is about, madness, graphomania, 'civilization of the book', techne, ear, Aye me!

This thread could use a soundtrack.   Now it has one.   Question:  would counting the logical fallacies, the superficial, or choreographed leaps in the following amount in the end to much the same?   Or would it amount to something less?  How might the concept of 'auto-critique' ap-ply.

...that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?  I can't even go into it, you see that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon, whole stupified mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of his work when probability cam in and threw that whole safe predictable Newtonian world into chaos, into disorder wherever you turn, discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord, contradiction, what they're calling aporia they took from the Greeks, the academics took the word from the Greeks for this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy the clock without the clockmaker and the desperate comedy of Kierkegaard's insane Knight of Belief and even Pascal's famous wager in a world where everyone is "so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness" where the artist is today, the artist and real artist, Plato warned us about, the threat to society and the, read Huizinga on Plato and music and the artist as dangerous and art as dangerous and music in this mode and that mode, the Phrygian mode to quiet you down and the tenor and bass Lydian to make you sad and the soft and drinking harmonies, the Lydian and the Ionian where the art the, the artist having trouble breathing here I, coming out of the anaesthesia down in the recovery room tried to raise my leg and it suddenly jumped up by itself like a, like the pain avoiding pain that's what all this is about isn't it?  Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, beyond the pleasure principle?  My golden Sigi his mother always called him, if Emerson was right and we are what our mothers made us?  "Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children," the first forms virtue and vice take for them, not my golden Sigi no, he lifted if from Plato's Laws Book II, talking about his own high ethical standards....The quantity of pleasure not the quality the whole point of it and these digital machines come in, the all-or-none machine Norbert Wiener called it, machine that counts brings in the binary system and the computer with it, so Wiener tells us about a brilliant American engineer who's gone out and bought an expensive player piano.  Pushpin or Pushkin, does care a damn for the music but he's fascinated by the complicated mechanism that produces it that's what America was all about, what mechanization was all about, what democracy was all about and the deification of democracy a hundred years ago all this technology at the service of entertaining Sigi's stupefied pleasure seeking trash out there playing the piano with its feet where it all come from isn't it?

[...]

Coming events cast their shadows and all the rest of it for Sigi's stupified trash out there gaping at television dollar sign's all they see where we are today aren't we?  Waiting to be entertained because that's where it started and that's where it ends up, avoiding pain and seekind pleasure play the piano with your feet, play cards, play pool play pushpin here it is, here's Huizinga talking about music and play he quotes Plato yes, here.  "That which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness nor yet, in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it affords.  Such pleasure, entailing as it does no appreciable good or ill, is play," goes on about little children and animals can't keep still, always moving making noise playing skipping leaping making a racket ends up where it started with toys, toys, toys, every four year old with a computer.  Press buttons it lights up different colours he's supposed to be learning what, how to spell?  No, it corrects his spelling doesn't need to know how to spell, how to multiply, divide get the square root of God knows what don't have to read music know a cleft from a G string just keep pumping because that's where it came from like Wiener's engineer, not the music but how it's made, tubes bellows hammers the whole digital machine, whole binary system that all-or-none paper roll with holes in it running over the tracker bar that's where all of it came from, toys and entertainment where technology comes from going back, back, back to Vaucanson's duck that ruffled its feathers and quacked waddled and shat, back a thousand, two thousand years with the penny-in-the-slot machines and water organs Hero of Alexandria made to entertain the locals and the living statues on the island of Rhodes Pindar talks about, the artifical trees and singing birds made for the Emperor of Byzantium a thousand years ago nothing but toys and games wherever you went, Charles V's armed puppets playing trumpets and drums and a lifesize singin canary made for Marie Antoineete made it pretty clear who this frivolous entertainment was for, articial birds singing real birdsongs to teach birds how to sing?  Mozart writing music for fluteplaying clocks and Beethoven's Wellington's Victory written for Maelzel's panharmonicon while those rococo Swiss watchmakers were still busy making princely gifts of musical snuff boxes and pastorals featuring tiny figures doing farm chores and the French libeled as usual for smutty versions available across the way where Vaucanson's foul duck and his shepherd boy played twenty songs on a pipe with one hand and beat a drum with the other and his flutist, good God Vaucanson's flutish! actually played the flute?  Because that's where it came from, where the technology came from right down to that paper roll with the holes in it where the computer came from, you see?  Just take a minute to explain all this computer madness besotted by science besotted by technology by this explosion of progress and the information revolution what we're really besotted by is people making millions, making billions from computer chips computer circuitry computer programs one man making thirty billion dollars in a year because that's what we've always been besotted by, Philo T Farnsworth had it right seventy years ago, didn't he?  What America's all about, what it's always been about that thirty billion dollars?  What the computer's all about what all of it's all about, try to pin it on some humble genius so Pascal shows up age nineteen with his digital adding machine, Leibniz with one that multiplies and divides and finally Babbage and his Difference Engine, Babbage adn his Analytical Engine with its punched cards Babbage the grandfather of the modern computer so it's Babbage Babbage Babbage but he got his idea from Jacquard's loom so that's all you ever hear, Jacquard's loom Jacquard's loom Jacquard's loom hits you square in the belly no where did I, can't believe it I jast saw it here Flaubert, Flaubert must have been alphabetic with Farnsworth everything organized here it is yes here it is, letter from Flaubert 1868 asks about the silk weavers in Lyons, work in low-ceilinged rooms?  in their homes?  children work too?  "The weaver working at a Jacquard loom" he says he's heard "is continually struck in the tomach by the shaft of the roller on which the cloth is being wound, it is the roller itself that strikes him?"  There, you see?...no, no it's the principle of the thing, eighty years before Babbage, it's the same principle Vaucanson used for his flutist, this drum pierced with holes and levers controlling its fingers and lip and tongue movements the air supply driven through the lips against the edge of the holes in the flute it was actually playing the notes selected by the holes in the drum, the notes selected by the holes in that roll of paper becasue the piano was epidemic, it was the plague spreading across America a hundred years ago with its punched paper roll at the heart of the whole thing, of the frenzy of invention and mechanizationand democracy and how to have art without the artist and automation, cybernetics you can see where the, damn!  Where the tissues, just get cold water on it stop the bleeding, you see?  Scrape my wrist against this drawer corner tears the skin open blood all over the place it doesn't hurt no, skin's like parchment that's the prednisone, turns the skin into dry old parchment tear it open with a feather that's the prednisone, reach for a book reach for anything tear myself to pieces reaching for this book listen, you'll see what I mean, opening page you'll see what I mean, "From March to December" he says, "while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone," same thing as prednisone, "I assembled every possible book and article written by," you see what I mean? "and visited every possible and impossible library" this whole pile of books and papers here?  "preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing" where am I here, yes, "a major work of impeccable scholarship.  It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished" you see what this is all about?  "I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition," but of course you don't no, no that's the whole point of it!  It's my opening page, he's plagairized my work right here in front of me before I've even written it!  That's not the only one.  That's not the only one either, he's done it before, or after, word for word right in this heap somewhere you could call plagiary a kind of entropy in there corrupting the creation it's right in here somewhere I can never find anything in this mess never get it sorted out, never get it in any kind of order but that's what it's all about in the first place isn't it?  Get things in order that's half the battle in fact it is the battle, organize what's essential and throw out the rest of it that's the, Phidias?  For me an image slumbers in the stone, who's that, Nietzsche?  Probability, chance, disorder and breakdown here's that punched paper roll holding the the, damn!  Getting blood all over these pages of ads for what I just said didn't I?  Whole thing turns into a cartoon?  an animated cartoon?  Chance and disorder sweeping in and this binary system digital machine with its all-or-none paper roll holding the fort yes it was the fort, whole point of it to order and organize to eliminate chance, to eliminate failure because we've always hated failure in America like some great character flaw what technology's all about, music entertainment counting, counting, seventy years ago one great pianist cutting a roll coordinating his hands and pedaling within a fiftieth of a second 1926 one company cut and sold ten million rolls whole thing turns into a cartoon, mob out there crash bang storming the gates seeking pleasure democracy scaling the walls terrifying the elite who've had a corner on high class entertainment back to Marie Antoinette storming the Bastille with here yes, here's one yes, here's a German ad 1926 holding the line for the class act against here they come, here they come, "a still larger class of people whoe cannot successfully operate the usual type of player, because they lack a true sense of musical values.  They have no 'ear for music,' and for that reason they play atrociously upon pianos equipped even with high grade player actions" talking about the class act?  about defending these elitist music lovers?  Not here no, talking about what we're always talking about.  Sales!

