Synesthesia is Reality (part 1)

I want a polemical element to my paper. I want reductionist to feel like they need to qualify their position, with excuses and vain pleading... if they want appeal in Portland. This won't happen over night, but with some hard work we can subvert their system. I know I am in good company in this regarded. Portland at large does not except the prevailing prejudice that solutions can be arrived at by isolating factors, but the effects of reductionism remain a continues fact of daily life, even in Portland. In addition to making a case for Synesthesia as a more accurate account of reality then one that supposes the senses of perception to be purely insolated from each other, I'm also going to present alternative methodologies that, while they don't represent the world in a comprehensive manner, have a tendency to open the senses to a wider realm of possibility rather then limit them.

We want to show the world that synesthesia, at its heart, is an integral part of the human experience.   

There are many things in dispute among we who want to see the esthetic value of synthesis prevail in our city, but one thing we all have in common is that we all recognize something in synesthesia that is essential to experience. This is our united front. We don't disregarded neurology, empiricism, analytics, or pragmatism, we only reject that any of these explain anything on their own. Synesthesia is not a pathology, reality is synthesis.

The synesthetic experience goes to the heart of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of existence. He boldly attacks the idea that we can understand perception by isolating each sense from the others. In, Phenomenology of Perception, he writes, "The formulation is literally meaningless if vision is defined by the visual quale, and sound by the acoustic quale. But it rests with us toward our definition in such a way as to provide it with a meaning, since the sight of sounds and the hearing of colors exist as phenomena. Nor are these even exceptional phenomena. Synesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and feel." Merleau-Ponty thought the isolating of the senses was do to scientific investigation, while I do thing the senses are synesthetic in the very way Merleau-Ponty presents them, I don't think that science hides the true nature of the senses. perhaps it's the other way around. That while each sense is dependent on the synesthetic whole, the focusing of a sense puts all the senses to the serves of one in such a way as to disguise their true synesthetic nature, and the scientists Merleau-Ponty refers to only take for granted what most western people take for granted, we can focus one sense or another, or that there is something called sight, or there is something called hearing.

M.Merleau-Ponty provides many examples of "Synaethetia" in normal human experience, but he also provides case studies of Synesthetic processing in subjects of abnormal brains. The reason these cases are so compelling is because they show how our brains work on a more primary level. It is a gift to know the mechanism that make complex processes possible. Merleau-Ponty gives us this gift.

In cases where a human has received damage to their cerebellum, (front part of the brain), the visual sense and motor response is less regulated, resulting in surprising consistent reflexive responses to raw color. Merleau-Ponty refers to a case study, conducted by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Goldstein, where such individuals where shown color cards, "The gesture of raising the arm, which can be taken as an indicator of motor disturbance, is differently modified in its sweep and it's direction according as the visual field is red, yellow, blue or green." ("Phenomenology of Perception" 209) The causal role that color plays on these subjects indicates a closer link between bodily movement and eye sight, and while bodily movement isn't usually considered a perceptual sense, these cases could be said to indicate a synesthetic relationship between the parts of the body because their automatic responses constitute a joined whole between sight and bodily movement. A movement of the arm can be enacted by a color, such a movement is affectively the gesture of a sight. Kurt Goldstein's study showed that red and green produce smooth movements, while blue and green produce jerky ones. Even which eye receives the sight can alter the response, "red applied to the right eye, for example, favors  a corresponding stretching of the arm outward, green the bending of the arm back towards the body."("Phenomenology of Perception" 209) These reactions, Merleau-Ponty says, can be reduce to two basic categories, those that produce repulsion; red and yellow, and those that produce attraction; blue and green, like an ameba repealing from the poke of a probe or an exploding star scattering new elements through out the universe, when the regulatory functions of our cerebellum are not functioning, we extend the sight of our eyes to the function of our arms. We don't interpret sense data, our bodies extend our senses through out our bodies. Colors are not just stimuli for our brain to interpret, they are lived significance for our motor physiognomy. But these responses can not be reduced to the stimulation of visual wave lengths on our nervous system because even in cases when the color "blue," for instance, is produced through contrast rather than definable blue wave lengths, the same motor responses accrue in the test subject. We are all familiar with the phenomenological experience of feeling uncomfortable in a give environment, what Merleau-Ponty (a phenomenologist), shows us is that these phenomenon have consistent patterns and can be tested inductively, even empirically. 

