Non-Time and Hauntology

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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby barracuda » Sat Jun 18, 2011 2:32 pm

kelley wrote:is jack or anyone else familiar with george kubler's 'the shape of time'?


A wonderful book, and relevant to the discussion here:

Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of something made a little time ago and so on back without break to the first morning of human time.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Wed Jun 29, 2011 6:35 pm

I know I keep posting about this, sorry can't help it - it's like picking a scab lol. But anyway, yet another Simon Reynolds interview, which I won't post all of (you'll all be relieved to know I'm sure :wink: ) but the "money quote" is interesting



Your journalistic career began in the 1980s, the age when the British music weeklies (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds) were the prime movers in musical critical discourse. Aside from the obvious game-changing nature of the advent of the Internet and the mass diffusion of critical voices that has resulted, how has the art (so to speak) of music criticism evolved from those days? What ideas and approaches to music writing have come and gone since then?

It would take a small book to track that story. The main change I’ve noticed, partly related to the erosion of the gatekeeper function of music critics, is that the messianic or prophetic mode of rock-writing has faded away. Because the critic is rarely introducing readers to something for the first time, the whole “I have heard the future” approach is no longer called for. But also the idea of “the future” of music has eroded for all the reasons I explore in Retromania. We don’t really think so much anymore of a style of music being more advanced than other music forms, or a particular genre or artist being a herald of how music will be. That idea of an axis extending from the past into the future, and which certain artists, records, genres, are further along than others are—who thinks like that anymore? It’s precisely this linear model of time as having a direction that seems to have collapsed under digiculture.


http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/14423 ... eynolds/P1


Applicable to more than just obscure online cultural debates from the early years of the 21st century non?
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edgy & dull a 6 inch valley through the middle of my skull

Postby IanEye » Wed Jul 06, 2011 9:19 pm



"This is my attempt at writing a simple song. I remember reading about the early says of Doo Wop, about people tuning in to these weak little stations and hearing a kind of ethereal/spooky love song drifting back to them.
I relate to that sort of sincere but also dissociative idea of music more than any 'realness'. I like the idea of looking at things through a filter, leaving things to interpretation.
It can be more genuine sometimes to connect on an impersonal level."
- Dayve Hawk
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby Allegro » Tue Jul 12, 2011 10:46 am

.
Who in forever’s name is Alex Roman? Might he be a foremost visual arts creator for displaying 21st century’s ongoing late baroque era in architecture, visual and performing arts?

Thanks to JackRiddler’s essay here, which gave this classically-trained guy pause to think before writing that first paragraph, and to then think again once I had read the two Simon Reynolds’ articles contributed by battleshipkropotkin and gnosticheresy2 in this thread. Thanks to all.

Like JackR wrote in his essay, well, my intention is to expand the hypothesis by adding a broad assumption that brilliant graphic artists such as Alex Roman may create pieces that bring together various art forms, which could then count as another of hundreds of thousands of breakthroughs throughout this 21st century baroque period before a few breakthroughs emerge as those did during the baroque period of architecture, art and music ensconced in Roman Catholicism in the late 16th century through mid 18th century. (Also to be considered are psychological aspects of repressed memories wrt to Hauntology.)

Anyway, this video is so entirely brilliant, I thought some at RI would appreciate the orchestrated sensibilities and exhaustive detail involved in the creation of the piece.

The Third & The Seventh | exquisitely created by Alex Roman
— Best viewed in full screen, obviously

    [From here down are NOTES FROM 3DUP DOT COM; underscores mine] Alex Roman, aka Jorge Seva born in 1979 in Alicante (Spain), and he is one of the most admired artists in this CG Arena lately. Alex is considered as a master by many 3D designers and we are really pleased to publish his creations as a sample of how Computer Graphics are changing our visual experience in this world little by little...

According to Alex: “This is a FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal”.

    CREDITS

    Computer Graphics: Modelling, Texturing, Illumination, Rendering: Alex Roman. Done with Autodesk 3dsmax, V-Ray (Chaos Software), Adobe AfterEffects and Adobe Premiere.

    Postproduction and Editing: Alex Roman.

    Music: Sequenced, Orchestrated and Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar and EWQLSO Gold Pro XP).

