellect to understand what birds are doing, but, this requires the necessary abstractions and specializations of science, the everydayness of awareness means meaninglessness from bird calls. We can say of the bird calls that they are noise that is either pleasant or discordant, but what they essentially are, communication of reality for given birds, is inaccessible, entering the mute world of stuff.

Animals? An animal is a being that is moving with or in opposition to a hand. And these beings, that we conceive as inferior to us, that we abuse, mock, love and consume, to what extent are these animals just stuff? Animals are a precious reality through the forced identity and role the hand guides them to. But are we animals by the conclusions of evolutionary theory?

A world of meaning, is made up of two distinct types of things: a world of human projected meaning and a tortuous, concealing region of meaninglessness, this all requires us to proceed more carefully in our perception of the world as something external, objective and accurate. The designations of the animal is not something essential, but rather, a relative definition in expression through a body -- a hand. It is an fabrications, a tool, as much as a handle is a purposeful item that only has meaning to the human being -- the being of hands. Language plays a categorizations role amongst others. It has always been thought, and it is a very ontologically conservative position, that categorization is an act of discovery or a revealing of externality; e.g. my senses perceived that there are beings that have feathers and lay eggs, and through reasoning, I can maintain a class of beings that have these qualities. It is not so simple though if our systems of categorizations are to have more epistemic rigor. The act of categorizations through language and thought is a constructive, formulating act; it is an uncontrollable expression of our bodies responding and interacting with external mass. Our eyes vibrate with the world in a deep relationship that requires a mutuality for the world of meaning to form.

Moving beyond the modern comfortableness of positivism, the nihilistic dessert of anorectic metaphysics, the body must become fat, revealed in a new corpulence where desire, a body is the fertile ground for where an analysis and a creation of reality begins. The animal kingdom is structured through the categorization of attributes, but the logic of objects and attributes reveal the deeper mathematical structures that are ingrained in our perception of the world through the gristly sinew of brains. Birds with feathers, fish with gills, etc. hides our membrane clockwork: A(x). The structuring of the world has roots in the evolutionary pressures that occurred to develop brains to function and succeed in a very specific environmental situations. Knowledge structures are functional, working games removed from truth that allow for successful manipulation of the world at a most base level, achieving just enough accuracy to allow progenitors to survive and reproduce.

Bodies are measured by those who have bodies, and even with the most scientific scrutiny, the meaning of the animal body can only be understood in relative terms to our body; the flipper is understood through the hand. The bone, the flesh, and the organs become entities of use even if only consumed objectively, split, torn, mashed to reinforce a structure of knowledge. With the body, so too is the realm of the animal constrained to the needs of our intellect. To some large degree knowledge is right about many things when it comes to animals, but only right in the sense that it allows a greater mastery and use over their beings; we understand the neck well enough to tie a leash around it, but that is the end of the understanding, for that is the end of the use. Caged or leashed, exposed, what fraction of the being is ever really given to the base needs of other animals? Does the dog ever stop being merely a neck-hand being?

How divergent is the desire of hunger and the desire of analysis? As dirty, greasy fingertips separate the gristle and the meat, the teeth mash, and the tongue prods feeling the slippery blood and the tinge of iron shimmering in the mouth -- what voracity! The eyes blur and sharpen, the mathematics of the rules of the game are felt through the straining brain, failing and correcting until the system crystallizes. The flesh of the animal cooking under the glare, hardening, melting, stripping the bones, ossified with jagged edges of a crystallizing system -- what veracity!

What a wrongheaded mistake to think that science is an idealistic, other-worldly endeavor. Science, and its progenitor, philosophy, is filled with the blood of desire, the extension of the body out into space, and the entrenchment of physicality and thought. Philosophy and science are manifestations of the body as much as anything else is. Intellect is a desire that can consume the animal physically as much as it can consume the animal as a thing in thought to be controlled, stripped and analyzed.

And only in the quiescence of impotence, where desire briefly ceases, where we realize we are animals as much as animals are, but in being animals, the term deconstructs; the subject, the creator of the relational term cannot become his construction, man cannot be an animal, in doing so, he enters a shattered realm. A hand grows weak and loses grip of the neck. An animal, the creature of man’s hand, dashes away in fear, but immediately it returns from the dark outskirts, new, something else entirely, no longer an animal. The two become creatures, nameless and formless that move outside of structures of knowledge, structures of the body, of desire. In the briefest moments, no animals, but rather, a creature capable of things immeasurable, unnameable; something that cannot be used, controlled, destroyed and abused -- an absolute, irreducible relationship occurs. An animal receives a personal name, and suddenly, it rears up above the hand as an emanating, forceful creature.

We Are Markets, Not People

2010-05-19T02:00:00.002-04:00

There are two modes of being in our post-modern world: neurotic and political. There can be no other way, for one must choose. The apolitical innocence of small, unconnected worlds, like hidden tribes cradled and hidden by a geographical mother no longer exist. There is no tradition, no myth, no god to inform, there is no purity of culture from which globalization, cacophonous hums of machines -- from which a hyper-reality orchestrated by dominant forces informs, disciplines and manifests the spirit and body of the contemporary human.

Are we not corn? Are we not TV? Are we not radiated, electrified with the new pollutions that in all essence create the maladies, the existential horrors of the new human body? As swarming groups feel the lechery of tumors and chemotherapy, what are the new forms of our lives? Do we fear the slow death of godlessness or the slow death of alien cells consuming us inside-out created by an endlessly complex etiology of thousands of radical chemistries of the human scientist that have no human meaning, have no place in the equilibrium of nature? Technological pollution has entered our bodies, affected them profoundly, and in doing so, have created new phenomenological realities, new feelings of the body, and thus new identities, new egos. Are we not our own pollution?

