Stop Making Sense

Girl in an abandoned building, 2012

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:36:00 -0400

Girl in an abandoned building, 2012

Doc Watson - Moody River

Mon, 28 May 2012 14:49:01 -0400

Doc Watson - Moody River

nevver: Bill Murray, Cannes

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:47:00 -0400

nevver:

Bill Murray, Cannes

Photo

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:46:27 -0400

an argument for hip hop

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:39:00 -0400

i guess lately i’d fallen out of love with rock n roll, and now i guess im becoming a believer again. the strange boys, ty segall, rock music that makes sense because it isnt trying to be, it just is. this is refreshing because for a long time i wasn’t getting anything out of rock, just hip-hop. i read a quote by designer patrik ervell and it captured exactly what i had been thinking: ‘…But it just think it goes back to what we were talking about before rock n’ roll. to me there’s nothing that feels cliché or suburban or unbelievably dull in hip hop right now. it’s so hard to find something that feels genuinely underground, and i think i see that in hip hop, and not necessarily what you hear on the radio. there are clubs in new york that are really interesting and people are trying new things and mixing new things together. you know, things that really perk your ears up.’

nevver: May Day

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:26:56 -0400

nevver:

May Day

Reflections on the Future of Quebec Universities

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:14:00 -0400

It’s May 1st and student strikes are still in full swing in Montreal, eleven weeks after students began walking out of classes. That makes the current strike the longest in Quebec history. It’s hard to say where it will go, but with international media and other outlets catching on and surprisingly showing support, there can be no doubt that students have earned a place in Canadian history, a perception to be determined in large part by the outcome.

My take on the strike is as follows. I am not a student these days and I haven’t identified myself strongly with the cause; primarily because I have trouble identifying with social movements wholeheartedly, the thinker in me resisting the consequences of practice. And there are particular things that have discouraged me from this movement. There is a certain fashion to wearing the carré rouge that is presently undeniable; and I don’t like identifying with bratty teenagers wearing the red square, even if that means also identifying with students who have a legitimate cause and more than enough proof to manifest against current university conditions.

The truth is, the kicker for me in the debate isn’t really the increased financial burden being placed on students, but rather what Quebec universities wish to do with the money (75% tuition hike in five years), and what that means in general for the future of these establishments. It’s well known that established ‘public’ universities are bedding more and more frequently with the private sectior, and therein lies the trouble. By all glimpses at the government’s 2011-2012 education budget plan, ‘A Fair and Balanced University Funding Plan, To Give Quebec the Means to Fulfill its Ambitions’, Quebec universities and the provincial government are aiming to increase the privatization of education and place the burden for this on students rather than private investors. This movement on behalf of Quebec is in line with others across North America, where universities have essentially turned or been forced to turn public spaces of learning into marketable, profitable enterprises expected to aid in a society’s general economic development. Corporate entities, perceiving the assets and capabilities of the university for themselves and perhaps society, continue to ink out complicated research contract with university affiliates and this is perceived as a good thing from the perspective of the university as well, since it ensures economic growth and perhaps jobs for some.

That being said, we can see this market-based philosophy making its way into the Quebec government’s university budget: in their creation of their ‘fonds pour l’excellence et la performance universitaires,’ for instance, an incentive cash pool that will reward universities who generate the largest donations and legacies from businesses and individuals. These donations will go towards corporate sponsored research, that has not only taken on a substantially larger role in recent years in universities, but has likewise been distributed entirely unevenly. Out of university research contracts awarded in 2005-2006, hard sciences (health science, applied science) took in over 75% of grants, while social sciences and the humanities only 7.8%. Looking at those numbers alone should trouble all humanities students and get them thinking about their institutional place in the future.

Finally, we can see the university moving towards its transformation as economic-business machine by looking at faculty payroll in recent years. Quebec payrolls dolled out to ‘administrative staff’ in the last ten years have increased by 2%, while those given to professors actually dropped by 4.4%. This is in keeping with the idea that today, according to the Quebec government, what is really needed is not great professors but great managers and administrators, the purpose of whom it is to sell and manage the university in terms of future investments. Between 1997 and 2004 alone, payroll expenditures going to administrative personal rose over 80% (40% at UQAM, for example, to ‘top-tier executives’).

Anyway, by now you should get the picture and agree or disagree with this model and where the government seems to be pushing Quebec universities. As a former humanities student, it is hard for me to swallow some of these numbers, because it means demoting my field and speculating on its increasing irrelevance. As well, I find myself not inspired by university-corporate partnerships, even if they produce more efficient technological or other advances. One should always remember that these corporations are getting something out of the deal, specifically a lot of money, and that in this case it will have belonged to the students.

