but it was all a big mistake

"When Socratic irony was taken seriously and the dialectic as a whole was confused with its propaedeutic, extremely troublesome consequences followed: for the dialectic ceased to be the science of problems and ultimately became confused with the simple movement of the negative, and of contradiction." - Difference and Repetition, p. 237

mind over matter

«It is by means of reflexiveness—the turning back of the experience of
the individual upon himself—that the whole social process is thus
brought into the experience of the individuals involved in it; it is by
such means, which enable the individual to take the attitude of the
other toward himself, that the individual is able consciously to adjust
himself to that process, and to modify the resultant of that process in
any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness,
then, is the essential condition, within the social process, for the
development of mind.» - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mead/

By "mind" here, Mead means something very particular --

«Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to
point out meanings to others and to himself.»

What we could understand is that there is a reality of social
programming -- and another parallel reality of non-signifying
experience. Surely, we have an awareness of non-meaningful experience.
For example, I am sitting on a chair, but this is not a meaning, it is
an act; it is only made "social" by me writing about it.

Students and followers could get confused by this. It's interesting
that Jung takes a similar view of language and the mind, whereas
Burroughs, for example, takes a rather different view:

«The soft machine is the human body under constant siege from a vast
hungry host of parasites with many names but one nature being hungry and
one intention to eat. If I may borrow the lingo of Herr Doctor Freud
while continuing to deplore the spread of his couch no one does more
harm than folks feel bad about doing it 'Sad Poison Nice Guy' more
poison than nice -- what Freud calls the 'id' is a parasitic invasion of
the hypothalamus and since the function of the hypothalamus is to
regulate metabolism... 'Only work here me.' 'Under new management.'
What Freud calls the 'super ego' is probably a parasitic occupation of
the mid brain where the 'rightness' centers may be located and by
'rightness' I mean where 'you' and 'I' used to live before this 'super
ego' moved in room on the top floor if my memory serves. Since the
parasites occupy brain areas they are in a position to deflect research
from 'dangerous channels'. Apomorphine acts on the hypothalamus to
regulate metabolism and its dangers to the parasitic inhabitants of
these brain areas can be readily appreciated. You see junk is death,
the oldest 'visitor' in the Industry.»

Junk... heh

to sum up: philosopher's phootball phantasy

Deconstruction is entirely a theory of relations of interiority,
even though it recognizes that such relations are never completed
but always still in process.

[...]

Note for further elaboration: a lot of this has to do with the way
that DeLanda, through Deleuze, is ultimately channelling Spinoza, to
whom the language of capacities to affect and be affected is
originally due; and also Hume — again via Deleuze's reading — in order
to account for how the individual person exists as an "emergent
property" of the assemblage of a quantity of impressions, ideas, and
chains of association. Now, Whitehead writes a lot about Spinoza and
particularly Hume, recognizing their importance but also their
limitations, which have to do with the fact that neither of them think
sufficiently in terms of events. Spinoza fails to think the event
because of his absolute monism; Hume, because of his denial of "causal
efficacy", and development of a theory of mind entirely in terms of
"presentational immediacy." Where Deleuze uneasily juxtaposes Spinoza
and Hume with Bergson, and DeLanda entirely ignores the Bergsonian
side of Deleuze in favor of the Spinozian side, Whitehead is the one
thinker who actually does — much better than Deleuze — integrate
(using this term in the mathematical sense) Spinozian and Bergsonian
imperatives. This needs to be explained further, in conjunction with
Whitehead's aphorism that "there is a becoming of continuity, but no
continuity of becoming" (Process and Reality 35). -
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=541

quick fix

"The film becomes an allegory of the dead end of white Euro-American
culture, which can only live so long upon its no-longer-active
cultural heritage of Elizabethan poetry and vinyl 45s." -
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1205

advice from an elderly gentleman

JG: I can hazard only a guess at what he might say, but based on his
many published "admonitions for youth," I'd say this sums it up:

"Think for yourself. Fortune and misfortune: take neither personally.
You have to take a broooooaaaaad, general, view of things, you see."

Oh yes, and here's one he liked to remind people, noting "It may save
your life!" Goes like this:

"If you are holding onto a rope to a lighter-than-air balloon, and it
comes loose from its moorings and heads into the sky, LET GO OF THAT
ROPE! IMMEDIATELY!"

cause and effekt

"Nonlinear and statistical causality bring back to the philosophical
conception of the causal link some of the complexity that was taken
away by the notion of constant conjunction. Additional complexity may
come from an analysis of catalysis, an extreme form of non linear
causality in which an external cause produces an event that acts
merely as a trigger for an entire sequence of further events. But
while restoring the richness of causal relations does make them more
likely to explain complex material behavior, it is a restoration of
their objectivity that will have more profound philosophical
consequences: material events producing other material events in ever
more intricate series, whether there are humans around to observe them
or not." - Manuel DeLanda,
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/manuel-delanda-matters-2/

there is no spoon

"It is very likely that this infant, when placed in its high-chair at
the dining table, will pick up and shake a graspable item that has a
rounded shape at one end. We call that item a spoon and may say that
the infant is assimilating it to its rattling scheme; but from the
infant's perspective at that point, the item is a rattle, because what
the infant perceives of it is not what an adult would consider the
characteristics of a spoon but just those aspects that fit the
rattling scheme." - ernst von glasersfeld

feasts of the passover

"The cause of the final plague, the death of the first borns of Egypt,
has been suggested as being caused by a fungus that may have poisoned
the grain supplies, of which male first born would have had first
pickings and so been first to fall victim."

