Aesthetic Morality. The Minimal Division Of Attention. The Maximum Unity Of Mind.

I continue to situate my thinking at the intersection of art, culture, and politics.

I, however, am beginning to associate myself with the issue of morality. 'Moral philosophy' or whatever. Not the most useful category. But an important one.

The idea of morality and moral action is clearly implicated in my thinking, yet I have failed to use the word.  But it seems so obvious!

Because the thing I have been most involved with is the definition and cultivation of an attitude. I have tried to elaborate a style of living, a way of being, and I have tried, so far as possible, to embody that attitude.

Further, I have identified this attitude primarily with aesthetics. By choosing aesthetics as the basis of morality, I was picking up a line of thought that Foucault initiated at the end of his life. "Recent liberation movements," he said in 1983, "suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on" (Foucault Reader, 343). Foucault believed that a new ethics could be found if we were willing to engage in historical study. In particular, Foucault believed that the ancient Greek notion of the 'aesthetics of existence', in which life itself is conceptualized as a work of art meant to be actively created, could be a useful starting point for modern ethics: "Among the cultural inventions of mankind," he argued, "there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot be exactly reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now–and to change it" (Ibid., 349 - 350). For Foucault, the Greek aesthetics of existence was this starting point. It was a technique that we could repeat so as to arrive at something new for ourselves. Morality was somehow to be found in the belief that "everyone's life could become a work of art...." (Ibid.,). Morality, for Foucault, then, had to be found outside of the dominant scientific discourse of our day. And the Greek notion of aesthetics as the basis of morality was his starting point for the elaboration of a new ethics.

This is the idea that I have been most occupied with for the last year and a half. The question of how to constitute a new form of morality. One that finds its primary reference in aesthetics. One that is politically relevant. One that escapes the pressures put on us by modern forms of thought and morality.

My recent inclination towards the language of morality is also influenced by two other factors. First being my new essay that I'm working on, 'Nihilism, Magic, And Amusement', and the fact that I just received a copy of Alasdair MacIntyre's well known book After Virtue: A Study In Moral Theory. John Gray works with MacIntyre in Enlightenment's Wake, claiming that he properly identifies our problem as the collapse of the Enlightenment project. Both Gray and MacIntyre argue that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself, failing to provide any basis for individual or political morality. MacIntyre's conclusion is quite radical: "Marxism's moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act – and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance" (After Virtue, xviii). Although he references Marxism, his claim reaches far beyond it, aiming at the core of modern Western morality.

This is also Gray's conclusion: Modern attempts to rationally ground morality have failed. The modern project, the project of the Enlightenment, has left us in a state of cultural nihilism. We need a new way to conceptualize morality, we need fresh thought on the moral and political issues our society face. Gray believes that 'humiliated modes of thought found in poetry and mysticism' may be the answer. Foucault believes aesthetics is the answer. Schiller seems to believe that aesthetics is the antidote. Collingwood does too.

My conception of aesthetic morality, the aesthetic existence, is therefore in response to a real cultural-political situation: the state of nihilism brought on by the collapse of the Enlightenment project.

We thus have the situation and the response. We have cultural and political nihilism, and we have aesthetic morality. How impossible it seems, though, that we can ground morality in aesthetics. We seem too far gone. But I gotta try.

When I first began this writing I intended to explore two very different ideas. But then I got wrapped up in the language of morality. But I'd like to discuss those now.

I just want to briefly highlight two of the things that the aesthetic existence strives for, as I see it. The first is what I am calling 'the minimal division of attention'. The second is 'the maximum unity of mind'.

The minimal division of attention is a phrase that is supposed to communicate the goal of mindfulness, which is essential to the idea of aesthetic morality. Both Buddhism and aesthetics place a lot of emphasis on the role of consciousness. In both, consciousness primarily means awareness. And awareness is a tool that is to be purposefully used and managed.

Think about the way we use our attention. We can direct it somewhere, we can purposefully focus on something. Or sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes I'm at work and I'm doing something, then I hear something, someone says something to me, and my attention becomes divided. I continue doing what I'm doing, I still make the latte, but my attention is divided, and I'm paying attention to a conversation or a person instead of devoting my attention to the drink at hand. As a result, I may not even remember making the drink. I might make it wrong. Something may have gone wrong. All of this because my attention was divided.

An important thing to strive for, therefore, is the minimal division of attention. It is impossible to have an entirely focused attention. I will always be thinking about other things. There will always be some concern in the back of my mind. Some thought of the past or future dividing my attention. But it is a useful ideal to strive for the minimal division of attention. Focus as much as possible on the tasks at hand.  Aesthetic morality strives for this kind of focus of attention, this kind of mindfulness.

The second thing that aesthetic morality strives for is the maximum unity of mind. One byproduct of the modern spirit of enquiry is the intense segregation of forms of knowledge. As Collingwood says, with the advent of modern thinking "no man can serve two masters; he must give his whole soul to art, or to religion, or to philosophy, and in choosing his friends he chooses at the same time his enemies" (Speculum Mentis, 33). Modern disciplining of knowledge does not just divide knowledge abstractly, it divides our minds and hearts. Moreover, this disciplining does not emerge merely from the sciences, but is implicated in modern forms of government. Schiller argues that the "more precisely speculation made necessary a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the more intricate machinery of States made necessary  a more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations, the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance" (On The Aesthetic Education Of Man, 39). We are thus divided in both our intellectual and political lives. We can no longer exist with the unity of mind that existed before the advent of modern forms of thought and government. The Enlightenment project's goal of rationally organizing society's has destroyed our ritualistic ways of life, leaving us in a state of nihilism, and personal and communal division.

Unity of mind is thus an important thing. It matters how comfortably we can corral our experiences into a coherent sense of self and community. And the aesthetic existence strives for this unity of mind. The aesthetic existence is one in which choices "reflect an individual's authentic sense of reality, not the holding of a certain course in accordance with markings on a moral compass constructed by others" (Sumida, 1997, xvi). The aesthetic existence strives for a unity of mind. Collingwood puts all of this quite succinctly: “What is wrong with us is precisely the detachment of these forms of experience–art, religion, and the rest–from one another; and our cure can only be their reunion in a complete and undivided life. Our task is to seek for that life, to build up the conception of an activity which is at once art, and religion, and science, and the rest” (Speculum Mentis, 36).

The task of seeking the unity of mind is a difficult one. And clearly it cannot be expressed merely by an aesthetic existence. Because it must also be a religious, scientific, historical, and philosophical life. But, frankly, science, history, and philosophy sit quite easily in my mind. The task, then, is the recovery of religious-aesthetic forms of experience. For only by reintroducing those forms of experience can we integrate them with our scientific, historical, and philosophical modes of thought.

The aesthetic existence thus seeks mindfulness (the minimal division of attention) and a total sense of reality (the maximum unity of mind).

This was a weird writing session. Took a bit and took some weird turns.

But this is where I'm situating myself these days. I am trying to overcome the era's cultural nihilism by trying to define an attitude that strives for the focusing of attention and the unity of mind. And I believe that this attitude deserves the label 'aesthetic'.

Don't be distracted! Don't be divided!

Pay attention and feel unified!

Why Collingwood?

