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.