consciousness, the imaginary, ideology, the real, sex and violence

Consciousness is a funny thing. Late modern and postmodern theories have attempted to establish, variously, that consciousness is an insignificant epiphenomenon of biochemical events in the nervous system, a technology of oppression and control through ideology, a grotesque product of the imaginary, a relatively self-aware if not entirely self-transparent absolute, or just the difference between what it’s like to be you versus what it’s like to be a goat.

As I start to gird the loins of my consciousness^* in preparation for the Spring semester, Althusser’s theory of ideology and what I understand of Lacan’s account of the imaginary keep coming up. (In some ways, Althusser + Lacan = Baudrillard, but that’s another story.) Althusser says that ideology is how we represent to ourselves our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. Lacan says something that to me suggests that the imaginary is how the subject of desire is constructed, so that we are able to live despite the occasional upsurge of the real. In both cases, ordinary everyday consciousness is at closest a couple removes from the real.

This bothers a lot of students. It has bothered me, but mainly because I didn’t get it. Recently I’ve realized that any time we encounter the real, our apparatus of imaginary relations, desires and fantasies, that is, “reality” as we live it, crashes down around us. The real is unbearable.

In fact, the real is unlivable for a sane person. The real is a huge pile of shit, mouldering garbage, the doom of civilization, your own personal doom, all the lies you’ve told, everyone you’ve ignored, everyone you’ve fallen in love with, and everyone you’ve hated. And they’re all having an orgy of sex and violence. 

Even that isn’t real enough to be the real, because I’ve imagined it (and I hope you have too, fair reader). 

What the hell am I doing writing this? Well, it’s like this…

I write always to someone. The someone changes, depending on the time or the writing. I believe I’m at my best when I have someone I write to for a while. (And yes, it’s you. You know who you are.) So this is a secret message to that someone, while also masquerading as a public message about how I am thinking about consciousness.

Now, you don’t want to know all that, or be thinking about it when you read this, probably. I certainly don’t. When I do think about it, the imaginary relation I have to the one I write to, and to writing, and to myself, starts to come undone, and the real situation begins to appear, and it is not pretty at all. 

This writing is an orgy of sex and violence. Read it again from the start if you don’t believe me.

Where was I? Ah yes, consciousness, ideology, and the imaginary. 

I’ll give you another example, one that is more embarrassing to me personally, but less to you. Whenever I play the guitar, a part of my consciousness becomes a rock star. It is essential for me to have this imaginary relation to the guitar to be able to play. (And of course, I play to someone.) Ideology is the set of beliefs through which I interpret this imaginary relation: what I mean by “rock star,” and how I theorize the cultural position of “rock star.”  

Without the imaginary, I’m just a doofus with imprecise and weak fingers, plunking along. That’s hardly tolerable, let alone an engaging way to spend a couple hours. 

We need the real, and ultimately cannot avoid it. But we can’t bear it. Consciousness is where this gets worked out, and that’s why we’re always so goddamn tired.

^{* Does consciousness have loins?↩}

and now for a brief rant about popular culture iconography

Too often, when Marxists write about popular culture, they come off as grumpy, unhip old poops. Exhibit A: Theodor “Don’t Call Me Sweetie” Adorno. (And although I am aware that Teddy Baby’s reputation for hating jazz is a bit overblown, I think anyone who really understands music can't possibly think that he did. This is in fact why he is Exhibit A.)

At great risk of self-poopifying, I would like to call attention to what I think is a sure sign of the decadence and depravity of consumer culture in our day and age—the cynical, meaning-destroying, emptying contextless repetition of iconic images. I hope to do more than complain, but to sketch an analysis of this capitalist spectacle.

Marilyn Monroe has been dead longer than I’ve been alive, and her image has continued, zombie-like, to roam among us. The image “Marilyn” is a reference without meaning, an icon of sex appeal that is by now rendered totally sexless. It merely indicates when and where one is supposed to respond according to an overdetermined habit of “belief.” That is, as a normal subject, the image “Marilyn” cues you to associate “sexuality” with some object. It operates like a sticky note, if you’ll pardon the expression, that labels an otherwise inert object with the message that you are supposed to believe is sexually charged and obtainable by purchase, contrary to all reality. “Marilyn” is obscene and prurient, an image of sexual death that normalizes the necrophilia of consuming behavior.

Furthermore, I am convinced that normal subjects know this and are capable of appropriate shame about it. As in the case of all our cultural addictions to obscenities, we consume “Marilyn” in guilt, and that guilt provides the excuse for continuing to use, continuing to consume.

