A rant from me for my Genre class.
Part 1...
Firstly. I actually do want to change the world somehow. I’ve been working on my own little project trying to get a grant together for a year+ now. It’s a civics/art project I’m calling Roots. I’m trying to invent new infrastructure based on social media tech to inspire and bring people together, mostly informally and in all manners for mostly environmental and civic purposes, but also a bit of freelance and art. Call it my very own genre idea if you wanna milk it for this class.
The ideas and reading have taken me that long and now I’m at a point where I need a professional editor and someone to help me formalize the thing. I’m not sure how to formalize a grant, ask for money, or where I’m even going to try and get funding yet. Ideally I’d get funding from the university but that’s sketchy with our state’s funding situation, so I might look privately or into public interest groups. I’m gonna seek endorsements from well-known people as well. Justin Parrish, one of our new representatives, already thought it was cool and I tend to make people’s jaws drop when I can articulate the idea, so I’m kind of confident I’ll get somewhere with this eventually. If anyone’s interested in helping or checking out my progress on the grant I’d say comment here or email me and I can share it with you.
Back to the 4th law thing from yesterday’s entry. First, here’s a quote from this awesome paper called “Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Behavior” by Rod Swenson (link: http://www.ethics-based-on-science.com/uploads/2/8/5/1/28516163/mjm-notes-entropy-and-evolution-ordered.pdf ):
Ecological psychologists (e.g., Gibson, 1979/1986), arguing that living things and their environments must be seen as single systems have historically rejected the postulates of incommensurability, and instead have adopted living thing-environment mutuality or reciprocity as a basic postulate. The law of entropy production maximization when coupled with the balance equation of the second law and the general process of autocatakinesis shows how this postulate can be directly derived. New insights into the relation between thermodynamics and evolutionary theory thus provide a rich new context for understanding the active, end-directedness of living things, for grounding biology, and a fortiori psychology in a commensurable context of universal law. Rather than being infinitely improbable "debt payers" struggling against the laws of physics in a "dead" world collapsing to equilibrium and disorder, living things and their active, end directed striving or intentional dynamics can now be seen as productions of an active order producing world following directly from natural law.
So that might be the first operable Theory of Everything that doesn’t contradict natural laws or leave gaps between physical and cognitive processes. The paper is incredibly beautiful if you’re well-versed in theory, though I’m not sure how it will stand up in a decade or two of more research. So what the hell does autocatakinetics mean in a Genre context? From a systems theory perspective, basically you can set up man-made systems that have a “natural” evolution from their start point, where things like organic structures can arise out of soup in very predictable ways. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps our systems of social power (i.e. capitalism) take advantage of this idea in ways, thus their dominance? That doesn’t make them “immutable,” but clever as fuck regardless, as capitalism appears almost to be the self-correcting and schizophrenic “natural state” of society as Deleuz hammered on about his whole career. Check out Roland Barthes’ Myth Today essay, too. Also check out this segment by Chris Hedges on the “Capitalist Labyrinth”: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=z0bp8L7YHWE.
Don’t believe humans are that clever? You might want to raise your standards for yourself then. Read some of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the dude was a physician and largely inspired our economic system for the past several hundred years. The world was his fish tank. This and derivative work are largely what our politicians are educated in, though much of the physics and philosophy that inspired it is lost on most people these days. There’s literally dozens of supercomputers making 20 nanosecond trades using these principles to maximize the speculator economy. Who’s economy? You should be asking that, there are even pill companies trying to maximize their influence. Also watch Adam Curtis’s most recent documentary called HyperNormalisation for a more articulate slam dunk. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afBmN7icFRw
In fact here’s a whole page of interesting and relevant content I compiled recently with free links to everything: http://mootyspoot.blogspot.com/2016/02/compiled-readings.html
The bottom line is that we can consciously create “natural” systems that people will live and grow in “naturally.” These systems are not necessarily what the universe put together but have enough elements and flow to fool most people into fixating on them to satisfy their personal “theory of everything,” i.e. maintaining a Hermetically-sealed homeostasis like the mindless fart factories they are. Ancient Greek playwriting was often about jamming as much subtext into the lines as possible for that effect, trying to represent reality while understanding the imagination that’s interpreting it so as to change it.