Everything is either latent shit or manifest shit in a post-capitalist, consumerist society.
Everything can be turned into and come from shit; who knew we could grow crops off of dead earth, sustained by genetic manipulation of crops, pesticides, artificial nutrients? Dead soil that delivers nothing to the crops -- just shit -- nothingness, a dirty artifice that taints and must be disposed of. "Farm animals," or more aptly, conscious meat-cogs, that are not pigs, chickens or cows, rather, they are shit. Covered in shit, turning into shit through pain, dirt, torture, absolute deprivation. But what are they really? They are pinned creatures, horrific, tortured monsters capable of a simpler, purer innocence that is impossibly alien to us; they are aliens, so much so that I might say that these creatures' collective consciousness, the hundreds of millions of them that appear on Earth every year in endless flickering, in all their suffering, in all their secret, hidden purity, in their eyes of boundless forgiveness, their awareness is the closest thing to God that will ever exist; billions and billions of bodies creating an absolutely sinless being.

So, what to do with the problem of shit? It is evident that where we are in history is the result of many social and historical forces that have culminated to allow for such a reality to exist, many of which we are only just barely aware of in terms of their causal impact on our everyday reality. Consumer capitalism has only one value which is absolute pleasure at the expense of everything. Pleasure is everything, and in order for that to be true, the individual, the pleasure-seeker, must be emphasized, developed and given intention.

The formation of contemporary identities are, for a large part, the masterful orchestration of institutional, governmental, industrial complexes that create an audience, a people in order to provide their self-sustaining service; a government must have a nation to have sovereignty over a people; an industry, a seller must have a buyer or a consumer in order for it to have a market. This seems counter-intuitive to us because traditionally the Adam Smith conception of the invisible hand is used to explain the functioning of the market; this conception, however, is out-dated and based upon a form of society that we no longer live in. If we are to have a serious analysis of our society in contemporary times, it must always include the prevalence of the media, in its many forms, and its hyperbolic effect on everyday reality. Also, our everyday person's market has moved onto pleasure as the sole motivator of purchases, where Smith's was based upon needs. Smith would be dumbfounded and incapable of explaining the hysteria of Tickle-Me-Elmo. This is Post-Capitalism Consumerism, not Capitalism.

Markets are created through the formation of identities by corporations and sellers. Then, through an artful manipulation of people's perception, their false ideologies, artificial misunderstanding of their own Pre-Consumerist histories and cultures, identities and adherence to such identities occur on a subconscious level through the media. Young boys believe men should smell like Axe Body Spray, where even though they are aware that such an idea is being marketed to them, and perhaps is orchestrated, they continue, regardless, to buy Axe Body Spray associating the absolutely artificial and meaningless smell with symbolic worth of being masculine. It's just a commercial, it's just a magazine ad, a billboard, a radio ad, a logo on your shirt, an entire mall that consumes most people's luxury and free time -- it permeates everything. Such a dialogue of the consumer and the plethora of symbols and meanings in their consumerist world replace, distort and blur all other sources of information through a cacophonous onslaught. One knows that none of this makes sense, that perhaps they have been duped, but they have no other sources of culture, of knowledge about how to be in the world. They must accept their busy world of bought and sold meanings and then ruthlessly enforce them because they have nothing else; even if their identities are fake, they are still an identity from which one can have meaning, can act, can understand falsely, but have the joy of the semblance of understanding.

Evolutionary Theory And The Closed Circle Of Intellect

2010-03-19T02:10:00.002-04:00

By human intellect the theory of evolution was devised, fleshed out, and now, breathes freely on its own. An idea that feeds itself, unfurling like cellular growth completing the mechanized steps of an instructive genome. We simply provide energy to the possible knowledge of a finite theory that explains all biological life from a physicalist foundation. The theory, however, is a purely human idea that is impossible and senseless for any sentience other than one that contains this brain and this body localized in this space and this time. By human intellect, we have explained human intellect and possible human knowledge through a biological, evolutionary understanding; but, through that explanation we realize the simplicity, the falsity and utility of our intellect, not serving the purposes of truth, but, rather, serving the purposes of survival, of life. By ability of our intellect, we have discovered the theory that explains such an intellect, which reveals such an intellect to be highly dubious. The universe contracts and the horizons come to meet us. For truth and certainty may be forever an aspect of humanity that remains incomplete, an impossibility. A malaise sets in and we wonder. But, if one gives up the quest for truth, and accepts the inherent incompleteness of our intellect and knowledge, they go on to another value. The value of life, and the possibility of the human intellect as a tool towards not greater levels of truth, but rather, greater levels of life.

Dynamo-Daemon

2010-03-17T13:17:00.007-04:00

I think; therefore I am. And not even a demon, a great imagined threat could disturb this axiom. I am aware of my thoughts, the consciousness of the self thinking something, and even if such thoughts are unclear, delusional and false they are my thoughts none the less; I must be real if I am creating such thoughts regardless of their status.

But a demon is not real as it is a hypothetical creature borrowed loosely from various myths and religious cosmologies. The imagined threat is never as visceral, real and brutal as what comes to be in the actual world.

Descartes was mentally incapable to imagine a real world where all truths and reality itself could be stripped to the bone. Such is the great failure of any single person's imagination in the formation of grand philosophical systems or any cartography of the world. Reality, the potential for the new, the building of the future, the ceaseless manipulation of the past that contracts and expands falling apart in our hands is the work of something far beyond the insignificance of the individual's imagination. Imagination releases thoughts like semen into the world, absolutely worthless, to be discarded like waste and filth; it takes the seminal energies of humanity, in a dynamic complex, and the fertile womb of the physical world that, itself too, interacts with such a complex of thoughts aborting and nurturing at random.