For more information on this subject, I encourage readers to check out links such as this one, sent my way by a former professor of mine, or this one, which successfully argues against the tuition increase and is the source of my statistics throughout this post. You can also look into the Quebec government’s 2010-11 education budget, which you can easily google and analyze yourself.

"I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books,..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:30:00 -0400

“I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.”

- Charles Bukowski

"Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character. The same applies to soul."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:59:37 -0400

“Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character. The same applies to soul.”

- Winston Wolf, Pulp Fiction

nevver: Pervert/Artist dichotomy

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:56:07 -0400

nevver:

Pervert/Artist dichotomy

Photo

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:42:28 -0400

Photo

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:48:15 -0400

Photo

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:17:49 -0400

nevver: D*Face

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:22:38 -0500

nevver:

D*Face

pulp fiction is the only fiction /

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:00:00 -0500

pulp fiction is the only fiction /

Photo

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:56:08 -0500

"I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time."

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:48:21 -0500

““I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.””

- Iriku, Akira Kurosawa (via emotional-algebra)

Truth, Falsity, Bullshit

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:54:00 -0500

There’s a scene in Farewell, My Lovely when Marlowe escapes L.A. to visit a luxurious beach house on the Pacific coast. Approaching the site, he notes in fine Raymond Chandler tone: ‘It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn’t see the water from the front of the place.’

This is a great imaginative account of what Marlowe sees because everyone can relate with the sensation described: everybody knows what it’s like to ‘feel the ocean in the air’. At the same time, following Harry G,. Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit in his essay of the same name, Marlowe’s words are also, carrément, bullshit. This is because, according to Frankfurt, they activate a metaphor that reaches beyond it’s possible truth-value. Nobody quite knows what it’s like to ‘feel the ocean in the air’, though that possibility sounds valid, and though we do know what’s like to feel the ocean breeze in the air, or perhaps smell the ocean from the beach.

To characterize bullshit critically, Frankfurt offers another example that relates a story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, whose professional raison d’être was to eliminate ‘nonsense’ from language, apparently spoke to a friend on one occasion who had just had her tonsils removed. When he asked her how she felt, the friend replied: ‘Horrible. I feel like a dog who has just been run over,’ to which Wittgenstein expressed instant disgust. ‘But you don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.’

Clearly, in a certain sense, Wittgenstein’s friend wasn’t lying. She would have been lying if she felt terrible and intentionally deceived Wittgenstein by saying she felt great. But here she is saying something truthful, at least in sentiment, but the trouble is really that the metaphor about the dog says something else, something strictly speaking impossible to verify in its complexity and precision. It goes overboard with an excess of precision and information. And for that reason it’s bullshit.

This is a useful example because it also indicates that bullshit, unlike the art of lying, need not be false. It is fakery, and linguistically diluted, but it may still be coming from a place of truth. And still that doesn’t make it factually correct, when put through the lens of language. Wittgenstein’s anger comes from the fact that, ultimately, his friend doesn’t really care to assess the accuracy of her statement before saying it. Or if she does, she mistakes a poetic device for accuracy, which just seems like laziness, or, if we want to be clear about it, good poetry but terrible politics.

These points highlight some differences between the lie and bullshit today. Lying entails a belief in the truth and falsity of something, and an accepting of a certain truth in order to disagree with it and lie (a lie is nothing without consciously disobeying and hence accepting a truth a priori). But bullshit never requires that kind of intimacy and adherence to truth. In fact, what distinguishes bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is its separation from the whole system of truth-falsity, its apathetic capacity to be removed from that discourse altogether.

‘The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie he must think he knows what is true (…) On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. (…) But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; we are not to understand his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it’ (54-55).

On account of the rather anarchistic properties of bullshit, Frankfurt concludes that bullshit, rather than lying, is actually the greater contemporary enemy of truth. He adds: ‘Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic’ (63).

This formation really made me think of philosophy in the given terms, namely as bullshit par excellence, if philosophy is precisely a case of speaking about those things of which most of us are ignorant (metaphysics, ontology, love, etc.). In a nice way then Frankfurt gives us a little book about bullshit that is also real bullshit, but let’s sweep that little conceit under the carpet. The bigger questions are about the excessive proliferation of bullshit in contemporary society and politics.

need to slow my pace ///

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:34:51 -0500

need to slow my pace ///

nevver: Fight or flight, Melisaki

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:44:13 -0500

nevver:

Fight or flight, Melisaki