Maxim: Everything said and done with joy will be retroactively conceived as shameful and embarrassing in a way you alone were oblivious to at the time.

New post to see what it looks like without a title.

Philosophical Diversity

Philosophy, like national parks, has a diversity problem, or so it is said. What this actually means is that academic philosophy has a diversity problem, that it is mostly white and mostly male, and that it is generally dismissive toward non-Western contributions. 

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric is given to collecting numbers regarding the citation frequencies of non-Western, female, and ethnic minority thinkers. As expected, those numbers are all very small, prompting him to ask, "Why don't we [U.S.-based philosophy professors] know our Chinese philosophers?"

I keep thinking of the videotape format war of the 1970s and 80s. Why did VHS win out over Betamax? There are many reasons, but they all seem to boil down to the vagaries of consumer choice. Likewise for the ascendancy of Anglo-American over Chinese philosophers. Any attempt to extrapolate the "determining factors" can only result in generalizations of consumer needs and demands of varying practical significance.

But unlike the market dominance of VHS, the homogeneity of academic philosophy reputedly derives from internal prejudice, a presumed distortion of how differences would actually be accommodated if faculty appointments were subject to external criteria.

And yet the distinction between internal and external is hard to maintain. External criteria, being diverse, can only be applied on the basis of internal prejudice. But where does the formation of such prejudice take place? When Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "unhired" Professor Steven Salaita for incendiary discourse, is she looking out for the public good or for the good of the university?

Pending Thought

Meta-capitalism.

Common and Uncommon Fear

The securitized lives in fear of a combination of punishments and external threats. Fear of the ruling powers and their police is a factor but more important and effective is fear of dangerous others and unknown threats - a generalized social fear. In some ways those who are in prison have less to fear; rather, even though the threats they face from the carceral machine, the guards, and other inmates, are severe, they are more limited and knowable. Fear in the security regime is an empty signifier in which all kinds of terrible phantoms can appear.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration 

But let's not overlook the formal equivalence between fearful situations by favoring one totalization of concrete experiences over another. Whether you are in prison or outside of it, there is always an Outside to your experiences.

Here, however, Hardt and Negri interiorize the prisoner's Outside within the experiences of the securitized, sheltering the prisoner from an Outside not his own, debasing his fear to accentuate the fear of the securitized.

But does the securitized know true fear? Does he fix his gaze on the Outside with frozen fascination? Hardly. The threat of "terrible phantoms" appearing is an amenity interior to his experiences, an excuse for resuming normal activities which now include the seamless integration of surveillance. The threat of annihilation is a buried nightmare.

Hardt and Negri would turn that nightmare into reality. They would awaken the securitized to true fear, the fear of God, the fear which only a prisoner can know - not to appreciate what he has, but to prove that what he has can be destroyed.

Fear Factory

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

There is no contradiction here. Knowledge is the necessary precursor to fear of the unknown. Correlating all the world's contents awakens the mind to the horror of an absolute unknown, because it leaves the totality itself unaccounted for, an arbitrary emanation from the nameless abyss attesting to a demonic will. 

Debt Factory

The movement we are tracing from exploitation to indebtedness corresponds to the transformation of capitalist production from an order based on the hegemony of profit (that is, the accumulation of the average value of industrial exploitation) to one dominated by rent (that is, by the average value of the exploitation of social development) and thus by the accumulation of the value socially produced in an increasingly abstract form. Production thus relies, in this passage, increasingly on socialized, not individual, figures of work, that is, on workers who immediately cooperate together prior to the discipline and control of the capitalist.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration

Sometimes is pays (!) not to be a team player.

My Work Here Is Not Done

I give my life of consumption as free labor for producing debt.

Economics and Religion

Post-capitalism is ciphered monotheism.

Leaving Footprints in the Trackless Waste

I used to want to write. Now, not so much. Writing is something I need to overcome.

Revolution

Procrastination is resistance.

Dialectical What?

More like Dialectical Standstill.

I am an incorrigible critic - a troll. This would explain to some extent the irregularity of these outtakes. With a few exceptions my friends also write irregularly, presumably out of fear, conscious or unconscious, of critics like me who would assault their work. And I share that fear, reflect it right back at them. Thus we find ourselves in this irresolvable deadlock of mutually assured humiliation, projecting our own dispositions onto each other in a dialectical cold war where ideas pile up on either side, always on the verge of deployment but never taking off.

And then we have Socrates, who wrote nothing. And what was he if not a first-rate critic?

Every apt pupil of Socrates is wrought with vacillation. Plato's genius lay in the way he offset the burden of his thought onto the shoulders of his predecessor. And he was fortunate to have had such a predecessor as Socrates: without him he would have left a barren legacy, fearful of critics laying waste to what would otherwise have been construed as philosophical misappropriations. Employing Socrates as a mouthpiece is above all not a way of honoring him, but a way for Plato to inhabit a zone of indistinction between reader and writer, and thereby elude any assault whatsoever.