I want to take all that abstract understanding into my writing in the sense that my words can be so careful and natural as to ignite people’s imaginations and lives, creating living systems in their heads as my favorite theorists and writers have been able to do for me. While a thermodynamic theory isn’t good writing advice per se, the spirit of it sure is, and that’s some serious alchemical thinking.
Modern mainstream culture has all but been swallowed by half-assed, soulless, outdated, power-hungry “natural” systems that continue to fixate us. The only thing that can replace them are better evolutions of systems, however, since the majority of us survive by what’s currently in place and nobody knows how to steer hundreds of millions of people to something radically different. That’s why you see us haplessly running off the environmental cliff, we are collectively very slow to change what keeps us most comfortable even if it may spell our eventual doom. Of course is that us being biologically-driven morons or because we actually want to drive ourselves to extinction i.e. the Thanatos? I really can’t tell anymore. Something something genre blah blah grammar is arbitrary but life is not blah blah let’s do something actually imaginative with this class or I’m gonna go nuts.
Part 2...
*Deep breath*
Strange Loops are the basis of the thought in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. You don’t necessarily need to read the whole thing because it’s all for demonstrating a fairly straightforward idea that requires a very long discussion to fully appreciate - and it’s totally worth it. The idea itself is that both physical and artistic systems can be understood in terms of tangled hierarchies and emergent phenomena that are synonymous with how consciousness itself works. This is deeply empowering to one’s intuition, sense of self, and ability to navigate and create in the world because it’s a way to connect to everything without reducing it or ideologically capturing it.
The hierarchies Hofstadter talks about are the reductive/deductive analyses we can apply to a situation, things like the psychology of the artist, their biology as a human, the earth they turn on, and the education they have. You can have as many variables as you want, even tracking something as far out as the thermodynamics of the brain and body. The hierarchies are tangled in that the analytical methods themselves are still subjective phenomena, as with terms like “genre” and “flare” and “form” and “style,” all simply patterns floating around in our brains on a rock screaming through space. The unintuitive bit is that defining these hierarchies and systems gives them a life of their own, thus being “conscious” is really an abstraction of our ability for mixed pattern recognition - in all its mundane and esoteric grandeur. That has infinite possibilities but still defaults to physical laws that we can absolutely understand at today’s level of collective knowledge.
The book is a very long-winded way to pick apart exactly what our conscious experience is and it really gives you a didactic way to connect to just about anything deeply and in a very naturalistic (mythical?) sense. It’s only one way to do it out of dozens, sure, but Hofstadter’s perspective reflects intellectual rigor of the highest order and can give you access to those outer worlds as they relate to everyday life and your creative process as an artist. If I was all-powerful I’d force everybody to read this or something like it because the ability to be consciously aware, focused, and dealing in abstraction is the most useful skill we can have in today’s information society - no matter how we try to ignore the reality of it. It’s important to keep that skill anchored to a solely real and adaptive context, too, or the fantasies quickly become cheap and minds quickly become incestuous with recursive, unimaginative masturbatory nonsense. And I bet few will understand what I’m saying because nobody’s read that far between psychology, literature, physical science, and computation, as well as lived experience - the most tangled hierarchies in human thought.
*Deep breath*
Unfortunately, not being aware of the Systems theory perspective (seriously, watch HyperNormalisation or even Machines of Love and War by Adam Curtis) on the top of all these fairly objective subjects means you will be endlessly subjected to other people’s ideas that indeed take advantage of all these things you are not aware of. Most of your tastes, most of your conversations, most of your emotions, many of the things you buy and wear, most of the things you consume - all that is continually being molded (consciously and unconsciously) by those who are empowered and in the know, often even by people on the other side of the planet (considering where most of our tech and commodities are made). We’re asked to trust the intent blindly on most occasions because we deal with manufacture and activity indirectly through the monetary system.