Motor responses to color are even felt in normal people, for intense when your mussels tighten up when you go in a room with lots of bright contrasting colors you are having a motor response to colors, maybe tenseness isn't your immediate response, but if bright contrast colors get you exited then that’s likely a deep motor response as well.  Merleau-Ponty explains how this "responsiveness" to color isn't entirely passive, he speaks about sense perceptions and a person that senses"...it cannot be held 

that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers

significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my

hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is

nothing but a vague beckoning, 'If a subject tries to experience a

specific color, blue for example, while trying to take up the bodily

attitude appropriate to red, an inner conflict results, a sort of spasm

which stops as soon as he adopts the bodily attitude corresponding  

to blue."("Phenomenology of Perception" 214)

This might seem strange at first when you read Merleau-Ponty speak of synchronizing our bodies to this or that color, but this really is an ordinary experience. Maybe you have experienced this; you go into a home of some one you've just meet or a music venue with cement floors, and gradually you feel more and more at home entail they sell the house and you almost cry or the band finally starts and all the nerves or cold energy gets evaporated in to the passion of you're dance. This is what Merleau-Ponty means by synchronizing your senses with this or that color, and it really is partly your decision to make, you could just stand there awkwardly while the music plays or refuse to visit your friend with the weird paintings, or you can synchronize your senses. 

A good portion of Merleau-Ponty's work in perception, deals with the way the different senses perceive space, and the over laps and disjunction between these perceptions. This is a really good way to discover synesthesia in "normal" experience because space is a common domain for all the senses. Merleau-Ponty invites us to a classical music consort and asks us to consider how this music effects our perception of space. "When, in the concert hall, I 

open my eyes, visible space seems to me cramped compared to that 

other space through which, a moment ago, the music was being un- 

folded, and even if I keep my eyes open while the piece is being 

played, I have the impression that the music is not really contained

within this circumscribed and unimpressive space. It brings a new

dimension stealing through visible space, and in this it surges for-

ward, just as, in victims of hallucinations, the clear space of things

perceived is mysteriously duplicated by a 'dark space' in which other

presences are possible. Like the perspective of other people making

its impact on the world for me, the spatial realm of each sense is an

unknowable absolute for the others, and to that extent limits their

spatiality."("Phenomenology of Perception" 222)

When we consider the space in which music is played, the synesthetic nature of normal perception becomes more apparent, because a grange hall can be a high class venue if the right music is played, and even the most ornate opera house is a dead relic compared to the heavenly hall it becomes when a great peace like, Rachmaninoff concerto No. 2, is played. Space and motor response are often over looked in discussions of “normal perception” synesthesia, because they are such remote elements of perception. But isn't it strange that space is felt almost tactually, even though it’s something that by definition can't be touched? Like a self fulfilling prophecy, it seems that perception of space and motor response are so remote, precisely because they are the realms of synesthesia which are most entrenched in “normal perception.” The perception of things that cant be traced back to one or another sense is that which Merleau-Ponty refers to as the invisible. When you are at a concert, a syntheses happens between what you see and what you hear, what’s most phenomenal about this syntheses is that it isn’t perfect, you can sense the difference between the way your sight fills the room and what you hearing fills the room, even though your sense of space would be impassable with out the way these separate senses work together. It seems that there is a larger whole between the disparity of these two experiences of space; the visual sense and the auditory sense. Otherwise how would we know that the room is to small to contain the music? It seem this is a prime example of what Zizek calls a Parallax.

Topic 2: Merleau-Ponty discovered what Zizek calls the minimal difference, and applied it to the parallax of the eyes and expanded it's application to the other senses, and even to language. To begin with lets consider Merleau-Ponty's  example of "binocular vision" and how it relates to his larger notion of syntheses. "Now, though perception brings together our sensory ex-periences into a single world, it does not do so in the way that scientific colligation gathers together objects or phenomena, but in the way that binocular vision grasps one sole object. Let us describe carefully this 'synthesis'. When my gaze is fixed on a remote tiling, I have a double image of objects nearby. When I transfer my gaze to the latter, I see the two images converge on what is to be the single object, and merge into it."(230) "Binocular vision" is Merleau-Ponty's paradigm example of the syntheses of the senses, and it is a good one, no one questions the unity of multiple sense organs when it comes to the vision of their eyes, but every one has went cross eyed before and knows the difference between the unity and the divergence of the sense of sight. Could you imagine having more then two eye's? This would be a whole new syntheses. This is what Merleau-Ponty says is happing to all our senses, they are being joined together like one eye with another to make a single experience. Far from confusing the experience of vision, it is the discrepancy between the eyes that gives us depth perception, this is the same thing as what Slavoj Zizek calls the "minimal difference." In the same way the "minimal difference" between the sight of the opera house and the overwhelming sound of the music makes the real experience of the music expand our sense of space, so to does our two eyes join one single vision. Merleau-Ponty even applies this "minimal difference" to interactions with other people, "As soon as we see other seers, we no longer have before us only the look without a pupil, the plate glass of the things with that feeble reflection, that phantom of ourselves they evoke by designating a place among themselves whence we see them; the 'lacuna' where our eyes, our back lie is filled, filled still by the visible, of which we are not the titulars."("Visible&Invisible"143)

