Posts Tagged “Philosophy”

06w44:1 The Language of Quotation

by timothy. 3 Comments

‘When the individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship. Illness and inadvertent death are not things to be feared. He practices one of the arts, or philosophy or mathematics, or plays a game of one-handed chess. When he wishes, he kills himself. When a man is the master of his own life, he is also the master of his death.’
‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.
‘Of course. There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations’.

-Jorge Luis Borges, A Weary Man’s Utopia (1975)

Somehow the world has become a mediocre comic book, as predictable as a Star Trek episode. I grew up watching Star Trek and still love it for its graphic design, but it was never embarrassed about cannibalizing from its past storylines, and eventually it got so bad that ten minutes into an episode you could anticipate the entire plot-line. But this is an effect not confined to a show like Star Trek, it is true of almost anything on television. I was surprised when I read Chapter 18 of John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards earlier this year in the way he blended his view of art history and it’s failure to adequately resolve itself to television, which he saw as the logical conclusion of centuries of attempts at realistic image making. Image making, he thought, is tied to our desires for rituals. And TV combines animated images with ritual plot-lines, as predictable to contemporary viewers as those reciting along with a priest as he holds up the host. As he wrote:

People are drawn to television as they are to religions by the knowledge that they will find there what they already know. Reassurance is consistency and consistency is repetition. Television – both drama and public affairs – consists largely of stylized popular mythology in which there are certain obligatory characters who must say and do certain things in a particular order. After watching the first minute of any television drama, most viewers could lay out the scenario that will follow, including the conclusion. Given the first line of banter in most scenes, a regular viewer could probably rhyme off the next three or four lines. Nothing can be more formal, stylized and dogmatic than a third-rate situation comedy or a television news report on famine in Africa. There is more flexibility in a Catholic mass or in classic Chinese opera.

He went on to say, and I think this is a kicker given how it was probably written in the 1980s:

The rise of CNN (Cable News Network) canonizes the television view of reality as concrete, action-packed visuals. Wars make good television, providing the action is accessible and prolonged. The Middle East, for example, is an ideal setting for television war. Cameras can be permanently on the spot, and a fixed scenario of weekly car bombs, riots and shelling ensures that the television structure will have ongoing material.

(It makes Steven Colbert’s joke about this past summer’s Israel-Lebanese war more than just a joke but a perfectly conscious reflection of the reality of the situation). In addition, the violence on television reflects a long Western tradition in depicting violence, seen in graphic mediaeval crucifixions and the tortured damned we are familiar with from those seemingly unenlightened times.

But from the enlightened times we got Goya’s image, the sleep of reason producing monsters. As Mark Kingwell points out in his essay ‘Critical Theory and Its Discontents’ the image’s caption can be read two ways, as either ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’ or ‘the dream of reason produces monsters’.1 John Ralston Saul, with Voltaire’s Bastards took the later interpretation for his thesis. But the experience of this decade is one of the first reading: the thoughtlessness of the times producing predictable nightmares.

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Everything has gotten so insane that peace and quiet and non-interaction certainly has a lot more appeal. No need to answer the same old questions about how I am, which are rhetorical and meaningless, no need to tell the same boring stories about myself or the state of my life, no need to feel the peer pressure of conforming to someone else’s idea of who I am, who I should be, or how I should be. It is better in this decade to withdraw and watch operas on DVD (Wagner’s The Ring), or famous TV shows (Battlestar Gallactica is like such a masterpiece); and to avoid browsing websites too much because it just seems to add to the sense that everything has gone to bullshit, as MacLeans seems to think as well. So I missed the whole beauty video thing until the day before I saw it on the front page of the Toronto Star, and as I’ve been adjusting over the past month to a 6.30am wake up time to become a ‘corporate minion of patriarchy’ (my Halloween costume) I’m not so eager to go a’gathering for goodreads. I’ve been warning you all for months now that this project isn’t what it used to be, and that will continue to be true in the future. This list began small enough that I knew my audience – drank and laughed with some of you in the past – but now has become anonymous and my motivations for doing it continue to be some sick sense of responsibility to do my part to inform whoever might come a’googlin. I should be much more selfish and egotistical to fit in properly I know. But my work on the web in the past has come from a desire to document, and at this time I would like to use this list to promote and to document for whatever that’s worth.