    Sound Design by Alex Roman. Based on Original Scores by Michael Laurence Edward Nyman (The Departure), and Charles-Camille Saint-Saens (Le Carnaval des Animaux).

    Directed by Alex Roman.

REFER ONE | REFER TWO, FINAL VERSION | REFER THREE | REFER FOUR
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 12, 2011 1:16 pm

Image

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen ... -jerusalem

"I've come to think that the universe is a four-dimensional site in which nothing is changing and nothing is moving. The only thing that is moving along the time axis is our consciousness. The past is still there, the future has always been here. Every moment that has existed or will ever exist is all part of this giant hyper-moment of space-time."

Confused? Moore puts it this way. "If you think about a standard journey in three dimensions -- say, being in a car driving along a road, the houses you're passing are vanishing behind you, but you don't doubt that if you could reverse the car, the houses would still be there. Our consciousness is only moving one way through time but I believe physics tells us all those moments are still there -- and when we get to the end of our lives, there's nowhere for our consciousness to go, except back to the beginning. We have our lives over and over again."

Moore is friends with (and revered by) several leading physicists -- many of whom will gladly tell you there are probably more than three spatial dimensions. He is particularly taken with the pop-star-turned-TV-populariser of science Brian Cox, and asked him recently: "How do you square the second law of thermodynamics with your earlier assertion that 'Things Can Only Get Better?'" (This joke is very funny to only a very small number of people.)

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Usually Just a T-Shirt

Postby IanEye » Tue Jul 12, 2011 1:52 pm



".gninnigeb eht ot tpecxe ,og ot ssensuoicsnoc ruo rof erehwon s'ereht ,sevil ruo fo dne eht ot teg ew nehw dna"

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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby Allegro » Sun Jul 24, 2011 4:11 pm

.
WRex, just to let you know your quote hadn't passed this guy since I had refreshed my memory by rereading a couple of days before your post the laws of thermodynamics. So, yeah, the opportunity to :hihi: was mine. I think it was the image that got me good.
Wombaticus Rex wrote:... He is particularly taken with the pop-star-turned-TV-populariser of science Brian Cox, and asked him recently: "How do you square the second law of thermodynamics with your earlier assertion that 'Things Can Only Get Better?'"...
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Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:52 pm

MacCruiskeen wrote:From Pere LeBrun, the website of Wayne Kasper, a very good writer I've only just chanced upon. Right at the end, he says, "Admittedly, this post is half-baked, anecdotal and impressionistic," but I found there's a hell of a lot in it that resonated with me very strongly (and I don't even live in Britain).

------------------------------------------------------------------------


29 May 2011
Their Cave (And Welcome To It)


The real creation myth of the west.


Here's some autobiography, a banal excerpt, far more dull than some things I could tell you: Recently I was employed as a Census Collector. The pleasant weather was conducive to working on foot, and I like to move around when working. I wasn't confined to a poorly-ventilated office, overseen by a David Brent, populated by nodding replicants of all ages. I doubt most would describe me as a 'people person' (I'd prefer to see myself as discerning), but working face-to-face with 'the public' has always been preferable; and I'm far more at ease doing so than most colleagues I've had. Moreover, compared to most of the shit on offer, the pay was quite good. I could choose my hours and decide how to use them. If you covered your brief within two days, or even one, you still got paid for five. So, whatever. I've seen much worse.

At this point you're probably expecting a tirade about precarious employment, government tenders or bad management. Or how my fine mind* was entitled to something more ennobling. Sorry, but no dice. I accepted all that as given as soon as I saw the job ad. To engage in such a critique would be as redundant as saying Big Macs smell like shit, or Saturday night TV is like a Nuremberg rally for eight-year olds. Let's just say what predictably poor training prepared us for wasn't reflected in actual experience. The media tried to stir up the possibility of a middle-class revolt (their favoured kind); or in training, anarcho-crusties binning their forms in the name of protest. Apart from one doorway bore who lectured me on why he shouldn't be expected to bother, even though he would anyway (I'd hate to be his son, I thought), it was a hassle-free process. I'd go so far as saying that it was rather enjoyable.

