Later that day...
Web-design as art is silly and not worth pursuing. Everyone's browser is configured differently, and DON'T give me some shit about how design-ambiguity and the constant flux of space outside of language is represented by your f-ing page never looking right. I have a statement to make. Pay careful attention.
I HATE art, artists and art-culture. Really, genuinely HATE them, to the point where if I could push a button and wipe all three out, counterbalancing as much human suffering as possible with speed and precision of execution, not only would I push it, but I would do so with an erection.
If anyone else is interested in a class-action civil suit against the umbc art department, email me.
Earlier that day...
I'm still stuck on the sokal hoax. I feel especially close to it because the arcane and obfuscated rambling that sokal sought to pull-the-pants-off-of was the main burger of meat my professors chewed on at umbc. It's kind of sad, especially when you consider that I'm $25,000 in debt and learned nothing, not even the definition of 'postmodern.'
Actually, this brings me to another point: a lot of people, including myself, my friend phil, that one professor whom I fucking hate (colin ives), my mom, and many, many other students and scholars of the humanities, secretly yearn to be studying real science. I had my embarrassing little episode with math (which is thankfully past), phil laments that he didn't study math or classics, colin likes to brag that he has a brother who's a scientist (colin also programs computers, albeit in a PROPRIETARY LANGUAGE), and even my mom has remarked that she 'must study physics.' I guess all of this wistful yearning is being sparked by the 'science studies' at which sokal is scoffing; when we art-farts are exposed to a glimmer of the...i dunno...either beauty, social status, or some combination of the two, of deductive science and logical thinking, we get all teary-eyed and start to wonder 'can't I do this too?' but I'm not equipped to study math or physics; for whatever reason (inability?), I found myself on the path of art-buggery, and here I am. But at least I admit it:
I WISH I COULD STUDY SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
There; that wasn't so hard; I feel better already. This is something with which I've been struggling for some time. When I was engaged in my flirtation with 'higher' math, I recognized that I was often very slow to pick up the rigor of things. I had a lot of mathematical intuition, and when I finally learned a concept, I achieved, I'm quite certain, a deeper understanding of it than most other students. But I was extremely slow -- I had to take differential calc twice (one audit over the summer, and once more for credit in the fall). And, towards the end of integral calc, my brain was just sort of full, and I completely skipped maclauren and taylor series. I just left the questions blank on the exam. But I still got a 'b' in integral calc (i got an 'a' in differential). At any rate, I felt I was in no way prepared to go on to multi-variable calc, and thus ended my math-affectation.
In short, the sokal hoax deeply hurt my feelings, but at the same time it reminds me that I'm independent of all this bullshit. I don't wear a badge that says 'postmodern charlatan' on my sleeve -- no one even has to know that I was an art major. It's funny how what you've studied becomes 'what you are.'
Eh, screw it. Make art, not manifestos.
Also, it's worth pointing out that my particular art program, 'imaging and digital arts,' could have been the official, ivory-pillar headquarters for 'science studies' and really just dreadful, brainless, embarrassing assertions of technical competence forced through a rusty sieve of completely unashamed art-bullshit. I mean, come on: 'introduction to art and technology'? Please.
Ok, sure...it'd be cool to resolve the rift between science and the humanities, but there are so many just shameful, wasteful pitfalls that it doesn't seem worth it sometimes. You over there with the dread-locks and emo glasses: keep painting your 50-foot mural with toothpaste and antelope-dung. You over there with the pocket protector and linux t-shirt: keep...i dunno...writing that lab report (?). See? What the fuck do i, or any other art-brat, know? Haha, I'm not even a proper art-brat; I went to state school.
If anyone has suggestions for my life, email me.
Actually, I think I've solved the problem. Actually *make* a 50-foot mural with toothpaste and antelope dung. That would be cool. In other words, just go out and make some art, and stop talking about it so much. It's really a deadly trap to fall into.
I can totally understand why killing all the intellectuals comes up so often in history: not because they present a threat, but because they're so goddamned annoying. I think mao just couldn't handle another paper on tranformative hermeneutics, and started gunning; I know I would have.