Death of a President was released in North America on Friday, and it probably won’t be in theatres for long. Not that it matters, because it will attain a deserved cult-status on DVD or streamed from wherever. First of all, having never seen George W. Bush in person he has always been nothing but an animated image to me. Real through portrayal and the delusion of the animated image, and so fitting, I think, to see that image manipulated into another version of a potential reality borrowed from many months from now. The skill of the digital effects became apparent very quickly; ten minutes into it I recognized it as a masterpiece, a shockingly effective use of Photoshop-like tech, and a devastating commentary on current global-american-centric-politics. I mean, what other President of the United States has inspired a fictional yet realistic depiction of his assassination while still in office to the extant that the film is presented as an historical documentary on the subject?This blending of time – watching images from a future, depicting an event from a year from now, presented as some bleeding-heart leftist documentary typically shown on CBC Newsworld on Sunday nights, twists itself into the cold water blast of just how stupid everything has gotten (given how the movie is built out of the current media clichés, from the dialogue right up the structure) but also how we’re caught up in a television dream dictating reality to us. The film hits all the right points, with an eerie accuracy, from the deluded missus posing as Bush’s speechwriter saying how he was somehow connected to God, to the political backdrop of North Korea and Iran. The speeches have been written and the players have taken to the stage and Shakespeare’s famous line has never seemed more true.And for that reason, for the sheer fictionalization of our reality, this moment in later history which seems real because it is on TV, real through portrayal, this film will also be must-see viewing for Presidential historians, both present and future. I am compelled to write about it now, to time-stamp this text with the current date, so that there is evidence to future researchers that this movie came out a year before the October 2007 events that it depicts. I would like to think that this movie will still be watched in future years, long after the Bush administration; as a sociological study of this decade, a study in documentary narrative, as an art film, and as an historical marker of the transformative power of Photoshop-like effects. I got a glismpe watching this movie of the media-scape of the upcoming century and felt future-shock. Nuanced political discourse through fictional history, which only highlights our current confusion between memory and thought. This film is cultural evidence that we can only seem to think through the ‘hindsight is always 20/20’ trope, and that retrospective documentaries have become so prevalent in the age of the self-absorbed baby-boomer-at-the-controls-of-everything (and hence a narcissistic mediascape on their politics, youth, and classic album collections) that it’s only fitting to examine a presidency’s attack on civil liberties through the genre.The CBS Sunday Morning program had a piece on Oct 29 on the beauty video and Photoshop – explaining what young creative people take for granted to the old foggies who watch that sentimental sunday morning sunshine stuff. And the key is what young people are taking for granted versus what the old foggies running the show have in their minds about our future. An older person close to me the other day posited that I might live long enough to see one of Toronto’s main traffic arteries – the Don Valley Parkway – turned into a double-decker highway. As if allowing for more greenhouse gas emitting machines would be an adequate solution to our traffic problems, a vision completely oblivious to environmental concerns. I countered I’d much rather see a better public transit infrastructure built. But of course, I understand where this idea comes from. It’s classic ‘cars are a great and my identity as a man is tied to the sense of freedom they bring me and the teenage sense of fuck you I never got over’. It’s the same mid-twentieth century mentality that you get from politicians when they promote the need for more people to study math and science, because not only is there a space race and we have to prove that consumerist democracy rocks, but because we need all those future engineers to retro-fit these highways into double-decker monstrosities. Ah these old people: it’s enough to wish them all dead, or at least look forward to the future when they’ve left the scene and we can build the world into something more fair and beautiful. They all gave up after Bobby was assassinated, and you can watch all about it on November 23rd. What a contrast. We’re in a situation when eloquent and visionary politicians are now part of a dreamy past, while our present is made up of inarticulate war-mongering folks notable for their lack of vision. That doesn’t seem to me a sign of a healthy state of affairs.

Wishing a certain old-foggie dead is precisely what director Gabriel Range has tapped into. I saw it at a 3:50 matinee with four other people. That is to say, I went alone and there were only three other people in the audience. I’m not sure if that’s worthy of mention – seeing late afternoon matinees on Sunday afternoons isn’t popular enough to be stereotypical. But it also contributed to the feeling that I was watching a secret masterpiece living up to art’s typical response from consumerist culture. They were told to not watch it by the media who readily quoted the likes of Hillary Clinton who thought it was ‘despicable‘. It fits into the thoughts I’ve had lately about Hitler’s famous degenerate art show: Hitler, as John Carey pointed out in his 2005 book What Good are the Arts? was being populist with that exhibit, selling the public their own prejudices toward modern art. But there is a theory about how art is a psychological reflection of the zeitgeist, capturing the spirit of the age, and it seems to be ironic that Hitler, in promoting this to mock it, provided an historical marker for modernist art and highlighted the degeneracy of the society which legitimately elected him in 1933. It was degenerate art made within a degenerate society and Hitler unwittingly held up a mirror thinking it a spotlight. Whenever politicians start making pronouncements on cultural products, one has to think something significant is going on which will need explaining to future generations: that it is an art historical moment.