In some ways a more curious case is the iconography of the film The Wizard of Oz. Reconfigured as it is here, as imagery in a computer game that functions as a non-gambling form of gambling, it means nothing. It does not actually refer to The Wizard of Oz—not to the film, not to the plot or characters in the film, not to the actors in the film. The “ruby slippers” are only the icon, without reference.

We generally expect cultural signifiers to signify, even if all they signify is the universal command to consume. As part of an advertisement for a game whose primary purpose is to expose users to more advertisement, these signifiers can barely be said to add value as a brand for consuming. These icons simply float, purposelessly and meaninglessly, in a nebula in which all images are juxtaposed without interacting or reacting. It is degree-zero of communication, as Baudrillard put it: the staging of an image that is a non-image because it is not an image of anything. Baudrillard called this the hyper-real, but this is because he was nostalgic for meaning, and such images can only appear as hyper-real in reference to a reality that they deny or destroy. They are hypo-real and hypo-realizing for experience. They defy any attempt to compose meaning.

What does it mean for us, or about us, that we spend so much time among these sepulchral artifacts?

error types

I don't know why Type I errors and Type II errors are called that. (Type I is incorrectly denying a null hypothesis that is true; Type II is incorrectly affirming a false null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the opposite of what you believe is true. They are also called false positive and false negative. In either case, these errors involve believing something despite the evidence.) There have been various proposals for a Type III error -- for instance, cooking the evidence by setting up a trial that leads to a preordained conclusion, or misrepresenting the problem.

I can't keep them straight. I never have. "Type I" doesn't mean anything to me. Herewith, then, I propose an alternative error typology.

Dickhead Error. A Dickhead Error occurs when one continues to affirm a hypothesis that has been demonstrated to be false, often with increasing loudness. (The loudness can be vocal, but can also be expressed through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Shithead Error. A Shithead Error occurs when one ignores all evidence contrary to a particular hypothesis, or contrary to any hypothesis whatsoever.

Asshole Error. An Asshole Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis that serves to re-affirm the incorrigible certainty of one's perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood.

Fuckhead Error. A Fuckhead Error occurs when one ignores all perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood that are not one's own. (Fuckhead Error is often expressed loudly either vocally or through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Making Shit Up Error. A Making Shit Up Error occurs when one invents, imagines, or indulges in fantasy of evidence. (Making Shit Up Error is often coincident with Shithead Error or Asshole Error.)

Wile E. Coyote Error. A Wile E. Coyote Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis beyond one's capacity to test without causing oneself injury.

Oh, Right Error. An Oh, Right Error occurs when the probative evidence for or against a hypothesis is ignored until pointed out. (Often repeated ad nauseam.)

This error typology could have wide application, beyond scientific fields. For instance, during political debates, it's likely to come across instances of Dickhead, Shithead, Asshole, Making Shit Up, and even Fuckhead Error. Some political ideologies are composed of nothing else. I believe the typology could be handy in organizational governance meetings as well. How often have you observed your boss making an Asshole Error? With the proper terminology, you can clearly indicate the kind of error your boss has made, when you are in a job interview, answering a question about why you were fired.

The Wile E. Coyote type error is particularly useful for describing faulty reasoning by cats and skiers. Oh, Right Error, though ubiquitous, is still good to ascribe, in hopes that the faulty reasoning does not devolve into Shithead Error.

I'd like to see some publications adopting my improved error typology in the next few months, so get on it.

of termites, reputation, and character

We have drywood termites.

We called in the pest company that wrote the certification prior to our buying this house. The inspector came back out, identified the termites, said he was sorry to bear bad news, and that there had been no visible evidence of them during his earlier inspection, so we'd have to pay to fumigate. He offered a deal to us to fumigate at cost.

I said we didn't feel like this was our problem, since we relied on a certification his company wrote. We didn't buy termites. He said that in his opinion, we wouldn't be able to demonstrate in court that there had been evidence that was ignored, and anyway, that it would have made no sense for him to fail to note the termites, since he would make money on reporting them.

We contacted our realtor, who made some inquiries. The next day she called to tell us the seller and the pest inspector would cover the cost of fumigation. She opined that they wanted to protect their very good reputations. Indeed, when my Loveliest reported the termites to some friends, they immediately asked who the inspection company was, and were impressed to hear they had agreed to cover the cost.

The inspector and seller will have thus preserved their reputations. We won't have to pay for fumigation, but we will have to move out for two days, with our cats and turtle, and move all our food out of the house.

I am a suspicious person, so I did not trust anything but the offer of free fumigation (and only really barely trust that, in fact). Knowing the history of philosophy also makes me inclined to focus on the difference between reputation and character. Reading Plato will do that to ya. And I have just been reading the Apology with my intro class.

Around here, in my experience, businesspeople's (well, really, businessmen's) reputations are built on their stated commitment to Christian values. In my experience, too, this is pretty cheap talk -- never mind that a reputation for being a Christian property investor or Christian pest inspector makes as much sense as a reputation for being a Buddhist journalist or Shinto mechanic.

Have either the seller or the inspector demonstrated anything about their characters? This is a basic problem in the way Plato wrote about this issue. Someone concerned entirely about reputation, who does not give a damn in his or her soul of souls, could still be powerfully motivated to do what looks objectively to be the right thing, for reasons having nothing at all to do with ethics.

Don't get me wrong: I'll take the fumigation. I'll even report on service review websites that they provided it. I don't think I'll say anything about their characters.

are blogs dead?

Maybe.

I haven't been using mine as intensively as in summers past for thinking my little thoughts. This summer has been different from summers recently past. I've been doing some stuff off-label. I ended up not having a lot to say about Bataille or Bachelard, only a little to say about Husserl, nothing at all about Sloterdijk, and until now nothing to say about Levinas. I don't think I've been as driven, or as narrowly focused, as in recent summers.

Partly, I think I'm still running out the implications of the intensive work I did over two summers ago. That has churned up things to track down and write about embodiment, passivity, erotic experience, normality and abnormality, and now subjectivity and consciousness (that's why I'm reading Levinas). I'm also still writing about faculty subjectivity and ethics in relation to tenuous-track employment status. In short, doing the kind of work that puts things in order, ties up loose ends, and so on, has taken up more time and space, and so I'm reading more broadly and less intensively.

I'll probably write something in this space about Levinas soon. He's starting to bug me.

2012 -- the year I forgot how to sleep

We went to bed at a perfectly normal time. I was extremely sleepy. I fell asleep. I then woke up at four AM, feeling a little sick, and somewhat anxious. I must have woken up my Loveliest as well, and we talked a bit about my condition lately.

I had seen my psychiatrist earlier in the afternoon, and that, I believe, got me thinking further about how I'm doing. I came to the conclusion I had fabricated answers on the little depression/anxiety inventory they give me every visit. What I said was that I had lied on the item about having normal interest in enjoyable activities. We talked about what we could do to help me with that. Lauren suggested that I email my psychiatrist to tell her that I retrospectively wanted to change my answer. I felt guilty about it, and not being diligent with my homework. But I also believe that the stress of the semester (including events like the election) has broken me down. I felt guilty about that, then noted that it's ridiculous, because everyone gets broken down by the semester.

I proceeded not to sleep for another hour and a half. First, because I resent having to do homework, I started thinking about my general resentment of (and resistance to) medical and psychiatric surveillance. Thus, of course, I ran through an interpretation of Foucault's work on power/knowledge as a way of having us pay attention to the cost of this form of social order and civilization. Then I imagined a conversation with someone who rejects what he considers postmodern thought without clear understanding of it.

I got out of bed, walked around, sat down to read a couple pages of The Art of Happiness, and came back to bed, with my brain suddenly running through causes and instigating events of the Civil War. South Carolina's secession weighed on my mind.

I lay in bed, now trying consciously to bring about sleep, by doing what Merleau-Ponty suggested in Phenomenology of Perception: people fall asleep by imitating the behavior and situation of sleeping people. The problem then was that I couldn't figure out what people who are going to sleep think about other than causes of the Civil War.

At 5:30 I gave up and got up again. I read more of The Art of Happiness -- a book I think is an excellent choice for that trick some people do of getting up and reading for fifteen minutes when they can't sleep (ironic, isn't it?) --, glanced at a couple news items, worked a relatively unchallenging sudoku, and have been working on my sneezing.

A week ago or so, someone asked me what my plans were for the break between semesters. I think I'm going to try to learn how to sleep.

ethics, education, empathy

In my Professional Ethics course, I have my students read an essay by a community college English instructor who is unsure how to deal with the confessional personal essays his students write in composition classes. His students go through all sorts of hell, tell him in their essays all sorts of private information, including details of their lives they’ve never told anyone else. His dilemma is that he can’t tell where to draw the line between responding to the essays as a composition teacher, and responding to them as a person.

I use this essay to get at a dilemma that I believe professionals in many fields face (though likely more often in education and caring professions) – negotiating the boundary between the professional-client relationship and a person-to-person relationship. I started using the essay because I was getting so many liberal studies majors (i.e., students preparing to be primary school teachers), but now that I’m getting practically none of them any more, I try to relate it to the nursing and other health-related professions students. It’s easy to imagine a physical therapist working with a patient, who suddenly blurts out information about some kind of harm or danger the patient is exposed to. What are the therapist’s responsibilities? Suppose the situation is ambiguous legally, ethically, or factually?

As I’m reading it this afternoon to prep for class tomorrow, I’m finding myself wondering why I’m so drawn to this essay. It’s good, and I think the issues it raises are real and important, but I don’t know why I think it’s all that important. I have affection for the essay and empathy for the author that go beyond my pedagogical purpose in using it in class. This is partly because I don’t think education is reducible to training, but I’m sure it’s also because of my own experience of caring teachers I had, in high school especially, who crossed that boundary, and likely (in one case at least) violated their own ethics rules, out of that empathy and care.

So here’s my confession: I love it when this happens to me. It’s impossible for me not to feel empathy and affection for my students, and impossible for me not to care about them as human beings, beyond being students. I want them to do well, to be well, and I want to help when that’s not happening. I feel like I have a responsibility not only for their learning, but also, when it comes up, for their being – in fact, their being is more important to me than their learning.

Of course, my Loveliest had been a student in a class I taught. But it would be a cheap dismissal to say I’m concerned about my students’ being because I have some sort of fascination with illicitly crossing that boundary. I’ve crossed that boundary numerous times, in mostly very minor interactions. I have listened many times to students talk about their history of mental illness. I had a student confide in me about her crisis of religious faith, brought about by a conflict over a relationship she had. I had a student come to ask for advice about what she and her girlfriend could do to form a legal marriage, in case Proposition 8 passed.

I had a colleague a few years ago who used to refer to her students as her “babies” or her “children” very often, and I think that’s going overboard. On the other hand, I do not see any reason the state of their souls shouldn’t matter to me.

(Warning: cheap punchline to come.)

This is why I am ineligible to serve in administrative positions at the CSU.

the end of semester blues, sorta

It's finally getting close to the end of this wretched semester and academic year. Some nice things happen at the end of a semester, and I've needed nice things lately for reasons I won't go into, to avoid ranting.

One nice thing is last teaching days, and the relief that provides. Another are the rituals of closing shop - clearing out the inbox, filling the recycling bin with obsolete memos and old papers, the final faculty meetings.

Far better are the lovely exchanges of appreciation. It's amazing how much it means to me to hear that my course was significant, helpful, interesting, or inspiring. I'm collecting a few of those already. I have two students this semester in a GE class who have previously taken another GE class with me. I've seen them as first year students and now seniors. They deliberately chose my class to complete their upper division GE requirement, because of their good experience in the lower division course. They've recently let me know that.

I've also received unsolicited, unexpected, and much needed expressions of appreciation from faculty I represent in the California Faculty Association. I do a lot of work for faculty, and I nonetheless get a lot of flak, much of it illogical, about my representation and advocacy.

It's bittersweet. I have regrets, I made mistakes, I have frustrations, but I also have successes, victories, and joys.

(Yep, I had joys this semester. It just hasn't seemed that many in the face of all the negativity.)

Academic Year 2011-2012: A Year That Will Soon Be Flushed Down The Toilet.

several unconnected observations

Last year, CFA bought 6 units of my workload, 3 for being lecturer rep, and 3 for being a faculty rights rep. At the end of the year, I told the others I didn't think I'd earned the units for faulty rights. I've earned them this year. Shit, I've earned them in the last two weeks.

 The Filthadelphia Flyers lost to the New Jersey Devils today, and are out of the NHL playoffs. I'm ecstatic. Schadenfreude is a terrible emotion, but what the hell. BLLLLPBPBHH!!!!

 I upgraded my iMac to Lion, had to update MS Word to the 2011 version, and suddenly my fonts went missing. They just came back. I did nothing to cause this. All I've done with fonts lately is copy my font book to a flash drive to move them into the new MacBook Pro California bought me to perform sedition with. I have concluded that MS products are built on a software platform that would have been subject to capital punishment in 1600's Salem.

 The semester will not die. I have not yet decided whether it is a zombie, a vampire, the devil, a rock, Bermuda grass, or fascism.

random items

I'm reading an article by Lewis Lapham in the May Harper's. Lapham used to be the magazine's formidable editor in chief. Under Lapham, Harper's was icily brilliant almost every issue, in my opinion. I miss his voice and I think the mag has slipped rather a lot since his retirement. His article is on the peculiar American trait of historylessness, which provides the basis for our political discourse's constant doomsaying and constant nostalgia. Hep stuff.

I'm also listening, as I have done a lot lately, to Chopin solo piano works. I have come at last to the conclusion that Frederic Chopin is not allowed in the house. I mean: "Funeral March"? Are you kidding me? (Lauren didn't even bother to point out that he's long dead, this morning. She sort of chuckled.)