The simple imagination of one man was far from the real threat that could actually manifest itself far beyond the potential of any one individual imagination. "Gott ist tot," Nietzsche declared through the character of the madman in the market place; he wanted us all to realize the death of God in the Western world, and foresaw, in his limited ability to conceive, a world of nihilistic brutality. His individual imagination, though capturing the horror of a Godless world, was incapable of imagining the level at which such a dynamic of human energy and a fertile womb could create real history. Endless blood and semen of hundreds of millions lubricating the engines of tanks and planes in world wars, and ovens igniting flesh, boiling fat and covering everything in a burnt gristle.

Descartes, and his individual imagination, could not conceive of a world where everything could sincerely be doubted. He is almost as a jester with the threat of the demon that acts more as an annoyance to be overcome rather than a threat that leaves us overcome with anxiety -- what simplicity in retrospect!

The world we live in now is a world where the real is absolutely impossible. The demon never revealed himself to try and rob us of our reality and remains just a hypothetical for young philosophers to counter, allowing them access to the world, nominally in petty argument. Technology is the "demon" that Descartes could not conceive as an individual of limited imagination; far more pernicious and all-encompassing, a reality of something that was possible for the humbler forms of humanity living in relation to a natural world, brought to death and life, brought to reality through the breath and encompassing of the forest, dessert or ocean.

Now we are in a world that is fed to us by technological production. All senses have been analyzed, all faculties considered, and all of our products are made to plug them all up and satisfy them in deprivation chambers of satiety. Most of these things though are ideological manifestations of things rather than the real things themselves, that still remain in our collective minds from our roots of a humanity long passed. A tomato was once real, we knew all of his components, how it grew, where it grew -- we grew it ourselves, watching the slow, natural process and we consumed thankfully. Now tomatoes are engineered in a genetics lab to attempt to capture this confused, notional, nominal conception of a tomato, grown in inconceivable fields of endless, homogenized crops, covered in pesticides that kill and stop all interactions with the world, fertilized in engineered fertilizers that allow crops to grow on soil with no nutrients, ripened in chambers with ethylene gas, grouped together with tomatoes from a hundred other farms, shipped across oceans and countries, sometimes frozen, thawed and delivered to the grocery store to sit on a shelf so you can grab it thoughtlessly -- "oh, a tomato, I need that." That tomato in the consumerist capitalist world may as well be a hallucination of a schizophrenic. The process by which it has arrived to you is so abnormal, and robs it of most of the nutrients and the qualities that make a tomato real to a human body, that this tomato you have is just satiating your old notion of what a tomato. You had nothing to do with its creation, you have no idea how it was created, what is the natural process by which a tomato is created, you are blind, dumb and deaf to the world and are in a deprivation chamber of satiety. The only role you play in this "world" is to continue to believe that it is real, and that you desire to be sated by it so you participate in it, and give it your seminal energy, your blood and the only way you can show value for anything in this system is by giving your money to whomever needs it to create more contraptions to stick in your orifices.

What does it matter that you know you exist -- Cogito ergo sum? I think; therefore I am. I know I exist but I exist in this "demon's" world no longer as a hypothesis!

Love As Efficient Organ

2010-02-04T22:53:00.005-05:00

The formation of a living body is the miraculous un-miracle of billions of years of millisecond dice rolls. There is a certain genius, to anthropomorphize, about the incessant onslaught of variation and time. Fewer resources in an environment will facilitate an eventual, accidental exploitation of such a situation by the decrease of overall body size of a species; there is a latent efficiency in evolution, and an animal, which can develop as many functions as possible into one organ is going to be the more successful than an animal that develops two -- on sheer fact that two organs will most likely necessitate greater body mass and greater need for sustaining resources. The human sex organ is a very simple example of this efficiency and utility. Many of the parts of the organ used for the purposes of reproduction are also used in the excretion of waste in a relatively harmonious way; there are a thousand other examples of this and all have intimate knowledge of it upon reflection. But why stop at the body, why not include the mind if we are to be good physicalists, good scientists and decent thinkers?

If the mind is the end product of the operations of the brain, which if we are to comfortably side ourselves with any contemporary scientific thought we must simply accept regardless of convoluted philosophical difficulties the body-mind connections create, then how can we not look for the efficiencies of our own brain. The phenomenon of love, as discussed previously, is the sort of dream-work of the brain that our consciousness perceives as real and essential. Most likely though, this is just a projection that we can ascertain, understand, explain, use and manipulate accordingly like a mask. The hard ground, the blood and guts behind the mask is nothing like this phenomenon of love, but is most likely hard-wired, relatively unalterable biological drives. From that, do we not find further evidence in the ambiguity of love how it is the same feeling, same word, same comprehension that exists between parent and child as two sexual partners?

Now of course there are some differences here, and I am not saying that anybody who loves their child actually wants to have sex with the child and vice-versa, but rather, we can all access how closely related these love emotions are between partners, parent and child, and a plethora of other relationships that use the word love. Is the brain not developed by the same principles that evolution develops the body? Then perhaps, very likely, the feeling of love and its ability to be used between a host of different relationships for different gains is an efficient use an aspect of the brain. It is not the failure of language to correctly distinguish the various types of love that exist towards various objects, but actually, language is often correct in its large, generalized groupings of the feeling love, as it is a dream-like projection of an emotion that stems from an efficient use of one aspect of the brain repeatedly in different situation. A single organ, the penis, urinates and ejaculates as much as a brain, and its various developed, specialized areas, most likely uses the stimulation of neural pathways again and again for what, on a phenomenological level seems like very disparate mental events.

On Love and Animals

2010-02-03T00:27:00.012-05:00

When the word, in its trivial, transient shapes in the air, beat clicking, sputtering, competing with the humidity to signify the meaning of the concept of love was it used between two people(?) -- a mother to newborn, an infant to parent, between partners formed in in the pursuit of various goals? Was it simply a narcissism or perhaps was it between a person and something supernatural?

