Monday, May 30, 2005

no idea is somemaybetimes a good idea

Kombinat! in a comment here quotes Kundera: "It is deplorable, but it is a fact: we have learned to see our own lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires..."

I pointed in turn to the notes here. We can say "we have learned," but it is also possible that the "we" that is allegedly learning is but one element in a transactional economy - a sort of food fight of the symbolic order in which the symbols themselves are morphing:
The television sits in the place in the home our grandparents once occupied, central, revered, carrying the stories that teach the young about the world, and the television is the voice of retail transaction.

Spam, that anyone with an email account despises and complains of, is a handful of gravel compared to the avalanche of commercial hook and promise the television saturates our homes with. But we're used to that, and the young don't know any other world. The parasite is on its way to symbiosis.
Certain kinds of thinking might need to occur in some space that is innocent of the social. There is no rhetorical flourish, no wish to persuade, no clique of happy few. No idea of whom it is or could be addressing. No idea of much at all. Chaosfroth. It may appear fumbling since it has no pre-conceived understanding (Kleist) of what it is thinking. Intermittent, unsure of itself, it may seem unformed. Until the parallel wheel of language allows it form.

Thinking occurs. As opposed to what passes, stentorianly, polemically, or gracefully, for same, much of the time, and chatters to keep trying to.

abecedarian

A) A "high speed internet provider" that was to have provided DSL to our new abode by May 23 was a no-show. (Designed by Kafka). Nor did they contact us to say as much. My call succeeded in unearthing the information that it will be (at least) another month before they get around to us. Wires and those who wield them suck. Let entremanures fill the sky with stratellites and be done with this nonsense.

B) Belatedly, in wonder at the research and technology: C and D. How does one, sans horbe, synthetically generate reading intonation?

E) Echoic thoughts about genre keep occuring. Genre as, or with, or in, or under, "belief systems." To even say "belief system" is to be writing within a certain genre. Perhaps something of this is on the way to the ballpark of the ballpark of this non-captious list from Ray Davis.

skipping a letter...

G) Goodwillie's platform of Things that Suck:

* Money Sucks – it has devalued people and become the worst addiction which has corrupted our personal goals, institutions, value system and our revered democracy
* Democracy Sucks – it has become a red herring to keep us powerless
* Personal and Family relations suck – has deteriorated into feuds instead
* Religion sucks – divides people rather than bring them together
* Good people suck – have created more calamity than bad people
* Peace sucks – peace does not bring peace

Saturday, May 28, 2005

can't we all just sing along?

o, Lordy, yes we can. hangin on his every word.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Post might read IMproPRieTies more often

A friend pointed me to new published reports which appear to bolster the allegation, made here on Aug. 22, 2004, that FEMA was entirely a political arse job, with no ulterior motive of actually doing anything whatsoever for people afflicted by "Hurricane Charley."

In part I said:
...the problem with FEMA is, it has become a Republican artifact. That is to say, its role here in Charlotte County, as far as I can see, is to help Mr. Bush win Florida in November.
And now "media" are saying things like:
Homeland Security sources said FEMA's efforts to distribute funds quickly after Frances and three other hurricanes that hit the key political battleground state of Florida in a six-week period last fall were undertaken with a keen awareness of the coming presidential election. Washington Post
FEMA Director Michael Brown himself, a sincere-ish blusterer who has the air of a Pattonesque General so in command that his troops all know better than to hint at his public display of nudity, seems to have lent credence to this view as well:
Brown cited Hurricane Andrew in 1992 as a historic failure that still looms over FEMA, which was harshly criticized for failing to deliver aid and distribute funds quickly enough to victims in Miami. That failure has long been blamed as contributing to President George H.W. Bush's defeat that year. WP
The point is not only the squinty joy of having told you so but also the fact that in nuce, the Florida disaster was responded to exactly the way 911 was responded to: with great energy, a cone of error approaching 100%, supreme public relations sensibility and an incompetence so astonishing as to induce the unavoidable conviction that something was on their minds other than the FEMA mission statement.

The point I failed to make then, but which was very much present to me, has to do with complexity. I failed to point out that the "emergency management" operation staged in Florida by Bush 2 and, BuddyJesus forbid, 3, was carried out on friendly soil, with a willing population, under optimal communications conditions, overseen by a President and Governor who happen to be brothers, with nearly unlimited resources close at hand, and it was a megabollockian fuckup of the first magnitude. If the Bushes couldn't get this one right, what makes USians conceive that these "leaders" can get anything right in the Middle East?

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Eyeless reading - tracing

Here's a book: A Natural History of Shells, by Gary Vermeij. Vermeij has given unparalleled attention to seashells. In them he finds traces that he interprets as hints to the nature and resistence to vulnerability of large-scale human organizations -- nations and multinational corporations. Also by the same author, who has been blind since the age of 3: Nature: An Economic History. Featured on NPR.