We’re supposed to all know the game. It’s what makes a film like Death of President possible: string together all the tv documentary clichés for an audience made sophisticated enough by an ambient televised environment to not be confused by the fiction. But of course I say that as someone who saw it with four other people, a film which as far as box-office measures go, did not exist, and as someone with the capacity to reflect on what I saw. As I walked out of the theatre I heard the terrified screams coming from the next theatre-room, looking back I saw the poster for Saw III. Of course Geogre Bush is President in a time when watching violence is what enough people want to do to make it the top film this weekend. You might point out a horror movie is appropriate for Halloween, but Halloween is only appropriate for children. The popularity of violence in whatever manner just highlights our collective immaturity and our inability to grow beyond a mediaeval past, as Bush’s recent moves toward the elimination of habeas corpus show.

JRS wrote: ‘This perpetual motion machine works effortlessly if the flood of images illustrates situations the viewer already understands. That is one of the explanations for the system’s concentration on two or three wars when there are forty or so going on around the world. The others are eliminated because they are less accessible on a long-term basis. Or because the action is less predictable and regular. Or because the issue involved does not fit easily into the West’s over-explained, childlike scenarios of Left versus Right or black versus white. Or because the need for endless images makes television structures unwilling to undertake the endless verbal explanations and nonvisual updates which would be required for the other thirty-seven wars to be regularly presented.’ This was first published in 1992. In the time between now and then, nothing has changed. While the audience have grown more sophisticated, so has television’s methods at keeping the conversation simple. But for me, there is another question, and that is, why? Why is any of this important? Ritual? That alone seems too simple an explanation. I watch TV for the illusion of company and for the occasional good, or big idea.

What is television for? Some will say it’s merely to get us to buy things, but others will say it is to inform. But are we being informed or frustrated? Isn’t anything political on television simply a way of frustrating a democratic citizenship into feelings of impotence when faced with such inane political figures? And isn’t it this sense of frustration precisely what leads to the events depicted in Death of a President? That’s not something you’d get with an uninformed populace, nor perhaps one you’d get if the political machinery actually could register the democratic will of the population. We remain dictated to, told what to think about movies by Hillary Clinton or whatever expert they got hold of at the local university.

I first read Borges’ story, A Weary Man’s Utopia in the winter of 2001 following you know what, when the shit had hit the fan and all the flags were flying. It is the story of a man’s afternoon visit with a fellow in a far distant future. He tells the the fellow

‘In that strange yesterday from which I have come,’ I replied, ‘there prevailed the superstition that between one evening and the next morning, events occur that it would be shameful to have no knowledge of. The planet was peopled by spectral collectives – Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, the Common Market. Almost no one knew the prior history of those Platonic entities, yet everyone was informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues or the imminent breaking off relations between one of these entities and another and the messages that their presidents sent back and forth – composed by a secretary to the secretary, and in the prudent vagueness that the form requires. All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities. Of all functions, that of the politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a minister was a sort of cripple who had to be transported in long, noisy vehicles surrounded by motorcyclists and grenadiers and stalked by eager photographers. One would have thought their feet had been cut off, my mother used to say. Images and the printed word were more real than things. People believed only want they could read on the printed page. The principle, means and end of our singular conception of the world was esse est percipi – “to be is to be portrayed”. In the past I lived in, people were credulous.

I would like to think that in the years since it was published in 1975, people have become less credulous. But the forms of these popular delusions have only aggregated more nuance, so that things are not only read, but heard and seen, and people believe what they read on screens. Or at least the old foggies who are freaked out by Wikipedia seem to think so, severely underestimating the capacities of people to understand the collective nature of the site.