The chain of interactions that ends in you behaving a certain way or doing a certain thing is so mundane you’d never guess there could be a deliberate structure behind it, you’d think it was all perfectly natural or well-taken care of and accounted for. This structuralism isn’t conspiracy, it’s a simple fact of biological and social life and the fact that we’re a country defined by thousands of years of complex religious, scientific, and political conversation. Society is a Conscious process, it only exists in abstraction - so you need to ask Who’s abstractions before you let them make you feel good about yourself. It’s as simple as being scammed and as complex as your entire socialization being poisoned by active power structures that you are likely not aware of, like being in your own individualized cultish bubble. Doubt is essential to living well, though it’s not always comfortable. Here’s a fun one to fuck with you on how bacon and eggs became so popular in the US thanks to Eddie Bernays (and I ain’t hating on bacon and eggs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vFz_FgGvJI
I’m partial to the highly intellectual, sounds-pretentious-but-isn’t stuff because it’s been my most useful filter in my thinking and decisionmaking. Most importantly to me, it has given me the ability to navigate mental health issues and social prejudices like I never could have imagined, preventing me from becoming a hapless victim to those processes that most of us are ignorant of. This is a deeply personal battle that I or any others with similar experiences will rarely speak about but I can tell you first-hand that our depth of understanding of language in general matters for everything, and how far we take that defines how much we can willfully do and be present for each other - if we’re lucky enough to get the chance to educate ourselves and find fair treatment.
*Le gasp for air*
Oppression and possession leads to a gradual distancing (Othering) and fragmentation (memory partitioning) of your life and consciousness. That is so dramatically damaging long-term and across generations yet so poorly understood short-term in the greater culture, to the extent there might be a pandemic of dissociative disorders via the “suppression of multiplicity” due to the ideological pull of “Western” civilization: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu
Dissociative disorders affect at least 10% of the US population, too, and goes largely undiagnosed. We need to be aware of these mental health trends and what these illnesses are caused by, as they are very much reflective of the overall health and status of a strange and loopy culture. People can get episodes of epilepsy or schizophrenia or mania just from their stress-responses spinning out of control, without any other factors like genetic or physical damage. Dissociation is just another normal stress and panic response like fight or flight, fyi, and can result in all of these symptoms and eventually actual pathology if left unchecked. We’re in a different kind of jungle these days so people quietly panic for seemingly any reason, too. These things are treatable, but only with a lot of re-education and therapy after the damage is done. And the sooner these things are caught, they require exponentially less work to undo as mental illnesses become associated to all parts of your life over time, becoming normalized into the choices you make. Consumerism, as much as I love my stuff I bought, is one of the grandest havens for dissociation.
This is how a lot of people end up projecting themselves or end up homeless or in recurrent abusive friendships/relationships for major examples, usually beginning with the parents/environment (including the society as a parent/environment). Attachment theory is incredibly interesting and has everything to do with dissociative disorders. Some forms of autism even seem to fall along these lines, where the individual’s mind is just really far away from the mainstream from the get-go and they haven’t gotten the proper stimulation to connect to (rather than brutally conform to) that. I’m ranting off about all this because it totally applies to Genre in the way we give meaning to our interactions with other people, and the power and expansive depths that idea is really sailing on for connecting to and healing each other. Dissociation is a sort of a shapeshifting genre of mental health that takes on many many many familiar forms yet retains its own subtle functionality.
Modern academia is lightyears ahead of the status quo in some places like this, and the progress in all academic fields has fed directly into cognitive research. The fun of cognitive research is that it comes from all disciplines and learning the good stuff has had a measurable impact on my thinking and learning abilities. My intuition for learning itself has improved, and that makes me feel like I can do anything with the time. It doesn’t take studying of cognitive science itself in all its rigorous psychological, engineering, and mathematical principles to become “awake” or “woke as fuck” as people say now (totally on board). At the very least experiencing art (under the broadest definition of art as an expression of skill and imagination) that reflects a high level of mindfulness and depth of understanding of the world will get you there. You can also get it from a good walk in the woods, too, honestly, but I prefer to internet these days since there’s endless peer-reviewed and up-to-date resources once you know where to look.
I say cognitive science and systems theory should be mandatory subjects in some kind of survey class, and ethics should be taught through all schooling. It would do wonders for the arts and sciences, as well as get civic gears turning I’m deadly sure. But instead of shoving more academia down your throat here’s a list I made of mostly-amazing anime to treat yourself. The depth of some of these movies and shows is indescribable: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5cclgr_fL2zdUVDd0RROVpfa3c
/endrant. You have no idea guys, no idea.