Ranking Lives

After a slow start, I am now moving swiftly through R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy, or as swiftly as can be expected given life's obstacles - that is to say, its means. Sometimes I find a passage I want to underline but a pencil is nowhere within reach, so I sail right ahead to the next one that gives me pause. Here is one such passage only a few pages back from where I just left off in the second book (so I can still find it) in which some characters debate the meaning of a parable:

"It means that these things - courage, honor, even love - are problems, not absolutes. Questions."

Iryssas shook his head vigorously. "Courage, honor, love - these are problems? Then what are the solutions? Cowardice and depravity?"

"No," Kellhus replied. "Cowardice and depravity are problems as well. As for the solutions? You, Iryssas - you're a solution. In fact, we're all solutions. Every life lived sketches a different answer, a different way...." 

"So are all solutions equal?" Achamian blurted. The bitterness of his tone startled him. 

"No. Of course not. Some lives are better lived than others - there can be no doubt. Why do you think we sing the lays we do? Why do you think we revere our scriptures? Or ponder the life of the Latter Prophet?"

Examples, Achamian realized. Examples of lives that enlightened, that solved...." 

Now we can debate the meaning of this passage. But clearly it means that lives are ranked according to their powers of resolution to problems common to all. The size of a problem is measured by the number of solutions competing under a single name - 'courage', 'honor', 'love', whatever - while the leading solution is decided by the totality.

But what is decided by the totality is determinative upon each life: however a life ranks as a solution, it follows inferentially from the nature of the problem. But different problems yield different ranking orders. Therefore, to raise the exemplary status of a life, one need only decide on a new problem for which that life is now the leading solution, and by which a new totality is born.

Pilgrim

I have become privately obsessed with this photo. I return to it often. At first it made me sad, but only because I viewed it with human eyes. Now it seduces me toward alien worlds.

I didn't have the courage to be born in this child's village, so here I am instead, gazing upon him from a safe distance on the eve of his departure along a dark trajectory disappearing over the horizon and promising greater vistas than can be conceived by any human being. It's little wonder to me that the photographer has fled this world in pursuit.

LIS Superstition

Here's an idea: library and information science (LIS) is not a science. It's more like a business model for advancing an ideology. This is most evident in the way LIS educators advocate so-called information literacy. While they recognize information as irreducibly diverse, they are only concerned with textual information and its derivatives.

The American Library Association (ALA) defines information literacy as "the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information." By this definition, anyone with the skills to survive in the wilderness should count as information literate, even if he can't read text. He can still read his surroundings. But no LIS educator teaches how to spot and decipher cloud formations or animal tracks.

In the wilderness, there is no reason for what is called collection development. Any information that would satisfy the survivalist's needs is too volatile to be stored for future use. The optimal collection is always already present. It is the wilderness itself, subject to auto-revision.

Now the analogy between the library and the wilderness threatens to collapse in relation to intent. In the wilderness, the collection has no intent behind it. But if the survivalist is superstitious, he still might pray to a deity to supply him with the right information, a sign for good weather, perhaps, or game.

By the same token, a library user might appeal to a collection developer to stock the shelves with a particular book. But it's mere superstition that the collection developer responds to his needs. His needs are submerged beneath all that happens between making the appeal and such time that a copy of the book finally becomes available for checkout.

The collection developer only looks at aggregates when deciding what to collect. The user might be a part of that aggregate, or he might not. It's really not up to him - unless he's a crony.

Friends of Carlos

PREAMBLE

We, the undersigned, in order to seal our friendship with Carlos Brocatto for all eternity, raise the forenamed to the status of Demon Incarnate, and shall be known henceforth as the Friends of Carlos, or Carlotic Enthusiasts, or Carlomancers, or any variation thereof. The articles of affirmation here set forth describe our constitution.

ARTICLE I - NATURE OF THE BEAST

From the soundless depths of the bottomless pit, in the midst of ontological anarchy, we affirm against all hope that the Demon Carlos, or the Carlos, exists everywhere at all times, past, present, and future; that he is, was, and always shall be sovereign; and that, knowingly or unknowingly, the purpose of all other beings throughout history, named and unnamed, terminates in the fruition of his demonic will.

ARTICLE II - HUMAN PARTS

We affirm that Carlos Brocatto, born into this world as flesh and blood, is the living idol of the Carlos; that we, the Friends of Carlos, are his lesser avatars; and that, wherever we may find ourselves on the face of the earth, we act in concert to manifest his demonic will.