An ocean of difficulties presents itself, and an juxtaposed coast of methodologies to embrace such complexities exists simultaneously expanding either side of us. No anthropological or archaeological work can ever allow us a clear entry into the lived emotional lives of prehistoric man, nor is it possible to ascertain the mental faculties of our humanoid ancestors beyond the measurements and shapes of skulls, projecting the developed and undeveloped mind located in the brain. Ambiguous symbols of proto-cultural artifacts leave only the cinders of the fire of the earliest experiences by humans. What were the sensations that must be eternal, structured in the brain of Homo sapiens that have been vital to our survival and success, that could never leave the species without its destruction? Was there love in the earliest people?

How do we remove ourselves from the contextual difficulties of our hermeneutics regarding history? Has love as it is conceived, generalizing, in a Western, contemporary notion existed beforehand, at least on a basic level where some qualities that are essential to love are equivalent to the love used by humans throughout history? Are we not always in some extent guilty of a relativistic history that melts away and coagulates as history itself is processing itself eternally? How do we talk about love as something more than this love, at this very second, that might slip away into undecipherable nonsense for the flux of humanity, as ancient texts are for us today?

How do we separate the love and identify the love that we seem to share with other advanced lifeforms? May we even use that word? For many, the love of a dog is love as much as there is love between contemporary humans, and we, as a recent historical occurrence, have broaden greatly our notion of love as something that we share with many other mammalians, especially in the form of maternal care and group or pack behavior; the necessary existence of primordial sympathy and empathy to allow for a group of animals to live together, becoming more fit and successful in their environment through group cooperation. When we speak of love, as love between humans, are we not struck by the alarming quality that even a bird, not only an animal but also not a mammal, is capable on a consequential level to maintain the behaviors necessary in order to raise chicks? Nurturing, caring for, protecting, teaching and a willingness to die in order to protect their young, how do we separate these seemingly similar formations of love from our own?

Why complicated it? Why be so long-winded and muddy-up the ease of the pragmatics of language? Love is always changing and evolving by who the user is, the user's placement in the universe and his desired meaning. To some extent this is true, no matter what I say, love as a concept and as an everyday word will continue to slither around, difficult to pinpoint and catch, and will continue to be used as it has ever been used; however, in the interest of truth, and higher levels of scrutiny, we have to analyze how often love as a concept is moving like water, but suddenly, becomes stiff, brutal and violent as if a wave crashing against rocks. What is that which rises from the ocean and strikes us?

Love is the goal, the aim, the meaning by which all contemporary humans strive; it is the very core of life, and any denial of it brings mental and physical violence to and from humanity. Though it is at times aimless, unclear and ambiguous, love as a concept will reveal itself as the hard soil of everyone's existence. You must love your children, you must love yourself, you must love all humanity, you must love life -- above all other things, all goals and all thoughts, love is the one that is the indomitable, eternal and immortalizing emotion. You fight war with love, death with love, and you seek death, the absolute termination of everything, to constitute love to save the entire universe with love.

And we never think, how simply the mechanistic behavior of the ducks in the pond may be exactly the same love as the love you have for your children, for your God, for your life. Something evolutionary so simple as a ordering of your brain to guarantee you will "love" your children no matter what against a will you may call yours. It is rather the other faculties human has, not a special formation of love. It is self-awareness, unmatched memory and an ability to project causally into the future, that humans have what makes love seemingly more intense, more important and easier to manipulate for the purposes of gratification of biological needs; horses snort because it causes a release of pleasurable chemicals in their brain, they through a crafty intelligence abuse their own biological structures to essentially -- masturbate! Loving God or any supernatural being, is the cunning manipulation of biological structures of mammalian love; God is a masturbatory fetishistic item, an internal drug releasing endless pleasurable feelings, but the core of this love, the structure is one of the most base developments of the shrew-like mammal that crawled out of a hole hundreds of millions years ago with the ability to "love" its offspring but not to abstract and manipulate, then to go on to be able to at a basic level sympathize with its species to allow them to work together and survive.

Love begins to shatter under the pressure of a shadowy, sinister, animalistic, expansive reality that the human, the historical, the cultural conception of love covers. Love is contextual and difficult to pinpoint because it has a dual existence. There is the cultural conception of love that is always changing and being informed by the lovers, artists and priests that appear and disintegrate through historical flux, determining what it is as a cultural phenomenon. But in many ways culture acts as a veil to the brutality, to the animalism of truth that is horrific and sublime. One cannot say Yhwh's name, Moses could not look upon God's face, Zeus too would destroy man that looked upon his true form -- these myths hold the psychological terror humanity holds to the truth, to the divine. The unforgiving, the emptiness, the structured mechanistic forms that are hurtling and exploding through space that is expanding and tearing apart. One can never quite look upon the truth, but only relay it to the best of their ability in costumes and abstractions. This is the other side of love; the side of love that does not exist in nature, but rather, a thing that we have taken to be love that is rather, not love, but the uncontrollable, accidental mechanistic unfurling of mammalian structures that have no true meaning in a human sense.

Miserable Women

2009-09-27T16:18:00.003-04:00

I was at work and I caught some blip on the television. A typical trash news or entertainment news agency, whichever term you prefer, CNN, was going through the involuntary digestion and expulsion of the latest supposed news-worthy event. Some study came out that documents the rising unhappiness in the general female population that correlates with their rising equality over the past thirty years, I believe -- forgive me for not knowing the exact details. Men, on the other hand, are getting happier.