Lacuna means gap, the it is the very same, "minimal difference," which Zizek refers to as the parallax: "the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational posi- tion that provides a new line of sight.The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view."("Parallax view" 17)  Even Zizek doesn't seem to realize that he takes Marleau-Ponty's notion of a lacuna in perception and expands it's domain to the very heart of reality, but I will explain that in the 2ed part of this paper.

Conclusion 1/2: (intromition) 

So there we see how Merleau-Ponty a known phenomenologist draws from an array of disciplines including, cognitive science, sociology, and analytics to illustrate the primacy of synesthesia in the deep structure of normal perception. I also presented some tools for discovering such a deep structure, including identifying "minimal difference" or lacuna in your own perceptions, and thought experiments concerning ways to interact with space. I have plans for a 2ed edition to this paper, Synesthesia is Reality, in which I will show how Merleau-Ponty concerning perception can be expanded to the nature of reality it's self using Zizeks' Parallax. Something I'm particularly excited about is the use of the Parallax to bridge the gap between perception and neuroscience and developmental sociology. I feel like this will greatly expand the applications of Merleau-Ponty's work. I think it will also be valuable in shifting the intellectual and social political environment towards a more synesthetic notion of reality. 

 

Work Cited




Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London: St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, 1962. Print.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwester University Press, 1968. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj, The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT press, 2006. Print.

 

Modest Mouse - Lampshades on Fire (from the new album).

From Strangers To Ourselves

Prejudice is natural, now what? A word from Antonio Damasio.

 

 

"reactions that lead to racial and cultural prejudices are based in part on the automatic

deployment of social emotions evolutionarily meant to detect differences in others because

difference may signal risk or danger, and promote withdrawal or aggression.That

sort of reaction probably achieved useful goals in a tribal society but is no longer useful,

let alone appropriate, to ours. We can be wise to the fact that our brain still carries.

the machinery to react in the way it did in a very different context ages ago. And we can

learn to disregard such reactions and persuade others to do the same."

                                                                                             -Antonio Damasio

  

 

 

 

 

 

German Punk, nationality and privilege. Ask the Question.

                                         Die Tödliche Doris - Tanz im Quadrat  

Who does this German Punk singer remind you of? It seems a voice, a dialect, an emotion, can be offensive in its self. Is a voice like that a privilege? Is it possible to check a voice, with out disregarding your being? How can you say nationality is constructed when you hear a song like this?

M.Merleau-Ponty & Individuality...

It is fashionable these days to insist that individuality is impossible, and it is plain to see that interdependence is the rule and not the exception. Even if one was able to separate them selves from other people completely and live in the wilderness, (the dream of misanthropes and saints alike), one would still depend on the direct resources of their immediate environment for survival and identity. The situation gets worse still for the 'individual' when one considers that every word one speaks is shared by every other speaker of their language. Even our privet thoughts consist of things we've heard. It be hard to even think of something that could exist apart from other things. Even ones awareness of a thing can disturb that thing's tranquil individuality by making it a comparison to other things.  

So what can the word individual even mean if we can't even imagine one? Is individuality meaningless? I don't think so. In spite of the fact that I fully embrace the communion of all entities, I still find that individuality is a powerful and liberating concept worthy of deep contemplation.

In, Phenomenology of Perception, M.Merleau-Ponty gives a possible alternate conception of individuality. "The novelist task is not to expound ideas or even analyze characters, but to depict an inter-human event, ripening and bursting it upon us with no ideological commentary, to such an extent that any change in order of the narrative or in choice of view point would alter the literary meaning of the event. A novel, poem, picture or musical work are 'individuals,'

that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning only through direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation." 

