May 14th 2013

juanmedinasty:

bettie-goth:

titlefight:

We’re playing FYF Fest in Los Angeles on August 24th with some cool bands.

http://fyffest.com

HECK YEAH

YUH!

Apr 17th 2013

(Source: pedalfar, via rollingthoughts)

Jan 31st 2013

vintageitalia:

Walking

(Source: vintageitalia, via hifabiano)

Dec 20th 2012

nevver:

The end is at hand

Dec 10th 2012

fucktheory:

Organon

Opinions Are Like Assholes, or,
Response, Refutation, and Reason in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

Here’s an actual thing I woke up to this morning.

My critique from yesterday:
“The epistemological blind spots of contemporary analytic philosophy leave it unable to recognize or understand its debt to the basic principles of Aristotle’s term logic.”

Analytic philosophy student’s response (reblogged, not sent to me directly):
“Here are texts you should read by contemporary analytic philosophers that will help you understand why your statement about analytic philosophy and Aristotle is wrong.”

My response to the response:
“You’re fucking retarded.  You don’t have to kill yourself, but for fuck’s fucking sake find better teachers and learn yourself some actual philosophy.”
(Are the PC police happy now?  Look, I’m being teacherly.)

Voltaire once quipped of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  In that spirit, let me say of analytic philosophy that it is neither analytic nor philosophy.  It is not analytic because it lacks any sense of self-reflexion about its methodology, its limits, or its principles.  It is additiveand algorithmic, blindly plugging and playing with frankly nonsensical assumptions about “first” and “second” order logic, about universal truth, and other such claptrap that mostly involves reinventing the narrow-mindedness of the Platonic dialectic in a series of elaborate squiggles.  And for much the same reason, it is also not philosophy, because it is not committed to the creation, reorganization, or evaluation of concepts, nor is it committed to the situation of historical claims on a conceptual plane of immanence rather than in a spiral of dialectical know-it-all-ism.  Since I’m fond of linking my entirely absurd claims to specific texts and comments, as opposed to making much more sensible arguments based on things that areentirely obvious but which somehow can never be adequately located, justified, or explained, I remind the reader of Nietzsche’s comment in Beyond Good and Evil:  “We must not forget that the most pernicious, most long-lasting and terrible fallacy in the history of philosophy was a dogmatic one - Plato’s invention of the ‘good in itself.’” (For the record, I have that shit memorized in German and I just translated it in my head.  First, study.  Then, argue.  Axiom #1).  

Since I’m consistently disappointed in efforts on the part of groups whose ideology I critique to adequately defend their position, I’m going to offer this post as a heuristic for dismantling my own claims. Try a little harder, folks, I’m not impressed.  You don’t have to like everything I write or ‘like’ everything I write, but if you’re new to my blog and/or arguments, consider pausing long enough to consider the possibility that you’re having a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that I just evicerated your favorite sacred cow.  Mmmmm….entrails. 

You see, I’m what the Roman Republic called a ‘haruspice’ or ‘haruspex’ (depending what text you’re reading and/or who’s doing the translating) - I specialize in ripping apart sacred cows and predicting the future based on the layout of the entrails.  It’s not deconstruction, it’s just the most delicious, locally-raised steak you ever tasted, fed on 100%-organic bullshit.  The only wood we use in our BBQ pits are the pathetic, self-congratulatory erections of tenured academics too blind to see the limits of their own disciplinary assumptions.  Having cogitated on these possibilities, consider going back through some of my archives, perhaps using my relatively consistent hash-tagging system, to see how and why the arguments you object to are situated - that is, what their conceptual plane of immanence is.  This applies not only to new readers, but also to regular readers who consistently send me messages along the lines of “Usually I like your blog, but today you crossed a line.”  Shut the fuck up, bitch.  You love it when I rip other people a new asshole but when you’re invested suddenly you think I’m a heartless, unethical bastard?  YOU should DEFINITELY kill yourself.  Let me sum this up in Axiom #2:  I’m not fucking talking to you.  I don’t make arguments against individual people except in rare cases where those people have gone out of their way to associate their own name specifically with a particular brand of public idiocy.  I only link to dirt, I don’t make any effort to break or collect it.  As a matter of course, I make specific claims about general ideological, disciplinary, or institutional conditions and processes.  Look at the title of the blog.  Now look at the subtitle of my blog.  Now look at both of them again.  This blog isn’t about you.  Unless you’re Peter Singer or al Ghazali or some other person I critique by name, the post you’re reblogging isn’t addressed to you.  And just because you reblogged it on Tumblr and had a knee-jerk reaction instead of taking the time to look at the source blog, or at least to reader the whole fucking original post (don’t use the abbreviation ‘OP,’ it’s gross), does not make your butthurt my problem.  Capisce?  This very post is a perfect example.  I’m guessing wildly that you’re a junior academic in analytic philosophy, somewhere between undergrad and beginning grad student.  Maybe not, but whatever.  See the index card above.  The point is, later in this post my rhetoric is clearly a critique of tenured faculty in contemporary academia.  Unless you are a tenured faculty member in contemporary academic, your taking offense at these comments, even if you are an analytic philosopher, clearly demonstrates, by what Aristotle could call “valid imperfect deduction,” that you’re an idiot.  The same proof might hold even if you area tenured faculty member, but in a different figure, obviously. 