What does this mean? Why would women become more unhappy as they attain greater levels of social and economic freedom, slowly creeping up to men? It is a foolish and often abused idea stemming from an Enlightenment, rationalists understanding of human psychology that happiness and freedom are somehow related. They are not. Such a thought is dangerously simplistic and frighteningly out of touch with the last hundred years. A relinquishing of responsibility and engagement in the world is what allows for the greatest level of happiness. The dream that forever destroying institutions and beliefs that stand in the way of rationality will bring about a great joy is just that a dream -- utopian notions are as damning as the dogmatic institutions they fight. We've seen the rationalist's psychology fail in various rising and failings of fascist regimes. We've also seen it fail in the complexification and secularization of societies that often leads to, if I may borrow Durkheim's concept, anomie; a general sense of confusion, anxiety and isolation in regard to social expectations and society resulting in levels of sadness and unproductive behavior.

Another study that came out a couple years back, which furthers my point, is that religious persons often report the greatest levels of happiness compared to their secular neighbors. Simply believing in a god significantly reduces your anxiety and depression levels. While some bad theologians would like to build the idea that belief in Christ is actually liberating and allows for a greater level of freedom and responsibility, those with any decency in their psychological assessments will rebuke such a claim. The belief in god allows for an assumption of control and an appearance of patterns in the world that allows for false comfort, it also doubles the world allowing for one to remove themselves from their Earthly responsibilities and focusing on things as means toward a new, unseen world like Heaven.

But before we get too far into that tangent, in sum, the greater level of freedom and personal responsibility one brings upon themselves, the more miserable they will become. Anxiety and dread will be so unbound it will be tangible; this is the condition of modernity, and all of us honest, and not so honest, atheists are usually overcome by intense fits of despair. Touch your pills in the medicine cabinet if you take them, I'm sure if you don't everybody around you does. These are the little formed stalactites growing in our caves. The usage of medicines, illegal and pharmaceutical, are everywhere to relieve the mental anguish.

Why are women so sad? Because women are becoming more free through the growth of their material wealth, the development of their own self-interested identities, and their greater levels of intelligence through education and leisure. The responsibility is incredibly heavy.

They are also becoming more sad because the powers that have slighted women and always made them secondary voiceless, faceless beings to men have slipped away and returned in new forms. No longer is a woman controlled, regulated and manipulated as ruthlessly by the social expectations of fulfilling household work, but instead, many women are endlessly presented with images and displays of what the perfect woman is like. There is not a tough man, a father, a brother or a husband to use his economic and physical power against her, but rather, a social organization through an onslaught of media to show women -- you are free to do whatever you want and be happy! But the best women do these things: where you can list off a thousand expectations of what intelligent, beautiful, free, happy women do. Women are also more miserable now then ever because the things that once controlled them are waning but a new, very nuanced and very psychologically vicious control is taking place in the use of symbols and unspoken expectations. Women are self-regulating more than ever, and slowly driving themselves insane trying to attain all of these new goals that they expect for themselves and society expects for them as well.

The Rigor Of Spasticity

2009-09-26T04:32:00.008-04:00

What is life? What is abstraction? How do we access pure becoming, pure presence that is not a crystallization and ultimately an alienation from the our real world? Each thought we conceive is one step away from the absolute truth that it was extracted from; how do we access that pure resource of life, of truth.

Our tools, technology must be more exacting; our steps must grow faster and we must attack aggressively, reaching out for this ultimate reality. The great prejudice of our age is that the rigorousness of language, a simpler language that is exactingly total, all encapsulating, is the key to reality; a man-made language like symbolic logic that captures the ultimate forms of human language and thought is the ground of epistemic fertility. The notion that theoretical physicists will write equations, with limited symbols that communicate the absolute truth of physical reality is one of the manifestations of this prejudice. The building blocks of the universe continue to get smaller, and more numerous, endlessly we find that which comprises, which comprises, which comprises, down into the limits of our latest exacting scalpel. We'll find that true, exact word that denotes that exact thing that comprises the entire world. Is it an atom, a neutron, a quark, what is next? Until then, let us blindly continue to let technology blossom like a stainless, serpentine flower, growing, coiling endlessly.

My philosophy is simple. For everything that has been thought and done, never assume that it cannot be done in the exact opposite way -- strike out to do the exact opposite of what is customary. The universe is comprised of energy as best as I can understand as a layperson. The categorization of that plastic, explosive, ubiquitous yet nonexistent energy is, as Nietzsche would term it, human -- all too human.

The universe can be counted endlessly, divided, dissected, added and multiplied, but, the universe is not any of those things. Humans are by their nature the ones that attempt to arrive at a number, a being, a thing in which they can think about, to manipulate and to use. But, looking into evolutionary patterns, we realize the formation of attributes and behaviors in a species has little interest in a definitive truth. Evolving a being into something that efficiently ascertains an external truth about reality with either its mind or body is highly complex and difficult. Evolution starts simple, and therefore, would evolve a being up until a point where its chaotic flailing and gesticulations would ever so often allow them to hit some cosmic truths to make them successful. Evolution did not create efficient beings, but rather, it create something simpler: many, many tiny buck shots, the hundreds of billions of tiny humanoid that have lived, that shoot out into reality and with many different slight variation in each member of the species, eventually allows for gradual trends in certain members of the species. One way in which our very distant ancestors came to be successful was by their mechanical adaptations that arbitrarily thrusted them out into reality, unaware of it, unattached but deeply embedded in it. Their random behaviors, basic mental tools that by successful combination eventually led to a very gradual development of the human mind that perceives the universe in its own highly evolved, yet comically simplistic way.

Mathematics seem as if they are highly complex, necessarily true by the access to reality they give us, but in truth, these mathematics that are locked in the natural structure of our brain are the end products of billions of years of senseless and arbitrary bodily deterministic mechanics being thrusted out into reality, eventually allowing for some of these mechanics to work and latch on to a tiny portion of reality. Our rigorous proofs, our basis for all science and empirical data, for all exacting languages -- is there any more of an exacting language than mathematics -- 1 = 1! -- could this all really be just the relatively successful baggage of highly evolved spastic machines waving their limbs and ideas out in the air of reality hoping to latch on to something to allow them to be successful?