Sometimes I wonder about my fascination with Collingwood. Why this dude? Why am I spending so much time reading and thinking about the books written by a man who died in 1943? What is it about this guy? Why this philosopher who, while known by many, is rarely collaborated with. And if someone does cite his work, it is often 'The Idea Of History' or 'An Autobiography'. Which are both awesome books. Super interesting and important stuff that is essential in Collingwood's oeuvre. But I've found such curious things in his other books. His work on metaphysics is super exciting. The stuff on aesthetics is so far-reaching. All kinds of gems.

Sometimes I say 'He is a thinker at the intersection of so many different types of thinking. He has a unique philosophy of history, of mind, of science, of nature. He is a total thinker.' Which isn't exactly true. Alain Badiou seems like a pretty damn total thinker: novelist, mathematician, logician, philosopher. Danggggg, he speaks several languages whoaaaaa. Collingwood, too, spoke and read many languages. But he wasn't a mathematician or anything. But he was a historian, philosopher, artist, sailor, and so on. He did a lot of different things.

But what it is about him?

I'm not sure what it is. But I keep moving through his books. Really excited for his book on philosophical method to arrive in the mail.

I'm also beginning to engage with new thinkers. Right now I'm reading Manuel Delanda and finding him very curious. He is a professed Deleuzian and holds a position named after Deleuze at the European Graduate School. Naturally, then, I'm also curious about Deleuze. 'A Thousand Plateaus' is sitting next to me, in fact.

I'm also very curious about Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and phenomenology broadly.

After watching Hubert Dreyfus discuss Husserl and Heidegger last night, I'm more convinced that Heidegger's work would have a ton to add to the project I am on. My project somehow loosely involves the relationship between aesthetics, zen, politics, war, history, individual decision making, education, and society blah blah blah. All kinds of stuff. But those first things I listed are definitely at the top of my list.

Collingwood helps me with all of those things.

The relationship between Collingwood and Foucault is also a big thing for me. A big reason Collingwood intrigues me is his similarity to Foucault.

Oh well, gotta go.

But I haven't figured out why it is Collingwood that I'm most compelled to read and think about. But I'll know at some point, I bet. I'll read all his books and study him and hopefully come to terms with him in some meaningful way. I can't let a mind like his go unexplored.

Delanda and Decision Making

I'm about 50 pages into Manuel Delanda's A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History and I'm pretty excited about it.

The thing that I see in it is a way to conceptualize individual decision making within materially and historically complex contexts.

Because with people like Foucault, who I love, we see the downplaying of the subject, the minimization of human decision making. Foucault's reasons for downplaying the role of the individual are understandable, as Johanna Oksala made clear to me in Foucault On Freedom. He was responding to phenomenological philosophy's tendency to ignore historical context in favor of introspection, to treat the subject as ahistorical. Foucault's histories may appear to ignore the subject, thus destroying any chance of conceptualizing freedom. But, on the contrary, his histories are meant to show us the limitations on our freedom so that we can choose with more efficacy. His explication of complex historical networks of languages and institutions is not meant to convince us that human freedom does not exist, but that it can only exist within this historically determined networks, that all of our thoughts and actions can only be historically constituted.

Foucault's choice to reduce the role of the subject in his histories, while understandable, leaves us with a challenge: How to arrive at a clear conception of human freedom while continuing to recognize the constitutive effects of languages and institutions?

I believe Delanda can help me with this. He argues that "to understand the role of decision making in the creation of social order, we need to concentrate not so much on the more or less rational character of individual decisions, but on the dynamics (centralized or decentralized) among many interacting decision makers" (43). He insists that we must take account of larger circumstances, the uncertainty of information, the difficulties that people have in knowing exactly what they are deciding, all of which can be summed up in the term 'friction'. He claims that to remove friction "from our models (by postulating an optimizing rationality, for instance) automatically eliminates the possibility of capturing any real dynamical effect (41). This comes remarkably close to Clausewitz's conception of friction as a force that can never be perfectly defined by theory, but which will always be a factor in decision making, all of those minor mishaps and events that lower the general level of achievement in a military campaign, or in any type of decision making, for that matter. Nonlinearity is also a major factor in Clausewitz, so Alan Beyerchan argues.

What I really need from Delanda, therefore, is a way to create a model of decision making that takes account of both the material and the ideal, of the physical structures of matter-energy around us and the languages, institutions, and ideas that give those material structures their unique cultural coloring.

Interestingly, this is precisely the task I am working on in AZI. I am working on developing a philosophical model of decision making that can then be applied to political, military, and civilian educational systems. The crux of the model, of course, will be the idea of experience, synthetic experience, and different forms of simulation that can provide such a synthetic experience.

Hmmmmm.

How curious.

But this is also where I see my work on Collingwood going. I am still reflecting on The New Leviathan, and the current part of AZI is an examination of political/aesthetic themes in Collingwood's final monographs. I hope to show that Collingwood's work was heading in the same direction, that his work implies the need to come up with a model of decision making and a method of educating that type of decision making.

So, there is something very serious going on in Delanda's work. I can't wait to see where this book leads me. How it leads me closer to Deleuze. How it leads me towards a synthesis of materialism and idealism. How it helps me in this task of properly conceptualized choice and the education of judgement.

Because I see myself pursuing work in the space where Collingwood, Clausewitz, and Foucault collide. Perhaps Delanda will be a crucial part of this attempt to synthesize these authors.

Predicaments

Sooooo.

Here I am. At home, hanging out. Wondering what to do with my night.

The biggest thing being that I have to be at work at six tomorrow morning. Yikes. I worked at 6:30 this morning. Bummer that I have to work again at 6 tomorrow. I'll be pretty tired. But I'll be fine for sureeee. No worriessss brooo.

I'm just not quite sure what to do.

The urge to really write hasn't struck me. I might be too tired to think clearly about Collingwood right now. Because the next step in my writing is all that stuff on Collingwood's final books that I talked about in my last post.

I think I'll just take a shower. Probably try and read some of A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History. I'm curious about it. Been reading the introduction. Seem unusual and challenging so far. But I'm excited to get into it.

Sounds fine to me. But sounds like early work. I hope I don't always have to work early on the weekends in the future. Well, I won't forever, obviously. But I wonder how long I will.

I'm Trying Not To Buy Books But I Failed Tonight!

I just bought a copy of Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought. Should be incredibly relevant to my interests, duh.

Should put me in contact with yet another monster of twentieth-century philosophy, duh.

Not sure when I'll get to it, obvi.

But I imagine that it has a lot to offer me and I'm excited to have the option of looking at it whenever I want.

Not blogging much these days because I'm busy, son.

I have, however, written the first page or two of the final part of AZI.

I will begin by examining Collingwood's final books, trying to see if there is a consistent relationship between politics and aesthetics in his late work.

I will argue that Collingwood's thinking can only lead to an attempt to theorize individual decision making, and inevitably, a theory of the education of the individual capacity for decision making.

In other words, I believe that Collingwood's project must be brought to bear on the Clausewtizian project of revolutionizing the relationship between history and philosophy, history and theory.

Collingwood's work must culminate in a project of figuring out how to properly educate the political elites and the citizenry alike.

This means building a theory of decision making out of the fragments of aesthetic, political, historical, philosophical, and cultural analyses found in Collingwood's late work.

This man died before he was able to articulate such a thing. I want to take it on myself to carry his work to its logical end, to the theory of political education. For, as Collingwood insists, "The life of politics is the life of political education" (The New Leviathan, 260).