"... with man hu meaning "this is plant lice", which fits one
widespread modern identification of manna, the crystallized honeydew
of certain scale insects. In the environment of a desert, such
honeydew rapidly dries due to evaporation of its water content,
becoming a sticky solid, and later turning whitish, yellowish, or
brownish; honeydew of this form is considered a delicacy in the Middle
East, and is a good source of carbohydrates."

"The speculation that manna was an entheogen, also paralleled in
Philip K. Dick's posthumously published The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer, is supported in a wider cultural context when compared with
the praise of soma in the Rigveda, Mexican praise of teonanácatl, the
peyote sacrament of the Native American Church, and the holy ayahuasca
used in the ritual of the União do Vegetal and Santo Daime
churches..."

learning to fly (ESR vs FWN)

and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for
things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the
original entities.

With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion
and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so
that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving
path which carries man where he would otherwise walk."

These features suggest that the customs are not
accidental, but are products of some kind of implicit
agenda or generative pattern in the open-source culture
that is utterly fundamental to the way it operates.

demotic french

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon

"Eugenides" means "well bred", but this is belied by his actions: a
blatant homosexual invitation at the Cannon Street Hotel (in the City,
a terminus to the Continent), followed by a dirty weekend in Brighton,
the Metropole then a fashionable hotel. Eliot had originally written:
"And perhaps a weekend at the Metropole", implying that the invitation
forms the poet's unspoken thoughts as to what might follow the
luncheon; Pound wrote "dam per'apsez" in the margin of the manuscript,
and underlined the offending word.

- T S Eliot: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'The Waste
Land', by C. J. Ackerley

concept formation (on truth and lies)

Fred said:

"Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not
intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized
original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same
time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases -- which means,
strictly speaking, never equal -- in other words, a lot of unequal
cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cber_Wahrheit_und_L%C3%BCge_im_au%C3%9Fermoralischen_Sinn

disjecta membra

1. Gregory Bateson - "digital versus analogic"

Bateson describes the speech of cats (and dolphins, and others) in
terms of something called μ-functions, which are communicational moves
that describe relationship. "Mew" means "dependency"!

But more generally an analogue *depicts* relationship, does it not?
ἀναλογία : "proportion"...

And I think it's safe to say that communication *of* the relationship
is concomitant in maintaining the relationship. If the cat said, "and
don't forget to take out the trash," then we would not only be
surprised, but more than mildly offended.

For Bateson, humans are unique among animals in their digitality,
which provides the ability to refer to discrete things rather than to
take part in "voicing" the relationship.

(Are you with me so far?)

2. Georges Bataille - sacrificial economy

Bataille considers variations on the theme of "potlatch". His idea is
that that expenditure is at the root of our economic systems. This is
taken up by Jean Baudrillard who argues that the *symbolic* order
comes directly from expense and destruction. In the first place, the
"sacred" is whatever is sacrificed. But it goes further than that.

Economics in these regimes is about maintaining relationships -
between the chiefs and those they lean on, and among the chieftain
class itself. Economics achieves a certain form of analogue
communication. A potlatch demands a return potlatch. A sacrifice to
the ancestors puts one into direct relationship to the ancestors.

The "symbolic" is therefor, roughly speaking, the world of
μ-functions: and of course, within this space there are all manner of
relational things that can be communicated, e.g. "I am your senior
adult male, you puppy!" (among wolves).

This adds some depth to a statement like this one:

"'Symbol' becomes a trope for a component of social practice rather
than the hinge for a theory of meaning."

3. Terrence Deacon - emergent orders

Now, it no coincidence that expenditure and destruction is the
fundamental form in "primative" societies, because it is the
fundamental form in general. In "civilized" societies, we have simply
become more efficient at it. What might this mean?

(a) First, according to Baudrillard, we have largely destroyed, or at
least neutralized, the symbolic order. What this means is that
everything is "coded" or digital. Disjecta membra rather than relata
refero perhaps (scattered fragments, as with the limbs of a dead poet
-- versus referring to things related, if only to highlight their
strangeness). In terms of Deacon's theory, what does this mean? It
means a new higher-order constraint that insists on thingness,
indexicality, graspability, familiarity, fungibility, usability, and
intelligibility.