What is that for truth? Is that truth? Could it not be that all we say and do is actually false -- 1 = 1 is not true, but rather, it is some false short cut that works like if a schizophrenic person kills somebody who is about to kill them, but they killed them because the voice in their head told them to, not because they perceived the threat and took care of their well-being. 1 = 1 works not because it is surely true, but rather, it works because it works. It has allowed us to do things, to survive and strike out successfully in the world, but it could be no different than a successful schizophrenic who by accident, induced by other causes in his unbalanced, spastic brain continues to make the right decisions unaware of the real decisions that need to be made. Sounds impossible, but consider if you have billions of year to fail over and over again, until the perfect failed system is able to exist perfectly, blissfully unaware resolving all of its issues by accident through shortcuts -- no =, not the pretty unity of thought and reality, but rather a giant explosive burst of mental excrement that shoots out into the world and hits the few nuances of reality by a luck that took billions of year to achieve.

Dare we do the unthinkable and abandon science for something else? What kind of truth might the language of poetry contain? Is poetry really the abstract medium?

Modality of Praxis

2009-09-23T02:52:00.008-04:00

I want to develop this idea more, but like everything else I think and write, I'll just start with the cursory. I have rejected ethics and morality. I no longer believe that they are viable, true or beneficial. You can understand this assertion by reading through my blog. Simply, I wish to justify life with life, and never, justify any aspect of life with abstraction or idealization. I want a radical abandonment of metaphysics and any justification that requires a metaphysical framework.

Why are you vegetarian then? Does that not build a lifestyle on moral principles?

Yes, vegetarianism, the common-usage of the term, requires a moral framework to allow for it to sensibly exist. The issue that first needs to be clarified is what do I mean when I refer to myself as a vegetarian?

For one to be an individual, a novel thinker and a person that is not alienated from his own ideology, he must be highly idiosyncratic, which creates semantic difficulties when communicating your ideas. I use the term vegetarian loosely as a quick way to reference myself as a person identified with those that are concerned. The primary difference between a vegetarian, and its subgroupings, and those that eat traditional diets is an issue of concern. Vegetarian are motivated by the presence of new awarenesses and new relationships that occur when one becomes concerned. Traditional diets are monolithic, silent ruins that say nothing and simply exist; the transformative power of concern is not present. Alienation from particular realities are highly present in a traditional diet. The attempt to jump this chasm of alienation, brought to you through concerns is an essential feature of vegetarianism. This is why I use vegetarian to describe myself, because I am concerned, and I am made aware.

Language operates in generalities and labels provide simple summaries. For one to have a truly unique idea, to think differently and to be fully creative, one must invent a new language to accurately describe it. Fortunately for you, I am not Heidegger, and I am not going to spend 200 pages redefining numerous words idiosyncratically and explain them in order to just build my new philosophy. Vegetarianism works as a pragmatic term I use to differentiate myself from those that persist on traditional diets.

Ideology and Praxis
What is the nature of my brand of vegetarianism? There are two modes in which one can practice an ideology. I will label them the dogmatic/religious approach and the experimental/scientific (more in line with the broader, weaker Wissenschaft than the hard English term science).

What is the dogmatic approach? It assumes core axioms that are believed to be evident. In vegetarianism, we can arrive at this with the assertion that the consumption of meat causes environmental damage; environmental damage is wrong because it will cause suffering and death; therefore consuming any meat is wrong because it is causing suffering and death. Another one would be, all living beings have some formation of a nervous system which causes pain when killing the entity. Causing pain is wrong because of the Kantian universalization of the principle (i.e. the golden rule, do on to others as you would want on to you.) Therefore killing any living animal is wrong because it causes pain. These are the unfurling of logical arguments with axioms and justified consequences.

We suddenly enter a very structured prison. You can never consume meat ever in the dogmatic position. Your logic requires justifications, and a contradicting action unhinges the entire project. The person becomes rigorous, inflexible and highly insincere. Their behavior must always be justified beforehand by their deterministic logic, that they love as a ferocious shield against detractors, but malign when they feel trapped and hypocritical.

Humans, as humans, do not function well in this sort of system. It is unnatural, as the justification for the behavior seeks out abstraction and logic, when naturally human behavior is highly passionate, capricious and strange. The dogmatic approach demands us to deny the human, to deny the body, to deny life in the pursuit of ideals, metaphysics and logic. Humans do not operate long on mathematics though; numbers do not sustain; the entire project decays in the total denial of the human condition -- something like a vegetarian anorexia nervosa sets in, a paralysis like Christianity. Passion is lost and the world no longer justifies the person's existence. Wasn't that the whole point though, to save the world so we could have it? The dogmatic approach is a great irony, for it asks us to save the world by throwing it out from our hearts, but then why save it?

The experimental approach is how I've chosen to pursue vegetarianism. There are no axioms, no mathematics to build, no metaphysics to justify life. Life is life -- in absolute purity. One ceases to eat meat as a way of sharpening, intensifying life to strengthen it and make it a canvas of potential creativity. To merely choose and act thrusts you into the world, and allows for a host of realities to appear to you. Some choices allow for a greater expression and understand, while other choices are shallow and superficial and lead no where. To try vegetarianism, as a thing you try everyday in experiment, uncovers a world or perhaps creates a world of intense meaning, where one becomes more connected with their primary source of being in the world -- food. Fauna is different, flora is different, the world seems to be alive again because you are merely just more aware of it through concern. Nothing in the world changed though, you just dared to experiment to see the world differently like an unknown artist paints a tree in a way that it has never been painted before. You become directly invested and connected with life.