Today I am going to attempt to read a "work of philosophy" by a French "collective" active in the 1990s. There's a guest lecture on campus on Wednesday about them. I am deeply suspicious.

I am also going to try to read one of the papers I have to comment on in Canada in June. This one is on the McGurk effect. No, I'm not making that up.

But what I really think I ought to do is get back to writing something about porn.

do I work hard?

I frequently use my own career and experience to illustrate issues in my Professional Ethics class. Today, after a discussion of ethical problems in academic publication and conflict of interest, a student approached me and asked about my own record of academic publication. (I have had a handful of run-ins with questionable publication practices, not surprisingly.)

What he asked, in fact, was how he could find the things I've published, so he could read them. I replied that he might not find them all that accessible, since they are, after all, academic publications (which is an ethical issue in its own right), but if he was really interested he could search for them. He mentioned Google. Hmm.*

Anyway, it led me to think about my CV and how up-to-date it might be. I checked it out this evening. There are things missing, and I'm editing it, but what this brief exercise has really made me think about is my record of academic and scholarly achievement, and what it means.

I've presented around 40 papers at academic conferences. Almost all of them have been international conferences of philosophical scholarship or phenomenological investigation. Is that a lot?

I've had several peer-reviewed publications. Only three or four have been peer-reviewed articles in academic philosophy journals. The rest have been in little off-beat publications I thought were cool, like the late, lamented Journal of Mundane Behavior. I guess that's pretty good, considering where I work and what the mission of my university is.

I've served on a dozen university and college committees, served on the academic senate for 10 years, and have been a peer reviewer for several conferences, and editor of conference proceedings, a board member of a couple scholarly societies, etc. etc. etc.

It looks like a lot of work, all listed up like that.

--

* The "Hmm" is due in some small part to the fact that, if he actually does look me up, he might find not only this blog, but a reference to my Journal of Mundane Behavior article on the phenomenology of pornography, or some of the other weird things I've published. He might also find some of the terrible things that people have, no doubt, said about me on teh Interwebs.

titles

In a random fit of public service, I present, for the edification of whoever stumbles by, the basic formats for titles of academic publications in the humanities. If you are looking to start, or advance, a career in academia, you would be well advised to adopt one of the following for each and every paper, article, chapter, or book title.

As is well established by this late date, the humanities is our culture's last, best bastion of the defense - nay, the celebration - of diversity. The diversity of your opinion is sure to be well-received and given a fair and honest hearing, provided you adhere strictly to the exceptionless, unavowed, unwritten rules. To help you along, here are the officially accepted title types.

Word, Word, Word
This looks especially good in Times New Roman centered on the 10th line of a cover page. Do not get cute and put this title in a larger font. 12pt TNR has passed the test of time. Besides, no use calling undue attention to yourself. You'll only make yourself look uppity.

Word and Word
Also good, and also translates well to Palatino Linotype.

Adjective Noun
(See also: Adjectival Phrase Noun)

Most commonly used as for books, this title format juxtaposes two different parts of speech for added interest. Handy for incongruous or non-sequitir titles that drive sales up. (Who wouldn't buy a copy of Lithe Feminism? Or Reconstituted Community?)

These title types have spread through academia, predominantly in the US, by way of the insidious influence of so-called Continental philosophy on lit crit and other quasi-disciplines.

Pithy Non-self-explanatory Phrase:
Lengthy, Verbose Explanatory Phrase that Entirely Defeats the Aesthetic Elegance Effects of the Pithy Non-self-explanatory Phrase, or that Even Conflicts with the Basic Thrust of the Preceding Phrase, Such that the Pithiness of the First Phrase is Revealed as a Failed Attempt at Hipness
This tremendously successful title type is particularly prized in cultural studies. A remarkable feature of this title format is that the catchy first phrase need not relate intelligibly to the content of the text. It could probably be chosen entirely at random, so long as it makes it seem like you're going to say something provocative or amusing. You don't actually have to be able to do either! And the long subtitle gives you the opportunity to say what the content really is, or to make an assertion that you will not defend in the text.

the day I stopped being a psychology major

I started my college career as a psych major (or, as I usually like to put it, suffering the delusion that I was going to be a psych major). I was also in the university honors program, which was articulated through departments. A student in the program would take a few general ed courses, but the rest of the honors courses were within the major.

My first honors psych class was called History and Systems of Psychology. The textbook was decent, though heavily biased in favor of behaviorists. The class was taught by a professor nearing retirement, who lectured to us for 48 of the 50 minutes in each session from yellowed notes, punctuated only by his coughing tic. He would then ask if there were any questions. I always had questions, but after the first two or three, he did his best to avoid calling on me.