As for politicians being cripples: I recently saw a motorcade come up University Avenue in Toronto and turn onto Queen St – first the chorus of motorbike cops, lead by someone who parked in the center of the intersection, leaping off to perform his ritual in the same manner a parodist would: exaggerated self importance as he held the traffic back, like a romantic hero confronting a tide, and along came the parade of black cars with their two-wheeler escorts. Who was this asshole? I thought. Some celebrity? I still don’t know, although I later heard the Prime Minister was in town. Perhaps it was him. But it seems to me that to parade around in black cars with tinted windows reveals a foolish paranoia: they all think they’re important enough to be assassinated and so hide from us as if we’re all crazy, showing a contempt for the citizenry which is unfair. Leaders shouldn’t hide from us and treat us as if we’re dangerous. But ironically that’s precisely the type of behaviour that leads to the protests they need to be protected from. – Timothy

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1. The essay is found in the book Practical Judgments pages 171-181 and the quote is itself a quote from one of the books he’s reviewing; the orginal thought is attributed to the introduction by David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy in their 1994 book, Critical Theory.
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Death of a President | Official Film Site
http://www.deathofapresident.com/

Death of a President | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_President

CNN, NPR turn down ads for Death of a President | CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2006/10/25/doap-ads.html

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 30 October 2006 @ 10:39 PM

06w21:1 Forgeting the Soil

by timothy. 0 Comments

 

Last night I caught the CBC1 Ideas re-broadcast of the 2004 symposium held to discuss Jane Jacobs’ last book, Dark Age Ahead. Toward the end of the program Nobel-winning economist Robert Lucas presented a picture of things being great just as they are. According to Lucas, the movement away from ‘the idiocy of rural life’ (a phrase he credited to Marx) was a good thing and nothing to be concerned about. I was dumbfounded to hear this, questioning the limits of his imagination. If everyone moved to cities, where would our food come from?

What then followed was a presentation by Norman Wirzba, who brought up my concerns with an eloquent speech on this basic problem, which is one of ignorance about the cycles of life. This ignorance is encouraged by city-living and tempts us to believe that we live in a post-agrarian age. His point is that we do not, nor could we realistically.

His talk was so good that I contacted him after the broadcast to request a copy of his paper to post on Goodreads. He got back to me this morning and it can now be found at the link below. – Timothy
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The Forgetting of Soil: A Response to Dark Age Ahead | Norman Wirzba
http://goodreads.ca/normanwirzba/
“The steady migration of people from farms or rural areas to cities or suburbs, a migration pattern now being replicated across the globe, means that very few of us have any realistic or honest idea of where food comes from, and under what conditions it can be expected to be safely and reliably produced. Food is conveniently and cheaply purchased at the store. […] Given the important insight that culture is not primarily transmitted through the written page or computer screen but rather that ‘cultures live through word of mouth and example,’ (5) a fundamental question emerges: does the victory of urbanization over agrarian life nonetheless signal a long-term defeat if it means the loss of living, concrete examples of sustainable engagement with the land? Who in our society, what face-to-face apprenticeships, will pass on the wisdom we need to live well in bodies that are themselves dependent on the health and vitality of other biological bodies and systems?”

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 24 May 2006 @ 2:45 PM

Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence

by timothy. 1 Comment

Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 3 (Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence)


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Religion and Violence | Charles Taylor
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/lectures/taylor/rel_violence04.html
“Religion and Violence explores the complex relationship among modernity, religion, and categorical violence – namely, violence directed against people on the basis of their belonging to a certain category or group. Professor Charles Taylor will discuss the rising tide of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism, and ask what connection this phenomenon has to modernity.”
Note: I went to this lecture in November, and these are the notes

Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence | The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright
http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/media/taylor_se041128.ram
Real Audio file on the above lecture, recorded a week later (48.53min)

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emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 22 February 2005 @ 4:09 PM

05w03:1 The Enlightenment

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 3 number 1 (The Enlightenment)


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Group Think | Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_12_02_a_snl.htm
“Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it ‘philosophical laughing,’ which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people w
ill come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.”Although this article begins with an history of Saturday Night Live, it also contains a history of the Lunar Society

The Lunar Society | BBC Radio 4
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime_20030605.ram
this links directly to a Real Media file and will launch your player. It is a radio discussion on the history of the Lunar Society that Gladwell wrote about

French Enlightenment overrated, historian says | Chuck Leddy
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/29/RVG5H8BCEK1.DTL
“Himmelfarb’s basic contention, one she supports with great passion and wide-ranging scholarship, is that the great 18th century French Enlightenment has been vastly overrated and that the British and American Enlightenments have been comparatively underrated. Her goal in writing this book is to ‘reclaim the Enlightenment … from the French who have dominated and usurped it’ and restore it to the British and Americans.”