-Willaim Gaddis, Agape Agape, 4-14

Further reading.

Comments

[Squibb]

You mean, like, numbering them?
Like a list?
Would a list of the... be a moment of the ..., or would it still be a list?
That sort of thing?

[Charles]

a list is only literary to the degree it resists/desists, performs a sort of ruthless and uncompromising discomfort, restless imperfection within listing, that sort of thing?

[Let the conversation continue]

[last few comments copied from the thread now closed:]

Squibb--I'll bite. I think 500 seems pretty good; you'll need some folks good with security and computing systems (watching 24 might be helpful for this!!), and, likely, at least a few people inside. By why give up the possibility of holding? It seems that with a few top generals in line, and some disaffected troops, maybe also some DC cops in on the game, that holding could be possible. And, it would also be cool to have a coordinated media message going on so as to try to get support, stir up more resistance, etc.

Posted by: Jodi | Mar 8, 2006 9:17:26 AM

Jesu...that'll teach me to stay in the library til closing.

Ok, going back several dozen comments - I'll try and keep this brief - my two main questions (despite skillful and selective editing by lcc!) were:
1. how does currency trading work in practice?
2. what does lcc (as someone who presumably doesn't but has interesting arguments about most things) think about teaching? (the 'is it evil?' thing added after nothing was said about the matter - as I mentioned above, I'm ambivalent about it in lots of weird complicated ways and curious to know what someone outside of 'teachers' might have to say). As Discard puts it rather more eloquently: 'perhaps you, being someone who does not make intellectual practice contingent on a university stipend/salary, might have a beneficial perspective on the relative merit -- or lack of merit -- there may be in such work. '

There has been some worthwhile discussion of both questions in the end, (and the increasing awareness on my part that I really need to know a bit more about trading, etc. in practice, and read more things like the material roger noted).

I heartily apologise for the clunky, unnecessarily ambiguous tone - I assume, in retrospect, that I did mean the 'unplugging TV' questions a little bit sarcastically, and what this reveals to me is that I shouldn't write comments/anything when as tired as I was last night - no good could possibly come of it. And, probably, as lcc point out, that TV is one of the few sacred cows that even (or especially) academics/intellectuals/blank react rather (revealingly) oddly about.

It's a shame lcc didn't pick up and quote the rather complimentary things I was saying about her writing/arguments, tho...or even the possibility of buying her lunch for that matter...

Posted by: infinite thought | Mar 8, 2006 9:19:06 AM

Just to clarify, regarding capital as relation... I was trying to add to what s0metim3s was saying, perhaps it was unnecessary. I could easily be corrected. However, in order to make clear, and thus to delimit the scope of my remark, I was thinking of these sentences of Tronti:

"Here social capital is not just the total capital of society: it is not the simple sum of individual capitals. It is the whole process of socialization of capitalist production: it is capital itself that becomes uncovered, at a certain level of its development, as social power.

Even in terms of individual capital, capital is a social relation, and the individual capitalist is the personification of this relation: he is a function of his own capital. and the direct expression of his private property. But in terms of social capital, capital comes to represent all capitalists, and the individual capitalist is reduced to an individual personification of this totality: the direct functionary, no longer of his own capital, but of the capitalist class."

Posted by: Discard | Mar 8, 2006 9:33:33 AM

[John]

I'm a little confused as to how Greg Brown fits in with this discussion, but, confusion notwithstanding, I still would like to pause long enough to celebrate it as an excellent soundtrack choice.

[Jodi]

I don't get why the other thread was closed. Long threads get an energy or something, they get rolling, rolling, rolling (Rawhide!--soundtrack)

[Nate]

Infinite,
I'd love to hear what _you_ think about teaching. And Jodi and Discard too.
Nate

[Christoph]

Jodi: I closed the thread because I (misguidedly?) hoped to carry the energy over onto the broader LS "plane", and because the point of the post was proven and warranted a closing.

In retrospect, it may have been silly. But just the number of posts that have popped up may have to do with the dynamics; I sincerely hope I did not put a plug in anything...

[Christoph]

Oh, and nice choice of soundtrack.