If I’m making an argument about the blindness of your disciplinary method, you can’t refute that argument by insisting on the very principles I’m critiquing.  Axiom #3.  After I finish this post, smoke a joint (for medicinal purposes…I suffer from serious paranoid anxiety about the state of higher education - I can’t seem to face up to the facts; I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax), and play with my spiders a little, I’ll write a separate Organon post explaining this axiom from an Aristotelian perspective, i.e., whooping your analytic ass all over again.  Booyah. 

Let’s start from the top of this morning’s sophistical funhouse:
“This might be an aside, but I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on suggesting either that modern logic supports Aristotle (or vice versa) or on the A/E/I/O sentences.”

First off, it “might” be an aside?
Axiom #4:  First think, then talk.  Let the idea simmer, and let the gears in your head finish creaking.  Make an intellectual determination - is it an aside, or is it not an aside?  Logic!  Then, having made this determination, proceed to the next bifurcation -  if it is and aside, does that make it irrelevant?  If so, why the fuck are you saying it anyway?  You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.  When I have nothing to say, my lips are s-s-s-sealed. 

Next up:
“I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on suggesting either that modern logic supports Aristotle (or vice versa) or on the A/E/I/O sentences.”

Oh, you wouldn’t huh?  That’s good to know.  I’ll keep that in mind.  I’ll make sure to update my teaching notes based on your recommendation.  And I’ll also make sure to, oh, I don’t know, UPDATE MY FUCKING READING NOTES FROM FOREVER AND A FUCKING DAY AGO, because my post clearly states that these are notes I took when I first read Aristotle. 

Axiom #5: Teach the text like it teaches itself.  Read the text like it writes itself.  Respond to an argument on its own conceptual plane of immanence.  Here’s why close reading is an invaluable and primary tool of speculative and conceptual inquiry, and here’s why the utter inability of analytic philosophers to to fucking read and write coherent English will forever make them an intellectual joke not just to me but to the general reading public.  You can mock Nietzsche all you want.  He died in an asylum, har har har.  Not only is it amusing as fuck to watch a bunch of dandruff-flecked undersexed neurotics make fun of a paranoid schizophrenic’s mental illness, there’s also the small matter of the fact that Nietzsche was not only a successful lecturer and professor, attaining tenure at Basel at the age of twenty-fucking-four, bitch, he was also one of the most brilliant prose stylists in the history of German language.  That’s why people read him everywhere in the world, in every language of translation and in many, often critically inadequate, formats.  He make not make sense in your squiggly little world of sets and theorems, but the thing is, Bad Will Hunting, that Nietzsche, with his social anxiety, debilitating physical illness, and paranoid schizophrenia was better able to communicate his thoughts to an educated reading public in an enduring and coherent than you pathetic gasbags who get paid an absurd, tenured salary while graduate students teacher your classes by rote memorization, inculcating another generation of bright young thinkers into a pernicious and self-enclosed dialectic oscillating between utter lack of inquiry and resolute navel-gazing (the term ‘navel-gazing,’ by the way, comes from the Greek omphaloskepsis, and originates in the esoteric Byzantine practice of hesychasm, which is utterly alien to Western Latin theology but which has close ties to Sufi Aristotelian mysticism and to the Indo-Aryan philosophy of yoga, all three of which you have been taught fuck-all about).  

