Like A Rolling Stone

Here's something incredible:

April 11, 2005 - In, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus recounts the recording sessions for the 1965 Dylan hit.

Read an Excerpt

Recording Session 2 for "Like a Rolling Stone" / 16 June 1965, Studio A / Columbia Records, New York City

With Michael Bloomfield, guitar, Joe Macho, Jr., bass, Bobby Gregg, drums. Al Kooper is at the organ; Paul Griffin is at the piano; Bruce Langhorne is playing tambourine. Al Gorgoni and Frank Owens are not present.

Rehearsal take 1 — 1.53

Dylan leads the group into the song with a strong, strummed theme on his electric rhythm guitar. Paul Griffin has a loose, free bounce on the piano; Kooper immediately has a high, clear tone. Dylan stops it: "Hey, man, you know, I can't, I mean, I'm just me, you know. I can't, really, man, I'm just playing the song. I know — I don't want to scream it, that's all I know — " He takes up the theme again; Bloomfield and Gregg come in. The feeling is right all around; a rich ensemble is coming together.

Hoarsely, Dylan starts the second verse — "Never turned around to see the frowns" — and you can feel Bloomfield finding his groove. "You never understood that it ain't no good" — and it breaks off, just when it was getting exciting. From the control booth: "Bob, just you alone, so you can hear what your guitar sounds like, on this amplifier. Only you, please, for a minute." Dylan plays the lead-in, again, the rhythm behind "Once upon a time," a small, twirling dance around something that is yet to appear, and you begin to hear how the whole song is structured around those four words, that idea: how the purpose of the song is to make a stage for them. "That's enough," says the voice from the booth. "We can play it back for you."

Quote of the Day

"We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention," said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). "We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights."
"You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention," added Kirk, who voted for the bill. "I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you."

Well, that's a relief.

Stasis

I've said this myself, and nobody seems to agree with me. '80s nostalgia began not half way through the '90s. The first decade of the 2000s is over, and I have no idea what looks quaint or kitchy about the '90s--not enough has changed. Watch "The Wedding Singer," and then think about what the version of that about the '90s would be. Impossible.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

UPDATE: The sketch comedy show "Portlandia" puts forward the proposition that Portland, OR is stuck in the '90s. Since I spent most of the previous decade in Portland and other parts of Oregon, maybe the world has moved on and I didn't notice.

Juxtaposed Quotes

‎Kristin Snicklefritz sez (hold your applause until the end): “After taking a good nights rest and reflecting on all the debate over property destruction, Anarchists, and the movement as whole, my current conclusion is that those decrying the property destruction, those demonizing Anarchists, those holding up signs and chanting “peace” like they’re at a damn A.N.S.W.E.R. organized protest march (with some subsequently committing violent acts against -people- to “maintain” that “peace”)… have no concept of what is going on. Without Anarchist methodology and organization, this movement a.) would not exist; and b.) if it existed would not be this successful; and c.) would not have gone from 0 to Port of Oakland shut-down in less than one month. I’ve heard cries for the Anarchists to leave, that if they want to “go against the movement”, they should start their own movement. Something that has been echoed by liberal organizers in movements over the past 10 years, since the Anarchists mobilized against the WTO. Well, they did start their own movement. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. And now they are ironically being told to leave. Alright, but if they leave, they would like to take everything they brought with them to this movement. Direct Democracy through the General Assembly, the Consensus process, Facilitation, most of the proposals we all vote on in the GA, Food Not Bombs kitchen organization, communalism, communal infrastructure, a rejection of state authority to be able to police the occupied space, THE TAKING OF SPACE, protest medics, the book shields, taking to the streets without a permit, the chant “Who’s streets? Our streets!”, Security training, safer spaces, a refusal to liaison with the government by the government’s hierarchical terms and process, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much everything that makes this movement what it is, what makes it so very different from the liberal psuedo-movements we’ve witnessed over the past decade, what makes so people excited about it – Anarchists. If you want them to leave – Anarchists, Anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians – they will take everything they’ve brought with them to the table out of this co-opted movement. Then we can all watch the movement cave in on itself in a matter of a week.”

But if militancy approaches work, it cannot be assimilated to it. Work is the activity on which the dominant world is based, it produces and reproduces capital and capitalist relations of production; militancy is only a minor activity. By definition, the results and effectiveness of work are not measured by the satisfaction of the worker, but they have the advantage of being economically measurable. Commodity production, by means of currency and profit, creates its standards and instruments of measure. It has its own logic and rationality, which it imposes on producer and consumer. By contrast, the effectiveness of militancy, "the advancement of the revolution", still hasn't found its measuring instruments. Their control evades militants and their leaders. Assuming, of course, that the latter still worry about the revolution ! So they are reduced to counting the material produced and distributed, the levels of recruitment, the number of actions undertaken; obviously none of these measure what they pretend to. Naturally enough from this they come to imagine that what is measurable is an end in itself. Imagine a capitalist who could not find a means of evaluating the value of his production, and so settled for measuring the quantity of oil consumed by machines. Conscientiously, workers would empty oil into the gutter in order to produce an increase in... production. Incapable of pursuing its proclaimed goal, militancy only gives itself the name of work.

Imagine There's No Douchebags

This is from a blog post I stumbled onto by a guy named Hennessy. The post makes the point that John Lennon clearly had no talent for theology, and he should have stuck to what he was good at, singing or whatever. Of course, one must ask whether this guy has any business talking about music, especially in light of the first sentence below. Anyway, I found this amusing and perhaps others will too:

It must be said that Lennon’s lyricizing for the Beatles and his first solo albums were merely a prologue for his enduring masterwork and most famous composition, 1971’s “Imagine.” Much ink has been spilled about this song, treasured by millions the world over for its supposed message of peace and harmony. It is regularly ranked one of the greatest compositions of all time by the editors of music magazines and radio programmers.
“Imagine” is in fact a blatantly nihilistic evocation of an atheist global utopia where the triple-scourge of possessions, greed, and hunger have all been abolished in the name of international brotherhood. Think of it as a North Korean propaganda film with a great piano riff and a nice string arrangement.
When I regard the life’s work of John Lennon these days, I do it with a high degree of ambivalence. His music, and the Beatles’ vast catalog, retains its enormous appeal. But I can neither sanction Lennon's godless vision of the world nor separate it from the experience of listening to his music. I would go so far as to call it dangerous.
And I’m not the only one.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/12/john-lennonrsquos-bad-theology

"Originary Technicity"

I am wondering about the limits of a thinking that makes a kind of automatism fundamental to thought (and presumably everything else). This sort of claim seems to undermine the truth-normative grounds for accepting it. Having just read Originary Technicity by Arthur Bradley (an excellent book), my suspicion is that this kind of discourse--one that sees "technology" (with or without scare quotes) at the heart of the human-- leads into a circle that cannot be escaped by radicalizing the insight, but that there is a fundamental impasse here. Bradley sees the impasse, but I think he wants to radicalize the discourse of technicity, although he gives no indication how this might work.

I should say that I do find these sorts of claims very convincing, particularly those of Derrida and Stiegler (but Deleuze has his own bag which I am not really up to commenting on). But they seem to lead to an inescapable aporia. They probably lead back to Heidegger (of course one could substitute any number of other thinkers who take the conditions of truth seriously as more than an effect of 'differance,' but Heidegger for me). The strength of this sort of thinking is that it critiques the residual anthropocentrism in Heidegger from a perspective that is not merely axiological, but has some argumentative traction. Yet it seems like it tends to collapse back into Heidegger, and I'm not entirely satisfied with that.

Sorry if this is too terse, it's hard to find time for this sort of thing. Please comment if you have something to ask or add.

Greasy Kid Stuff

Now that I have a two year old daughter, I am exposed to a lot of children's books. The kind of thing she can dig at that age is a bit limited, as one might imagine; she gets bored with too much text, and although her English is pretty good, she's not exactly William F. Buckley yet. There are things that are better than others, and things I particularly enjoy (Dr. Seuss is still great), but a lot of my enjoyment comes from how much she enjoys something, rather than any real artistic merit, or however we want to put that.

It was astonishing, however, to come across this thing called In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. It's really a great little book. As a kid I read Where The Wild Things Are, like nearly everybody my age or younger, but he takes it to a whole other level, as they say, with this thing. It's a dream tale that's surreal, creepy and full of mystery.

The Birds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8775ZmNGFY8

Quote of the Day

There's not really a "quote of the day" feature, I'm just dropping this here so I remember it, since it's very pithy and partly expresses something I have been having a hard time formulating:

Generally speaking, the opinions of the proletarians, their political beliefs, their religious identity and their cultural practices are all objectively irrelevant to their revolutionary potential. Such surface phenomena have become increasingly historically irrelevant because: (i) capitalist relations have hollowed them from essential social truths into mere localized mystifications of the commodity form (ii) these eviscerated formations such as Political Islam have no capacity to transform the productive relation.

The Beatles: American and British

I'm thinking about the Beatles lately because I recently got "Beatles for Sale" on cd. Up until "Sgt. Pepper," Capitol records would take the records the Beatles made and release them in Britain, then cut out some songs and release them in the USA, saving songs for future albums (and manufacturing entire albums in this way, like "Yesterday and Today") and sometimes adding songs from singles, so the albums in the US were different than their British counterparts.