How does one carry out the political education of both the ruling elite and the citizenry, therefore, is the question that must be raised in response to Collingwood's final books. And it is the question I intend to answer with a little help from my friends, Clausewitz, Foucault, and Collingwood himself.

For I aim to be a Clausewitzian, a Foucaultian, and perhaps above all, a Collingwoodian.

Wasting Time

I'm spending a bit of time this afternoon on a website called I Waste So Much Time.

Funny, the self-referentiality of the name. They understand this internet culture of distraction and they are claiming it.

I wonder how I should feel about distraction and amusement. I amuse myself. I distract myself. I can't read and write all the time. Sometimes you just need to relax a bit.

And I'm so tired lately. I have been working a whole lot. And it sucks. But I'm making money. Living hard, too.

I have to go to work at 4:30. I figured I'd relax for a while.

I could lie down and read The New Leviathan. But my mind just feels a bit too restless. I want to look at funny and clever pictures. See how many funny people there are in the world. There are a lot.

And man, this picture is soooooo funny:

I spent a good 20 seconds laughing out loud after I saw it.

I'm not sure why.

Chemistry jokes are funny.

But this blog of mine, this Savage Riley, is a bit stuffy. I usually go off about philosophy and shit.

But sometimes I just dick around, look at fun pictures and videos, explore the dredges of the internet.

My other blog is also a lot of fun. We write about mouths. Me and my friends. We write about mouths.

Yes. Circulate.

As Jeezy says. Circulate. Don't be scared. Let the dollar circulate. Let my intellectual capital circulate.

Sometimes I just need to relax. Because soon enough I'll be working again. Writing again. Reading again. Not relaxing again.

So today I'm just relaxing. And that website and that picture are relaxing to me.

I laugh out loud even just thinking about that picture. Nice.

My Mind Is Not Quiet

When I walk around I don't stop thinking.

I have one thought after another. They chase one another, build on each other.

They just keep coming.

Always in the form of language.

I experience one sentence after another.

I tried to focus on my breathing. This one in, this one out. Accompanied by words at first. This one in, this one out. I kept track.

Then I let go. This one in, this one out.

Without the words this time.

This one in, this one out.

Just this one in and this one out.

Words chirp beneath the surface.

But this one is already coming in, and then it went out.

I'm not sure if I ever lost the words. If they ever fully ceased. But I know that the process of breathing overtook them. There was a moment.

I need to take my interest in mindfulness a step further.

Language And Thought

As I move through The New Leviathan there is one thing that troubles me.

Which is Collingwood's claim that thought is always accompanied by language.

I don't know if I buy this.

Thinkers like Guy Claxton claim that thought does not require language. That Descartes' famous phrase 'I think, therefore, I am' should be reformulated as 'I act, therefore, I think'.

What, precisely, is thought?

What do we mean when we talk about thought?

I'm not sure. But for some reason Collingwood is explicitly claiming that thought and language go hand in hand, are inseparable.

I'm not so sure.

I should look at Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking? I already own a copy of it. And the title couldn't be more appropriate for my concern, right?

Oh well.

I'll sort this out at some point.

But the relationship between action, 'thought', and intellect is a complex one that awaits me.

I feel great about that journey though.

Absolute Presuppositions, Thought, And Mindfulness, Or, Metaphysical Mindfulness

Collingwood's An Essay On Metaphysics is a very interesting book.

He defines metaphysics as the historical science of absolute presuppositions. An absolute presupposition, like it sounds, is a "presupposition... which stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer" (31). We must presuppose certain things absolutely if we are to continue thinking at all. The study of absolute presuppositions, however, must be accomplished through historical study. This is "because the question is not one that can be settled by introspection alone. Introspection can do no more than bring into the focus of consciousness something of which we are already aware" (43). This is why the study of absolute presuppositions, metaphysics, must be a historical science. If we want to know the absolute presuppositions of our own thought, or of other thought, we must be willing to compare our mode of thinking to other's. "It is only when a man's historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity," Collingwood asserts, " that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member" (56). Thus, it should be clear that"Every metaphysical question either is simply the question what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion, or is capable of being resolved into a number of such questions together with a further question of further questions arising out of these" (49). And this study of absolute presuppositions must be accomplished through historical study.

This is difficult to think about personally, however. How I discover my own absolute presuppositions and how do I go about thinking once I have discovered them? I wrote this last night while i was very tired. 'How to know what one absolutely presupposes and still continue thinking? I was brushing my teeth, thinking about my body, water, and heartburn. I presuppose absolutely that my body can be exposed to germs, that my stomach is full of acid that might cause me pain, that Tums will make me feel better. Yet I continue to think. I struggle with this idea of knowing an AP and continuing to think.' How to study your absolute presuppositions and yet continue to think?

Well, I think that last night I was aware of my absolute presuppositions but I was still thinking. As I said, I had heartburn, and I immediately thought 'oh I'll eat some Tums'. That thought absolutely presupposes the existence of stomach acid and the capacity of Tums to quell the stomach acid that has been irritated. I washed my hands after I used the toilet, which absolute presupposes the existence of germs. I went to brush my teeth and I was careful not to touch the bristles of the brush, because I knew that if I touched that part it would go into my mouth and germs might get into my mouth. Absolutely presupposing the relationship between germs and illness. So, in that case, last night, I felt like I was thinking about my absolute presuppositions, yet still letting them do the business of structuring my thought. I still followed all those thoughts, performed all those actions, but I was aware of my absolute presuppositions.

This type of historical work on absolute presuppositions, that is, metaphysical work, can never be "carried to completion, for it is a work which in the nature of it can never be complete, but done as required, piece by piece, when the need arises" (85). So what am I to do with this work, then? If metaphysics is a constant project, what is its purpose? What is it to help me do if I can never complete it?

Well, I think that the task of metaphysics is really to help us pay attention better. Collingwood explains how scientist's can fail to make a certain observation if they are 'too clever'. That metaphysics ultimately deals with the "simple and familiar, visible to the eyes of a child, and perhaps hidden from clever men because they are too clever" (172). One might be so wrapped up in a constellation of absolute presuppositions and the conclusions that it leads us to that we are entirely ignorant of our presupposing at all. Absolute presuppositions, however, are indispensable. They are the basic constituents of thought and "unless we have them already arguing is impossible to us" (173).

So if we can't get rid of our absolute presuppositions, what are we to do with our knowledge of them? Well, like I hinted above, I think that metaphysical study can be an aid to mindfulness. If we know what we are presupposing absolutely we open ourselves up to different types of observation. We can then be sure that we are not being too clever, having an obvious reality hidden from us by a certain absolute presuppositions. If we know what we presuppose absolutely we can examine reality more easily.

His conclusions in that Essay are much like Foucault's in The Order Of Things. Thats why I was able to write about Foucault as enabling a mindfulness. There is a lot to be said for historical study and the cultivation of mindfulness.

This explication of Collingwood is merely a part of my idea of Modern Zen, in which mindfulness is achieved by embracing historical ontological study.

Yup.

More will be said of this in Part IV.4 of AZI, I suspect.

Or elsewhere.

I've got lots to say about these issues of history, philosophy, self-knowledge, mindfulness, etc..

What Is This Thing I've Been Doing?

I just published Part IV.3 of the Art, Zen, And Insurrection project. Frankly, I'm not super satisfied with that part. It felt like a sloppy inquiry into Foucault. It feels like an uncertain step in the project. But a necessary one. I needed to disentangle the idea of the aesthetic existence from Foucault's work. Because I want it to be more than Foucault was able to explain it to be. I want it to be a more properly political project than Foucault makes it seem. Because he doesn't really precisely say what this aesthetic existence is, or what it is supposed to do. He didn't get that far. He died.

But I'm working on asking the questions that I think need to be asked about the idea of the aesthetic existence.

Last night after finishing IV.3 I took a walk. It occurred to me that the whole project made sense in terms of a series of interconnecting essays. It isn't really a coherent statement. It is an exploration. It was an outline that prompted a research project.

All of the Parts correspond to a specific question. What is art? How is it connected with society at large? What would it mean to live an aesthetic existence? Would an aesthetic existence in anyway be a political project? Four questions for four parts.

Each of those larger questions, of course, breaks down into more questions. Thus all the subsections for the parts.

For a long time I didn't know how I was going to think about the aesthetic existence as a political project. But I still don't really know. But I took a six month break and the reading I did helped me begin to think about it politically, even if I haven't done it adequately. Which I will probably never be able to do. But it is a good exercise nonetheless.

I also feel good about the way the project has affected me personally. I have become a different person over the last year. I moved to Seattle. I started working full time. I've been working on these ideas nearly my entire time here. And I have been working on AZI for a little more than a year.

The crux of the whole project is the idea of self-creation. For Collingwood, Searle, Smith, and others, the world is constituted primarily by language or ideas. The idea of status functions and all that business. Humans therefore have some capacity for self-creation through language. This is what political institutions should probably strive for: attempts at the purposeful creation of a community through language (writing laws, having conversations). Art and the aesthetic existence, which is essentially an expressive existence, is all about self-creation. I value writing as a way of changing myself, asking myself questions, and I can see how this project has helped shape my thinking and my behavior.

I think the writing has helped me become more aware of myself and my social behavior. I still do certain things that I'm not crazy about. I get shy sometimes and all that. So I'm not always expressive. Sometimes things hold me back. But on the whole I think I've become more expressive, I think I try to be mindful. I try to remain in a willful state of uncertainty. I find that I pay attention better if I assume that I don't know what I'm looking at. And this is a crucial part of Collingwood's notion of the aesthetic process. The artist always particularizes experience, never naming the feeling, but expressing them through other means.

Implosive Rationality And Politics

In May I came up with the phrase 'implosive rationality'. With that phrase I am talking about the paradoxical use of reason. I think reason is most valuable when it is used to improve non-rational or intuitive behavior. Reason, if used properly, ceases to exist in its own right. Instead, it implodes on itself, destroys itself, and leaves a positive habit in its wake.

I think this conception of rationality has some political implications.

Mainly because civilization and society are non-rational processes that a community engages in. We are all living in relation to the social structures that we know, engaging with them more or less habitually. The business of civilization (going to work, loving people, having relationships of all kinds) is accomplished habitually. This is why Alfred Whited said: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism... that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extended the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them." Civilization advances by expanding the unconscious repertoire, by creating new habits for people.

Politics, however, is a rational process. In politics people think, they make decisions, write things, all with the hope of making society better. But civilization is inherently a non-rational process. Politics must therefore be a form of implosive rationality. Ideally, at least.

Is it thus fair to call government and politics the institutionalization of habit? The purposeful creation of institutions that will habituate people in certain ways. About the creation of mediums that will provide a society with a certain set of habits.

Maybe. There is something about society and habit. There is something about implosive rationality and the creation of habits. There is something about politics and reason.

There must be something about politics and implosive rationality. Something about government and the creation of habits.

What I'm talking about is government and the purposeful creation of minds. Trying to create people by creating the institutions they work through.

I really don't know what else to say about this stuff.

Reason is such a strange thing. How to properly use it when most of life is so antithetical to it? Because it must be used. The rationalization of politics might be a good thing. But the rationalization of life and society is impossible and probably not good.

Because I don't think the rational life is possible. Life must be habitual. Life must be intuitive. Life cannot be an endless rational process. It will always be marked by spits of rationality. Rationality has a place in it. But it is not the central thing. Habit is.

Modern Zen As The Synthesis Of Micro And Macro Perspectives

I was thinking the other night about this whole idea of 'modern zen' that I've been reading, thinking, and writing about. I had a conversation with a friend about it. About how I was assaulting this image of someone who seeks wisdom or enlightenment solely from within their own mind. But of course that can be done. There are all kinds of people living who are able to be peaceful, mindful, calm, happy, all just by engaging with their own minds. Lots of people are able to achieve mindfulness through the phenomenal mind alone.

But what I'm advocating as 'modern zen' is different than at. And I think it is probably has a lot more to do with me than anything else.

What I mean by modern zen is a synthesis of historical ontological philosophy with the personal goals of zen. Historical ontology studies the nature of our being and experience through historical methods. We recognize that much of our experience is symbolically constituted, that we have our experiences because we have labels to identify ourselves and others with. If our being and experience is symbolically constituted, then this means that self-knowledge, in some ways, must be historical knowledge.

Modern zen, for me, is an attempt to achieve mindfulness through the historical ontological interrogation of the categories that structure our experience. It means studying the history of gender and sexuality, of war and nationalism, or economic systems and political ideologies. It means the historically contingency of our thoughts and feelings may prevent us from knowing their origins. It means achieving an zen like mental state from an intellectually rigorous point of view.

I partied the other night. As I was walking around I started thinking about the phrase 'the synthesis of micro and macro perspectives'. Because this is really a question about that. The mind is the most micro perspective that I can think of. It is the bedrock of all other perspectives. Then we move outward to other, more macro perspectives. One of them being the historical perspective, another being the cosmic perspective. We can assume these different perspectives on our own lives.

I don't know if there are other perspectives beyond these three that I could distinguish. Would it be even more 'micro' to look at single celled organisms? For some reason that seems like it is macro... But I'm confusing myself. I can't think about that right now.

What I will say is that I am interested in obtaining a point of view that has managed to synthesize my micro perspective with more macro perspectives. Namely, I want to synthesize an historical perspective into my phenomenal mind. This is the synthesis of micro and micro that I am most concerned with these days. Because this notion of modern zen, in essence, is about a synthesis of historical knowledge into the phenomenal mind. It is about synthesizing a historical knowledge of symbols into my own perspective, with the goal of reducing the way that those symbols structure my experience. Studying the history of gender, for example, so that I will be less dominated by the idea that I need to be aggressive, or pay for girls, or talk to them in certain ways.

So there appears to be a trace of transcendentalism in this idea of modern zen. I don't know much about this word. And there was something about Husserl and transcendental consciousness or something. But it seems like an implication of this idea of modern zen that I am learning about the history of symbols so as to transcend their effect on me. Seems like a pretty obvious implication of what I'm saying.

I don't know if that is the case, though. In practice, transcending a symbolic order is pretty difficult, as I reflected on recently. So, if its goals are not transcendental, what then, is the task of modern zen?