For Merleau-Ponty the individual is some one or something that can only be understood through a direct encounter, and this makes sense because if said "individual" could be understood through analogy then it/he/she would be in an inseparable collection with its analogue. The kind of individual Merleau-Ponty speaks of does exist, if it didn't analogy would be sufficient for experience. What's strange is that a set of analogies like a poem can, it's self, be an individual. Merleau-Ponty's individual is possible even given what we know about the role of interdependence, because we all know individuals that live in families and communities. 

This understanding of individuality has the power to reopen the discussion between individualists and communalists and open new relationships of liberty and dependence. This debate goes to the heart of the meaning of love and respect.

 (I do not think collective entities are imaginary).

Time Space: The Neo Rauch astate.

The Artist Neo Rauch lives in the same world as me. A place where the architecture and infrastructure govern the lives of humans as if they were Olympian god's dancing through the void, and the past conspires with the present to unbind the future into an enchanted kingdom of electronic heraldry. My only protest of the Rauch estate is the sense of disconnection between things. The visual space divided up, and smashed together. In my world one might wish they could get this kind of space. They might even fight for it. They would try to construct prisons and museum to keep people and things apart, but ultimately they would fail and anarchy would be leashed upon the land once more. 

don't be stupid any more

I don't think people can imagine the world diffrent then the way it is. That is way they accept so much wickedness and stupidity. Why they are willing to fight something until it happens, then they think it's the greatest thing in the world, and you must be a regressive reactionary idiot to think anything different. It's not that they just forgot the way it was, they don't even think it could be different. We live in a wicked world that isolates people and calls it social welfare and steals from people and calls it prosperity. Why is every one struggling more today then the day the recession ended? I have seen the system, and it eats human souls. I have seen human souls rot of under exposure before my very eyes. I live in one of the most progressive cities in the world, and I have seen people systematically isolated and lied to by the people who swore to help them. Electro shock therapy is still practiced. Electro shock therapy is clear cutting the brain. Well I'm telling you now, no one believes your lies, you don't even believe them. Conservatism, what are you conserving? Politics, don't be so vain.

Hermeto Pascoal - Música da Lagoa (Hosted Media)

Progressivism is narrow minded.

Progressivism is deterministic because it persuposes that there is only one path to the future. All other paths lead backward or into oblivion.

Do we all agree on what the word progress means?

The early years of Mt. Tabor, By Grant Nelson. (Hosted Media).

The early years of Mt. Tabor. By Grant Nelson

Why I believe in a God.

Bertrand Russell wrote a book called, 'Why I Am Not A Christian.'

I believe in God.

The primary reason I Believe in God is because I know that I can't gain anything

by not believing in God.  

The Joke of the Master Musician. (My reading of the work of Daniel Coffeen).

The spectacle of Music. 

                                

I remember when I joined my first band. I was stoked, playing your guitar is an experience with endless possibility, but with a band, even a shity high school punk band is like nothing else. I remember telling my friend, "I'm in a band now!", and his response was, "you have an album? You play shows? It means nothing unless you actually play shows." His words stuck with me, giving me motivation to make it happen, but also shifting my focus, (the seed of ideology!) ever so slightly, from making something, to making something happen for me. I started to think of being a musician as something I had to do, which is so obvious, right. You are what you do otherwise you could say your anything you want, and it be true, even if you only did it once in your enter life, even if you never really did it at all. But gradually I started to think of it differently. Reading phenomenology I started to question identity on a deeper level. What is my being in the world? What are my becomings? What is the lasting effect of what I do? What sense do I make? And that's it! listening to Daniel Coffeen’s podcast I realized that being a musician isn't making a new sound and twisting you friend’s fuck'n arms off tell they get the tune right. It's the way you hear the world when you are trying to make something of it. It's not just making a guitar do what no one thought it could; it's feeling in your whole BWO! (sounds like profanity!?) the strife of trying to make a guitar do what it can't do, that's what it means to be a guitarist, every guitarist knows this. It’s the struggle with the instrument that transforms your ears, your fingers, even your eye’s, I still remember the way my guitar case smelt when I first bought my electric guitar. It's the same with painting. Most paintings don't look like there subjects, the best are still paintings though. Not painterly! Painting in a painterly way is like playing smells like teen spirit the way it's written in guitar world magazine, which brings me to the problem of the philosophical concept of a world, as presented by Heidegger as a referential totality, which sounds communal and holistic. But when I read Badiou enlisting the art world as a revolutionary force of change it becomes very apparent to me what a referential totality means, a closed system controlled by planners. The curator is king and the museum is her realm. The museum, as it turns out is a reductionist’s space where affect can be isolated from effect leaving the utilitarian hegemony to rain supreme over mood and spirit. No these things are not dichotomous; the curator is not the art world, but art is not separate from the world, the art world is just the name of a certain hierarchy who’s king is the fool of utilitarianism. A beloved stooge of a fake radicalism. The museum is an asylum of fetishes to powerful for the "material" world. So it is with the music store, if I could play Stair Way to Heaven, again, what a ridiculous world that would be!! Instead we will talk about equipment. The thing is that music takes practice but how can you practice something like music! Thank you for the inspiration Daniel Coffeen.