Recently, my wife decided we should get all the Beatles albums so our daughter could hear them. I think a lot of people probably still prefer the American versions because it is what they grew up on.

The situation with me, however, is as follows: When I first heard the Beatles, at least when I first really dug them, was when I was four years old. I remember two albums from that period, both American artifacts: "The Beatles' Second Album" and "Something New." My entire world changed upon hearing this music. I instantly became a Beatles fanatic, and eventually a rock music fanatic, and eventually a fanatic of other kinds of music. "Fanatic" seems a perfectly apt word; there was and is something not quite balanced about my attachment to music.

Anyway, I listened to the Beatles so much that I was largely burnt out on them by the time I was 16, and I have rarely listened to them voluntarily since I was 19 or so.

When I was a school child it was considered uncool to like the Beatles, and people mocked me for it. But they caught up around 9th grade, when it became respectable.

Anyway I decided to go for the British versions because it will give me a fresh take on some of the music, and perhaps in a new context I can again appreciate some of the music freshly.

I went for "Beatles for Sale" because I never owned "Beatles '65," the American analog. Hence I was never really burnt out on a lot of the songs.

I will try to say more about the album in a future post.

The Beatles and Wikipedia

When I was a child, I always had a sense of living in the shadow of the '60s (a decade I mostly missed, having been born in '68). Most of my knowledge of the '60s came from books about the Beatles. Since these books about the Beatles were about the Beatles, the main focus was, quite naturally, the Beatles. I formed a view of the situation where the '60s were largely about the Beatles. These books would always emphasize the unprecedented sales and influence of the Beatles. I eventually formed an idea of the Beatles as the biggest cultural sensation in human history, and certainly the biggest thing to ever happen in popular music.

I had this notion, I think, that, in the '60s, nobody went more than a couple of hours without thinking of the Beatles. Not even LBJ, probably, when he was preoccupied with what was going on in 'Nam. After all, even 'Nam could only be understood through the lens of the Beatles.

When I got a little older, a few things happened. For one thing, I read a few books about the era that weren't books about the Beatles, which probably gave me a sense of proportion I hadn't previously had. For another, Bob Dylan came to seem much more significant to me in that era. Also, I was at some point introduced to the weird "Beatles or Stones" dichotomy--like the equally weird "dogs or cats," you were supposed to choose one. And for a while there it was much hipper to choose the Stones. As far as singing and songwriting skill, they were clearly overmatched, but they were a little grittier, and in some ways more masculine, and they had more blues and rootsiness in their music, or at least they had these things in such a way that they sounded more natural with them. I don't think I ever preferred the Stones, but the fact that so many people did seems significant.

Anyway, I'm not sure what it was like to live through the '60s, or what the significance of the Beatles was. There were people who broke some of their sales records and things who rarely, if ever, entered my consciousness while they were doing it. But maybe it wasn't like that back then, it was perhaps all newer and rarer.

I am pretty sure that the Beatles are the only band or artist that this is true of: if you go to their Wikipedia discography, there is an entry for every song on every album. I'm not sure how that came to be, or what it means. A lot of Beatles fanatics are Wikipedians? Or such people are heavily represented because of their prevalance in the world at large? I don't know...

Classic Rock

My memory tells me "Classic Rock" was concocted by radio stations in the 1980s. The Classic Rock repertoire mostly begins in the mid-60s. My question is, what happened to the 50s and early 60s? Why isn't that Classic Rock?

Titan Man

I passed 1,000 views some time today, I think. I wish I knew who the thousandth customer was, I'd give them a lifetime supply of posts.

Heidegger and Realism Part IV: a brief remark

I realize that the account I gave in the last post sounds a little like one version of 20th Century Analytic philosophy, with science permitted to talk about the world and philosophy concerned with the conditions of such talk. But there are important differences; for one thing, for Heidegger science is not privileged over other modes of ontic disclosure. For another, Heideggerian thinking isn't concerned with the mechanics of signification--logic-- so much as it is an attempt to preserve the world-disclosing potentialities in language, and to cultivate an openness to the event of disclosure. Much more could, of course, be said about this, but this is not the moment for that.