Those who 'failed' (keep that word in mind) to complete questionnaires had pretty everyday (that too) reasons. To wit: Old age, disabilities of varying severity, mental illness, extended stays in hospital, adult illiteracy, limited English, parents of disabled children, parents of many children, new mothers, underage mothers, sheltered accommodations, transient bedsitters, immigrant workers in precarious accommodation, overworked service workers like carers or nurses, or newly-independent young people unaware of what a Census actually is. In a nutshell, those that the government has decided to fuck over with extreme prejudice; with more popular support than many would care to admit. Here's the point where you expect me to Con/Dem the filth overseeing or enabling this; but I'm afraid you're in for more disappointment. I'm not quite sure where I'm heading here. Believe it or not, most of my posts are 'improvised' whatever the subject; so expect a ramble. However, at this stage I'm bored with attacking the government, in writing at least. It's something else, something that's been niggling me way before the last election; something in the corner of the eye that may only be clear at given moments.

In my designated area was a peaceful bar/cafe where I would organise my paperwork at the end of a shift. With that out of the way (give or take any other commitments) I'd sit, watch and listen to the other customers. Their accents, their body language, their appearance, and indeed their subjects of conversation, had little or nothing in common with those I had just visited. It's doubtful that any of them completed their Census more than a week late, if late at all. Although they weren't all white, healthy and middle-class, they were still unrepresentative of the surrounding area with which I had become aquainted. In the cafe, they weren't hipsters and they weren't the 'beautiful people', but as a micro-demographic they would be defined as 'normality'. For want of a better term, their proportional representation would be mirrored in an evening soap opera, or indeed polling booths. To all intents and purposes, they appeared very much at home in British society.

In younger days, this juxtaposition may have led to a vague sense of resentment or hostility; but it wasn't that. It was a sense of... not sadness (although I may have veered towards that, if forced to label my emotions)... but numbness, a sense of comprehensive distance; without any feelings of omniscience or superiority. I couldn't help but wonder if these feelings were shared by the clientele I observed. The chitchat, the greetings, body language, common reference points: to filter the content and pay attention to the styles, rhythms, structures and themes of communication (the treacherous rewards of studying English Literature), I couldn't help but conclude that this distance was shared around the room. It was even observable with parents of young children, families. I really hope I'm making sense here, but what came to define their interactions were the hard limits of what they didn't do or say. I'm not talking about Hollywood 'emotion' or Oprah-confession either. Many of the people I visited had a more openly conversational manner than the people socialising in front of me, despite their non-stop banter. Those I visited discussed the circumstances of their life (not negatively, I must add), their medical or family conditions, or if recently arrived in their homes (or country) how they came to be there. I assure you that as a lazy hack I made no attempt to extract this information from them. This was in stark contrast to the volume of discussion in the cafe about consumer goods, newspaper articles, films or indeed 'relationships'; largely discussed in terms familiar from any number of TV shows or lifestyle magazines. They probably saw themselves as working definitions of 'everyday people'. In a harsher mood, I'd argue that their mutual/self-image may be superfluous to life as it is generally lived; but I'm reluctant - if not unable - to make moral judgements. I'm struggling to define it as something else.

Here's a less (?) banal slice of autobiography, which may or may not be relevant: One winter I became hooked on Mad Men, in a way I no longer would on a TV series. This was during one of my periodic bouts of lonely alienation, at levels so acute it can feel almost purifying, if not vaguely mystical. It encouraged another, but far less periodic, tic of mine; something familiar to anyone who's heard of 'chaos magick' (or watched Seinfeld): the decision to behave and conduct oneself in a consciously superficial manner, according to an image you want to project, protect, and in some senses believe. Yep, that's the embarrassing truth. I wanted to be Donald Draper for Christmas. I set myself strict rules about how I would dress, what I would discuss and how I would discuss it; with a view to maintaining this image at all times in almost every situation. I never lied, but what I would 'reveal' would be subject to strict boundaries. I reshuffled my persona according to how familiar I was with the company I kept. This wasn't with a particular goal in mind, and socially I've always been quite lazy (see above - I'm not offering advice on how to get laid here), but you know what? It 'worked' in a way that still freaks me out. How it did I'll leave to your imagination, but the problem(s) arose from a gradual, unavoidable, revelation of depth. Those drawn to this deliberate 'emptiness' became hostile to much of anything beyond that. I never 'cheated'. Nor did I make a sudden turn to the 'dark side'. I just eventually relaxed. Nonetheless, initial plasticity was rewarded with what's regarded as 'good' according to mainstream mores. My minor downfall came from discussing life beyond the spectacle. Where my error of judgement occurred depends on one's relationship to said spectacle; so I'll leave you to make up your own minds about this episode, or seasonal arc. You may even find it creepy, if not a little Mr. Ripley-psycho, but in my defence these adjustments were actually quite minor; little more than an 'edit' of sorts. And anyway... how many of us do the same throughout our working lives, friendships, even marriages?