Virtual reality triumphs over the vision quest.

(b) And so things are accelerated. Instead of mixing sugar and water
and waiting for the sugar to dissolve, one drinks Coca Cola.^*
Nevertheless, the concern with this sort of emergence is that it will
ultimately destroy itself. The whirl-pool is the fastest way to drain
the tub. According to Deacon's theory, life is supposed to put in
*additional* higher order constraints to allow the heightened form of
entropy to be sustained. Because no one has time to wait an entire
generation for change anymore, we invent things like peeragogy.

But apart from the question as to whether "we" (or anything) will
survive, there is another interesting question to ponder in the mean
time: is there hope in any of this for a neo-primitivist order, a new
symbolism, real relationship, etc.?

4. Martin Heidegger - whither relationship?

Mathematical things are "things, insofar as we learn them; things
insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to
be in advance, the body as the bodily, the plant-like of the plant,
the animal-like of the animal, and so on."

"And so on" means -- the human-like of the human, and the very
mathematical of the mathematical itself.

And this mathematical of the mathematical is the one thing that is
essential to the proper functioning of emergent orders. This is the
function we call "learning." And what is this? ...... Is it perhaps a
strange sort of μ function?

The way Heidegger puts it, learning is a kind of "taking where he who
takes only takes what he basically already has." It is a form of
direct seeing in the world -- a way of relating to the world as it is.
I think it would be OK to say, optimistically: a way of relating to
the world AS relationship, a way of apprehending the world itself as
an emergent order.

(One acknowledges that this is somewhat strange feature to observe in
something that went digital long before digital was cool.)

5. William Burroughs - language is a virus

In this note, I have traced the evolution of language from the cat's
meow to modern mathematics -- in a very schematic form, to be sure.
The question that remains is whether there are relationships within
the particular μ function that is mathematics, whether we can find
*within* this form further "endogenous" μ-functions. Are there
mathematical forms that voice their relationship with other
mathematical forms, to us, or to anything else?

One naive answer would be "category theory." But there is another
more interesting answer, which is that mathematics is, in effect, the
entire "DNA" of what we have learned. Except, this is not quite
right. It would be better to say that *we* are *its* RNA. We
replicate it, and expand it, and unfold it. We give voice to it in
the same way that "mew" gives voice to the relationship between cat
and human. In brief, yes, there are μ functions within mathematics:
for mathematicians, they are, quite literally, the stories of our
lives.

*: Bergson: "Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that
their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously
unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself
gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix
a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar
melts."

just browsing

"For books that enter Google Books through the Library Project, what
you see depends on the book's copyright status. We respect copyright
law and the tremendous creative effort authors put into their work. If
the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you
can page through the entire book and even download it and read it
offline. But if the book is under copyright, and the publisher or
author is not part of the Partner Program, we only show basic
information about the book, similar to a card catalog, and, in some
cases, a few snippets -- sentences of your search terms in context. The
aim of Google Books is to help you discover books and assist you with
buying them or finding a copy at a local library. It's like going to a
bookstore and browsing -- with a Google twist."

virtual argumentation (untaken notes)

Baudrillard:

«[J]ust as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish
chance -- which is to say that there would never be a final throw of
the die that, through its automatic perfection, would put an end to
chance -- so one can hope that virtual programming will never abolish
events.»

Hutto:

«In this model the clinic could become a virtual model of the
patient's workplace or home and the construction of such virtual
environments in a clinical setting could introduce novel (more
thoroughly embodied/enactive and environmentally informed) aspects to
the therapeutic process.» - "Embodied cognition and body
psychotherapy: the construction of new therapeutic environments"

Me:

0: (Permitted and encouraged.) Virtue, Wisdom; what the philosophers
seek to teach. (Related to the idea of a prima causa.)

1: (Permitted but discouraged.) Vice, as distinct from sin or crime.
(Do not worship false idols; or phrased positively, study cosmic principles.)

2: (Required and encouraged.) Using the common currency, speaking
the common language. (Study the liberal arts.)

3: (Required but discouraged.) Social transformation through
deviation from the norm. (There is a time for all things under the
sun.)

Hayles:

The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual
Ecologies, Entertainment, and "Infinite Jest"
New Literary History
Vol. 30, No. 3, Ecocriticism (Summer, 1999), pp. 675-697

Aberdein:

«Virtue theory originates in ethics, and in particular the work of
Aristotle. In recent years, it has come to be applied to other fields
of philosophy, most conspicuously epistemology. There are two main
constituencies among virtue epistemologists, distinguished by their
different characterizations of virtue. Reliabilists understand virtues
to be reliable faculties, such as sight or logical inference. For
responsibilists virtues are acquired character traits, such as
open-mindedness or intellectual humility.» - In Defence of Virtue: The
Legitimacy of Agent-Based Argument Appraisal

Lenin (as quoted in "The Big Lebowski"): "You look for the person who
will benefit."