Rules are to be used as if rules in a poem form or in a style of artwork; this is what dead ethics can be, where misery is abound and nothingness reigns -- a great art blooms like graffiti on a Church's weathered steeple. The motivation for life reveals itself not as a mathematics, rather, the flux of becoming, the shadowy, black desires that are the vital forces of life and people begin to make their presence available. My vegetarianism was justified by many rational thoughts, but in reality, the rational thoughts were merely justifications for the much more complex and true-to-life passion that I felt for such a lifestyle. I chose to feel and think the way I did before I ever had a truly good justification for it; one seeks justification only after one has been convinced of its vital power in the world by coming in contact with it.

The terror of the nihilism that will onset once values and ethics reveal themselves to be hallow have been a main concern for the last century, but if we do the unthinkable, and dash the whole project and accept morality as hallow, we can suddenly use them again; no longer conceived as universal, necessary truths but rather as creative tools to strengthen our lives through discipline. Our passion and vital energies are no longer lost by the sickening structures of morality's mathematics; our rules are dumbbells that we may use to exercise our lives. We can touch what once belonged to God and manipulate them to rip them from the Heavens to benefit our vital human energies.

In my diet, I choose to eat fish on occasion. I am not a hypocrite because there are no axioms to contradict; only the perpetual experimentation of new ideas and new ways of being. What stays, what fades away? Like good art or an indelible poem there is something that is beyond words to justify why it is great. An experimental practice of something, allows for the eventual creation of something that works, just clearly works well by how it allows for life as life to exist in a meaningful, fulfilling and empowering way. There won't be a quiet abstract equation for life in the future, only a fertile and healthy human body engaged in life.

Jesus Will Return One Day: Nameless, Faceless, Nonexistent -- Who is Jesus?

2009-09-19T04:22:00.009-04:00

The desire for equality is lecherous and self-destructive. The notion of equality is the affirmation of another's power, the establishing of yourself as the other to an absolute measure. If you are to be free, do not seek equality, fairness or justice. Seek an absolute individuation, a narration of self, become reclusive, refuse a dialectic that defines you relative to anything other than yourself. Eradicate language, create new languages through art, become joyfully mad, exactingly hysterical. New concepts, new modes of being paved by the un-thought words that appeared from nothingness into a naturalized, essentialized fact like Abraham's god. There is no God part of the human brain, no God gene, perhaps there is a predisposition for mysticism; all cultures have developed mystical thoughts, but only one main cultural source formulated a monotheistic notion of those primal feelings that developed into an metaphysical plague that ensnares every word and therefore everything thing. Ideas are alive by our unknowing and unwilling participation in their absolute permeating quality in every aspect of life. What if gods and passions reappeared to us one day by the force of a person madder than Abraham, as they float down from unknown worlds and sweep us into a cultural development that free us of our sickening, Christian (Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Platonic) relationships to the material world, to our bodies, to the primal, absolute realities of the complexes and dynamics of true life. A new metaphysics, a new mathematics, a new epistemology, a new ethics; it is bound to happen in our age of nothingness and meaninglessness. Everything is an empty cliche that has been coined by a slavish, vengeful, petty ghost from some Near East slum that the earth had rightfully quashed underneath its sands. These brittle, crystalline structures of language and meaning that shine unabashed, hide their empty caverns, and blind us from the reality that they will all cave in on themselves and new signs and symbols will be formulated again.

Texts and Oceans

2009-09-13T16:00:00.006-04:00

The body is a text? Perhaps, but texts are written upon blank pages -- a tabula rasa. If we were to write upon the body as a text, suddenly there are signs, there is meaning bleeding through the pages. "I did not write this, I must erase it," thinks the theoretician, but upon erasing the inconsistency, the glaring and marring blood, new stains begin to seep through. We write incessantly, transforming the body, adorning the body, seemingly creating the body, but we keep losing what we have written in the pooling blood. The body speaks before we write, perhaps we should listen to it? It may be too hard to read the bloody runes of our body because once understood, once brought into a dialectic with our minds, it is like hearing the voice of God and being annihilated by the sheer power of his presence; one must accept the truth of mortality, of the runic blood and organs, the shit and sweat "penned" by billions of years of incessant, mouthless forces. The power of our wielded pen is made meaningless by the endless flux of constant becoming of billions of imperceptible, undefinable forces that hit an amusingly small lottery -- like a win of 5 dollars on a 2 dollar scratch ticket that allowed the imperfection of humanity to arise.

Every sign we adorn to the body, we think is a definitive mark and relegates the being and its behavior, but really, the mark is a romantic notion, and its study is the business of the romantic and painfully all-too-human philosopher. The mark is scrawled on a piece of parchment that floats on top of a ocean with unknowable depth and size. The waves move the piece of paper accordingly, the sign is washed away or remains by the force of the ocean, a rather trivial event if it stays or remains.

ClickclickClickClickclickClick = Beatles

2009-09-12T03:07:00.005-04:00

What the hell was everybody celebrating a week or so ago? Beatles-mania was being foisted on to us by the media. It was the anniversary of something. I can't recall, nor would it matter because I just can't bring myself to give a shit.

Everybody loves the Beatles. Everybody pays homage to the Beatles. Everybody is indebted to the Beatles. It's all quite joyous and wonderful to be connected to the sire of popular music as we know it. The apex of two guitarists, one bass and a set of drums with its perfectly crafted verses and its undeniable chorus. Matching our jackets and hair, and putting forth an image that was designed to sell records. Our culture is secure. The harbingers of our highest cultural ascent made their way by selling themselves as the first boy band to diseased "little girls" that are incapable of a real sexuality because of the latent Victorian mores on sexuality that permeate. From the same population, young girls and women, that the cocaine-addled (perhaps rock star?) Sigmund Freud made his career and entered into our pop-cultural lexicon and thought patterns, so too did the Beatles -- perhaps the most well known band in the world. Where the impositions of human culture breed hostile, sterile and controlled lands, there's a black market of indecencies that become highly prized. The Beatles were like a bottle of cheap moonshine that makes you deaf, dumb and blind, but highly prized in the stifling air of prohibition. Everything human becomes pornographic -- the voyeurism of psychoanalysis and the relationship between the analyst and patient, alcoholism as an obsession and physical elation from the destruction of the senses, and the Beatles as an artificial sexual partner, something near a prostitute (always available, emotionally and relationally unresponsive, and a vessel for fetishistic fantasies, for pubescent girls that very often have no physical, cultural or symbolic modes of libidinal energy. The Beatles started their career as pornography.