This is a moment where I wish I understood zen more. Does zen contain any trace of transcendentalism? Does it in anyway advocate this type of thinking? My gut reaction is not, it does not. Instead, it would encourage me to directly engage with that reality. Not to try and overcome it through an act or transcendence or withdrawal, but to face it. To show it down straight up.

This to me seems like the right attitude or goal for modern zen to set for itself. Not one of transcendence, but one of intelligent engagement. I learn about the symbolic rules governing my experience not so as to escape them entirely. But so as to understand them, to apprehend them, and to navigate them. To synthesize that historical knowledge into an acting phenomenal mind.

And this is more of a one way street than a two way street. The phenomenal mind, the micro mind, is synthesizing the macro perspectives, and not the other way around. This is about the phenomenal mind enriching itself through imagined larger perspectives.

Hmmmm, this is the phenomenal mind synthesizing experience so as to enrich its own experience.

Modern zen, it appears, is a zen that is achieved or augmented through synthetic experience.

This is all very new to me. These conclusions, this relationship between synthetic experience and modern zen. But I guess it makes sense. If historical study is inherently about synthetic experience, which Collingwood implies it is, then there must be some relationship between historical ontology and synthetic experience, and thus a connection between modern zen and synthetic experience.

Hmmm. This notion of modern zen has a lot of development left in it. I need to work on it more. I need to read more zen. Need to continue to think about historical ontology. Need to continue to think about the political implications of these ideas, of the idea of self-creation that is necessarily bound up with it all. I need to take account of the role of synthetic experience.

This is all in progress.

There is a third perspective I'll touch on briefly: the cosmic.

Lately I've been watching a lot of shows on the origin of the universe. Really intense and strange stuff.

Narrators say shit like "understanding how something could emerge from nothing means understanding the nature of the universe, and the nature of ourselves."

Scientists consistently assert that to understand ourselves we have to understand the nature of the universe. That understanding the big bang means understanding our place in the universe.

This doesn't sit quite right with me, though.

It was like when I watched a show on parallel universes and the big bang and I was so outraged that they kept referring to it as 'a theory of everything'.

But what about the social and historical worlds? That theory of the universe would leave that domain completely untouched. This type of cosmic, pre-historical knowledge would be valuable until we crossed the threshold into history: into the time when language begins to structure reality more than nature and instinct. And perhaps language is just another instinct. Which I have no problem with, and why Searle's chapter in Making The Social World 'Language As Biological And Social' is invaluable to me.

But what I'm railing against right now is what I perceive as a false claim to self-knowledge. I don't think these physicists know what they are talking about when they say that understanding the universe is about understanding ourselves. Because I can't imagine what type of useful knowledge would come out of that discovery. How would that fact leave the social world changed in any way? What types of decisions would be encouraged from that revelation?

I don't know. But my hunch is that self-knowledge must be historical knowledge. That is the more effective way of knowing ourselves, and also an ignored mode of knowing. People don't think of history as a source of self-knowledge. But I do.

But anyways, the point of this post is to deal with the idea of synthesizing macro and micro perspectives. At the core of modern zen is the attempt to synthesize historical knowledge of symbolic order into the phenomenal mind. This implies that modern zen is fundamentally about augmenting phenomenal experience with synthetic experience.

The cosmic perspective, however, I still don't know what to do with.

The question is this: What macro perspectives can be usefully synthesized/incorporated into my phenomenal mind? What macro perspectives will best inform my micro perspectives?

Questions questions question!

I highly recommend Collingwood's An Essay On Metaphysics. I can't wait to really do some serious writing on it, because I suspect it is a gold mine for these ideas. I know it is.

It is like The Order Of Things but better.

Mindfulness and Symbolic Order

Lately I've been doing a good bit of writing about Master-Signifiers and symbolic orders, how they effect my emotions, and how they structure my relationships. It was all very fun to write about. It was all very personal for me. But clearly an incomplete statement. Just a moment ago I was doing my dishes. My mind was wandering. I was thinking about mindfulness. Thinking about paying attention to my life, my emotions, my relationships, so on. And I want to explicitly bridge these two lines of thinking: I want to explain how the historical-philosophical study of symbolic orders directly enhances one's capacity for mindfulness.

So why is this the case? Why does mindfulness require the historical-philosophical study of symbolic orders?

Well, let's reflect for a moment on the stereotypical image of mindfulness: the image of the monastic life. We have this image of a person wearing a robe of sorts, standing among nature, arms gently folded, a serene smile, complete peace and acceptance. This type of mindfulness, this monastic image, is one that is typically pursued from the first person perspective, that is, through the phenomenal mind: the mind as we experience it.

It makes sense to approach mindfulness from this phenomenological perspective. We all deal with our minds in this way. I don't know about you, but I live with my mind everyday. I have all kinds of thoughts, feelings, experiences, sights, sounds, et cetera. Clearly, the phenomenal perspective must be a part of practicing mindfulness. Any pursuit of mindfulness must ultimately return to the phenomenal mind.

But is that enough? Is it enough to think about your thoughts, to deal with your mind alone? Or are there larger, external factors that need to be taken into account? Does the phenomenological approach need to be augmented by some sort of historical or philosophical perspective?

I am clearly in favor of the latter. I don't think that work that takes place in the mind alone will suffice to provide a mindful perspective.

So why not? The answer has something to do with symbolic orders.

The goal of mindfulness is to observe reality as it actually is. But when I begin asking what 'reality really is' I run into some difficulties. What is reality? What is this world I live in?

And the only answer can be that I live in a symbolic world, one constituted by language. So, to know what the world really is I would need to have some kind of knowledge of the symbolic order that sustains my world.

Because my experience, in its particularity, is always tied to some kind of symbolic order. My experience is inseparable from thoughts of money, thoughts of rigorous conceptions of gender and sexuality, thoughts about particular organizations of space (bus stops, shops, etc.). If we think about the real details of our experience we have to admit that its particularity can only be explained by reference to a symbolic order.

If we don't recognize this then we run the risk of mistaking the particularity of our experience for something very general or universal. We might end up thinking that the particular anger I feel must be identical to the anger that someone felt a thousand years ago. But that simply can't be the case. Because my anger is unique in that it is historically located in a unique symbolic order.

This is the real danger of restricting the pursuit of mindfulness to the phenomenal mind: if I only operate through introspection then I may mistake the origin of my thoughts and feelings. I might end up thinking that my experience is universal, rather than historically or symbolically sustained.

As I said above, the quest for mindfulness will always end with the phenomenal mind. The experienced mind will always be the place where mindfulness is actualized. But that does not mean that it can be achieved from there alone.

I am claiming that the image of a monk achieving mindfulness through phenomenological inquiry does not fit the (post)modern world. We too (historically) deep in a symbolic order, and if we don't take that symbolic order seriously we may easily mistake the origin of our experience. The task is therefore to augment phenomenological inquiry with historical-philosophical study of the symbolic orders that sustains our experience in its particularity.

This is essentially what I am trying to talk about in my essays on 'The Genealogy Of The Modern Mind', or what it means to create a 'historically augmented theory of mind' through 'the study of the mediums through which the mind works'. In this sense, symbolic order can be thought of as the medium through which our minds work. And if we don't understand the history of that medium, the history of the symbolic order in which our mind is working, we can't expect to really be mindful of what is going on around us, and why our experience exists with all its nuance.

Who knows where this leaves me. It certainly leaves me at the issue of human self-creation, and how to go about it.