When I play a weak riff am I a weak guitarist? Am I a great guitarist just because I can hear the guitar in the wind? I become a guitarist when I hear the guitar in the rhythm of the snow. What you are becoming is always with you. The master musician is some one who can practice music. No one could practice music!

The skeleton of Being.



 Artist Igor Morski often depicts a metaphoric reality. 

When McLuhan says, when you sit in a chair the chair extends your spine, he means that a chair has the same structural function as the bones in your body, to hold you up. Deleuze says the same thing but he explains it as becoming-chair, they both want to highlight the way we are a part of the world around us, they just explain it in different ways. This point is a good one for designers to consider because it relates form and function, to identity and being.

 

For Love of Ideology in General/A Rebellion for the New Millennium.

    Some ones idea of what ideology looks like.

 

Dictionary.com defines ideology as;
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

 

 

For many people ideology is a term of contempt, but I don't think this makes much sense at all. 

Ideology and desire are not separate. There is no secret desire which ideology seeks to suppress only desire in conflict with desires. A critique of ideology "as such" is a contradiction, because it negates the Meta level which it assumes ideology 'falsely' comes from. Either ideology comes from lived desires or there is a transcendent source from which it comes. Conversely desire itself could be said to be transcendent because it seeks to actualize the dream, or the virtual possibilities of reality.

I agree that 'focus' is ideological because it is directed by desire. This, as you know, is called intentionality, and isn't necessarily subconscious. A stated goal can itself be a distraction from the bigger picture. Intentionality isn't the same as desire, it’s the way desire limits, and sharpens our perceptions and 'involuntary' actions. This is why Buddhists practice detachment. The idea behind meditation is that if you sit long enough with your desires you will eventually realize you don't need to fulfill them. This in turn makes you see things that are not directly related to your desires, but it doesn't dissolve intentionality completely. Surly this is a beneficial practice, not least because it opens you up to new possibilities, and desires, and inspirations. Intentionality makes thought and action possible. This might sound like I’m saying that intentionality traps us in our perceptions, I’m not. We shift our perceptions every time we change which task we are doing, intentionality is what allows us to do this, but meditation can give us whole new intentions.

Deleuze differs from the Buddha in that he encourages us to cultivate our desires. In a thousand plateaus, Deleuze writes about the empty Body without Organs, I think this is the same thing Vajrayana Buddhists call the "the diamond body," a bodily state free of desire. Deleuze instead prescribes a state he calls the Full Body without Organs.
There are two characteristics that define the Full Body without Organs: 1) no one desire is thought to be a stand in for another, as in the sublimated desire, and 2) the desire is self-fulfilling. Deleuze gives us two examples of a full B(w)O; 1) the masochist who enjoys his suffering, (for the perverts), and 2) a lover obsessed with the mere thought of their lover, as in courtly love, (for the prods). Both examples problematize Freud’s notion of sublimation because the object of desire does not require consummation, nor is it a stand in for consummation. The full B(w)O also provide us with a new conception of desire which opens new possibilities for discovery, because these desires open up to a multiplicity of subtle experiences.

Ideology is thought to be a human construct, which means that humans create it out of nothing and then force it fascistically on reality, but ideas don’t come from nowhere much less the human soul, they are part of the natural world, that is not to say they are good, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas.

I recently read an article by Syreeta Mcfadden called ‘Teaching the Camera To See My Skin’, in it, she quotes Godard calling Kodak's film stock racist, because it couldn’t see dark skinned people.Can a film stock have desire or intention? Can it be focused on the wrong thing? Is Anti-ideology fascist? These are questions for an emerging world, where possibilities are not reduced to what has already been done. Ideas are the world of the possible.


Teaching the Camera To See My Skin, by Syreeta Mcfadden:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin

Gentrification is Localized Inflation.

