Crisis hasn't gone anywhere as far as I can tell; there are hardly any page views, and most people didn't sign on in the first place. I had hoped that the discussion would have become self-motivating, but it didn't happen; I had also hoped that the empyre discussion might have inspired some people, but that didn't happen either. On my end, I feel the course was too unstructured; that worked with the first course I did with Underacademy but it clearly didn't work here.
The hurricane took up far too much time and energy as well; and after that, there was the nor'easter. I had also been invited, about a week or two before the storm, to be the keynote speaker at a conference dealing with simulation and virtual worlds - between that and the storm, the past month has been exhausting. I still have friends who have destroyed houses, and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in Chelsea, where I had a residency, was underwater and is still recovering. We're fairly stressed in New York.
The main thing is, again, that most of the students who signed up, never participated in the blog and most likely didn't read, and those who did participate, quickly dropped out. So perhaps we should call it quits?
Comments welcome; I literally am not sure how to continue at this point.
- Alan
Sorry for not taking more part in the course
ReplyDeleteCrisis in the crisis list, what else to expect?
Thinking about the zen koan of water in a bucket, then the bottom falls out of the bucket - "No more water, no more moon in the water!"
I think we're on a dead path, dead end, meaning the world we've created, or rather destroyed. I find it hard to imagine humans existing only some thousand years from now (which is a small length of time given the existence of the planet, life, or even our branch of it). Other species might have survived in spite of our drive for exploitation. Humans will be remembered, or then forgotten, as the suicidal species. For the short time we've been around, what a wonderful spectacle we're making! The drama-queens of life, the crisis-mongers of the universe! Until the end we'll prefer corruption and personal gain to a sustainable ecology and environment for life. We look for solutions in technology, on other planets (to exploit or just to save ourselves), rather avoiding the issues until the crisis itself will take over and force the changes through, through suffering and catastrophes. We'll sacrifice Africa, we'll sacrifice the poor, we'll sacrifice other species - surely the intensities will heighten. It will take time and generations though, but I don't believe humanity will work it out. With our brains, not very well balanced between the different parts, primal, violent impulses and rational thinking. Maybe our brains were too fast developed, just some new layers built on top of old crap from the reptiles, and so on (sorry the affected expression). The power we've had have been too big for our domain... ... ...
Hope? Will buddhism save us? After some thousands of years of spiritual development, men decided to live in peace, to help each other and to support all life on earth.
I feel comforted by the saying of the diamond sutra, "not to cherish the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, a separated individuality". It saves me from ruin. or ruins me from saving... The bottom of the bucket falls out, no more water, no more saving, let it go, let it fall out - no more moon in the water, no more illusions. Illusion of ... humanity? ... Evolution will take care of itself. Our contribution to the universe, to life, to understanding?
i wrote some time ago, in another context, something similar, to paste in here:
well this was too long for a comment so the paste is in the next.
I certainly agree with you here, even in relation to Buddhism. It reminds me, crisis reminds me, of existentialism; we're thrown into Dasein (Wikipedia: "Dasein (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːzaɪn]) is a German word which literally means being there (German: da - there; sein - being) often translated in English with the word existence. It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger particularly in his magnum opus Being and Time. Heidegger uses the expression dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself."), and we're ill-prepared. Other species have blooms, from cicadas to algae, but they have not had the consciousness to comprehend their situation, much less the global situation they affect. Unlike many other species, we're doomed, we know we're doomed, and can do little if anything about it.
DeleteOther species by the way comprehend death; there are even rites of passage among birds, for example. We're blind to the world around us, that we transform so deeply.
I described myself yesterday to someone as a mournful or troubled atheist; I would love to believe, perhaps it's my genes speaking or my life-inertia, in some sort of afterlife or purpose to all of this, even if it were nothing more than conceivable enlightenment, but nothing holds for me; it's as if the world were porous, penetrated by annihilation, and nothing else.
And of course thank you for this, I wouldn't have expected anything but brilliance from you, no matter how despairing. (This comment seems out of place but I'll let it stand.)
some notes related to this -
Deletedeath makes us free. knowing i will die - the one who is thinking and
writing this, the one who knows he will die - the one who knows he will
die and who will die, he is free from death. this freedom is terrifying
beyond fear. but it makes us soft and calm. why so different reactions?
first of all, freedom is freedom - who said freedom was good, or bad, or
had specific properties - isn't it rather free from properties? so then,
the freedom, which is mine, aquired from thinking about my death,
doesn't have specific properties, but negates them. if i feel bound then
freedom frees me, but if i'm already free then freedom might terrify me.
so "death makes us free" should be understood as free from the bondage
of death (if death indeed has bound us). how to stay free, when in
freedom the world collapses on you, you collapse on yourself? the
different reactions seem to be dependent on the environment, almost like
a logical operator it transforms everything it sees, negates it, turns
itself into the abjected, frees itself from, and frees itself from
itself - transformations take place, maybe irregular, unstable. It will
induce in you what you are not. So death would intensify life, through
freedom, but this intensifies also the notion of death again, the
entanglement, as if death was flourishing through the freedom of life
Doesn't death resolve fear? Who can be afraid of anything, given his own
death?
The flying arrow
DeleteI'm bound to follow my body, and its rules, though I'd rather not. It
means my values, my worldview, isn't supportable, isn't human... For
example, I don't want to be a master of anything or anyone - not even
myself. But my body will pay for this akratic ideal. "Cultivate!", it
responds, "Grow!" - but I refuse. I know you'll cheat me in the end, so
I refuse to be your servant. "But it's for your own good!", my body
says. Even so, I'd rather die than be your slave. "But I'm the only
thing you have!" it argues. I don't even have you, I respond. "How can
you say that - how ungrateful you are", the body answers, "Don't you see
that this is exactly what makes you a slave? And when you're your own
master you're free?" I find this mastery repugnant and illusory, like
you're fooling a child to eat his food. The child will eat when it's
hungry anyway. Even when we know we're going to die, we keep on eating,
even the last supper, or the last meal of a stately executed. This is
how I see it: Life returns to you when you look at death and decide to
throw it away, along with any kind of mastery. Even mastery returns to
you when you deny it. I deny everything and everything comes back, but
in freedom, in complete freedom. And I continue to eat as if I didn't
eat at all. I'm like the flying arrow which doesn't move at any moment,
and hence doesn't move. So then why do I say I'm bound to follow my body
though I'd rather not? Well, does the flying arrow move or not? If you
say it moves then you're bound to follow. And it moves if reality is a
continuum, if there is no definable 'moment'. But if there's no
definable moment then how can you be bound? How can you be bound by a
continuum? You see, there's the trick - you treat reality as if it were
pixelated, as if there were 'moments' and bodies moving through it -
sort of a digital world we build and relate to - turning ourselves into
slaves (of the matrix somehow). But in a digital world the arrow doesn't
move! We call this mastery, to hold the arrow, and that's the illusion.
You're kind of holding yourself, holding your life, holding your death,
holding even this mastery of holding. And you have to hold the movements
to follow your body, though you'd rather not... As if you had a double,
a physical and a digital body, and you want them to correspond, fighting
with yourself until the end - the digital fighting movement, the
physical fighting inertia. Or, the mind is fighting the flux of the
body, while the body is fighting the stillness of the mind (it's
inability to reflect it completely). But be sure, the flying arrow
moves, and there's no way you can hold it, even with the best
resolutions. All the same, I'm the flying arrow that doesn't move at any
moment, because I'm not bound by it, not bound to follow, simply because
I'm the arrow.
To the first post - that's very much the philosophy of Sartre's existentialism in Being and Nothingness - really do recommend the book (which I like). But in the book, the analysis is also complicated by annihilation - Pascal talks about the darkness and despair in Pensees, a precursor - at least for me this absolute freedom (which S. also developed in terms of existential psychoanalysis) is the ultimate despair for two reasons - because of its 'wobbliness' - there is no inherent communality in it - and because the freedom exists only in terms of limited duree or projection - and even nearing the lowering of the curtain, human consciousness might be so curtailed as concretely unable to respond to any situation, free or bound - just inert...
DeleteYes, of course, in relation to the second and the digital world. But the duality you stress disappears with phantom limbs, with autisms and catatonias, with tics, with the diminution of any sort of mastery with age; the arrow doesn't fly and may not appear to move at all. When you finally look at death, you die - that's the inertness, not the dialog with the body within the body and within the mind, which are all entangled in the first and last place. Most of us have a will to survive, to eke out, hence the last meal is still a meal. But the will doesn't carry conviction, it exists within communality, within a phenomenology of others that in a way undermines the existential project/tion - Alfred Schutz is good on this, as is Merleau Ponty and Michael Taussig. Not trying to throw names out here, these are things I think about, that's all, as do you of course!