The Myopia of Optimism

From the occupy Philly blog:

‎Kristin Snicklefritz sez (hold your applause until the end): “After taking a good nights rest and reflecting on all the debate over property destruction, Anarchists, and the movement as whole, my current conclusion is that those decrying the property destruction, those demonizing Anarchists, those holding up signs and chanting “peace” like they’re at a damn A.N.S.W.E.R. organized protest march (with some subsequently committing violent acts against -people- to “maintain” that “peace”)… have no concept of what is going on. Without Anarchist methodology and organization, this movement a.) would not exist; and b.) if it existed would not be this successful; and c.) would not have gone from 0 to Port of Oakland shut-down in less than one month. I’ve heard cries for the Anarchists to leave, that if they want to “go against the movement”, they should start their own movement. Something that has been echoed by liberal organizers in movements over the past 10 years, since the Anarchists mobilized against the WTO. Well, they did start their own movement. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. And now they are ironically being told to leave. Alright, but if they leave, they would like to take everything they brought with them to this movement. Direct Democracy through the General Assembly, the Consensus process, Facilitation, most of the proposals we all vote on in the GA, Food Not Bombs kitchen organization, communalism, communal infrastructure, a rejection of state authority to be able to police the occupied space, THE TAKING OF SPACE, protest medics, the book shields, taking to the streets without a permit, the chant “Who’s streets? Our streets!”, Security training, safer spaces, a refusal to liaison with the government by the government’s hierarchical terms and process, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much everything that makes this movement what it is, what makes it so very different from the liberal psuedo-movements we’ve witnessed over the past decade, what makes so people excited about it – Anarchists. If you want them to leave – Anarchists, Anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians – they will take everything they’ve brought with them to the table out of this co-opted movement. Then we can all watch the movement cave in on itself in a matter of a week.”

Yes!!!! Anarchists have given us the movement we want!! Now...who is going to give us the world we want?

Heidegger and Realism Part III

In my past couple of posts on the topic, composed quickly (as this one will be), I moved too quickly over, and perhaps even muddled, the question of the difference between SZ-era and later Heidegger on the clearing. As I mentioned, in SZ Heidegger says "Dasein is the clearing of being" or some such. "Dasein" does not name the human being, but the way in which human beings exist. However, Heidegger did not always maintain complete clarity on this, often referring to Dasein as "a being" and even talking about individual "Daseins." As for the former, if we refer to Dasein as "a being," we must immediately remind ourselves that it is a being whose essence lies in its existence, i.e. it is a being whose enabling characteristics (i.e. "essence") are not qualities but potentialities that are enacted in the temporalizing motion of projection and retrieval. Dasein names this motion, i.e. the way of being for human beings. Thus when Heidegger talks about "Daseins" it must be seen as shorthand for "beings who exist in the manner of Dasein," i.e. "beings whose way of being in the world is clearing projection and retrieval."

After a troubling interlude in which he starts mouthing off about "German Dasein," Heidegger settles into a manner of speaking (this is not a particularly scholarly or well-researched claim, so feel free to contradict me) where human beings are referred to as "human beings" (menschen, let's leave "mortals" out of it for now) and Dasein is used more consistently to talk about the human manner of being. (A final wrinkle I won't explore here is that the bar is now higher for Dasein, so we aren't automatically existing in a Dasein-like manner).

In the interim, Heidegger discovers the "history of being," in other words the clearing is now explicitly historical-epochal. The giving of the clearing, or I would even like to say "a clearing", although I don't think Heidegger does, is not a result of human projection but, as we have seen in previous posts, is of the nature of an event--not in the sense of a thing among others that occurs within given conditions of manifestation, but in the sense of a happening that itself brings these conditions of manifestation into play .

At the same time, there is no clearing without Dasein, in a sense Dasein still "is" the clearing (H. may even maintain this formulation in some later stuff, I couldn't swear he doesn't, "Letter on Humanism" maybe?). Without a being who exists in the manner of temporalizing/disclosing, beings would be undisclosed. Human existence enacts the clearing. But the clearing no longer reflects human projects, humans are in a sense called to witness the disclosure of being.

Heidegger does not say that beings wouldn't exist without Dasein; in fact, there is a lacuna because Heidegger has no terminology to deal with things that do not be (forgive the formulation). Only Dasein is said to "exist," so that word is taken. Bare subsistence is associated with presence-at-hand, which is itself referred back to a particular disclosing comportment to beings, and hence it refers thinking back to the clearing. When things are, on the other hand, they are disclosed, since being is identified with disclosure (or "truth"). Heidegger awkwardly makes a pass at this from time to time, basically hinting that if he had words to say it, he'd admit there were still things hanging around before anything existed in the manner of Dasein, but this is not really a question for thinking--it is a question for science, which can happily disclose archaic beings (even "arche-fossils") without worrying about the conditions of their disclosure.

I'd suggest this is a perfectly acceptable situation for realists if and only if they are prepared to accept the implicit division of labor (Heidegger would hate that formulation) between thinking and science. We cannot think beings apart from their disclosure and our involvement in the latter, but we can know them, might be one way of putting it, although there's no reason to think Heidegger would put it that way. (This is a kind of reversal of Kant's stance toward the in-itself.)

Anyway these are provisional thoughts and I welcome criticism.

Miscellany

Some more fluff to keep the blog going in between substantive posts:

I subscribe to the New York Times via Kindle. I like it way better than the physical item; newspapers are unwieldy and I hate the way articles are continued later on, and one has to flip back and forth. But I haven't had much time to read it lately. I wish I could just get the Sunday edition, which would be enough for the week.

I was perhaps hasty when I mentioned that 99% probably included some baseball players...apparently 1% of the population of the US is around 3 million, way more than I would have thought without thinking about it, so to speak. I still don't know how much one has to earn to be 1%.

Teaching logic is getting boring.

Today is Halloween. I don't like dressing in a costume. I'm too lazy and unimaginative.

OK, more philosophy content is coming soon.

Bands That Soldiered On

For some reason I was thinking of bands that continued after the main member died. I recall as a youngster trying a few times (and mostly failing) to listen to Full Circle, one of the two albums The Doors made after Jim Morrison died. These probably never made it to CD. All I remember about it now is that there was a song called "4 Billion Souls"; pretty astounding that another three billion have piled on since then, all in my lifetime.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets apparently never recorded as "Buddy Holly and the Crickets"--the music was released alternately under the name "Buddy Holly" and the name "The Crickets" (although they toured as "Buddy Holly and the Crickets"). Not only did the Crickets continue after Holly's death, but his replacement--Sonny Curtis--wrote and recorded a couple of songs with the band that many of us will still remember: "I Fought the Law," which more people probably know by Bobby Fuller or The Clash, and "More Than I Can Say," with which one Leo Sayer had a hit when I was a lad.

I think Bob Marley and the Wailers were just The Wailers until Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh left the band, then after Bob Marley died they continued as The Wailers Band. But this wouldn't be too remarkable, were it not for the fact that at some point they recorded a song with John Denver, with a refrain that goes "Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh, Jah." I just found that out via Wikipedia, with a Youtube chaser: the song is called "World Game."

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead flirted with this when they toured as "The Dead," but it was at least somewhat of a name change, anyway.

There must be a lot more, but that's all I've got tonight. I feel like I forget that The Doors recorded two more albums before they broke up right after I remember it again every time, so it's always a little surprising. I'm not really a Doors fan, but it's hard to think of them as The Doors without Jim Morrison.

ADDENDUM: According to Wikipedia, Sonny Curtis also wrote The Everly Brothers' "Walk Right Back." Everyone should know that song, it is one of the great ones. The riff was later copped by Neil Young for his 90s song, "Harvest Moon."

Object Oriented Sallis?

Is John Sallis a speculative realist? His talk at SPEP seemed curiously object oriented.

The gist is as follows:

There are some decisive turns which thinking cannot refuse without falling back into nostalgia or irrelevance, and one such is what Sallis calls "the cosmological turn." Cosmological discoveries over the ages have shown the limitedness of terrestrial thinking. (Sallis dismissed as myopic those who might argue that scientific discoveries express a pre-given theoretical projection, insisting "There really are billions of galaxies" etc. )

Phenomenology studies manifestation to the point where it recoils on itself and displays the unmanifest, i.e. the various adumbrations of a thing that form its horizon but are not actually seen in any view of the object. But there is a new kind of object (or at least relatively new), a black hole, which displays a new kind of unmanifestness, one that is not partial or temporally conditioned but absolute. Light cannot escape from a black hole, it is invisible as such and absolutely.

This (relatively) new kind of object demands a new ontology, the old kinds are inadequate. Such a new ontology will break with the roots of ontology in Plato because a black hole, being absolutely invisible, has no eidos.

The upshot of it all, philosophically, is kind of vague and uncertain just on the basis of Saturday's talk, and I'm not sure that it's adequate for an ontology not to be eidetic to be new, or that there aren't non-eidetic ontologies already, or that the eidos can't be extended to pure intelligibility without reference to the literal "look" of something. But I did find the talk remarkable in that it wasn't what I expected to hear from Sallis.

In Reply to Sarah's Comment

No, I can't.

Heidegger and Realism Part II

The idea behind the clearing is that we cannot speak of beings, and thus of being (in the sense of the prevailing meaning of beings, what Heidegger calls "the being of beings") without some pregiven sense of what we are talking about. But we cannot give an account of the genesis of this sense without at the same time relying on it to justify our account, in other words there is something ungrounded at the root of our account, or, in philosophy parlance, an event, i.e something that just happens without being able to be grounded in any existing norms without fear of circularity, or, if you like, something which provides its own conditions.

