busting my ass

I think hemorrhoids have to be one of the most embarrassing things
to experience in life -- and if that's true, then life really isn't so bad.

To diagnose is to begin to recover.

* I've been working way too fucking hard. I thought it was just
rudeness on the part of my officemates to say "What, you're
here already?" when they came in in the morning, and "You
work too much" when they left at night. I was easily putting in
double 8 hour shifts in front of the computer without much to
speak of for breaks. Sheer idiocy. However...

* I don't have enough other things to do. Basically I live in
a "mono-culture" of coding and "individual" projects. I haven't
yet established the relationships with the people "down the
hall" that would make it possible for me to get work done
by "going down the hall" to talk to them. Yes, I can stay
home and read books and whatnot, but that form of engagement,
while not entirely "invalidated" seems to be regarded (by
me and others here) as "ancillary at best". Well, I think I
need a bit more of that kind of "ancillary at best" engagement.

* I don't have a particularly nice chair. That said, I'm starting
to feel "comfortable" enough in my new office environment to
make requests that will allow me to be more comfortable still.
Asking for a new "ergonomic" chair, asking for a new laptop.
It's been historically hard for me to put in requests (to anyone)
that actually validate my work and/or my existence via
other means than the "reverse prestige" that accrues to me
automatically as (alternately) a hick, a geek, an inner city
kid, a virtually unemployed bohemian, etc.

* I spent too long reading Zizek when I was sitting on the
toilet. I think this says something perplexing. Basically
that the "anti-ideological" stance of the casual Zizekian is
perfectly embodied by this momentary act of over-stretching
the anus...

And why is that? I think maybe it has to do with the
interesting interface between necessity (one must after
all take a shit) and inutility (feces is waste matter). In
face of necessity, the anti-ideolog seems inclined to give
a middle-finger salute. You say this is necessary? OK,
maybe I'll go along with you, but I will subvert the process
to my own ends. And similarly for non-useful or at least
not-immediately-useful things (e.g. Hegelian dialectic),
they are to be embraced and recovered/detourned into
entertainment, self-criticality, and ultimately "greater
health" (in a Nietzscheian sense...).

* Finally, I think it's possible to look at this symptom as
entirely "psychosomatic" -- related to childhood anxieties
about anal rape at the hands of my, in my mind,
overly-attentive grandfathers (may they rest in peace),
which I suppose can't be ruled out as a possibility just
because I don't remember it. And it's somehow this
presumably-fictional-but-who-knows psych-out that
is reactivated as a symptomatic inattention to the
needs/desires of my real body.

Case closed. Yeah??

proposals

ideas, engineering, and science

Interesting discussion in the Postgraduate Forum here
yesterday about research work combining ideas (both
new and historical) and engineering work (basically,
implementing ideas). Marion, who runs the PG forum,
suggested that science forms another distinct branch of
things to do. I liked that.

What's interesting to me is how these three things might
fit into one coherent frame. Seems quite philosophical
and a bit hard to articulate. But to be colloquial: ideas
suggest how things might fit together, science confirms
or denies (mostly denies) any particular idea, and
engineering actually creates something that fits together
the way the idea indicates.

The thing is, I wouldn't see these things as stacked on
top of one another, but rather, as intermixed. For example,
ideas can come from the way it feels to interact with some
"engineered system" (or anything else; usually "interactions"
include non-engineered components, like people).

We tend to get "credit" for any one of these things -- but
to make a really good dissertation, it's good to have
appropriate coverage of related things (any thesis could
talk about related ideas, related engineering projects, or
related experiments). What I was wondering about was
how we could tell just what sort of contextualization was
"appropriate".

upholstery buttons

I noticed when reading Zizek's "For they know not what they do"
that my "double theorization"
(http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-youve-seen-one-cute-girl-youve-seen.html)
has already been traced by Hegel, Marx, and Lacan.

The easiest way to understand it is in terms of a
so-called "topsy-turvy world" -- Zizek's most memorable
example is:

* Heaven is a place of peace, the
inversion of the suffering in our world;

* Nevertheless, God, King of Heaven, is
to be feared over and above any earthly
fear;

* Those who fear God ultimately needn't worry
about earthly concerns -- and suffering goes away!

In short, any time an "ideal" appears on
the horizon, we can expect to get some
sort of blowback through a similar "double
inversion", "double negation", "double narration",
or "double theorization".  Let's give it a try :)

Here's my example, reworked:

Step one: Theorizing people, we invent
"social systems of resource allocation and
social control".

Step two: Theorizing "social systems of
resource allocation and social control",
we invent "History".

Blowback: Human actions which would
otherwise be basically "meaningless" or
else "overdetermined" now become
"inherently meaningful" because they've
been mapped into the tableau of history.

In short, the thing we experienced initially
as a "lack" (humans need to be explained)
now becomes a "source" (humans generate
history).

Lacan's image is that of an upolstery
button holding things together.  I think
there could be a more dynamic image,
like a line extending to enclose a region:
only once it *goes out* and *comes
back to the beginning* does it enclose
anything.