But mindfulness is what is at stake.

Perhaps this has political implications. Mindfulness of politicians. Etc.

Meh.

I am convinced that the phenomenological component is inadequate in itself. But I am also convinced that any historical-philosophical analysis must ultimately refer to the phenomenal mind.

PIE

The last two days I began working at High 5 Pie in Capitol Hill. I like the shop. The people are nice. The owner seems cool. The manager is very nice and seems organized. My friend works there.

It has gone very well so far.

Today I worked from 6am - 11am. It was very early. I woke up around 5:30.

I was having a dream. I remember it was a vivid dream, an intense dream. But I can't remember what it was about.

The alarm smashed my dream world and left no trace of it.

I remember looking at the clock. It said 5:29. I said whoa. Maybe I will take a nap today after all.

But I doubt I'll take a nap.

I don't feel like napping.

I feel like making burritos with beans, cheese, avocado, tomato, and hot sauce. And what do you know, I got all that shit!

I got it from the store on my way home from work!

Days are so long.

There is so much time.

But I love to sleep. Sometimes I sleep a lot.

I also hope to get some writing done today.

Part IV.3 of AZI awaits.

It should be one of the easier sections for me. The topic is something I've been thinking about and working on for the last few years. So they are more mature thoughts than I was dealing with in IV.2 and that I'll be dealing with in IV.4. Those are fresher thoughts.

The issue this time is Foucault, his definition of politics/power, his use of militaristic metaphors, and, in particular, his use of the word 'insurrection' in the Society Must Be Defended lectures.

Section IV.3, in fact, is a pivotal part of the whole project. The title of the whole project, 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection' is directly connected to Foucault's work. The 'insurrection' component is connected to his Discipline & Punish, Volume I of The History Of Sexuality, and Society Must Be Defended. That was his work from the mid 70s. Who knows what happened to him. The 'Art' and 'Zen' components are also connected to him, especially Volume II of HOS, The Use Of Pleasure. Yeahhhh. Good to grapple with him. He was such a weirdo/monster thinker.

Hopefully I can eat these burritos, jam out to some musics, take a shower, and interrogate my friend Michel a little bit.

Jesus Christ.

Holy jesus.

I haven't thought or written like this in months.

Prepare for Part IV.2 of AZI to be posted in the next two days. It has been six months since I've posted a part of it.

And good god. Am I excited by how it is going.

I produced like 12 or 13 pages tonight and have the conclusion to the section all mapped out. And I've stumbled upon all new sorts of connections.

Really really really looking forward to refuting Benjamin and trying to explain what an aestheticization of politics should really mean (by Collingwood's definition of the aesthetic).

All in all I've got about 27 pages sitting in a word document. Part IV.2 should be somewhere just about 30 when I post it in the next few days. Maybe closer to 35.

I'm really excited.

I can't believe how much I love thinking and writing when I'm able to do it.

Sometimes it takes so long.

And then all of a sudden boom. I've thought a good deal. I've written so much.

What exciting days.

Over and out.

Breaking The Other's Symbolic Order, Facing My Own Symbolic Order

I'm very happy with the writing I did yesterday.

Not because I think it is good writing.

I don't think it is very good writing. It feels sloppy and sort of all over the place.

But I like how I'm pushing myself to change. I like how the writing was expressly about changing myself. I need to push myself to change. I am.

But it isn't easy to do the things I was trying to describe.

Because there is a symbolic order that determines the moments in which it is or is not appropriate for me to speak to someone.

And as I stood at the bus stop last I still felt that symbolic order in my heart. I knew I was in a space in which it wasn't really appropriate for me to talk to people.

Someone got on the bus and they sat down next to me. They had a cup full of yellow liquid from Pagliacci. It looked like Mountain Dew. It was around 11:30pm. My first reaction was to ask them if they were drinking Mountain Dew. But of course I didn't ask them. I just sat there with my headphones on.

And in that moment I thought about why it was so difficult to talk to people. I thought that it wasn't difficult only because I had to break with my own symbolic order, but because I have to break the other's symbolic order. I have to put someone into a position in which they aren't comfortable. Or maybe they are more comfortable talking to strangers than I think they would be.

But the truth is that I feel uncomfortable. I don't like breaking with the symbolic order that I'm used to. It is really difficult to just talk to people. To just do things that I'm not used to doing. Really hard.

Oh well. This is just one of the observations I have made about the writing I did yesterday.

I think it is important that I try to grapple with issues like symbolic order. That I try to discover the master-signifiers that are shaping my heart and my interactions. But I need to take into account that it is difficult because I am breaking the other's symbolic order.

And, more importantly (maybe), that I am breaking my own symbolic order. And that I'm not comfortable with that.

Master-Signifiers, Atonal Worlds, And Clausewitzian Theory Of Choice: Creating Habits by Imposing Master-Signifiers On The Self

There is a certain discomfort I feel in the world. A discomfort that stems from an uncertainty about how to relate to people. I stand at bus stops, I walk the streets, I stand behind espresso machines, and I look around at people. I see pretty girls. I see friendly faces. I want to talk to many of you. But there is something about this world we live in that prevents me from comfortably talking to strangers. What is it about this cultural world I live in? What does this world feel like, and why does it feel this way? Why are my relationships so weird and uncertain? Why is there no comfortable starting point for social interaction? Breaking the ice seems like such a difficult task sometimes. Why? And what can I do about it? The operative question of this essay, therefore, is this: Why is it so hard to talk to strangers?

This essay is undoubtedly an attempt at personal transformation. I want to make myself more expressive to strangers. I want to talk to people on the street more. I want to be comfortable doing this. So what I need to do is to analyze my discomfort. Ask myself: Why it is so difficult to talk to strangers? What is it about the world that we live in that makes us assume that we are disinterested in one another or cannot relate to one another? What can I do to make myself more comfortable talking to strangers? In asking these question there are several thinkers and ideas that will help me. First and foremost is Slavoj Zizek and his work on master-signifiers and atonal worlds, terms originally introduced by Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, respectively. Those ideas should give me a strong framework to analyze my own experiences. I then hope to use Carl von Clausewitz’s insights into the nature of high-command to reflect on the way I make decisions in the social world, and how I would like to modify my social decision making. The goal of this all, as with so much of my writing over the last two years, is to create new habits for myself. In this instance, however, I am exploring the idea that I can create habits for myself by driving master-signifiers into my heart, by analyzing the notion of master-signifiers, atonality, and decision making. The hope is that decision making, at some level, is about the imposition of master-signifiers. And that I can therefore make certain decisions that will translate into changes in my heart, changes in the master-signifiers that govern my habits. All of this might sound abstract and weird, but this writing should make it clearer. Perhaps you would like to follow me on this line of thought? It won’t be too long. I’ll begin by generally discussing the notion of a master-signifier, what it is. I’ll then move on to talk about the state of master-signifiers in my present world, which can be called an ‘Atonal World’. Finally, I’ll run down Clausewitz’s notion of decision making and explain the relationship between master-signifiers and the creation of habits. Onward to master-signifiers.