It should be noted that our sense of what beings are is not, for Heidegger, just a theory we cook up, as if from nowhere, because, even in spite of ourselves, any explicit thesis we can formulate about being expresses a position we already occupy, in other words it is formulated against a background of assumptions emanating from the way we live, the way in which we interact with beings before we come to theorize about them. In this sense, any theory is in fact a symptom, something that expresses an underlying condition. As we are, we speak, which is why Heidegger does not think that we have a special relation to being because we have language, but rather that we have language because of our involvement in being. We live our relation to being before we formulate it.

The later Heidegger gives the name "thinking" to that discourse concerned with this sense-enabling timespace called the "clearing" of being, and with the event which gives the clearing (which Heidegger calls "Ereignis"). If we keep this in mind, we see that he is not being dismissive but is precisely correct to say that "science as such does not think"; science is concerned with the real genesis of things, which can only be accounted for within the parameters of (the/a) clearing; science must operate within certain norms of truth. Thinking is not concerned with real genesis at all, but with how we can come to understand beings such that we can account for their real genesis.

Since Heidegger is not a dialectical thinker, he has no way to talk about real genesis and the genesis of sense as in any way intertwined. However, it is possible that with his later turn to the interplay of world and thing, rather than the ontological difference, as the matter for thinking, he points the way to a new kind of thinking which he himself would reject, one which keeps both sides in play, playing each off against the other. This would of course need to be developed in much greater detail than I can provide here, I just want to mark it.

What's more immediately important for the conversation about realism is to understand the sort of claims Heidegger is making when he divides discourse into thinking and technical discourses. Any discourses that pursue results along a pregiven path without addressing the event of the genesis of sense are deemed "technical." That Heidegger sometimes sounds dismissive about these needn't distract us from the real thrust of what he is saying, which is that the clearing is the space within which truths can be formulated. Heidegger is not saying that the truths of science are only true "for humans," or that the Earth couldn't have really accreted 14 billions years ago (or however long it is), or any of that stuff. What Heidegger critiques about science is not that it doesn't think the clearing, but that it actively forgets the clearing, so that technical discourses come to colonize all of human existence and all non-scientific questions are deemed meaningless or, at best, "fun." (I wish I knew how to do that slick thing where the word "fun" is a link):  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/why-i-am-a-naturalist/

Heidegger and Realism Part I

I will not of course try to say all that (I think) there is to say on this topic, and I am having difficulty finding the time to put into formulating thoughtful blog posts about philosophy, so I will assume some background on the part of my readers here in the interest of brevity.  In any case, I just want to try to orient this question in the way I think is proper, and hopefully in doing so I will make a small contribution to the ongoing debates about realism we find in blog world nowadays.

The key Heideggerian notion that has to be addressed by anyone asking the realism question is "the clearing."

For the Being and Time era Heidegger, the manner in which human beings exist is called Dasein. This means that humans are involved with the world in such a way that they are inseparable from it, and their involvement is temporal (and spatial, but above all temporal for Heidegger at this point). To speak in a little more Heideggerian manner, Dasein is involved in a world in such a way that it projects itself forward and retrieves itself from the past, in other words unlike objects that perhaps just bang into one another and have repercussions, Dasein's interactions with beings are conditioned by a temporal projection forward and a temporal retrieval backward. This can be seen any time I preheat my oven; I involve myself with the oven in such a way that I project that it will shortly be hot enough to put something in it, and I retrieve the meaning of 'preheat' and 'oven' in a more or less preconscious way, furthermore I may be fat as a result of things I've put in the oven before (retrieval) and want to lose weight (projection) so I am putting a diet meal in the oven, etc. No other beings do this--except (maybe) animals (to a certain extent), who naturally give Heidegger fits as a consequence. That is a whole other topic.

This projection and retrieval, or "thrown projection," is due to the primordial structure of Dasein, or Dasein's 'temporality,' the way it always exists outside of itself, returning to itself and projecting ahead of itself. This leads to the odd situation, which Heidegger apparently didn't notice, that what, for Heidegger, grounds ordinary sequential time--the aforementioned temporality of Dasein--also seems to rely on ordinary sequential time in order to make sense. But this is also a digression.