My point is this - I clearly state in my text that the notes I present are a summary of my own reading, refined and condensed for teaching.  Here are some valid entry points for critique:
- “I’ve taught this before, and my experience has been that…”
- “I’ve been taught this before, and my experience has been that…”
- “I’ve never taught this, and I’m concerned that teaching it this way might cause the following problems…”
- “I read this text closely, and I produced a very different summary, and here’s why.”
- “I’m a native speaker of Greek/a scholar of Ancient Greek/a student of classics who has been reading the text in Greek and here’s why I disagree with your reading and/or think your translation is lacking.”

“I wouldn’t”, you’ll notice if you actually read the fucking thing, is not on that list.  “I wouldn’t” just expresses your opinion.  Whoopty-fucking doo.  Hence Axiom #6: Opinions are like assholes - every analytic philosophy department is a flatulent collection of them. 

Drum-roll, ching.  But seriously, folks.  No, let’s get serious for a second.  Axiom #7, ladies and gentlemen:  You can’t fucking respond to an argument I didn’t make, and you certainly can’t expect me to respond to your response to an argument I didn’t make, and you mostcertainly can’t get butthurt because I tell you your response is a response to an argument I didn’t make, and if you waste my audience’s time at a conference or in class by publicly getting butthurt about such a response to a response, you can almost certainly expect to leave the conference hall with deep lacerations on your fragile ego because I’m 1/4 Transylvanian and I have the fangs to prove it, motherfucker.

Evidence: “suggesting either that modern logic supports Aristotle (or vice versa) or on the A/E/I/O sentences”

Proof and Scholium: Did I suggest that modern ‘supports’ Aristotle?  Did you take the time to read the fucking post before you ran your fucking mouth?  I’m gonna guess that the answer to both of those questions is a resounding no.  I said that modern logic - actually, I said ‘contemporary analytic philosophy, ’ which is a disciplinary, professional, and self-identificatory marker, as opposed to ‘modern logic,’ which is just a meaningless coupling of empty signifiers because you offer no conceptual plane to localize them - is unable to understand or recognize its debt to Aristotle’s logicalsystem.  I clearly linked the Three Figures with specific texts attributed to Aristotle and a specific lineage of speculative and conceptual pedagogy and philosophy.  You talked about some guy named “Aristotle” who you may have studied but I’m definitely not sure you read, and you talked about some abstract concept of ‘modern logic’ which doesn’t really mean anything. 

Hence Axiom #8: Determine, define, and defend your conceptual plane of immanence.  This isn’t just a question of conceptual adequacy, it’s also a question of styleand clarity.  Your ideas don’t mean shit if nobody understands them.  That’s the Aristotelian critique of contemporary analytic philosophy.  The more specifically you localize your claims in definitions, claims, and textual precedence, the more plausible, coherent, and convincing your arguments will be.  The more clearly your critique corresponds to the conceptual plane of the ideas you’re responding to, the more meaningful, genuine, and significant your critique will be.  Axiom #9: Read with the text, not against it.  Don’t try to bulldoze your way through the rhetoric to unpack the “errors” built into the argument; still less should you aim to “correct” another thinker’s argument.  Bitch, you ain’t my mother.  See what the author is doing; see how their intellectual activity might be relevant or interesting to you; see how you can expand, revise, or contribute to the conceptual plane of immanence they have constructed.  Axiom #10: positive, constructive critique is genuine philosophical labor.  Negating critique, what Eve Sedgwick brilliant types as “paranoid reading” in her bookTendencies(highly recommended, though you might accidentally learn you something), is pretty much always an inverse way of stroking your own ego by biting someone else on the nutsack.  Good for you, buddy.  

The last bit is this the bit “on the A/E/I/O sentences,” which prompts my final two axiomata.  Did you take a second, or even half of one, to actually look at what I had to say about “the A/E/I/O sentences”?  Here’s what I said, abstracted, boiled down, and reduced to a soft, pulpy mush for you to insert into your Venn diagram.  Axiom #11:  the study of philosophy and the study of the history of philosophy are not the same intellectual project.  Their conceptual planes of immanence overlap but are not coextensive or identical.  My explanation of the Scholastic notation for the Three Figures of classical Aristotelian logic was entirely rooted in a simple fact that was clearly expressed in my post:  in essentia the fact that these figures formed the basis of ALL education, argumentation, and intellectual authority in Medieval European philosophy, and that if you want to understand the structure, concepts, and history of that philosophy, you need to know these figures like the back of your hand.  Since the period during which the Three Figures had greatest significance, other than Aristotle’s own, is that of the Latin Scholastics, and since the A/E/I/O notation (also known as the Square of Oppositions) is the most frequent notation used by these Scholastics, I recommend using their own abbreviations as a heuristic or mnemonic device to study and memorize them.  In fact, the Scholastics invented many further devices, pedagogical, rhetorical, and mnemonic, to remember and imbibe virtually every aspect of Aristotle’s Organon, which is why I have so much more respect for them than for today’s graduate students:  because before they were allowed to open their mouths in public, they had to spend 10 years fucking studying the shit out of that shit.  

Which brings me to the last axiom, Axiom #12 - There is no such fucking thing as logical “truth.”  Truth is a myth invented by gullible Neoplato-Hegelian Christians.  Jews have never bought into it, and neither, for the record, did Aristotle, but hey, if you don’t take my word for it, you might actually have to read the Posterior Analytics to understand how Aristotle himself situates the Three Figures in his own plane of conceptual immanence.  There are only texts, concepts, relations, and the living mind putting them together and expressing them.  We can rephrase this basic claim any number of ways.  We can phrase it in imitation of Deleuze’s summary of Spinoa: there is only one substance that expresses, infinite attributes which express it, and infinite modes of substance in which it is expressed.  We can say, as Aristotle does, that both “truth” and “proof” are relative to the frame of inquiry, and it is never the syllogism itself that produces proof, but the structure of the syllogism in relation to the structure of the other two figures.  That’s why Aristotle insists that full proof depends not on the claims of any given deduction but on the convertability of the syllogism’s predicative relations.  There’s a reason Aristotle’s text explores three figures only in relation to each other.  Duh. 

More importantly, I’d like to quash with utmost vigor the analytic concept of “first-order” and “second-order” logic.  There’s only one world, guys.  And it’s the one you’re in.  When you close the door and start scribbling on the chalkboard to convince yourself how right you and always will be about everything you already knew, you aren’t magically transported to a Pythagorean universe of ideal numbers and pure figures which embrace in their purity the truth of existence.  Sorry.  You’re still a logic dweeb with dandruff.  As Spinoza and Hume both agree, there is no number in nature.  Aristotle’s logic is not an algorithm for churning out “truth” or even, for that matter, “proof.”  It’s a brilliant, timeless method of organizing one’s existing experiences of and arguments about the world in a measured and reflexive way.  In other words, the opposite of analytic philosophy.  There is only one economy.  And that economy would be much better served on an intellectual level by a systematic study of philosophy in which so-called “Anglo-American analytic philosophy” was a tiny, insignificant part, like Chomsky’s generative grammar and Singer’s utilitarianism.  Ugh.

Oh, and one last thing - despite vague claims about the incoherence of the Square of Oppositions, if you take the time to actually plug the four basic predications into the three basic figures one at a time like I have and like hundreds of thousands of Latin and Greek students had to over the ages, you will find that even with the best efforts of contemporary analytic philosophy, when the Square of Oppositions is understood carefully on its own plane of conceptual immanence, it is invalidated by one thing and one thing only, which is an empty set resulting from one or more predicative copulae.  But since an empty set is an entirely theoretical concept useful only for statistics and set theory and bearing absolutely no relation to the actual world, in which there is neither void nor ontological negation, this is a purely speculative contradiction.

Don’t even fucking talk to me about Aristotle, motherfucker.

:o

Nov 2nd 2012

deeannao5:

“Dia de muertos” (day of the dead) @ the Mexico-US Border in Mexicali BC Mexico border with Calexico CA US.

(via aleimina)