I do get the feeling that discussion in the face of crisis is almost too easy - bringing up the above, one of the main things that has emerged in relation to the hurricane, as you might imagine, is the volunteer community that has emerged, not only locally within neighborhoods, although that's the heart of it, but among neighborhoods and states and organizations as well. The darkness that looms in relation to the crisis, though, won't go away - the bringing of the city to its knees, and maybe and even hopefully, the questioning of the technophilia hubris that allows us (in the US) to say that everything has a solution, if enough money and power is thrown at it - or even, that allows us to say, God won't forsake us, because we are unfortunately a religious people here, and take our sides and stake with Heaven...
Delete
ReplyDelete*******The ant is crawling on the wall, poor humans. It falls down twenty times
its own length but starts again immediately while humans would have died
immediately, twenty times. We are soft animals, physically weak and
useless; our strength is in the head and by that making tools to
compensate our weaknesses. But by the mediation we've made tools that
just as well can be turned against us. It's more difficult that the
ant's tool can turn against it (though in evolution that's natural). Our
ability for suicide individually or as species, can also be seen as a
mediation, tool, but of life itself; which means that our strength is
neither in body nor in head but rather in the non-being (emptiness) of
consciousness. Does consciousness survive death of the body and head? I
didn't say consciousness reflected reality... Maybe evolution into our
consciousness corresponds to the species' suicidality. If we can mediate
ourselves to this extent... Yet the body is doing this mediation... So
the question is what we prefer: reality or truth. If we choose reality
then human consciousness about it doesn't matter, while truth is human
consciousness about reality. Evolution: why does reality want truth?
Maybe it doesn't, and will destroy any species that approaches it close
enough. Or the species will destroy itself in the futility of joining
truth and reality, because reality is truth minus humans. Then you try
to fix it with phenomenology and leave reality to itself, that's like
self-help for suicidals.
Who know how adapted we humans are to our environment, seems rather a bad case on the whole. How many thousand years more can we survive - and why does it seem improbable? Maybe we're so generalist that it works to our disadvantage, being ruined by success?
our bodies are too small for our heads, or the head too big for our bodies. We want to transform our planet! Transform ourselves! what great species we are! We're greater than ourselves, and we have no idea of where we're going!
*****
We have no idea, because the idea of a goal, i.e. where we're going, is problematic in the first place; think of nothing but existence, and our teleology imposed upon or within that - that's about it. If consciousness survived the death of the flesh, I think we'd have some evidence, and the diminution of consciousness with senescence or severe illness or injury, proclaims otherwise; we dream of perfectly functioning consciousness as surviving, but there's no indication of that, or of what such consciousness would even be...
Delete- body, death. hard to come to terms with, our experiences,
Deleteconsciousness seem so rich, how can it die? But it was born, the
richness was born. Because it's so marvellous, life/consciousness, we
get hypnotized, it's such a great toy. We're blinded by the richness of
consciousness -
we're blinded by the uncanny imaginary of fecundity; if you look at social studies in the United States around 1910 or so, for example, you'll find that coal reserves were considered pretty much infinite - now West Virginia's turning into a wasteland (they lost their forests by 1909) and things have turned into the prediction of apocalyse...
Deletewe abuse what we use. -
I think re the above, that the fecundity, richness, itself is an illusion, and our very sight destroys whatever might have been, given the nature of instrumental reason.
DeleteIt's difficult certainly to continue like this - perhaps the most depressing discussion I've had in a long time. But the news is full of depressing commentary, images, videos, testimonies, discussions, and so forth, and we live immersed in such - we should have listened more to the signs of global warming, instead of seeing it as a conspiracy foisted on us by a secretive scientific community acting in consort for whatever ends...
This is what happens within the politics of Empire - which always sees itself as boundless, endless, and of course, they/we all collapse...
Maybe consider it fitting that crisis, in part, caused a deterioration of the course.
ReplyDeleteFrom my perspective, I had technical issues (could never post, only comment) and found the lack of structure somewhat limiting. And just like the students I work with who take online courses, I let online work take a backseat to what was happening in my offline world.
Re your comment, yes, not only a deterioration of the course, but a deterioration of the course in the sense as "the course of human history" which is also deteriorating. I still wonder why you couldn't post; if worse comes to worse, please add comments as posts and announce them as such...
DeleteMeanwhile Eyebeam Art + Technology Center where I was residence is cleaning up after flooding, and the news here continues even now to be largely about the hurricane and its effects; the rest, the elections for example, seem secondary. Everyone is weary and I think people in the region here are subtly traumatized, in the sense that this occurrence is now considered to be the new normative: we're leaving a premonition of the future, and the area isn't wealthy enough to protect itself against this kind of enormous destruction.