A handful of times we had what the professor called class discussions, usually of about 20 minutes. But the honors psych students seemed incapable or uninterested in discussing the history or systems of psychology. They would find a relevant item from class notes and repeat it. When I tried to raise critical questions during a class discussion, the professor told me that we weren't there to criticize, but to learn, the history and systems of psychology.

We spent weeks on Wundt, and then two class sessions on psychoanalysis, a "system" of psychology the textbook essentially dismissed as superstitious claptrap that only delayed psychology becoming a genuine science. I had been reading Freud since my sophomore year of high school, and was trying to read Jung, and I found this blanket rejection of Freud ridiculous. Text and professor were eager to move on to the real scientific psychologists, and given loving emphasis were the behaviorists Watson and Skinner. I tried to suggest that the argument legitimating the scientific status of behaviorism was circular, but was told that it's real psychology because it can do things (which psychoanalysis, by extension, cannot) - make people stop smoking, or fight the urge to suck their thumbs in important business meetings.

After the long chapter on Watson, the continued frustration with the honors psych students acting like sheep and with the professor expressly precluding critical discussion, I decided I needed to do something. We were just getting started on Skinner when I made my move.

I drove the 45 minutes across town to my parents' house, and dug out my sister's old scuba fins and snorkel. That morning before class, I stuffed them as well as I could into my backpack (the fins stuck out of the top), and walked from my dorm to the classroom, making sure I would be a couple minutes late. In the hallway, I ran into the only other student in the class who seemed to be interested in discussing the history of psychology (a psych major, who turned out to be kinda crazy), and told her I was going to shake things up. She went inside and found her usual seat.

Meanwhile, I geared up. Shoes off, swim fins on. Mirrored sunglasses. Backpack strapped to my chest. Snorkel.

In this getup, I whisked open the door and flapped across the room to my usual seat, just in front of the crazy psych major, along the windows. As I collapsed into it and got out my textbook, the professor said, suppressing a tremendous rage, "That's alright, no one noticed you coming in."

He went back to his notes and tics, and lectured on Skinner. I paid attention, but managed to glance around the room at all the psych majors, staring straight ahead at the prof, blind to my existence. Halfway through class, in mid-sentence, the professor suddenly addressed me, saying that I was to remain after class to discuss my "idiotic stunt."

I got you, man, I thought. You may be a committed apologist for behaviorism, but you're a lousy behaviorist. You fell for it. You gave me attention, while denying that you were giving it. And as we all know about denial...

He got through about 40 minutes, but then gave up. He couldn't concentrate. The class left, and I stayed behind, and I explained myself. I told him I did what I did to protest the total lack of meaningful discussion in the class, to try to shake up the psych zombies - make that honors psych zombies. I even waited until we got to Skinner, to protest the obvious bias in the book, and to do something that I thought would be poorly explained by behaviorism.

I can't remember what he said. I don't think he punished me, except that he gave me a B for a final grade after all the A work I'd done.

After class, I walked over to the psychology department and met with the department chair. I told him what happened in class - well, some of it. I told him about the zombies' reaction. And I told him I was dropping the major.

the end of the world - not 31 January 2012

Pundits are proclaiming today's Florida Republican Primary to be the most significant yet. The Republican Party establishment have evidently come to their collective senses and realized that OMFG NEWT F***ING GINGRICH IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?! Consequently, they've poured buckets of money into Mitt Romney.

(Not literally, I suppose.)

Of course, the real significance of this is: Rick Santorum's campaign will begin its inexorable and pitiable descent from madness to obscurity, obscurity to boutique, boutique to dropsical, and finally, dropsical to dead. (That's the usual course of these things.) Despite this, I can safely say that the world will not end today.

There is also no 31st verse of the first chapter of Revelations, and although Chapter Two, Verse One of Ezekiel provides some intriguing hints of what could come up later, obviously that couldn't apply to our situation today, since it's January 31 (i.e., 1:31), not February 1 (i.e., 2:1).

So enjoy your day. My enjoyment of my day will begin with an optometrist appointment. I would make a joke here about going to "see" my optometrist, and it would be hilarious, but I don't have the heart. Depression is a terrible thing, and, as a tip for everyone, optometrists are not qualified to treat depression.

(By the way, it's also impossible for the world to end on the day you go to see your optometrist. This does not apply if your eye doctor is actually an opthamologist.)

on becoming a monster

I've spent some time this morning looking back over notes I wrote this summer on phenomenology and embodiment, in a typescript and in a bound notebook I keep as a kind of commonplace book.

In my book, I reserve the last two or three pages to list things I want to look into - there's a list of phrases, titles, or potential lines in a song or poem; there's a list of music, books, and other media stuff to look into. It's a long list, and I was surprised this morning to realize how much of it I had consumed this summer, and really, over the last couple of years.