OK - maybe I'm still not being clear, so let's return to those I was paid to visit. Despite being an 'official' presence in their homes, many of them interacted (with me, with each other) and behaved with far more ease and candor than anyone I saw in that cafe over six weeks (or since), however drunk they got. For reasons practical or social, most of those visited would be invisible, if not absent, from public spaces; particularly the indentikit retail spaces of most British city centres. The way such areas are designed, policed and operated has accentuated this 'absence' since the 90s. This isn't just the case with shopping - nightlife seems to conform to this pattern ever more, whatever the venue. Gone are the days when beauty (or rather excellent grooming) would stand out in a run-of-the-mill bar or restaurant. It's a common standard that isn't explicitly demanded, but agreed to as much as contemporary codes of behaviour and conversation. To get dystopian about it, I'd argue that the spectrum of clientele in these spaces rarely ventures outside what their flyers, adverts and billboards insist it is. Even how we 'let it all hang out' offers no contradiction to how it's marketed. By this I don't just mean beauty or fashion, but the general way our relationship to capitalism's spectacle can be a mutually affirming, but for one party reductive, process. As the political mainstream (or 'centre') contracts its discursive boundaries, I've found this to be the case with political discussion too. Not just in newspapers and TV, but in the online jungle and the meanderings of daily life. Conversation has become as formulaic as Hollywood genres, but I just know this wasn't always the case.

'Our' imaginations, 'our' public life, even 'our' emotions - can it be they've been subjected to a rapid** segregation, gentrification and enclosure, as severe and asymmetrical as it's been for those late with their Census? As a lifelong pedestrian, I claim a certain privilege: I can stop, look and move through society as it may actually be, if regarded in terms of its majority. The majority that doesn't speed past society in cars from A to B, huddle together within property/career cliques, or use leisure time get drunk or buy tat in designated 'centres', or indeed participate in the great wall of noise known as 'public opinion'. This became particularly apparent to me when I stopped following pop music, watching TV and movies, or reading newspapers much. Being left with little to talk about except politics or personal relationships/gossip just left me with little to talk about - to discuss those matters in depth seems to have become increasingly unwelcome (all plot and no character). Which may be the main impetus behind this blog. Those unwilling or unable to participate in this aren't so much the 'silent majority' as the invisible majority; perhaps only clear and present to each other, or those paid to work with them (itself subject to the requirements of the spectacle - listen to a policeman, teacher or social worker discuss themselves/'them'. Chances are you'll hear a fair share of TV cliches, however ridiculous). I've done that kind of work myself (and I wasn't immune to cliches, either). When I did, something became apparent: what are designated as vices, social problems, emotional issues, circumstantial difficulties, cultural barriers, family dysfunction, 'risk factors' - it's all just life to the vast majority of us. It was this that bothered me far more than levels of bureaucracy or managerial control. This is a living, breathing world of difference, trouble, surprise and experience. The mainstream, the spectacle, the 'centre' - it has less and less room for any of it. Why do so many people expect it to have room for them? Why fight for space in the coffin before it slowly closes?

Admittedly, this post is half-baked, anecdotal and impressionistic. I offer no manifesto, nor any moral assessment of 'how people are'. Or I at least hope not. My feelings on the above may just be a symptom of some undiagnosed mental illness; and if it is, I'll be far from alone in that. It's just something that seems to lurk around what I see, do, and discuss these days: a culture of full spectrum surface, a quiet 'singularity' that really has had profound effect on how those identified as 'normal' relate to each other. A deliberate - and relatively recent - exclusion of depth, any attempts to entertain it, or identify things for what they are (why this need to find so much significance in empty product?). A consensus imposed without (much) violence, but no less aggressive in its demands. How this has occurred remains unclear. I may even completely change perspective, and happily immerse myself in it all; as so many seem to have already done, following a voluntary lobotomy. So much so that I may even delete this post very soon. Saying that, comments are even more welcome than usual. It's not as though my 'worldview' is as complete and tidy as that colonizing the public mind. If no comments are forthcoming, it remains to be seen whether I rest my case, or make an urgent doctor's appointment. I doubt either option would put my mind at rest, but maybe 'rest' is the last thing our minds need under present circumstances.