ARTICLE III - NO-ESCAPE CLAUSE

We affirm that, in sequel to the pledge of friendship, there is absolutely no going back; that the appearance of conflict between any human parts signals nothing more than a demonic shift in posture; and that the vector of demonic will shall always prevail as the summation of any conflict whatsoever.

ARTICLE IV - INVOCATION

We affirm that the invocation of the Carlos is justified in proportion to its recurrence, and that invocation strengthens his presence among us.

The Smell of Solipsism

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel has posted an interesting sketch of what he calls idealist pantheism. And when I say "interesting," I mean to congratulate myself for having sketched out a similar idea many years prior as an undergrad, but under a different nomenclature more consonant with solipsism. Many thanks to Carlos Brocatto for instigating that idea, at once utterly ridiculous and compelling, one sultry night in Riverside as we sat outside of an inexplicably trendy hookah lounge.

But whereas Eric works out his idea from the outside in, starting with God as the universal postulate, the supreme cosmic unity or highest species of being, and then parsing out individual human subjects as modules of divine cognition, circumstances dictated that I work out my own idea from the inside out, starting with the individual human subject and expanding outward to infinity. First, supernatural agents affecting the subject's conduct, angels and demons and so forth, are interiorized as so many parts of his unconscious. Then, having thus abolished the utility of exorcism, the utility of defending personal space is also abolished by interiorizing other people. Thenceforth, the subject continues his outward expansion to include all the nations of the earth, all the stars and planets, and all the galaxies and beyond. In the end, the subject is all there is, and he is a solipsist, that is to say, God.

Except there is no end, and there are any number of starting points for expansion. So if there is a God, he is neither unitary nor singular, but unbound and multiple, an endless expanse of overlapping solipsists.

Sleepy Weather

I sit outside watching my son at play in the dirt in the light of the afternoon sun. He runs a hand over the ground like he's smoothing a blanket, and with the same disregard for the transference of disease. I'm struck by a vague sense of his limited powers of differentiation, and of the growth of what powers he does possess out of that nebulous pool of sensual stimuli beginning, let's say, in the womb. And as I continue to watch, he inserts a fingertip into a nostril and digs out a viscous coagulum, looks around coyly, and stabs it into the earth. "Take that, wench." The words bubble up out of nowhere inside my head. My eyelids feel heavy. I start to nod. I decide to surrender to the god of siesta.

The Gates of Heaven Are Closing

When a rich person looks down on a poor person and denounces him as the source of his own poverty, he's not wrong, he's just following a different protocol for inscribing subjectivity. The person - the subject - is an assemblage of multiple forces; the individual is only its avatar. But it would be a mistake to think of those forces as purely social; the assemblage is not a class (the rich, the poor). It's less human, more elemental, more demonic. There are occult forces at play in every gesture, all too easily dismissed under the rubric of chance or coincidence.

A subjective act can be any event whatsoever, understood as an irruption of surplus reality into the world. In this sense, winning the lottery is a choice as surely as any kind of wage labor: the numbers fall into place as uncannily as the neurological impulses directing muscular contractions.

All of this adds a new spin to Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." A rich person, in so far as he is alleged to create his own wealth, is an inflated subject encompassing not only the individual - the avatar - but also the entire legacy of conditions enabling his prosperity, up to and including other individuals from generations past, and all of their numerous bequests. He is a vast, pulsating mob bottle-necked at the gates of heaven.

The paradoxical flip side of this view is that when a poor person, as an individual, blames society for his own misfortune, he unwittingly accepts his own denunciation. He chooses to be poor by relinquishing himself to the subjectivity of his disabling conditions, and likewise becomes too unwieldy to pass through the gates.

Rich or poor, it is better to be so immeasurably.

Trapping Fools

By now you will have heard about the Supreme Court's ruling on April 2nd to end restrictions on overall contributions to federal campaigns. If I know you, there is a good chance that you will agree with me on what this signifies: the further collapse into political impotence of the citizen majority, the tilt of power leaning in favor of the ultra-wealthy. But you will probably disagree with me about its greater significance. There is none whatsoever. 

The inconsolable outrage of progressives is as amenable to what they ostensibly despise about the ruling as it is completely predictable. They clamor for the right to an alternative configuration for trapping fools in the serial order, where all voices are rendered equally impotent by the redistribution of contingencies separating individual speech from the actions of state. Instead of allowing for state sovereignty to converge on the sovereignty of a few individuals, they would let it disseminate into the inhuman dimensions of the world at large.

But dissemination is always already immanent without being represented through legal mechanisms. Representation is only a passing illusion, a futile gesture for arresting the collapse into immanence.