Master-Signifiers

This writing was on the whole inspired by a particular chapter in Slavoj Zizek’s book Violence. The chapter is titled ‘Sexuality in the Atonal World’. This was the first place I encountered the notion of a master-signifier, and that of atonality. A master-signifier is a idea of Jacques Lacan’s. It is primarily a way of conceptualizing symbolic orders that organize societies. In every culture there are certain things that simply are the way they are. You can analyze them only so far, and eventually you hit a cultural bedrock in which all you can say is ‘this is simply our tradition, this is how we do things’. A master-signifier can make no further appeal to any other signifier, it stands completely on its own as a symbolic bedrock. Interestingly, Urban Dictionary provides a pretty good definition: “In Lacanian theory, a signifier which stops the slippage of the signified under the signifier and fixes meaning, thereby forming a stable symbolic order. It is a particular signifier with no signified of its own, which stands in for the "fullness" of the meaning of the symbolic system itself. However, since contingency and lack are taken to be primary in Lacanian theory, it is necessarily arbitrary and is unable to guarantee its own primacy except through arbitrary and ungrounded violence.” At the end of the day, all culture is somewhat arbitrary. There will always be certain things that simply are that way, that simply exist as they are. Tradition and custom will always be there as master-signifiers.

What are some examples of master-signifiers? Well, historically, we can say that gender once stood as a master-signifier. It used to be the case that gender was conceptualized as a simple binary, and that was simply how things were. Or perhaps I can say that politeness or humanity is a master-signifier of sorts. We are polite to people simply because they are human beings who deserve to be treated well. In any case, I don’t feel like going too far into examples of master-signifiers, but I hope the idea is clear. Well, to be honest, it isn’t as clear to me as it should be. But I think these points should make sense: 1. Every society operates on some kind of symbolic order, a set of linguistically constructed rules and categories that regulate and structure relationships. 2. That at the bottom of these symbolic orders there are certain signifiers that can make no further appeals to logic, they are symbolic bedrock of a symbolic order.

The question for me, though, is this: What are the master-signifiers in our own culture? What are the things that I simply take for granted? This is where the notion of atonal worlds becomes relevant.

Atonal Worlds

This notion of an atonal world was originally advanced by Alain Badio, but I have learned about it from Zizek. Badiou draws on the idea of atonal music in order to metaphorically describe the state of contemporary culture. Atonal music is, according to wikipedia, ‘music that lacks a tonal center, or key’. An atonal world, therefore, is a world which lacks a clear tonal center, “which lacks the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose a meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality” (Violence, 34). Badiou and Zizek believe that we live in a world in which master-signifiers have ceased to adequately order reality for us. We live in a messy world of gray and uncertainty. “A basic feature of our postmodern world,” Zizek asserts, “is that it tries to dispense with the agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally” (Violence, 35). Our world is constantly uncertain, without a stable symbolic order (other than economic order, perhaps). This is perhaps putting it too strongly. But we don’t have stable symbolic orders like we used to, like people had in other moments in history.

I, for one, feel this in my daily life, and think that this notion does some good in explaining why it is so difficult to talk to strangers. When I’m on the street and I see people all around me I have no idea what I could possibly relate to them about. There is no simple thing that I can assume that we have in common. There is no reliable symbolic order to structure our interactions. So I keep to myself. I don’t put myself out there. There is this feeling of uncertainty, a palpable lack of common ground. It can be hard to deal with. It can be hard not knowing precisely how to relate to people, not knowing what type of common ground I have with people around me. Anyways, this is the issue of atonal worlds. And I think that this notion really helps me understand why it can be so hard to talk to strangers. It is because I live in a world without a clear symbolic order.

So what should I do about this? I don’t have any (obvious) master-signifiers that obviously structure my relationships, and yet I still want to talk to strangers. What should I do? Well, there two questions left for me to ask. First, I must ask: Does this world really lack a tone? Or is there a secret tone that sustains its supposed atonality? After that I’ll explain how Zizek and I think that the study of wartime decision making can provide some insights.

This World’s Secret Tone

Although this world’s most prominent master-signifiers may have diminished power, and this world appears to be atonal, that does not mean that this world completely lacks a tone, completely lacks a symbolic order. Because it would be impossible a society to function if it completely lacked a symbolic order. So what am I to do about this front of atonality in my world? Zizek asks this same question. He says, “how are we to proceed when (as is the case today) we dwell in an atonal world, a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality?” (In Defense Of Lost Causes, 31). The answer, Zizek asserts, is that “one has to oppose it in such a way that one compels it to ‘tonalize’ itself, to openly admit the secret tone that sustains its atonality” (Ibid.). For Zizek this means asking certain questions about our symbolic world. Asking questions, for example, about “the secret qualifications of ‘tolerance’ which excludes as ‘intolerant’ certain critical questions, or the secret qualifications which exclude as a ‘threat to freedom’ questions about the limits of the existing freedom” (Ibid.). There must therefore always be a secret tone, a hidden master-signifier, which sustains the atonal appearance of a world.

So what is the secret tone that sustains the supposed atonality of my world? I think that the economy provides the secret tone that sustains tits appearance of atonality. This point is not something I’m confident about, but a casual observation that occurred to me on a walk. It is probably too simple, and frankly, doesn’t make much sense when I think about it. But none of this stuff really does. I find it all somewhat confusing and strange. Zizek’s work, however, does in some ways imply this conclusion. Being the Marxist that he is, Zizek talks about how the economy is the force that underlies all other Master-Signifiers, or contaminates them with its own secret tone. I’m not sure if this is the proper conclusion to draw from Zizek. But please see if this quotation corroborates what I’m saying, or if you can decipher i better than I: “The ‘economy,’... is not just one of the spheres of political struggle, but the ‘cause’ of the mutual contamination–expression of struggles. To put it succinctly, Left-Right is the Master-Signifier ‘contaminated’ by the series of other oppositions, while the economy is the objet a, the elusive object that sustains this contamination....” (Ibid., 291). Such a difficult quotation. But it seems as though he is saying that the economy provides the secret tone that sustains the appearance of our seemingly atonal world. That it is the Master-Signifier that secretly creeps its way into all other facets of the symbolic order. Or, to put it in terms I developed in July, perhaps it is the ‘master medium’ through which all other mediums function.

And because this essay is really about why it is so hard to talk to strangers, I will have to bring a little personal reflection to bear on this idea. Because the question I really want to answer is, Why do I or do I not speak to a person? I can say that the place I speak to the largest amount of people is at work or other economically defined moments. As a barista, I talk to say many different people. All kinds of strangers, all kinds of co-workers, all kinds of people. And I love it. That is one thing I have always loved about working, I don’t have to worry about whether or not I can or should talk to someone. If you are in my store, I have no problem with speaking to you at any moment. I will say hello even if you aren’t looking at me. I will ask you questions. I will talk to you. So funny how that works. How work provides me with this symbolic order in which speaking to someone is so easy and expected. It really is fascinating, how that works. So, it would seem to me that the economic system is in fact one thing that provides the secret tone that supports the atonal appearance of my world.