*Not a boast. I assume most of us have one, in one way or the other.

**I can't help but see this process as having accelerated, and consolidated, over the past decade.

ADDENDUM
Dismiss not, however, the genuine concerns of our most vulnerable volk. If we call them pricks, do they not bleed? Or at least command their audiences (and advertisers) to share their pain?

http://perelebrun.blogspot.com/2011/05/ ... to-it.html
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:44 am

The landscape is barren

Image

culture, media, everything seems to reflect this at this snapshot in time
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:52 am

Re: op.

Time Magazine = spooks, or intelligence agents.

"Hauntology" = spooks, study of....

Get it? duh.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Mon Aug 15, 2011 4:40 am

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:Re: op.

Time Magazine = spooks, or intelligence agents.

"Hauntology" = spooks, study of....

Get it? duh.


Well you certainly don't.
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby justdrew » Tue Aug 16, 2011 12:30 am

August 13, 2011
The Elusive Big Idea
By NEAL GABLER

Neal Gabler is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California and the author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.”

THE July/August issue of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Take a deep breath. The ideas include “The Players Own the Game” (No. 12), “Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was” (No. 6), “Nothing Stays Secret” (No. 2), and the very biggest idea of the year, “The Rise of the Middle Class — Just Not Ours,” which refers to growing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Now exhale. It may strike you that none of these ideas seem particularly breathtaking. In fact, none of them are ideas. They are more on the order of observations. But one can’t really fault The Atlantic for mistaking commonplaces for intellectual vision. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests.

There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.

But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it. The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less.

We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems. Freud taught us to explore our minds as a way of understanding our emotions and behaviors. Einstein rewrote physics. More recently, McLuhan theorized about the nature of modern communication and its effect on modern life. These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

BUT the analogy isn’t perfect. For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.

The implications of a society that no longer thinks big are enormous. Ideas aren’t just intellectual playthings. They have practical effects.

An artist friend of mine recently lamented that he felt the art world was adrift because there were no longer great critics like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg to provide theories of art that could fructify the art and energize it. Another friend made a similar argument about politics. While the parties debate how much to cut the budget, he wondered where were the John Rawlses and Robert Nozicks who could elevate our politics.

One could certainly make the same argument about economics, where John Maynard Keynes remains the center of debate nearly 80 years after propounding his theory of government pump priming. This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.

But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences like the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has theorized on everything from the source of language to the role of genetics in human nature, or the biologist Richard Dawkins, who has had big and controversial ideas on everything from selfishness to God, or the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been analyzing different moral systems and drawing fascinating conclusions about the relationship of morality to political beliefs. But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.

No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word.

Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational. It is thinkers who are in short supply, and the situation probably isn’t going to change anytime soon.

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby marycarnival » Tue Aug 16, 2011 12:49 am

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.


Nice.

Thx for posting, drew.
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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby tazmic » Tue Aug 16, 2011 11:36 am

"Are our mobile phones ‘electro-libidinal parasites’?"

Based on a talk by Mark Fisher at Virtual Futures 2.0'11 (audio available)

NO TIME

"Looking back ten or 15 years ago, who cared about constant communication apart from teenagers? Who has got control of time, and how have they got control of it? Fisher believes that our mobile phones are ‘communicational parasites with a very low-level jouissance’; they are capable of tainting all other levels of enjoyment with their constant pull on our attention. ‘Why are we so ready to accept the story that technology delivers modernity, when actually... it’s pretty clear from the last decade alone that changes in technology aren’t enough on their own to deliver new culture?’ he asks."
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

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Re: Non-Time and Hauntology

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:19 am


http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151850

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

Posted on July 31, 2011, Printed on August 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_ ... resistance


Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.

The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”


Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/

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