Dasein's involvement with beings provides them with a horizon, in other words it bestows meaning on them. In other words, Dasein opens up a space within which beings can meaningfully be. This space is called "the clearing" (die Lichtung). This doesn't exactly mean that beings were meaningless before people existed; it just means that they can only appear as they were before Dasein in the space opened up by Dasein's involvement with them, particularly in the mode of science. Science asks questions of real genesis, and this always leads us back to before there were beings who existed in the manner of Dasein. Heidegger says Newton's laws didn't exist before Newton, but the phenomena they describe did; in other words, Newton's laws are themselves part of the space Dasein opens up, they are themselves in fact a cleared space within which beings can present themselves. It is a confusion to say the laws existed before the clearing, because the laws are clearing (although of course they are not exhaustive of it).

Heidegger in Being and Time says that Dasein is the clearing. In his later work, however, he is more likely to say that Dasein, or, increasingly, Mensch, stands in the clearing. The clearing does not constitute beings, it simply gives them a space in which they can meaningfully appear (I'm not claiming that any of this satisfies everyone's realism requirements, by the way). In the later Heidegger, the clearing is no longer seen as constituted by Dasein's projects, but is rather given to Dasein in an event-like way, as will be seen in the second part of this post.

Glitch City

For some reason, I can't comment on my blog.

A Quick One

I don't really lack things to say, just time to say them in. Anyway keep coming back for the blog roll, and philosophical content is coming soon. In the meantime, some fluff:

Girls here at my school say "thenks" when you hold the door, sometimes even "thenk yo." Is that a regional thing? I hate it.

I dislike it when I'm trying to call someone and there's a little scraping noise on my cell phone, which makes me think they're picking up, and then it rings again. Does that happen to anyone else?

"Slumdog Millionaire" may be the stupidest movie I've ever seen.

I've been watching "Breaking Bad," and it's really entertaining.

Gasoline is too expensive.

I'm not a big fan of rice as a soup ingredient.

OK, I'm running out of fluffy bits. Until next time...

A More Realistic Approach to Numbers

Although I was surprised that a little Googling showed their estimate of 100 million gun owners to be fairly accurate. But these folks are clearly more math-y than liberal arts-y, judging by the mangled figure of speech at the end:

During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists. They were in turn actively supported by perhaps 10% of the population. In addition to these revolutionaries were perhaps another 20% who favored their cause but did little or nothing to support it. Another one-third of the population sided with the King (by the end of the war there were actually more Americans fighting FOR the King than there were in the field against him) and the final third took no side, blew with the wind and took what came.
Three Percenters today do not claim that we represent 3% of the American people, although we might. That theory has not yet been tested. We DO claim that we represent at least 3% of American gun owners, which is still a healthy number somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people. History, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities. We are one such minority. So too are the current enemies of the Founders' Republic. What remains, then, is the test of will and skill to determine who shall shape the future of our nation.
The Three Percent today are gun owners who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act. Three Percenters say quite explicitly that we will not obey any further circumscription of our traditional liberties and will defend ourselves if attacked. We intend to maintain our God-given natural rights to liberty and property, and that means most especially the right to keep and bear arms. Thus, we are committed to the restoration of the Founders' Republic, and are willing to fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution that we all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.
We are the people that the collectivists who now control the government should leave alone if they wish to continue unfettered oxygen consumption. We are the Three Percent. Attempt to further oppress us at your peril.
To put it bluntly, leave us the hell alone.
Or, if you feel froggy, go ahead AND WATCH WHAT HAPPENS.

If you see these guys coming, make like a tree and split...

I Am The ~0.000000000142857 %

Thanks to Don from Letters Journal for doing the math.

Inspirational Quote

I found this hilarious quote on the blog "Enowning," but I never could find it's source:

Philosopher Martin Heidegger stated that human beings live existentially (Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz). Reading is one way to experience our own existence and better understand the lives of others. Reading is also a habit of successful people.

OWS and Optimism

I feel like I should say something about the "Occupy X" phenomenon, but I don't have too much to say about it. One line of thinking seems to be that the protests have yet to mature enough to settle on some specific demands. On the other hand, there's the perspective formulated in this recent post from "I Cite":