And "consume" is the appropriate verb, I think - not in the Baudrillardian or "consumer society" sense, but in the sense of using and eating. I am consuming books and music at an especially alarming rate. I don't mean I'm in danger of using them up - one of the basic operating principles of consumer society is that the production of consummables must always be so excessive that consumption becomes an end in itself and continues without let or hindrance, so there's no worry we'll run out of stuff to consume.

I'm concerned about what it means about and for me. I am concerned that I am consuming far too much, and that my consumption of all these things - books, ideas, music - now threatens to make me monstrous. What if I become an eating machine that feeds on all this? That can't be good for me, or for the world, can it?

birthday, Vegas, fall semester, writing

Yesterday was Debra Messing Day at the House About Town. That's because yesterday was Debra Messing's birthday. Mine too. I got dozens of birthday greetings, which was very nice and made me feel well-stocked with friends and loved ones.

Last week we hit Vegas for a sort of Duquesne philosophy alumni bash, and I am slightly abashed to say that "bash" is an appropriate term for it. I don't care much for Vegas, because I don't gamble, and I find the architectural kitsch more than overwhelming. The best parts of those days were spent in a poolside cabana carousing, like old times.

Saturday I finally bought the bike I've been threatening to buy for nearly two years. It's not the bike I wanted, but it'll do. It's a cheapo 15-speed mountain bike. My fall schedule is so weird, that the bike seemed finally not merely warranted, but necessary. On Mondays and Wednesdays I have a class at 10, then I'm next in class at 3 pm.

That mess begins Monday. Today, I took stock of the 37 single-spaced typed pages of notes I've taken this summer on phenomenology and embodiment, to see what kinds of papers or articles I could block out of it. I think I have three legit ideas.

(1) "How big is my body?" This is what started me off this summer, as it came up in a conversation in New Brunswick. That'll lead to some nifty stuff on the phenomenological concepts of normal and abnormal, both of which are equivocal, both of which are targets of post-structuralist critiques that almost entirely miss the point, and both of which are, I think, absolutely indispensable to the phenomenological analysis of embodiment. I'll get at all that in part through describing and contemplating the wonderfully weird sensation I get of being suddenly taller.

(2) Unnamed item on "the body" as the fetish of phenomenology. At the end of summer, I wrote a 5000+ word essay that began its life as a potential article to submit to a special issue of a phenomenology journal, on "the body" and embodiment. My essay went in some directions I didn't predict, and I now call it "the goofy paper." The theme of "the body" being a fetish of phenomenological writers is really a way to critique "phenomenology of the body" as a way to examine embodiment, life, perception, etc. I think phenomenology of "the body" misses the mark completely. What's needed is not a clarification of "the body," which could only be a clarification of "the body" as a constituted object. What's needed is a clarification of embodiment, which is to say, in the lingo of the later Husserl, of the passive synthesis, or of the aesthesiological-physiological body - that which "pre-gives" "objectlike formations" to and for the ego. Cazart!

(3) Another unnamed thing, on the origin of meaning in non-meaning. So, when we get through with understanding passive synthesis and embodiment as fundamental origin of the ego having anything to make meaning with or upon, if we consider the pregiven as pregiven, we can't help but notice that it can't "mean" anything. Meaning is constituted/projected by an active ego. Meaning is a meaning precisely of an experience or experienced object. But meaning is not a pure invention of the ego: idealism is wrong. If that's so, then the source of the raw material of meaning is not itself meaningful but proto-meaningful, or, to make the point more, er... pointedly, the origin of meaning is non-meaning. (I'm certain, in retrospect, that spending time in Vegas helped me to understand that.)

temporal anomaly

Late last night, as it started to drizzle, I stood looking out and down on the townhouses that form our complex. Newly wet, in the orange-yellow haze of the dim streetlights, they looked very little but enough like the condos my friend Doug lived in in Northern Virginia almost 20 years ago. The feeling of looking down through the rain was not significantly but sufficiently like my Card Lane, Pittsburgh pastime, peeking out the big front windows of our second-story apartment. I felt very strangely as though all this time hadn't passed, and this wasn't Turlock, California, or 2011.

I've gone through a hell of a lot since leaving Pittsburgh in 1998 - several career crises, three major depressive episodes, an ugly divorce, involuntary home-ownership, an unpleasant number of feline deaths, the entire freaking Presidency of G.W. Bush. How can it feel as if nothing has happened, as if I'm still back there, back then?