For some reason, the idea of a blind man discovering, in the touch of molluscs, that humans do not understand the massive human constructs they make seems about right.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The world we have

I've lived in communities in which there was an unending fund of capital -- one could marry, have innumerable children, go far away to work, die, and be completely ok with that, because everybody was part of here comes Everybody. The individual didn't much matter. Money mattered, but wasn't the sole source of social and earthly solace. There were lots of things that mattered besides one's solitary existence -- things that nobody much could explain but entirely believed because of a shared memory of a bond between men and gods and living things. The community did not efface the individual, but was Everybody writ large. It contained the love and sense and care and dignity that we in the US associate with the nuclear family. The nuclear family is as hollow as the individual when the entire collective fails to be anything more than an aggregate of individuals trapped in desire and wealth bondage.

There is the wealth capital of USian understanding, and another sort of capital -- of the living people -- that is far richer. It's what we left behind when we tried to form a more perfect union. Nice try, no cigar -- at least, so far.

(The new union was more perfect because it was to be less bloody -- to be, in fact, not based on tribal blood, hereditary bloodlines, or any precious bodily fluid whatsoever. It was all very abstract, and at this late date it's doubtful that we can make sense of what it was supposed to be, other than to say it was an experiment in some form of open society. I say "we," but in fact, because of the very nature of this experiment, there is no more "we.")

Unparenthetically, there is no "we" in the US. No organic human solidarity through blood, race, religion, tribe. Not that people don't try. But the whole gambit of going it alone in the New World -- making sure no Indian power survived to keep us company, showing the British the door, thumbing our noses at any aristocratically ordered social world of peers and servants -- was to open the way to an order in which individuals of whatever persuasion could work, play, and remain on the near side of war, open or covert. The constitution was a rough attempt to keep people relatively honest by making sure no one got too much power or privilege. The Law, it was thought, would keep each of these mutually unbound individuals in line.

That is to say, the world we want -- or wanted, back when we thought we had an idea about such things -- was not so much a vision of a certain kind of world, full of good Christians, noble farmers and honest shopkeepers, as it was watchful and involved a deep and shared suspicion of the ways and means by which visionaries, no matter how well intended, tend to impose their worlds on others, whether their visions are shared or no.

Today of course nearly everyone has retreated from that bold and perilous 18th century insight into human error and delusion. One question is: how, in light of the lynxlike text that created us, have we managed to get so stupid?

This is a large question. Just the other day a friend pointed out that in the 1956 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which he owns, the article that deals with Roman History is thirty-five and one-half pages long. In the more recent edition used at his workplace -- first published in 1974 and reprinted through 1993 -- the same subject gets all of two pages.

Somewhere along the line, it seems the entire matter of source -- history, origins, roots, tendrils of the world we live in -- became too troublesome to describe in anything more ambitious than a sound bite. Exactly when this was decided, and by whom, is unclear. But if the Britannica has gone that far, we can be fairly confident that other representations of the wellsprings of the past are now airier than Kool Whip Lite as well.

So there's this breathtaking, nearly infinite abbreviation of the substance of what came before. What was once considered to be human knowledge, the basis of Reason which produced the social configuration we seem at pains today to be obliterating at every turn. We have no reason to be a "we" except for the root historical configuration that we no longer remember.

Such reduction of the past ought to give us a hint. Add, perhaps, the truly impressive panoply of contemporary experts on every hand -- academicians, rhetoricians, bloggers, pundits of AM, commentators of weeklies, newspaper columnists, do-it-yourself counselors, shrinks, career advisors, midwives, testing services, seers, sophists, trendy business book writers, Gurus of Information, masters of the finely turned period, moral manicurists, mavens of faith, Cassandras of Commerce, arbiters of taste, master chefs, dancing masters, one or another of The Most Remarkable Men in America, critical Intelligence firing on all cylinders, Ivy Leaguers, military strategists, women of business acumen, Damning Diagnosticians of Human Turpitude, Penetrating Prophets of Doom, icy ironists, learned etymologicians, string theoreticians, firewalkers, griots, complex semioticians and intuitants of complexity, lawyers, actuaries of annihilation, meteorologists, economists, Click and Clacks, labor leaders, discoverers of panaceas, investment advisors, pest control experts, mystics of Santa Fe, polemicists of radical, moderate and conservative Thought, post-ironic Zizekians, gadget wonks, cognitive semanticists, underground operatives, aromatherapists, Papal Emissaries, card counters, spoon benders, table turners, sex liberators, enfants terribles, idiots savants, ambassadors, vinophiles, tradeshow organizers, students of society, inventors of new techniques, profound interpreters of numinous phenomena and cagey hermeneuticians of phenomenal numina -- the embarrassing plenitude of these and more can suggest that we as a "society" have lost all memory of exactly how fucking unbelievably capable of self-delusion we can be. We forgot lesson 1 of 1775: "Do whatever you sensibly can to prevent others from doing unto you whatever the fuck they think they can get away with."