I found something online that's right up my alley, so, I'm going to deviate from my usual format of solipsistic rants and give a few links for public consideration.
What happened was that this NYU physicist named alan sokal published an essay that linked science to progressive politics, quantum mechanics to social relativism, topology to lacan, etc. His thesis was, as I understand it, that there is *not* an objective reality, as confirmed by applications of postmodern thought to scientific inquiry (and specifically, according to my sources, that gravity is a social construct). He published it in an artsy JHU journal called 'social text,' and revealed shortly after its publication that it was a hoax, in his revelation carefully illustrating what now seemed to be obviously glaring logical inconsistencies in the article. Sokal's intent with this prank was to take a bloody, ragged bite out of the underbelly of postmodern cultural theorists, and, in fact, postmodern cultural theories, showing them to be irrecoverably caught up in their own bullshit and deliberately ignorant of logic and objectivism.
Mainly, I simply enjoyed the spectacle of this really great battle between elements of intellectual dualism: right versus left brained, dionysian versus apollonian, intuition versus logic, etc. And all dressed up in a big, dada smirk. Imagine that.
Anyway, read the articles, you goob. Take twenty minutes. The exchange includes the element of drama, helping one not to fall asleep:
sokal's original parody article
sokal's revelation and explanation of his parody
'social text's response to sokal's revelation
sokal's response to 'social text's response
When all is said and done, I can't help but think to myself 'i don't think there *is* an 'objective reality' (as sokal says, "note the scare-quotes"). In other words, I believe that which sokal facetiously asserts. Call me a mystic or an idiot, but I'd even go so far as to say that the existence of an objective reality smacks of platonism, and is in fact the most hokey, mystical fallacy of all. I really hesitate here to posit my own opinions, since I feel out-gunned and outclassed by both sokal and the editors of 'social text.' but, this is a blog. So, here goes:
It seems like sokal is approaching the self-derision of his own silly article with logical engines, and then attempting to force the dope-smoking, word-inventing braniac-hippies of 'social text' to try and fight him with his own weapons. The braniac-hippies aren't prepared to do this, because they don't deal with logic -- that's not their way of understanding the world. They use poetry, emotion, and intuition to paint a portrait of reality, rather than draw a schematic of it with deduction and axiomatic assumptions. The editors of 'social text' apparently felt, when they decided to publish it, that sokal's parody painted a good portrait of reality, which I think it did, regardless of whatever logic-game flaws were present therein. Maybe sokal's right brain was trying to take over while he wrote his parody, and assert it's own character.
Sokal seems to think that this new brand of postmodern inquiry, referred to as 'science studies,' that attempts to approach scientific rigour with a literary and intuitive toolbox, is kind of stupid. I, on the other hand, think it's great, essentially because it serves as a translation mechanism for artsy types who would have missed out on the beauty of scientific truth simply because of its dull descriptive language.
I think valid points can be made that 1) postmodern epistemology is a tangled, ornamental, substanceless mass of pretension, and that 2) scientists and logicians are hopelessly trapped in their itty-bitty prisons of deductive thought.
After discussing it with phil a bit, I find myself with even less sympathy for 'social text,' and am sort of defecting fully over to sokal's camp. I didn't realize that sokal's central thesis was the 'social contruct of gravity,' (it's right in the title) which really exposes the article as an obvious parody (the editors of 'social text,' apparently, didn't catch it either). I guess the editors didn't really read, or at least didn't understand, sokal's article, and just published it because it sounded good, with all of its party-line buzzwords.
So, this is all starting to read like an embarassment of 'social text,' and by association, postmodern essayists and academic journals, as opposed to an attack on the core of the philosophies themselves.
Ethics -- what a load of poo. When you try to approach ethics with your cognitive, intellectual, logical, deductive engines (which are inherently and irreparably broken, not because you're dumb, but because they have a flawed structure), you invariably arrive at a dead end. You can 'understand' ethics if you approach it with something like intuition, or your gut feeling.