Toward a Demonic Epistemology: Part II

Belief is attributed to a person on the basis of his conformity with a dispositional stereotype; law is attributed to the world at large as an inhuman belief. Knowledge traverses the distinction between human and inhuman, signifying their attunement. But where a person knows something without believing it, the inhuman encroaches on the human without the person's consent. For example, when a person can cite the law of the land while refusing to obey it. Here, the world at large surpasses what the person believes, sometimes to the person's peril, and sometimes to its own. A person can disobey the law of gravity and plunge to his death; a state can legislate against a person's interests and be overthrown.

Toward a Demonic Epistemology: Part I

In the interest of "academic credibility," it might be worthwhile to examine a philosophical problem that has some traction among the tenured watchdogs of higher education. And since epistemology is still regarded among their breed as a respectable category of thought, I turn to my friend and former teacher Eric Schwitzgebel for raw material.

Eric has recently coauthored a paper, along with Blake Myers-Schutz, challenging the traditional assumption that believing something is a necessary condition for knowing that thing. Their argumentative strategy is straightforward: devise a number of thought experiments in which people's intuitions pull in opposite directions concerning the attribution of knowledge and belief to one and the same person. In each of those experiments, many people are inclined to attribute knowledge but not belief. The absence of consensus on the matter might be the product of ignorance concerning the purely technical definition of knowledge as justified, true belief, but instead of marking this as an occasion for indoctrinating the laity, Eric and Blake seize it as an opportunity to work toward a reformed definition of knowledge.

Their reformation derives from what they call the capacity-tendency account of the relation between knowledge and belief, according to which knowledge implies a capacity for truth not necessarily present in belief, while belief implies a tendency toward certain behavior not necessarily present in knowledge. Knowledge is truth-dependent; belief depends on fidelity to a dispositional stereotype for having that belief. But since dispositional stereotypes vary more than truth, it follows that there would be less agreement in the attribution of belief as compared to knowledge.

Having separated knowledge from belief, however, Eric and Blake stop short of accounting for its relative consistency. Moving ahead, knowledge reconnects with belief at a deeper level, where tendency spreads out and surpasses human behavior. For if humans have a tendency to behave according to dispositional stereotypes, the same can also be said about the world at large. One forms the basis for the attribution of belief, the other for the attribution of law. Law is nothing other than inhuman belief. Knowledge then emerges as attunement between inhuman belief, on the one hand, and a human tendency toward certain behavior that may or may not count as belief, on the other.

Killer Advice

What would Jesus do? No! Ask instead what a serial killer would do to pass as an ordinary human being.

Kuhn Dogging

Steve Fuller has written what may be the definitive book on Thomas Kuhn, whose reputation surpassed his own sense of propriety even within his lifetime. Definitive, because I can hardly imagine anyone else pursuing to such immoderate lengths the demons that possessed him, both named and unnamed - a veritable legion - bringing him back to earth, making him human again.

Fuller also fends off those demons that took Kuhn from behind and gave him a child that would be his monstrous offspring. But what is left is something even more monstrous. Unscrambling his genetic mutations reveals that he was already a freak.

Predetermination

Choice is retroactive to what "is" predetermined on the outskirts of consciousness. But predetermination is not necessity; it obeys no law. Predetermination flows from the demonic, whose retroaction reaches back to infinity.

Object of Becoming

Admittedly, the distinction between canonization and demonization is a precarious one. Let us say, tentatively, that to be canonized is to be located subjacent to an object of becoming - the Best Friend, for example - and that to be demonized is to be invoked as an object of becoming.

But the object as such is not inert. The canonized individual is possessed by it. The demonized individual possesses other individuals.

Toward the Invocation of Carlos

To canonize, or to demonize: that is the question.

As we mourn the loss of our comrade Carlos Brocatto in this his year of triumph, we must remember also to rejoice in what we have gained: on the one hand, the chance to install him in the canon of Best Friends, thereby to affirm that we are human, all too human; and on the other hand, the chance to summon him as a demonic ally, thereby to attain immortality.

Indiscernible Philosophy

Can one be a philosopher without "doing philosophy," without producing anything "philosophical" in writing or in speech - in a word, indiscernibly?

From Here

Like Bataille, I have been forced to become a librarian. Less than that, even: a library technician. In this way I am deprived of the option of finding satisfaction as a teacher of philosophy. From here I can only become...a philosopher.

Annotation on Demonic Faith

Demonic faith is bad faith universalized beyond anthropocentric discourse.

Second Thing

Take your pick. Your choice is retroactive to what "is" predetermined on the outskirts of consciousness. To choose is to affirm the will of God, who is nothing but the infinite distribution of demonic faith.

First Thing

Anything. This cup, for instance. It just sits there like a relic at the end of time. Its inertia is absolute. It's immersed in the complete absence of anticipation. I'm only a ghost in relation to it. But then I pick it up and drink from it. This is how I perform miracles.