What could be a key enabling element here, of use in helping come to terms with the effacement, the abbreviation of human time and the multiplication of Bacon's idols and worship thereof, is the fact that along the way from an agrarian society to this united state of contractual obligations, we created monsters and into them breathed life. There is nothing commensurate between a human being and a corporation, yet we mistook corporations for persons, and formalized that error. The media we are always complaining about is spamological speech by and for corporations that have no interest in or concern with human being in time, or history. A corporation, by definition, is capital with no obligation but to itself. As such it is a large and powerful entity with no social, aesthetic, political or ethical constraints. Our desire their plaything.

Corporations evolved as a means of aggregating capital in order to aggregate capital. They are ingenious mechanisms that provide "solutions" to "problems," answers to needs, and modes of ahistorical being in the world for large populations of displaced beings in the world. If they hadn't evolved, someone would have had to invent them, just as someone invented the steam engine.

But we have failed to civilize them. They are 10,000-necked giants that make sure we don't think about things like Roman History because that use of our time would make us irrelevant to their needs.

We have been gullible in opening human society to the non-human. For example, nearly every encounter with a corporation today entails extraordinary patches of unrecuperable time: no transaction without its Marketing Moment, its Legal Disclaimer, its Voicemail Maze, its Follow-up Survey, its Notice of Bankruptcy. And the error is symmetrical: Just as we ineluctably think of these entities in human terms, they invariably interact with us as if we were tiny replicas of corporations -- that is, creatures who have no death limit, infinitely replaceable machines. But die we do, and our lives are emptier for all the time wasted, consumed, obliterated and vitiated by corporations whose core is Das Kapital, not el pueblo.

Essentially, these giant entities that do not give a fig for history are post-modern. They are also pre-modern, insofar as they are simply outside the stream of the human. But not outside as in, having no impact on. More like boulders in a river -- entirely uninterested in where the flow came from or where it was going, but massively capable of sending it off in an entirely new direction for no reason at all. And it is this absence of interest that might help explain the boffo abbreviation of Roman History in the Britannica. We live, and breathe, and believe and dream and act upon, representations of a world issued by non-human creatures that have their, and not our, real interests in view. They wish us to forget that before they invented intellectual property, there was intellect, and the joy of making, and the eerie creak of the soul trying to take flight. We -- I -- don't merely want yet another vision of a world. I -- we -- need to learn to see the occulted world we have. Had. Have. To begin to consider how on Earth to take it back.

For Peter Karoff and Phil.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Sex slaves found in petri dish of capitalism

Mostly still not here just now, but little things like this deserve attentional juice.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

blogging 'n' Zeit

Moving sucks, alrighty? That's for all those who seem to have time to blog.

But, when one reads stuff like this(1):
the military brass were horrified at the low "firing rates" and anemic "kill ratios" of American soldiery. They immediately set about trying to break the next generation of recruits of their natural resistance to slaughtering their own kind. Incorporating the latest techniques for psychological manipulation, new training programs were designed to brutalize the mind and habituate soldiers to the idea of killing automatically, by reflex, "at the bell-clap of command," without the intervention of any of those inefficient scruples displayed by their illustrious predecessors.
and this(2):
All saddness does not come from a malfunctioning of brain chemestry. Sometimes I think it is lack of tribes in our culture. Isolation is hard to take for some of us. How wonderful if we could be like a pile of snuggling puppies or kittens with each other. Innocent; no ulterior motives, no vengence, no bad memories.

Some ingest chemicals to soothe the pain, ignore it or to LEAVE.The thing about this special kind of pain is that no one deserves it. It is not punishment from God, a moral flaw, bad karma, weakness, ... Sometimes it feels like these people have an ocean of Love that they have no way to exchange with other people, or don't know how.
, and, bedeviled by the imbricated aleatorics of "surfing," considers how they are, in fact, talking about the same thing, one is pleased that time exists.

(1) & (2): via TV and BSMoffat, who reward time.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Blade in the shade

My elder son relayed a conversation he had with a Goth girl in his high school. It concerned a student who comes to school every day dressed as a vampire. Long black cape, white makeup, black grief lines from eyes to chin. This vampire has certain routines. In one, he will stand in the shadow of a building, then leap into the light, then back into shadow, over and over.

Noting this recently, my son and Cassandra, his Goth friend, said :
He: Why does he do that all the time?

She: You know, sometimes pale people can't stand too much sun.

He: But . . . he's black.