[CR]

the point of the post was proven

this is the second time, I think, you've said this. I don't understand what you mean. Could you explain?

[chabert]

"1. how does currency trading work in practice?"

You're an adult. And as you've guessed, I'm not a teacher.

Google 'forex'. For a better understanding of markets in general, Doug Henwood's book Wall Street is available for download on the web:

http://www.wallstreetthebook.com/

The figures are outdated - it's eight years old - but still very good.

Teaching kids: I used to tutor kids who were thought to be 'slow' but were really mainly bored, anxious or resistant to authority. Kids were great mainly; the task was very frustrating. In NYC, a disturbing number of teachers have become volunteer drug pushers - get the kid on ritalin or a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. I saw Sleeper the other day; it struck me, that joke - the new world arizses in the aftermath of a nuclear war begun by albert shanker (former head of the nyc teachers' union) - really highlights a change.

Teaching adults: I am indebted to some professors of mine at University. A good teacher is invaluable. It seems everything is stacked against them. As a workforce, university faculty seems to be unusually submissive.

Some great teachers out there though, eric foner, manning marable, just about everyone who teaches dance at alvin ailey....When I was a wee little child, I learned to read and do basic math from a guy named Caleb Gattegno, deceased years ago. He was great; his method was great; he wrote quite a bit about method, and about the educational potential of television.

[chabert]

http://www.cuisenaire.co.uk/cuisenaire/products/history/algebra.htm

How to raise little communists? Give your two year olds cuisenaire rods.

[Bourbaki]

Alternative soundtracks ere an'ere, o'ere?

[Jodi]

Nate, on teaching: I

guess I'm not really clear about the terrain of the question, exactly. As a job, it's terrific. I get to wear what I want, have a lot of flexibility in choosing my hours, and get paid to talk about interesting books. There are downsides: committee work, grading. Academe overall has some unattractive features--in particular an oscillation between a fetishized newness and originality and a kind of protective herd mentality. And, when one is really into 'scholarship' then the sense of work is ever present, there is never a break, everything is work. So, most (fortunately not all) of my friends are academics, fun is going to lectures or talks, trips are linked to conferences or speaking invitations. I don't simply 'travel' anymore--everything is connected to work.

But, I think you wanted something more inspiring or more about the ethics of teaching. I don't have much to offer there. I recognize that many of my students will going into banking or finance. In some ways, I expose them to ideas that they will end up redeploying in the service of capital (Thomas Frank has a great chapter in One Market Under God about this). Some will change, become more progressive.

But, either way, I'm skeptical about the missionary approach to teaching anyway. Liberal arts colleges think of themselves as instilling a sense of ethics in future citizens. This grows out of the message of creating a kind of patriotic, knowledgeable citizen prominent at the beginning of the 20th century (I'm thinking in particular of Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton).

My goals are rather different: I think it is important to let people know that there are ways of thinking, reading, and writing that are not the same as what they get in mass media, that there are questions that have been asked for a long time, that the ideas that seem clear and self-evident are not. (I usually say that my strength as a teacher lies not in clarifying ideas but in muddying and complicating them).

[josef k.]

Discard - In terms of individual capital, fine, but this is because the individual is social relation, not because capital is. Marx argues in Capital vol. 1 that capital is not a relation, though it ideologically purports to represent itself as such, for the reason that, ultimately, capital relates only to itself.

[Nate]

Josef, can you reference, or better, quote where Marx says what you're saying? Your reading is in direct contrast to mine, and to that of the Marx commentators I most respect. I'll dig up a reference as soon as I'm able.

[josef k.]

At the beginning of Part II, Chapter IV of Capital, Marx writes: "The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital" He goes on: "The first distinction that we notice between money that is money and money that is capital, is nothing more than a difference in their circulation." (329)

He then proceeds to identify two forms of commodity circulation in relation to money, first: C-M-C, second: M-C-M, with first circuit representing the simple circuit of commodities, and this second circuit representing the circuit of money as capital.