The Enlightenment | Robert Wokler
http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf
“On the other hand, the same critics of an Enlightenment Project, […] commonly trace its conceptual roots to eighteenth-century philosophy. They are convinced that modernity was bred from the loins of the Enlightenment, out of its notions of the rights of man and its principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, which brought the age of feudalism to a close. If they are communitarians or post-modernists, they seldom hesitate to blame the Enlightenment for having conceived that monstrous child which our civilization has become, since they believe that, even while disposing of original sin, the philosophes of the eighteenth century actually committed it. The attempts of eighteenth-century thinkers to free human nature from the shackles of tradition are alleged to have given rise either to the empty desolation of atomistic individualism or to schemes of social engineering on a vast scale, or indeed to both at once. Such propositions, in different permutations, inform Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. I mean to show here that both propositions—that the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed, and that modernity springs from the Enlightenment—are false.”PDF file, 115 KB

PR men of reason | Anthony Daniels
http://tinyurl.com/5ywge
“We are all children of the Enlightenment, even if historical experience has taught us that rationality and benevolence do not necessarily go hand in hand, to put it mildly. The Enlightenment, indeed, could be regarded as a second expulsion from Eden: an imperfect Eden of cruelty and superstition to be sure, but one which at least contained a degree of stability and a number of comforting religious certitudes. Having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the Enlightenment, however, we cannot ever return to that imperfect Eden. We have been destined ever since to live in a permanent effervescence of expanding knowledge and competing ideas.”

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 19 January 2005 @ 11:18 PM

04w50:2 Erasing de Kooning

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 50 number 2 (erasing de Kooning)


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Antonio Negri: The Nostalgic Revolutionary | Adrian Hamilton
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2004/0817negri.htm
“I try to think of a polite way to remind him of the fact that every communist revolution of the 20th century lead to tyranny and mass murder. And a nice way to say that communism was a betrayal of the democratic values of the left. […] Negri recently described the Soviet Union as ‘a society criss-crossed with extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom’, which is more than he has ever said for any democracy. He even says that the Soviet Union fell because it was too successful. I point this out, and he replies: ‘Now you are talking about memory. Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism. The most beautiful thing is to think ‘against’, to think ‘new’. Memory prevents revolt, rejection, invention, revolution.’ He leans back as though he has brilliantly rebutted any critique of communism. So, is he seriously saying that we should never look at history, that the left should carry on as though communism was a great success, that we should not reconsider our values at all? […] None of the world’s real problems – from poverty to tyranny to climate change – are discussed in Negri’s work, except to claim that the poor are ‘more alive’, and the citizens of liberal democracies are living under the ‘real tyranny’, and… oh, I give up. It’s not just that this preacher of Empire has no clothes; he is living in an intellectual nudist colony. There are some important anti-globalisation writers, such as Monbiot and Joseph Stiglitz. But Negri is trying to keep alive a patient – Marxism – whose heart stopped beating long ago. So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.”

The philosopher as dangerous liar | Patrick West
http://tinyurl.com/3jsvt
“In his 1977 pamphlet Forget Foucault, the eminent French social historian Jean Baudrillard argued that Foucault’s writings are themselves discourses in power that impose their own narrative, projecting their own will to truth. Those who lionise this ‘author’ today, devoted as they are to this source of power-knowledge, continue to contradict themselves. Perhaps it is time to take heed of Baudrillard’s exhortation. Perhaps it is time to forget Foucault.”

Feeling sorry for Rosalind Krauss | Roger Kimball
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/11/may93/krauss.htm
“It is easy to be exasperated with Rosalind Krauss. She is pretentious, obscurantist, and mean-spirited. Enjoying a position of great academic respect, she has, through her writings, teaching, and editorship of October, exercised a large and baneful influence on contemporary writing and thinking about culture. In the end, however, one’s exasperation is likely to be mixed with pity. Here is a woman who has devoted her professional life to art and ideas but who clearly has no feeling for art and for whom ideas are ghostly playthings utterly cut off from reality.” Article date May 1993