So when I hear assholes talk about the Beatles, all I see is a bunch of servile cowards kissing their chains for providing such a convenient self-definition where musical expression is mechanically undertaken by the simple plucking of vibrations that form the specter of a chord progression that haunts our species eternally.

The Beatles are not musicians and are not artists. Maybe they were at one point, that's debatable, but it is irrefutable now that their works and image retain no likeness to that of legitimate artists. I fail to see the difference between Barbie and The Beatles at this point. They are highly marketed, vastly accessible, and quickly disposable commodities that ask no questions other than "how can I amuse you?" The lame attempt at spreading a sense of urgency or importance in regard to the Beatles was done seemingly so Guitar Hero could sell their new Beatles themed Guitar Hero pack. Now you too can play the "music" that you love so dearly by removing yourself from the creation of music into the mechanical, meaningless pursuit of adroit finger fondling to the sounds that has subjected us to a life of glorified elevator music.

Aural Fixation

2009-08-10T01:31:00.004-04:00

Cannot stop listening to this song:

It's getting dark too soon
A threatening silence surrounding me
A wind comes up from the islands

When distance fades to stormy grey,
Washed out from the deep of the ocean,
Here I will stand to face your wrath,
While all the others are praying

Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime
Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime

No rain can wash away my tears
No wind can soothe my pain
You made me doubt, you made me fear
But now I'm not the same

You took my wife, my unborn son
Torn into the deep of the ocean
I don't pretend that I love you
Cause there is nothing left to lose

And when silence comes back to me
I find myself feeling lonely
Standing here on the shores of destiny
I find myself feeling lonely

I had a life to give, many dreams to live
Don't you know that you're losing so much this time?
Beyond the waves, I will be free
While all the others are praying

Calm down my heart

The love in you, it does not burn
There is no lesson you can learn
And there are sounds you cannot hear
And there are feelings you can't feel

Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime
I don't pretend that I love you
And this time I'm not scared of you

The Silence of the Ritual

2009-08-09T03:59:00.006-04:00

Nobody believes in God anymore. There are moments of clarity in the throes of mental illness, of delusion, hallucinations, anxiety and terror. While the mind is swept up and clarity is lost, the totality of the personality of the Christian is atheistic; it must be because to live our lives in this time is an utter, unblinking confession to atheism. To touch the ground, and smell the air upon birth, is to feel a world and eventually witness a world that is totality devoid of God. Belief does not overtake the Christian, but rather, the mental anguish, the terror, the anxiety forces the actions of the person that wants to alleviate the pain of atheism. The obsessive-compulsive knows and believes their rituals are meaningless, and are embarrassed by them, they, however, must do them to alleviate the anxiety they feel when they haven't acted. The Christian is not far from this. They in truth know they do not believe, but the anxiety of not acting out their various rituals of mind and body overwhelm them with unending anxiety.

It nauseates me to hear thanks to God or a mention of God when people see something wonderful such as a beautiful landscape. All that is great is lost. The person that could have enjoyed the immediacy of the beauty must think of God. Perhaps the anxiety of being overtaken by something, something sublime that makes us feel small, meaningless and unimportant must be destroyed with the thought of God. It is like counting all that is in the world by 7 incessantly. All that is lost, all that is alienated and removed from you so you can in the most petty fashion silence your anxiety, your dread at the unknown. Christianity is a horrific mental illness, and mental illness in part seems to be based in a primordial need to possess, but to go far beyond that need and possess everything. The landscape that should be but a landscape becomes our landscape as created by God for us -- and what disgusting things await the land by these diseased animals through the sheer force of their broken, minuscule, gelatinous brains have taken the cosmos for themselves!

The Ontology Of What Not To Wear

2009-08-05T04:28:00.005-04:00

I like to think of myself as very much a contemporary philosopher. The Modernist enterprise for what philosophy and any intellectual discipline should be seemed like a realm for intellectual and creative squalor -- too regimental, too specialized. Why can't pop-culture and theory have a comfortable relationship?

From this discomfort with Modernism, I've decided to bring you a new project within my blog called:
The Ontology of What Not To Wear: A Post-Modern Foray Into What Is Clearly And Distinctly Fierce

To start out with since we've stolen his epistemological terminology, I want to take a moment for Rene "Fashionably Late" Descartes.

I'm highly skeptical of God's existence being clear and distinct, but one thing that is clear and distinct is Rene needs a damn haircut, girl! I know you're busy pondering an absolute, irrefutable truth from which to build all other truths, but maybe you should look into whether or not a demon is fucking with that hair rather than that mind. This is what happens when you separate the mind from the body -- dualism and a bad hair day.

Now on to some more presuppositionless fashion criticism. One of my favorite thinkers is Nietzsche -- note that I said thinker, not dresser. Let's take a look at this hot mess:

Here's Nietzsche probably spying some hot Ubermensch. But he is forlorn because he's never going to get a date with a mustache that is so 1980s Oates from Hall and Oates. Watch out boy, he's not a proto-Nazi! Let's hope his theory of eternal return is flat out wrongbecause I don't think I could deal with having to see that mustache over and over again for all eternity -- God is dead and your mustache killed him -- oh damn!

Thus ends my highly rigorous, nearly mathematical analysis of two prominent philosopher's fashion senses. A truly post-modern endeavor into the unexplored realm of popular culture and philosophical theory.