The feeling was so strong, it was very hard to accept that I actually am here, or that any of that time really has passed, or even that I was around for its passing. My sweetest tried to help me shake it off, looking straight at me, touring me around the apartment to show me the guitars, the kitchen, the rooms we sometimes call the Room of Requirement and the Chamber of Secrets, finally pointing out that Alexander and Arthur, die Überkätschen, the Flying Kittois Brothers, 35 pounds of compressed silliness, have only been here three years.

So I guess the date on the calendar means that it really isn't 1998 anymore, nor 1992. Where the hell have I been?

first day blues

Typical pre-semester anxieties last night woke me at 4 AM, from a bizarre dream in which the Chancellor of the CSU had imposed a policy on remediation involving providing milk to students. (This is a highly expurgated account of the dream. I don't want to go into more detail. Please don't ask. Imagine the weirdest possible ramifications of this. Now make it weirder, and ultimately cruel. There you go.)

I met my first class this morning. I forgot my "JOKE" sign. Note to self: remember that tomorrow morning. Bioethics requires its use.

Now I'm Pandora-ing through my office hour, and starting The Federalist Papers. Check this out:

Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.

That's Hamilton in 1787.

brief report of ongoing madnesses

Classes start in two days, and my schedule for the semester is not finalized. Consequently, I have opted not to put my syllabi together for the classes that might still be canceled. So there could be a little confusion as the semester starts.

Lauren is in surgery even as I write this. It's nothing major, it's outpatient, but still, it's surgery. Thanks, I'll tell her you said so.

I've drafted a paper, have another one to get done in a week, and have the revision of the AAUP paper to get started on.

Now for a political note. You may have heard various neocons pitching a return to the gold standard as a way to ... um ... to do something or other. Partly, they think that if the US returned to the gold standard, the federal government would not be able to run deficits because the federal reserve bank would have to stop printing money. From what I know about economics, I believe the basic flaw in their plan is that it simply isn't conservative enough.

After all, money doesn't grow on trees, not even paper money, which isn't even paper in the first place! (And let's not get started on the tree-hugging envirofascist movement!) For money to have real worth, it has to be based on a real, tangible thing. Fiat money isn't based on anything at all, except a social and political convention and the exchange value of goods, services, and labor. Labor obviously isn't tangible, and services aren't physical objects either, so that leaves goods, and we all know that a currency based on the exchange value of goods wouldn't be viable because we wouldn't ever know how much any goods would be worth. Right? Right?

A gold standard would give us a straightforward way to know the real value of everything, as compared to a certain quantity of pure gold. A laptop computer is probably worth its weight in gold, say, but my year's labor is worth, I dunno, say an ingot. I don't know how much an ingot weighs, but I figure, something like that. I'd carry my ingot to the Safeway and exchange it for groceries, get some return weight of gold back, and thus our economy would continue to flow freely, and we could all rest in the comfort of knowing that we really knew what things were worth.

That's the theory, anyway. But as I said, it's not conservative enough. If you really want a solid standard for money, you have to go back further in history, before the gold socialists took over. What we really need is a return to the beads and carved bones standard. You're welcome.

lots of things my family doesn't really know about me

We went back to Ohio for a visit. Chrissie Hynde notwithstanding, at least some parts of my city were not gone, though on balance, a lot of it was.

For the first time in probably about 10 years, my sister, my brother and I were all in the same place. There might be a long story behind that, but I'm not really sure. My family is like that.

I was about to write a quick gloss on the general situation, but that's not what I wanted to write about, so to heck with it. I'll just say that I have a brother 11 years older than me, and a sister 5 years older than me, and that, despite their calendar ages, I still insist on being 28.

What I wanted to write about is how weird it is to suddenly connect with all of them in this mediated way.

I'm connected to a few family members on Facebook, and posts to this antique blog eventually find their way to Facebook, so everything I write here or on Facebook is open to their inspection. My sister-in-law even mentioned, while we were in Ohio, that she has looked at a couple things I've posted, and a few of them she isn't too sure about.

So, all the stuff I post about erotic experience, about the weird food I cook and eat, about politics in higher ed, about union activism, about the whole world I occupy on a daily basis that has very very little to do with anything they knew or understood about me as a kid in Ohio... All of that is what they might read on any given day.

Today, for instance, I worked on the paper I'm hoping to present at the Back To The Things Themselves conference in New Brunswick this summer. The paper is about erotic experience, and today I wrote about being seduced by peaches.

Tomorrow it's as likely as not I'll be writing here about academic politics again, since I was just at the CFA meeting last weekend, and I also received confirmation today that my schedule for Spring is likely to change, with one week before classes start.

It's strange to think of my family reading any of this. I wonder what they might think of it, or of me, or whether they let it pass without wondering.