The Derrida Industry | Brian Leiter
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/the_derrida_ind.html
“Of course, even Wittgenstein and Heidegger are controversial choices, though in terms of sheer impact, they are plainly in a wholly different league from Derrida, so much so that anyone knowledgeable about 20th-century European and Anglophone philosophy and intellectual culture must laugh out loud at Professor Taylor’s dishonest hyperbole. (Why do those in literary studies think the intellectual world revolves around their once proud discipline, now enfeebled by three decades of bad philosophy, bad history, and bad social science?) […]If he had become a football player as he had apparently hoped, or taken up honest work of some other kind, then we might simply remember him as a ‘good man.’ But he devoted his professional life to obfuscation and increasing the amount of ignorance in the world: by ‘teaching’ legions of earnest individuals how to read badly and think carelessly. He may have been a morally decent man, but he led a bad life, and his legacy is one of shame for the humanities.” NOTE: a blog posting taking Mark Taylor’s opinion piece (orignally in the New York Times and readable here) to task for his ‘dishonest hyperbole’ with a breakdown and argument with his points.

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 10 December 2004 @ 6:30 PM

04w49:3 The Cartesian Hegemony

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 49 number 3 (The Cartesian Hegemony)


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Natural-Born Dualists, A Talk with Paul Bloom | Edge.org
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html
“Our dualistic conception isn’t an airy intellectual thing; it is common sense, and rooted in a phenomenological experience. We do not feel that we are material things, physical bodies. The notion that we are machines made of meat, as Marvin Minsky once put it, is unintuitive and unnatural. Instead, we feel as if we occupy our bodies. We possess them. We own them. Because of this, we talk about my brain, or my body, using the same language of possession that we use when we talk about my car, or my child. These are things that we possess, that we are intimately related to?but not what we are.”

An End to Mediational Epistemology | Charles Taylor
http://goodreads.ca/lectures/taylor/larkin-stuart04.html
“In two consecutive lectures, Prof. Charles Taylor will speak on the modern epistemological tradition, its effect on our thought and culture, and how that relationship is changing today. The first lecture will sketch the features and characteristics of the modern epistemological tradition, and describe its influence. The second lecture will explore how philosophy may offer alternatives to this tradition. ” I went to the lectures and put up my notes with commentary – Timothy

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 01 December 2004 @ 8:10 PM

04w39:1 Marshall McLuhan and Malcom Gladwell

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 39 number 1 (marshall mcluhan and malcolm gladwell)

Having gotten a better vintage copy of “Understanding Media”, one of the books I tried to sell at the used bookstore in the spring of 1999 was my other copy. They wouldn’t take it because they were well stocked. After I left the store, I ran into some acquaintances on the next block and we struck up a chat. I handed my McLuhan to one of them saying, “here take it, it’s a good read”. Now that they’re gearing up for a big McLuhan festival here in Toronto next month, I was inclined to visit the McLuhan files on the CBC Archives site, which are wonderful. They require Windows Media Player 9 (available here for OSX) and a good bandwidth. Since McLuhan’s study was the difference between “print man” and the electronic creature, I’ve included an article written by Malcolm Gladwell on “the social life of paper”. – Timothy


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Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message | CBC Archives
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-74-342/people/mcluhan/
“He was a man of idioms and idiosyncrasies, deeply intelligent and a soothsayer. He had prescient knowledge of the Internet. Although educated in literature, Marshall McLuhan was known as a pop philosopher because his theories applied to mini-skirts and the twist. For his ability to keep up with the cutting edge, one colleague called him ‘The Runner.’ Critics said he destroyed literary values. Today, McLuhanÂ’s ideas are new again, applied to the electronic media that he predicted.”

The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool | Gary Wolf
http://tinyurl.com/lihn
“By the time of his death, he had been dismissed by respectable academicians, and he was known in the popular press as an eccentric intellectual whose day in the media spotlight had come and gone. By 1980, the transformation of human life catalyzed by television was taken for granted, and it no longer seemed interesting to ask where the electronic media were taking us. But in recent years, the explosion of new media – particularly the Web – has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media env ironment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again.” Article Date: January 1996

The Social Life of Paper | Malcolm Gladwell
http://gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm
“Dewey’s principal business was something called the Library Bureau, which was essentially the Office Depot of his day, selling card catalogues, cabinets, office chairs and tables, pre-printed business forms, and, most important, filing cabinets. Previously, businessmen had stored their documents in cumbersome cases, or folded and labelled the pieces of paper and stuck them in the pigeonholes of the secretary desks so common in the Victorian era. What Dewey proposed was essentially an enlarged version of a card catalogue, where paper documents hung vertically in long drawers. The vertical file was a stunning accomplishment. In those efficiency-obsessed days, it prompted books and articles and debates and ended up winning a gold medal at the 1893 World’s Fair, because it so neatly addressed the threat of disorder posed by the proliferation of paper. What good was that railroad schedule, after all, if it was lost on someone’s desk? Now a railroad could buy one of Dewey’s vertical filing cabinets, and put the schedule under ‘S,’ where everyone could find it.”