Work is a great opportunity to meet people, and I’m happy it can be a social medium for me. But I also want to break with that type of symbolic order, because I don’t just want to be able to speak to someone in an economic setting. I want to speak with people at most junctures. Whenever I want, wherever I want. But it doesn’t work that way. But maybe I can push myself to make socializing less economically regulated. And this is what I really need to do: I need to attempt and modify the Master-Signifiers that are in my heart and soul. Because right now I’m analyzing supposedly large, abstract, impersonal forces. Things like symbolic order, the determining role of the economy, and atonal words. But all of these impersonal forces have a very personal correlate in my heart. I am saying that the economy has a determining role, and I feel that determination in my habitual thoughts and actions. So the real task of analyzing these ideas about symbolic orders is to modify the way that I relate to Master-Signifiers. The goal is to modify my habits. Right now it would be useful to define habit as the subjective expression of Master-Signifiers. The things I do without question, my habits, are Master-Signifiers working their way into my heart and shaping my behavior. Change my Master-Signifiers, change my habits.

In the next section I want to ask how this can be done. How I can access my heart’s Master-Signifiers, and how I can hope to change them. I plan on answering this question by using insights from strategic military theory.

Clausewitz, Choice, And The Heart’s Master-Signifiers

Now the question of why it is hard to talk to people has once again collapsed into a question about habits. The concern is now to understand how I can modify my habits by modifying the Master-Signifiers that are secretly governing my thoughts and emotions. And in order to understand this process of changing Master-Signifiers and habits I want to turn to strategic military theory. I am taking this analytical route because Zizek prompts me to do so. He explains the notion of a Master-Signifier by discussing Winston Churchill and JFK. He explains how Churchill wondered about political decision making, about how “after the specialist–economic and military analysts, psychologists, meteorologists–propose their multiple, elaborated, and refined analyses, somebody must assume the simple and for that very reason most difficult of transposing this complex multitude of views, where for every reason for, there are two reasons against and vice versa, into a simple, decisive Yes or No. We shall attack or we continue to wait” (Violence, 34). Similarly, JFK remarked that “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer–often, indeed, to the decider himself” (34-35). Zizek argues that “This decisive gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons is that of a Master” (35). What these men have done is to impose a Master-Signifier on others. They are able, through their words, to govern the actions of all kinds of other people.

This example isn’t 100% clear to me. But there is some kind of relationship between ultimate choice and Master-Signifiers. It seems that the act of choice resembles a Master-Signifier in that it cannot infinitely appeal to logic. At some point the choice simply must be made. This notion is consistent with my understand of Clausewitz. In On War Clausewitz explains how great commanders have to make decision through intuitive mental processes. They will not always know why they are making the decision they do. At some point they just have to trust their mind to have unconsciously sorted the information they have received. They must treat their unconscious instincts, the deepest parts of their minds from which huge decisions come, as a sort of Master-Signifier in its own right. They must trust the Master-Signifier that emerges from their heart, from their unconscious.

The only issue is the question of where those decisions come from, what kind of Master-Signifiers they are contingent on. Because I’ve already established that society’s Master-Signifiers work their way into my heart and effect my thoughts, emotions, and decisions. So there must be some kind of back and forth between the Master-Signifiers that exist within my heart and the Master-Signifiers that come from my heart. The things that go from outside to inside (Culture, Traditions, etc.) must effect the things that come out (Master-Signifier decisions).

So, I think what I really want to do is change the decisions I make, change the Master-Signifiers that come out of my heart. I want to change the decisions I habitually make. And in particular the decisions I make with regard to who I want to talk to and when. The only way to change those decisions that come out would be to change the Master-Signifiers within. I have to discover the tones of my world, discover how they have colored my decision making process. And I need to get to a place where I’m comfortable with the Master-Signifiers that come out of my heart, with the choices that I intuit.

Conclusion: Master-Signifiers and Habits

This whole essay is really skirting the issues that I have been calling personal archeology and self-creation for a little while now. The task is to discover the determinants of thought and action and to change them. To give myself a new set of habits by discovering what they are and by replacing them. This is something I’ve usually discussed in Foucauldian terms. But now I have that Lacan, Badiou, and Zizek have given me a new way of conceptualizing it. I am now able to speak in terms of Master-Signifiers and the ones that dwell in my heart. I’m able to speak of the atonality of this world that I live in, and to understand that my relationships are structured by the economy and by other secret tones that I’m not aware of. This has still been such a consistent theme for me. My writing is very personal. It is always about changing myself, understanding myself, examining myself, creating myself.

I just want to talk to more people. I want the decision that comes out of my heart to be the decision to speak. And I need to understand why it is that my environment often encourages me not to speak. It seems to me that we stand at bus stops and we don’t speak to one another because we live in this atonal world. This world where the economy sustains our relationships. This world in which you can’t just talk to people. But I want to replace that Master-Signifier with one of my own, with the idea that I should just speak to people. Just speak. Just talk. I want this message to come out of my heart. ‘Speak! Speak to them all!’

Oh The Thoughts

My head is exploding.

I just finished the first half of Collingwood's Essay On Metaphysics. How exciting.

I have so many thoughts going on leading towards this new essay. But man it feels like a daunting essay.

The next step is to sit down with all of my Collingwood and Foucault books and skim them, reread portions, pull quotations and loosely organize them in my three major sections, and wait for nuance to appear within those sections as a result of my study of the books.

BLAHHHHH.

I'm also feeling quite caffeinated. So I'm feeling intense.

My thoughts are feeling pretty intense.

The Other Day

The other day I was on fire.

I was walking down the street.

Hours before something hap snapped in me.

A switch.

A string.

A fire.

Something had changed.

I was beaming. Booming. Churning.

Something in me had become enflamed in the best way.

I was thinking of Nietzsche.

Thinking of how he said something about the intensity of his own feelings astounded him.

The intensity of my own thoughts and feelings continue to amaze me.

I like it that way.

I have writing projects to work on.

But I'm not quite ready yet.

I won't put it off too much longer, though.

So Long, September.

What an interesting month it has been. What an interesting two months it has been.

What a great year it has been.

Things have changed. I have a new job.

I'm working this one now and I don't know what I'm going to do next.

But I feel really good about that. I have so many different thoughts going on right now.

A large part of it is that I'm reading Collingwood's An Essay On Metaphysics. Such an important book for me to be reading. Such a crucial moment for Collingwood. The book offers me a moment in his life where his views on philosophy, history, and politics intersect in really fascinating way.

And it couldn't come at a better time personally.

As some of you (i.e. none of you or few of you invisible readers) may remember that in May of 2010 I posted an essay on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that I had submitted to a literary journal at Notre Dame. Unfortunately, the journal rejected my paper on the sole grounds that it had been previously published on my blog. Frustrating news that leaves me unsure about my vague goal of becoming a published writer before entering graduate school. So, I have learned a valuable lesson about the danger of blogs. One I may have been warned about earlier.

So one of my goals has been to produce a piece of writing that word be worthy of publication. And, more importantly, to not post the writing on my blog so as not to blow it. So I am working on an essay that will compare Collingwood and Foucault. More specifically, I will analyze their views on the subject, the historical nature of the subject, and the political implications of those views.

The tentative title is 'Why Foucault Needs Collingwood: The Subject, History, And Political Action'.

I hope it will go into some stuff.

I want to make it a nice, clean, concise, and limited statement. This is the type of essay that could into a monster project. And I suspect and hope that part of my future research will be the relationship between Collingwood and Foucault.

I think they represent vital issues. Issues about decision making, war, history, politics. They are really the two philosophers I click with the most so far. And I take philosophy of history so seriously. They are my masters at this point. In the future I'll hopefully be able to move beyond them.

This essay will be another step in that process.