The general assemblies are--or are becoming or can become--a power based on the direct initiative of the people from below. The Russian word for these councils is "soviets." An American version is being created by people from all over the country.
They are not based on "a law enacted by a centralized state power."
They are their own source of power--again, a direct initiative of the people from below.
In NYC, they are discussing their own security, in effect or potentially replaceing the police and the army. Yes, they still rely on the police to an extent, but this is an ambiguous, ambivalent, and partial reliance.
In the US, a strong majority (over 80% ) has little to no confidence in government. As the general assemblies grow and endure, they become a second power, a new source of collective self-governance.
At the beginning of the 1990s, we all witnessed a spectacular collapse in power--a government that seemed almost invincible (even as it was decrepit) crumbled. It can happen here.
We already know that there is no faith in government--our statistics tell us this regularly; our media report it--the right hates government and says it doesn't work; the mainstream condemns the stalemate; the left (2 or 3 people on msnbc) worries in a bizarre, schizoid fashion. The thing is---it is already common knowledge--everybody knows--that the political and the economic system is broken. The only thing that is left is thinking that change is impossible-but Occupy Wall Street has broken that barrier.
They can go to through the motions--and a new power is being constituted, all over the country in the different general assemblies. It will be tremendously exciting as the occupations spread to corporations--Occupy Tyson Foods; Occupy Verizon; Occupy News Corporation; Occupy Pepsico; Occupy GE; Occupy Microsoft. I wonder which companies will be the first to occupy themselves, becoming people's corporations before it's too late. 

This seems wildly optimistic. The slogan, "We are the 99%," encourages this sort of optimism, even as it leaves the class character of the movement as vague as possible, preferring to identify a tiny segment of the population as villains and allowing just about anybody else to identify with the movement. At the same time, the movement itself is comprised of a much smaller segment of the population than even the 1%, although if we include all those with vaguely sympathetic feelings the number would admittedly be considerably higher. And for me, there's something creepy about "We are the 99%." 

The problem is I have no idea what the 99%/1% thing actually means or whom it's meant to identify; it just seems like a vaguely catchy advertising slogan. But "Lenin's Tomb" certainly goes way over the top with this assessment:

This isn't east coast-west coast.  It isn't red state-blue state.  It isn't north-south.  It isn't Democrat-Republican, Cheech-Chong.  It's class war, the 99% against the 1%.

 If the 99% were waging class war against the 1%, it would be over already. On the other hand, if all this means is that the 1% are waging class war against the 99%, this breakdown is not even marginally perspicuous as far as class divisions go. 99% includes the vast majority of the bourgeoisie, the working class, the lumpen poor, farmers, bankers, policemen, politicians, Obama, me, you, and even a few baseball players. So what the hell are they talking about?

I can see how people can get carried away and start bloviating about "class war" and "constituent power," but what function does this optimism serve? Does it help the movement, a movement that doesn't even explicitly see itself as being about class war and constituent power? If you feel the need to comment on these things, is this sort of cheerleading really helpful? The biggest favor we can do any social movement, however we wish to define the latter, is to be as critical as possible.  If people march in the streets against the rule of finance, arrant speculation, and undue political influence on Wall Street, at least when they take to their computer keyboards it should be time to adjure all advertising, bandwagoneering, and demographic vagueness. In other words, less cheerleading, more critique.

Violet

This is my daughter on her 2nd birthday, last week.

Too Tough to Die

This is the Ramones album I've been listening to lately. It's the Ramones 8th studio album, and also their 8th best studio album. A lot of people think it is their 6th best, but Pleasant Dreams and Subterranean Jungle are both underrated. On the other hand, since it is their 8th, and 8th best, album, it is also better than any of their subsequent albums, although Mondo Bizarro and perhaps Animal Boy are probably close.

The only real classic is "Howling at the Moon." Although I've always loved "Mama's Boy," it probably wouldn't be quite as great for someone not already a fan. "Chasing the Night" is very catchy but probably not quite a great song. Some of the lyrics on the album are awful. For example:

The jails are filled to the max
Discrimination against the blacks

and

People talk behind your back
Most of them drive a Cadillac

always seemed pretty bad to me too. "I'm Not Afraid of Life" is a wretchedly bad song. The rest of it is pretty solid, although bad lyrics ("All alone in the danger zone" is a terribly weak tag line) mar a lot of it. It's more heavy metal-ish than any of their previous albums.

This won't be strictly a music blog, that's just how it's starting out. Stay tuned...

A Few Remarks on Wilco

I always thought Uncle Tupelo was kind of boring, and the same with Wilco. I recently watched the Wilco movie. I always thought if I did I'd get it with the music a little more, since the way the music is dramatically presented in movies can make it more engaging. But, I found the music kind of boring, and found myself eager for the songs to end. Usually I hate the way songs are always cut off in movies nowadays, even documentaries about the music, but in this case I'd lose interest before the songs ended. So, Wilco is boring.

If you watch "Superfly" you will see they play "I'm Your Pusherman" all the way through TWICE in the movie. Nowadays you never, ever hear a song played all the way through even once, unless it's a music documentary, and even then they cut into a lot of the songs or cut them off early.

Blogging

I will be blogging here. My intention is for this to be partly for the purposes of putting certain ideas forward, but also for writing whatever I feel like at the time, so don't get mad if you don't like it.