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 20 September 2004 @ 1:33 PM

04w11:1 Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva

by timothy. 0 Comments

Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 1 (Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva)

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Eco-Traitor | Drake Bennett
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html
“Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute […] Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization’s flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. […] He derides today’s activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind’s growing ability to alter the planet. […] ‘As I like to say, maybe it’s time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems.’ […] When I understood sustainable development,’ he recalls, ‘I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis.’ ”

Battle for Biotech Progress | Patrick Moore
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17889/article_detail.asp
“The campaign of fear now waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic. In the balance it is clear that the real benefits of genetic modification far outweigh the hypothetical and sometimes contrived risks claimed by its detractors. […] For six years, anti-biotech activists managed to prevent the introduction of G.M. crops in India. This was largely the work of Vandana Shiva, the Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy Indian family, who has campaigned relentlessly to ‘protect’ poor farmers from the ravages of multinational seed companies. In 2002, she was given the Hero of the Planet award by Time magazine for ‘defending traditional agricultural practices.’ Read: poverty and ignorance. It looked like Shiva would win the G.M. debate until 2001, when unknown persons illegally planted 25,000 acres of Bt cotton in Gujarat. The cotton bollworm infestation was particularly bad that year, and there was soon a 25,000 acre plot of beautiful green cotton in a sea of brown. The local authorities were notified and decided that the illegal cotton must be burned. This was too much for the farmers, who could now clearly see the benefits of the Bt variety. In a classic march to city hall with pitchforks in hand, the farmers protested and won the day. Bt cotton was approved for planting in March 2002. One hopes the poverty-stricken cotton farmers of India will become wealthier and deprive Vandana Shiva of her parasitical practice. ”

Poverty & Globalisation | Vandana Shiva
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm
“Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by most people. It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food providers in the Third World, and contrary to the dominant assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more productive than industrial monocultures. This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature’s production, production by women, production by Third World farmers allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as creation. Take the case of the much flouted ‘golden rice’ or genetically engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency. However, nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens that provide Vitamin A. The devaluation and invisibility of sustainable, regenerative production is most glaring in the area of food. While patriarchal division of labour has assigned women the role of feeding their families and communities, patriarchal economics and patriarchal views of science and technology magically make women’s work in providing food disappear. ‘Feeding the World’ becomes disassociated from the women who actually do it and is projected as dependent on global agribusiness and biotechnology corporations. ”

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emailed by Timothy on Sunday 07 March 2004 @ 12:48 PM

04w07:1 Private Parts

by timothy. 0 Comments

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Privacy and Deviance | HP Laboratories
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/deviance/index.html
“Privacy is a central issue of concern in the information age. Because of the ease with which data about individuals can be obtained, aggregated and dispersed, information technology can broadcast an individual’s secrets to unintended recipients who in turn can use it in ways that the individual no longer controls […] Our conjecture and motivation is that people are willing to reveal information whenever they feel that they are somewhat typical or positively atypical compared to the social group […] In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted experiments that revealed the true value that people place on their private data. Specifically, we tested whether deviation from the mean is the dominant factor in dictating how a person values a piece of information. We find with great significance (in excess of 95% statistical confidence) that the further a private piece of information deviates negatively from the mean, the greater the price demanded for that information. Furthermore, we find that small deviations in a socially positive direction are associated with a lower demanded price.”

Experiment: To Become a Photographer of Female Nudes | Grant Stoddard
http://www.nerve.com/regulars/ididitforscience/nudephotography/index.asp?page=1
” ‘Look, if you ask nicely, it’s amazing what people will do. Be up front, confident and respectful and see what happens. ‘ ‘But you have a ready-made harem!’ ‘But you have an accent,’ he reasoned. ‘ You’re miles ahead of the game.'”

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 09 February 2004 @ 4:06 PM