Those Things Thought

I have a new site. It’s still beta but pretty enough (It’s a tweaked version of this). The plan is to publish bi-monthly essays and creative writing. Nothing fancy, just a more polished version of previous incarnations.

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I have been thinking about how to reconceive this site for awhile. I am not doing as much theo-philosophical though as I once did and I have clusterflock for much of my reblog outlet. So consider this the official announcement of this site’s hiatus.

When something changes I’ll let you know.

A friend of mine recently opined,

“In the south they don’t mind living next to black people as long as they make less money, whereas in the north we don’t mind them making the same salary as long as they live across town.”

This, admittedly uncomfortable statement, seems pretty true to me and I don’t think it just applies to African-Americans. And lately I am wondering what is to be done about it.

The uber-economical Kymco People S 50 T4

It is a gorgeous afternoon here in St. Louis after a morning of rain and I have found myself in the usual haunt –with a large chunk of unexpected free time–with my left foot soaked and my right foot dry after a puddle across the street got the better of my agility, thinking about cognitive surplus.

At the very moment I had built the impetus to write that first sentence and plunge myself into the act of putting “black on white” a friend, an expert in paleotypography (Newton, primarily), comes to me with an existential crisis which evolves into a long conversation. The gist of our discussion is the obvious absurdity of his work on seemingly unimportant minutia in the face of unresolved injustices in the world. The hypotheticals of youth, his free time, and frustrated efforts led him to feel guilt for his sins of omission: he has done nothing to make the world better. The man who had dismounted his Harley at the peak of our conversation aptly said, “These are the problems of a man with a full belly.”

Too true and directly relevant to Clay Shirky’s point (text or video):¹

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

Full bellies and free time can be as much an asset as a deficiency and Clay articulates well they means a society cops with such existential dilemmas:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

In an age where there is cognitive surplus (his phrase) and easy exchange of information, I think, easily exacerbates these sentiments. His point was that the dawn of the internet and its increasing use is a boon for this cognitive surplus, a good medium for its trade, through blogging and content creation. However, in light of the social injustices in this world, I suspect blogging in all its forms is hardly the answer–and Clay, I presume, would agree with me. While it does get people thinking and interacting with ideas in a more engaging way then, say, television, it still is a means for deferral at worst and merely a way to organize data at its best. Cognitive surplus is certainly a blessing for Western culture but only if we can figure out how to cash it in.

This is very much Clay’s idea and I suggest you go check out his perspective.

1. kudos to India for posting it on clusterflock [back]

As it turns out, sleep deprivation is not condusive to writing and, couple that the neglect of putting black on white, you will find yourself in the position of writing about writing. Normally I would just forgo jotting something down and watch a film or play some sort of video game (I have developed a recent fascination with art house games) but the virtue of daily writing and the urging of a friend sitting across from me at the cafe. This is all terribly meta, I know, and consequently just a preface to anything of real substance (and I legitimately wonder why you are still reading).

Isn’t this, however, the case with much of our media consumption these days? in lieu of any absolutist or, to be softer (stronger?) in my language, courageous ideas we are willing to proffer, we find ourselves pushing the real questions to the background only to ask continually more and more basic questions. We are enamored with–and please pardon the word–”prioricity.” I know it is the case with me anyway: the only question I ever seem to ask anymore is “why do I/you think we know what we know. I, and quite possible a large swath of academic culture, spend our times on prefaces and prolegomena. A few years ago, and if you read this blog (or its earlier incarnations) with any frequency you will surely remember, a trilogy of essay I began discussing:

1. Why I should write

2. Why I should not write

3. Why I should not play devil’s advocate

The purpose of the essays was to assualt prioricity, to out-meta the meta, and show the covert vacuity of the ironic and clever. Quite naturally and un/ironically, the beforehand-saying obscured and frustrated the trilogy itself. My plan? To out wit the clever by its own gestures rather than criticism, sketching a protrait of the clever.

In a culture where meaning is defined less and less by the external world and more and more by one’s perspective of it, rhetoric and, consequently, hermeneutics shapes our beliefs more than in the postivists heyday. Successful rhetoric, the arguments people buy (the economic term is not accidental), are more powerful than any measure of “objectivity.” (Now I am as skeptical as the next contemporary about such words as “objective” and will in the future replace it with “intellectual honesty” or “proper reading.”) In other words, the clever has more value than the true (shall we say, instead of “true,” “honest and charitable assessment” or “philosophical” in its most etymological sense?). But I am not sure that the essays are actually possible, that they cannot stand on/by there own feet/feat. Perhaps the clever cannot out wit itself. Only time will tell. Shoot, it helped unravel modernism, didn’t it?

Regardless, I am using this post to give myself the impetus to pick up the essays again. I have a reasonable amount of time to work on the project because I have a few other projects I am working on. Andrew has a new theory on how to avoid procrastination, differ projects with other projects. Something is bound to get done eventually.

I found this little gem while rooting through the old record collection with the soon-to-be Eisenbrauns: