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Protected: A Vortext of Absolute Attemptations: or, the Whirlwind of Names & Miracles

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The Administrations of The Infinite

Terence Blake has posted a link, on Facebook, to this article: “In a MOOC Mystery, a Course Suddenly Vanishes
Though I realise there are more specific and ‘immediate’ (anthropically appropriated ‘immediacy’ of the internet, lol) concerns ensuing from this, I feel that a theoretical intervention could be of value here.

“A massive open online course on making sense of massive open online courses”
“So far, the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.”
“All the videos, forums, and other course materials mysteriously vanished from the website last week.”
“The professor was behind the deletion, according to Coursera.”

What is a ‘course’? Is it a ‘way’, a ‘route’, through the information deluge of ‘cyberspace’.
The ‘cyber-‘, in cyberspace, has connotations of ‘piloting’ and ‘navigation’.
In cyberspatial realms, where information can be decontextualised to varying degrees, the ‘pilot’ faces the challenges of recontextualisation. That is, what is to configure the gathering of information, the ‘learning process’? This introduces the notion of ‘principles of configuration’ or ‘frames’. What guiding principles are to be relevant? This entails the teleology of ‘purpose’: what is the desired ‘objective’? Usually, in a ‘course’, the ‘goal’ is to achieve a sufficient degree of familiarity with the ‘course’, the ‘information journey’, to the extent that one can demonstrate, not only ‘knowledge’ of the journey, but can communicate this ‘knowledge’ to others, in ways amenable to the social roles and functions reserved for those who can do this. For this, accredited standards of ‘expertise’ are produced, and so forth.
So, the objective here, essentially, is training for teamwork, as it were. The ‘objectives’ are specifiable, usually consisting of a mimetic ability to reproduce accepted standards of demonstrable ‘expertise’. Such specificity is not so readily available in a “course on making sense of massive open online courses”. For the simple reason, that such a course involves ‘stepping back’, so to speak, from the modes of ‘sense production’ particular to ‘objective’ disciplines, into a realm prior to any such objectification. Usually, socioeconomic demands being what they are, this realm is configured as a scenario in which a ‘subject’ chooses a mode of ‘objectification’ according to ‘personal’ preferences and abilities. Such a process is an invitation to inhabit, or help constitute, an ontological system: ‘What do you want to be?’ ‘Sally is an artist, engineer, etc..’

However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. Given this scenario, it is understandable that “he talked of feeling “lost” and in over his head”. For him, it could only be that “the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.” How can he author the life of another, without being a dictator? Hence his ‘experiment’, he has to get them to author their own lives, to pilot their own destinies, to navigate charts they choose. All he can do is facilitate that process.

Given that the initial scenario is that of ‘pure intellectual abstraction’, given that considerations of ‘personal emotion’ are indispensable to authoring ‘one’s life’: his attempt to elicit ’emotional responses’ is understandable as a reintegration strategy (“I pushed people to express emotion.”).
His ethical qualms occurred, because he felt the strategy was an ‘intellectual manipulation’ (“i mean ethics as in when you perform an experiment. i just did a few and feel uneasy about what i have done.” “I got trapped.” “I pushed people…” “And over the weekend things changed.”). Trying to democratise the situation, he offers the recommendation to “Help the others!”.    
Realising that the essence of the “course on making sense of massive open online courses” was to reintroduce the ‘active individual’ who constructs ‘senses’ relevant to themselves: realising that this entails a self-motivation that could not be taught: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ that internalises formal discourses was not sufficient to form a fuller learning experience, that an animating context of self-motivation was necessary: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ can only produce ‘confusion’, if faced with the essentially unformalised task of choosing from infinite, formal possibilities, he offers: “First step to #unlearn is to be #confused.”

 As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.

Thr’s an intrstng stry I rd, whn I ws a yngstr. It’s an apt cmmntry, smhw, on th mystry of th vnshng crs. lol

‘Ms Fnd in a Lbry [FULL TEXT]’. http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html.
‘MS Fnd in a Lbry – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia’. Accessed 3 October 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry.

PS. Th ‘mssng’ “Rx” drwr could symbls mssng ‘slf-mtvtn’? Wht, exctly, is slf-mtvtn?

 

Civics of Commentary

[INTRODUCTORY NOTE: This piece is an absolutely serious inquiry into the possibility that Professor Levi Bryant is a hippopotamus. Disguised as a satire on materialist and naturalist philosophies, its real intent is to prove that L.Bryant is a very naughty professor, indeed.]

 

Great apes such as ourselves [cannot stand the thought that we are contingent beings among other beings and, in our narcissism, cannot bear the thought that everything else isn’t for us and dependent on us]. ” (“Fighting Words“)

 

[Your thought is a reaction formation to the narcissistic wound of the fact that your existence is contingent and that] you are only the third of the three great apes.” (“Fighting Words“)

 

The basic lesson is don’t be a masculinist, ape-like, asshole.” (“Comments“)

 

 

   Professor Bryant offers these statements in two different posts. Obviously, as can be discerned from the bibliographic data, the contexts of the first two citations differ from that of the third. The first two citations derive from a manifesto explicitly stating Levi Bryant’s philosophical positions, which he considers to be “the only credible philosophical positions today” (FW).

   The third citation originates from a post delineating his “comment policy“. It is a somewhat emotive exploration of the ethics of commentary. After commending values such as “dignity” and “respect”, he concludes with a fundamental moral principle (cited above), that seems to be at odds with the categorical classification of humans he offers in the first two citations. It is by no means a contradiction: the opposition is ape/”asshole“. But Bryant enjoins commenters not to be “ape-like“, “asshole[s]”.   

   Assuming Bryant is addressing human commenters, the explicitly stated injunction not to be “ape-like” does seem to contradict his other statements. Perhaps he means that as humans are already apes, being “ape-like” is redundant? Or perhaps this is an example, already noted by Terence Blake, of his practice of ‘double positing’? It is difficult to determine the play of meaning here.

   But there is a deeper contradiction here, one that a self-proclaimed “materialist” should not make, especially after eulogising Freud. How are we to retain civility without the necessary anal retentions that Freud claims are among its constitutive factors, without (being) “assholes“?

        

 Bryant’s recent work develops his ethics of commentary, moving into actual blogging practice. “How to Make a Blog” begins with a report of corporate success: Bryant lists the visitation statistics of his blog, and asks how such figures were achieved. He goes on to form a list of hypothetical prescriptions: “First, the don’ts” and then “The Do’s“. For those who wish to replicate Bryant’s achievements, the list offers valuable and interesting advice. But Professor Bryant’s real breakthrough consists in what might well be considered a radical, perhaps even revolutionary, development of his theory of subjectivity-as-anatomical-object. In a bold move, he has shifted away from the central thesis of his influential work, “The Bottom Line: Civilisation and its Constipatory Structures”. After that canonical and exhaustive investigation of the “anal planes of immanence” and their “civil recapitulations”, constitutitive of the “social field”, he has decentred the former anatomical emphasis with “phallic relocation”. The relocation has a paradoxical structure:  “3) Don’t be a dick.“/”1)  Be a dick.“. This has caused some critics to speculate whether Bryant is fully committed to the paradigm shift, or whether the “relocation” is governed by a covert, anal oscillation. But Bryant is heedless of such reactionaries, explicating the actual conditions of immanence structuring the “relocation”:

 

“The thing is that you just need to be careful about not being a dick when you’re a dick.  It’s important to be a dick with style.  Again, if you’re constantly insulting others, degrading them, spitting ad hominems at them, and whatnot, you’re being a cock, not a dick.  Don’t be a cock.”(“How to Make a Blog“)

 

After an implicit clarification of the paradox as a nuanced, multi-levelled structure (Derrida’s “originary complexity”) requiring Heideggerian ‘care’, he brings in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer perhaps, with the importance of aesthetic consideration (“style”). And then, in the midst of announcing one revolution, he inserts another. Through an ambiguity, oscillating between figural possibilities of synonymy and literally specific otherness, he introduces the notion of specific relocation. ‘Specific relocation’ is the transcendence of local anatomical instantiation, subjectivity is no longer bound to a corporeal singularity. A non-local shift is possible. A human can become a male chicken (“cock“). Bryant discourages such shifts, though (“Don’t be a cock.“), probably because of the unpleasant methodology required to produce such effects.

 

Reactions have varied: scholars have grumbled about ‘transcendental signifieds’, idealistic gestures, and ‘quantum mysticism’: the posthumanists are speaking of the “arrival of an intertranslatability of species”: whilst the linguistic behaviourists unequivocally claim, “it’s just slang, a metaphor: the whole thing is a transcendental illusion, Bryant has turned idealist”.

There have been resonances outside of academia. A semi-religious subculture has developed, the ‘cussing-cluckers’, as they have come to be known. Through the vectors of impolite invection, they hope to transcend human existence and turn into ‘Holy Poultry’.

 

Finally, there have been the reactionary sceptics who claim that Bryant’s innovations are nothing new. They assert that vital transformations have always taken place through excremental channels:  that excrementality has always powered the ‘cycles of organic being’: subjectivity being a mere supervenient guidance mechanism of excremental flow. More extreme adherents of this scepticism reject the relation of ‘supervenience’, and the difference it implies, substituting ‘identity’ in its place: consciousness is the excremental flow: ‘consciousness is not autonomous governing conduction’, they say, categorising the view as ‘contraption idealism’. Until a critique of excre(mental) objects validates such idealism, it is perhaps wiser to reserve judgment.

 

It is unclear, at the time of writing, where Bryant might go from here.* That he has inaugurated a Copernican shift with “phallic relocation”, is without doubt an unquestionable advance. But that he might be suggesting the possibility of a specific transformation of anatomical critique, beyond the anatomical ‘organism’, beyond the ‘body’, beyond the species, can only be called visionary. But that, of course, is the province of the eye, the habitat of theoria, and the realm where matter and nature are not the only ideas

 

*Will he return to the restroom, or has he flown to the chicken coop?