Of course, maybe this whole rejection of logic just springs out frustration with my own inability to use the tools properly. But I think that no matter how smart someone is, they are going to run into problems with logic -- they'll just encounter them futher down the road. But, the same conclusion must be drawn:
Logic is broken. Don't try to explain or even describe things, because it's futile. It's good exercise for the neurons, and you can apply deduction to tiny little finite models like a sherlock homes murder mystery, but when you try to go outside the system, you find that logical tools no longer work.
I was reading about ethics and meta-ethics, hoping to cast some light on some things, and I sort of did...but in a way I'm more confused than I was when I started. I think I may have accepted nihilism and the nietzschean assertion that morality is an invention and has no axiomatic source based on the fact that it's kind of an enjoyable philosophy to sullenly smirk about when you're feeling down. I really don't have any reason to believe that there is no absolute morality, just as I have no good reason to believe that there is. It's a stupid question to ask. Nietzsche on prozac -- there's a thought.
I give up, I think...philosophy is a dead-end. If these questions were answerable, a lot of philosophers would be out of a job.
I don't especially want to base my self-worth on how many combinations of sounds I can string together to represent 'things,' whether they're discovered or invented; that's a waste of time if I ever heard one.
My mind turns to the programming language hq9+. The entire language consists of four commands: 1) 'h' prints out 'Hello, world!' 2) 'q' prints out the program's source code. 3) '9' prints the lyrics to '99 bottles of beer on the wall.' 4) '+' adds 1 to the accumulator, which is something like a temporary memory where the processor stores its discoveries. Using the term 'accumulator' is a bit obsolete, but I think that's the point -- it kind of throws into relief the fact that computers are just abaccuses. Also, it's kind of funny to see the contrast between doing something as complicated as printing out the lyrics to 99 bottles of beer on the wall, and incrementing the accumulator. I guess the point of the language is to take these four tasks which beginning programers are often told to do, and makes them trivial.
Compare to brainfuck, in which the entire vocabulary is:
> < + - . , [ ]
All of this kind of makes me tired.
I just saw 'the return of the king' with pesh. It was really good, and I found myself caught up in the dualistic mythological archetype of western civilization, before I realized, in mid-movie, that everything is one and dualism is just another form of reductionism. Maybe everything is 0. What would that mean? Maybe 'everything is 0' implies ~*~*THE VOID*~*~
It sometimes seems to me that existentialism and nihilism are more or less the same thing. What might contribute to this is the apparent inability of anyone to give a good definition of existentialism. Let's see what dictionary.com says:
'A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.'
Freedom of choice -- there's the rub, I think. Existentialism is kind of like nihilism, but it asserts, as opposed to 'you must believing in nothing' ('ve are nihilists, lebowski...ve believe in nah-sing'), that one can 'believe in' free will and the sanctity of the individual, etc. Sounds iffy to me. Nihilism implies that choice is impossible (well, as I interpret it anyway), and that free will is an illusion. Maybe nihilism takes existentialism one step further, to its natural conclusion. Let's see what dictionary.com says about nihilism:
'A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.'
That's more up my alley; values are baseless (un-axiomatic -- cannot be deduced from a 'base,' or axiom; enter godel), nothing can be known (deductive logic is an illusion, enter godel again) and nothing can be communicated (I'm fuzzy here...maybe enter wittgenstein?) anyway, I really think godel and his incompleteness theorem ripped up a hell of a lot more than mathematical systems. It has really ugly philosophical implications for pretty much the very cornerstones of western civlized thought.
Anyway, 'the return of the king' was enjoyable, especially the battle scenes. It's kind of cool how tolkein has supplanted the bible as the predominant western mythos, and using similar conceptual tools, too (good vs. Evil, the final battle, good has already won before the battle even starts, etc). This kind of childish reductionism (ha!) is appealing, but I think ultimately a de/illusion, just like 1) deductive logic 2) free will and 3) something else I can't remember. But those first two are how nihilism and zen fit together in my model of reality. Oh, and dada too, just because I say so. Well actually, because dada implies basically sneering at everything, taking nothing seriously, and indeed taking nothing seriously to the point where you start saying to yourself 'why do I even bother?' and then you just chuckle wryly and go play metroid on your nintendo emulator. See? It all fits together; the holy trinity of the 21st century: dada, zen, and nihilism. That's why nietszcszczhe was driven mad, by the way; he didn't have dada to soften the blow of god's death with a big inflatable monkey. Nee-chee died in 1900 -- only 15 years before dada, approximately. Bad timing.
Ok, I must devise a mnemonic device to assure that I spell neechee right consistently, so I won't have to rely on google's gentle suggestion of 'did you mean: nietzsche' all the time. Ok, 'i' before 'e,' first of all. Sometimes german words place 'e' before 'i', but not in neechee's case, because neechee was a wEIrdo. So 'i' before 'e'. Then, you have that big teutonic ensemble of consonants: 'tzsch.' 'tomorrow's zen seems corrupted hearsay.' then, there's just an 'e' on the end. Voila. Nietzsche. Nietzsche.
I'm doing a pretty good job learning perl, I think.
I'll format the date any way I damn well please. Also, I'm sick of putting the time up, especially since I don't blog as much as I used to. I just read inga frick's thesis (well, I read a few lines of it). She got her mfa from umbc back around 1997; she must've been one of the first people to graduate with an mfa or a ba in 'imaging and digital arts.' listen to this: 'My thesis explores a hypothetical space outside of the bounds of language by following a personal and subjective trail of longing for place and space.' for some reason, real artists are always talking about place and space, as well as semeiotics and language. I suspect they all read people like foucalt, derrida, levi-strauss, (sp? For all three) etc, and basically rip off a bunch of structuralist and postmodern party lines. So sad.
I could tell you about how art is a complete crock of shit, but that's almost like beating a dead horse. Everyone knows that the culture of art and artists is just about as low as you can go. Well, I gave it a shot -- I tried to find my niche there, in the art world, but I didn't talk about 'place and space' enough. Too bad; I guess it's marketing for me.
Once, in college, I wrote a paper that described artists as the cliquish, closed-minded bandwagon-jumpers that they clearly are, and as a result received not only a b on the paper, but a b in the class, effectively preventing me from graduating with honors. I will post the culprit's email address, just in the hopes that he gets some spam. His name is colin ives, and he now teaches at the university of oregon. ATTENTION SPAMMERS: ives@darkwing.uoregon.edu
This is pretty silly, inasmuch as he posts his email address online anyway. But that was an *excellent* paper that I wrote, and I did an *excellent* job in the class, both by arbitrary and even more markedly by class standards. I know for a fact that people whose output was of maybe half the quality (and quantity) of mine received an a for the course. Colin returned my paper to me with some snide comments on it, and I re-submitted it for-regrading. He returned it to me the second time with the same grade and additional snide comments. My thesis was, in essence, that artists are incapable of embracing the aesthetics of information technology because of it's unsavory association with the business world. I went into some more detail, and presented things in the form of some kind of weird logical syllogism that I had learned in a logic class I was taking pass-fail. It was obvious that colin was offended by my pigeonholing of artists and the art community, which even then I was beginning to roundly despise, and subsequently downgraded me.
They teach you, in art school, to subvert things, and to be in this constant state of angry rebellion. Then they act surprised when you angrily start subverting art orthodoxy.
I would find tearing colin ives's throat out with my teeth personally and aesthetically satisfying. Maybe I'll visit woodsy oregon some day.
Getting back to inga frick (greatest name ever), I really think reading and regurgitating unaltered and unanalyzed this incredibly dense philosophy that kantishly creates its own words to describe its own insanely complicated ideas is key to being a real artist. Oh well, yet another place where I don't fit in.
So, how about a job? Maybe I need to visit a job-agency or whatever. Employment-agency -- that's what they're called. Maybe that's a good idea.
I read this interesting paper about the effects of nihilism, that basically said that you have two choices when confronted with the void: 1) act like a character in 'seinfeld' and simply sneer at everything, or 2) start 'takin niggaz out with a flurry of buckshot.'
HAHA! You thought the blog was on hiatus. Not so! I can't help myself -- I must blog. This morning, I made an omelette out of cheddar cheese and a small disposable container full of some bright green condiment from an indian restaurant. It was pretty good. So, I have to find a job. I think I should go get a job at mcdonald's, just to prove some kind of point.