Joe

PS. Ray saw an earlier version of this note
and in respect of that last image, recommended
http://www.hegel.net/en/v0methode-dreieck.htm

"if you've seen one cute girl you've seen them all?"

In the spirit of that mildly perplexing comment, here's an
interesting panalogy.

(Note, I believe that's Hofstadter or Minsky's term for an
analogy or parallel between analogies; I will denote the panalogy
relation by ::~). This is from my dad -- and it was a bit
off the cuff, so I'll do some editing as I go along to develop
this idea further (thanks dad ;):

atoms:people::people:galaxies
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher:social systems
of resource allocation and social control (means of production and
relations of production)

One of the reasons it is "spurious" is that while people stand in the
relationship to atoms of "are larger than", more characteristically
the relationship is "are comprised of" -- whereas galaxies are not
comprised of people! (Although social systems are.) So let's correct
the first analogy a little bit:

atoms:people::people:social systems of resource allocation and social
control (means of production and relations of production)
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher: ?

But, uh oh, now that we've moved that final term across the "::~",
what should the "?" at the end be?

I think we should be clear that in the second analogy, a
"researcher" is some type of /scientific mind/ -- so the best
thing I can think to put there is /scientific discourse/ or
/scientific bodies of knowledge/ -- i.e., the "emerged"
system that is what the minds fit into. Maybe we would just
say this:

atoms:people::people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher:theories of
systems of resource allocation and social control

In other words, in this panalogy, "::~" plays the role of a sort of "theorizing"
or "virtualizing" relation. While people tend to agree that there really are
atoms, I think the same people would agree that a "piece of scientific
knowledge" is a virtual thing. (Actually, thanks to quantum mechanics,
the two types of objects may be fairly similar: both of them are a sort of
density that condenses into certain embodiments, on average, but which
may in general be widely dispersed; e.g. ask 100 people what a derivative
represents and you won't get 100 different answers, but you may still
get more than just one answer.)

The curious thing for me with this adjusted panalogy is that it posits
/scientific discourse/ as a prototypically "social science and economics"
kind of thing. Well, it's true that my dad is an economist -- but maybe
there's something more going on than just a matter of personal preference.

I think it's fundamentally quite hard to /think/ of anything that doesn't have
to do with "allocations of resources" (distributions of particles in space
and time) and "control systems" (cybernetics, whether 'social' in nature
or not).

It is now tempting to apply the "::~" relation one more time to generate
a structure like:

atoms:people::people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher:theories of
systems of resource allocation and social control
::~
metaphysical/mystical knowledge:philosophers/mystics ::
philosophers/mystics:theories of theories of systems of
resource allocation and social control

although one the problem with doing this is that we've now invited
ourselves to generate a huge tower of "::~" analogies, but we're
already very quickly running out of words and ideas to put into
them. So we might like to see some sort of closure or convergence
apply. Luckily, I think I have an idea for that:

atoms:people::people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher:theories of
systems of resource allocation and
social control
::~
people:?::?:theories of theories of systems of resource allocation and
social control

In other words, "metaphysical/mystical knowledge" is just the experience
of being human! We're now left wondering, what is that thing that is
comprised of humanness? But we found that before --

atoms:people::people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::~
detailed scientific knowledge:researchers::researcher:theories of
systems of resource allocation and
social control
::~
people:social systems of resource allocation and social
control::social systems of resource allocation and social
control:theories of theories of systems of resource allocation and
social control

This leaves us with one extended analogy in place of the panalogy:

atoms:people
::
people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::
social systems of resource allocation and social control:theories of
theories of systems of resource allocation and social control

Remember, ":" here basically says "are comprised of" (read right
to left). So how is it that the DOUBLE THEORIZATION of social
systems are comprised of the social systems themselves?!?

It's tempting to just replace this final confusing term with a more
natural term like "history". (And the Marxist insinuations
that we got started with, albeit parenthetically, might be
satisfied by that approach.) But let's not, in that case, forget
where this thing came from.

atoms:people
::
people:social systems of resource allocation and social control
::
social systems of resource allocation and social control:history

Notice that we've moved from a spatio-temporal relationship
(atoms configure themselves into things called people that
then subsist in time) to a more temporo-spatial relationship
(social systems of resource allocation and social control have
dynamics which play out and rearrange themselves in space, i.e.
by a mapping into "the historical record").

In other words, "theorization" is basically a mapping into
another (set of) dimension(s), and whereas "comprising" is
also (only?) conceivable as a sort of /mapping by extension
and systematization/ within any given (set of) dimension(s).

Because we don't have so many dimensions to work with,
nor so many ideas (e.g. atoms, extension, systematization;
concept, parallel, analogy), the map is not the territory, but
the map of the /mapping process/ is on the original map.
(Or whatever other Borgesian thing best describes the idea!)

Well, I don't think I've quite exhausted these themes, but
maybe I've spent enough time on them for the moment.

subject recruitment policies on wikipedia

«The Wikipedia:Research policy on subject recruitment on Wikipedia has
made its way through RFC and is now accepted as a policy on English
Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research»

This just goes to show how complicated things can get.