Marx writes: "In...M-C-M...the buyer lays out money in order that, as a seller, he may recover money." (331) In other words: in this circuit, money is not a relation, but rather both the beginning and end of the movement of capital. Marx writes: "M-C-M....at first sight appears purposeless, because tautological. Both extremes have the same economic form. They are both money, and therefore are not qualitatively different use-values; for money is but the converted form of commodities, in which their particular use values vanish." (332)

Marx writes: "In simple circulation, C-M-C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money, but that same value now in the circulation M-C-M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself." (335)

All citations from Tucker, Marx-Engles Reader, ed. Tucker, Norton: New York, London, Second Edition, 1978

[josef k.]

Very important not to conflate money and capital.

[Matt]

Also very important to correct typos. Typos corrected.

[Nate]

hi Josef,
Well... your read contradicts this:

"Capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, the instruments of labor, the raw materials, of which capital consists – have they not been produced and accumulated under given social conditions, within definite special relations? Are they not employed for new production, under given special conditions, within definite social relations? And does not just the definite social character stamp the products which serve for new production as capital?"
Marx, Wage Labor and Capital ch5. From here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm

This is also at least one stream of received interpretation of Marx, as evidenced in the second entry here - http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm

But we could quote each other to death and ultimately what Marx meant is not the most interesting question. I'm more interested to discuss what hangs on the distinction. Or, to be more clear, I think what matters is what one does with one's terms more than anything else. I don't have time to go into why the 'capital as relation' thing is important to me at the moment (other than simple habit, resulting from the ways I encountered Marx) but would be happy to talk about this later, and am willing to have my mind changed. I'm also keen to hear from you what you see as at stake in this.
best,
Nate

[infinite thought]

Strange this 'you're an adult' thing. I wouldn't claim to know what nuclear physicists/prostitutes/linguists did in detail either without asking them (and is this just unbearably naive or something?) - just because capitalism 'is all we know' in a more general sense, I'm somehow supposed to intuit how working with currency operates at the everyday level...? It really wasn't supposed to be an insult in the first place, and it's bizarre that you took it as such. Let alone calling me a 'cow' - now really - who's the adult? Still, thanks for the 'forex' cue: apparently, independent forex traders make up only a tiny part of this most grandiose of markets, and are frequently prey to scams. You learn something new every day...

Anyway 'you're not a teacher' - but you clearly have been at some point (interestingly). You say that: 'As a workforce, university faculty seems to be unusually submissive.'

Well: we try

[Christoph]

"the point of the post was proven"

I don't understand what you mean. Could you explain?

The point of the post was to draw attention to the mediality of LS. And to explore other possible forms, in a clean, healthy, fun way.

The lack of self-referentiality of blog communication, of post&comments and observation thereof, was if you like the "meta-point", i.e. the hermeneutic question about the "blind spot" of *every* observation. Even when the observation is one of the form of "LS TeeVee".

That is why I felt that I should avoid moderation, and arguably then close the communication at some stage (in retrospect, a mistake perhaps). I had no idea that the thread was going to go rawhide, of course. That was unplanned, but fortunate in the way it put a sustained emphasis on the question.

[Jon]

"The lack of self-referentiality of blog communication"

You think? I can hardly think of a more self-referential genre.

[CR]

See, well, maybe it's the teacher in me, but I'm not very fond of games like that. Flypapering, let's call it.

Equivalent to me running a class in which I bait the students into a wrong interpretation of something, spend 49 minutes listening to the students head down the wrong path, only to stop short at the end and chuckle at them. "Not very good at this whole interpretation thing / not very self-referential, are you? Q.E.D."

In short, I think maybe blogging rule of thumb #1 should be "No human experimentation." Maybe you, for some reason, disagree.

[Charles]

There may be a schism here having to do with those who read blogs more regularly than others.

We could do podcasts, movies, that sort of thing. Maybe a weekly podcast feature, regular rumble down under the ocean of self-referentiality, like the admirable MobyLives? Maybe someone would like to fund a Long Sunday trip to the next disaster area, or indictment hearings. Surely some more exclusive photos could only improve our street cred..

[chabert]

"I'm somehow supposed to intuit how working with currency operates at the everyday level...?"

No, you can take a quarter of an hour of your own time and read, instead of insisting on an hour of mine to write. Your choice of the latter is not naive, it is just lazy, infantile and self absorbed and I don't feel like indulging it. If you take the quarter hour and remain bemused, let me know what confuses you and I will try to clarify, though I am sure I can't explain it any more simply and clearly than the hundreds, if not thousands, of documents answering your question found easily on the web.