Anyway. Let's talk about pancakes. I don't think you quite grasp the extent to which I despise the ugliness of the human race. Ok, fuck this. This is dumb. I don't know what to write about. That's because there *is* nothing to write about.
Nevermind. This blog is back on hiatus -- I'll never blog again. I hate you.
I look really stupid without my beard. I shaved it off because I had a cold sore and wanted to pick at it, and I discovered that having shaved a small patch from my mustache to facilitate picking left me with a very strange looking beard. So, I shaved the whole thing off, and my beardlessness throws my facial fat into sharp relief. This coupled with my extremely long hair makes me look like just an extremely weird guy. I hope my beard grows back soon.
Denying someone employment because they dress a certain way, have hair of a certain length, etc, seems to be un-pc to the same tune as not hiring someone of a certain race. If I'm qualified to do the job (ha!), then why is the length of my hair or the presence of mustard-and-gravy stains on my light-up, porno tie a factor in the decision to hire me or not? It seems to me that if legality is going to monitor the hiring decisions of people based on things like race, disability, gender or pregnancy, then it seems to follow that any decisions based on any qualities of the applicant aside from strict job performance capacity should be disallowed. But then, you start getting into shit like 'the presence of gravy stains on a porno tie is a clear indication of work performance,' and of course 'the presence of a non-white race is a clear indicator of work performance' and 'how can you say what is and what isn't a 'real' indicator of performance capacity?', etc. A way around this would be to throw the whole monitoring system out the window and let people hire whomever they want to hire for arbitrary reasons. But then, I would be less likely to get a job with my stained porno tie.
The problem with approaching everything with the tendency to follow things to their logical conclusions is that you become unable to accept any kind of middle path. I have this 'all or nothing' problem, which makes me prone to extremism.
It also brings me to another point -- that I'm a liberal because I'm a conservative, or I'm a democrat because I'm a republican, or I'm a collectivist because I'm an individualist, or whatever *~*~*REDUCTIONIST~*~*~ way you (human) want to small-mindedly and dualistically break down the ether. But yes -- I'm a democrat because I'm a republican. I'm primarily self-interested, and don't give a shit about society or other people. However, I'm not particularly competitive or competent, so the best way to preserve my self is to rely on liberals who want to fork money and benefits over to the lazy/poor like myself. Policies favoring the ugly are in my best interest.
So, I (false) reductionsistificationally conclude or deduce (false) that FUCK FUCK FUCK that everyone is secretly a republican.
What's really confusing is poor people who are republicans, like stan, my old boss at texaco. He made about $30,000 a year, and was clearly blue-collar, and yet he talked about free enterprise and shit like that while he toiled away for the fatcat owner of the gas-station (one walter a. Smith, I think the 3rd, haha). So he's sitting there, talking about reaganomics while he earns his pittance and makes the wealthy wealthier. On the other hand, you have these people who say 'I'm a democrat,' while they earn $100,000+ and go around seeking designer medical care for their invented 20th century ailments. So I'm confused. I draw the conclusion (false) that ideologies are stupid, and people need to sit around and make more omlettes with green shit from indian restaurants.
This is not original. I need to come up with an original idea.
Imagine a situation where a guy is hanging from a balcony with his teeth, and has potted plants strapped to each of his toes. For political reasons, he needs to have 11 plants hanging from his feet (because the combination of '11', 'feet' and 'potted plants' appears exactly 11 times in the ancient wall-carvings of boo). So, the question is, would it be feasible to genetically engineer the progeny of this man to have 11 toes so he can, several years later, hang the appropriate number of potted plants from them, or simply graft an additional toe onto the current hanging man for a 'quick fix'? I would posit that a 15-foot blue sheep with a frisbee in its mouth like the plate-lip ubangi african dudes will come floating down from the stratosphere, powered by its own farts, and bite off the 11th toe.
I think I will stop 1) spell checking this blog and 2) checking the grammar and word choice of this blog. Fuck it. So anyway, I can't get this guy hanging from the balcony out of my head. The sky is crusting his hair with a wintry mix.