What do Money Multipliers or Monetary Inflation &OR, "big" Government have to do with Gentrification?
[These are some factors in gentrification that not often brought up in the general disputation.]

1. Gentrification is localized inflation.

2. Gentrification is caused in large part by City Planers.
3. Increases in money in any market, even local markets, results in higher prices over all, and
an appearance of lower quality products to take the place of the products that are no longer
affordable to those excluded by the gentrification process. This could be called the Wall Mart effect.
 4. When rent prices rise beyond the incomes of those unconnected to the inflationary flows, the excluded, (working class people and those on meager food stamp subsidies)  have no choice but to move away.
5. Centralized banking, and government to the degree that it is centralized, contributes to unequal distributions of wealth&power because centralized organizations have a limited capacity to support other structures, both social and infrastructural.
6. Centralized organizations have very little incentive to support organizations that don't increase there power directly. (Big business hasn't bought our democracy, they are simply the kind of social organizations that our system creates, they produce the power; guns, energy, technology, our government needs to serve us in the only way it can).

Candle light a la' Gram Harman & Rene Descartes.

                                 Gerhard Richter: Kerze (Candle), 1982 © Collection Frieder Burda

                                 Candle is also the cover of Sonic Youths brilliant album

                                  Day Dream Nation. 

 

Gram Harman, a contemporary philosopher that you should know about, says each object has its own essence apart from the some total of interactions it can come into with other objects or people. Harman says interactions reveal something that was already there, it wasn't always there because Harman doesn't believe that 'forms' are eternal like Plato did, its just been there for as long as the object has existed. I considered the nature of the candle in light of Harman's claim.  

 

Candle light will never be replaced by the light bulb nor was it ever merely a utilitarian object, lacking it's current magical quality. There has always been something both terrifying and soothing in the light of a candle. It is no wonder that Rene Descartes discovers the essence of thought & being while playing with candle wax. Or maybe it be better to say that, it is the vary essence of wonder that he did so.

 

 

 

Altai Kai - Кай кожонг (Hosted Media).

 

Povey and Bergson: matter&memory.

Edward Povey has a collage like element to his work, I don't think it's coincidental that it also has a super natural quality, the spirit brings together things that are otherwise divided by space and time. I think that this is a clue to what it means for God to be outside of time. Paradoxically it also illustrates how deeply connected the spirit is to space and time, it's as if dreams are just the cutting up of these two things. Many theorists have pointed out this connection between matter&memory indeed the philosopher Henry Bergson thought this was essentially what the human soul is, matter&memory.  Personally I think there's more to it. My impression of most spiritual people in general is that they think there's less to it. 

Mo is Shy - a KBOO Docudrama (Hosted Media).

A dramatization of the Portland Christmas Tree Trial. Joe Meyer, a reported assigned to cover the trial, adapts it for drama. Mr. Meyer admits his own prejudice for the defendant in his presentation of the trial. Personally, being from Portland this story has added intensity. If the defendant really had planed a bombing, apart from his interaction with the FBI, then their work of espionage most likely saved lives. I can't help but think this could have had a direct and tragic effects on my own life. Who knows, some one I love could have died there at the pioneer square that night. Still it is worth questioning the ethnicity of the types of methods the FBI used on the defendant. Very interesting story. 


Mo is Shy - a KBOO Docudrama

Conceptual Persona: Gram Harman.

Graham Harman, philosopher, conceptualizer of the tool-being, and founder of Object Oriented Ontology. Harman's radical claim is that 'objects', i.e. people, watermelon seeds, galaxies, police districts, ect., all have historically unique identities apart from any interaction, that might otherwise define them. The proof to this Harman claims, is that you can never exhaust every possible situation an 'object' can get into, so therefore each object must have an essence deeper than its inter actions with other objects.

 

Object Oriented Ontology contrasts with Platonic Idealism in that for Harman essences are not eternal, but emerge through evolution and technological development. 

 

OOO differs from Duleuze's philosophy in the way that identity relates to time. For Deleuze identity is difference in its self, this means that the identity of an object is simply all the possible distinctions it has with all other objects for the course of all time, but sense time never ends the being of the object is in a constant flux, or in other wards is in a constant becoming. For Harman differences and interactions between objects only reveal a small part of an essence that can never be fully disclosed. The example that Harman gives for this is that although window glass is transparent it is made visible by its reflection of other objects and although the glass distorts what it reflects the distortion can be deciphered by adjusting the relationship of the objects. If as Daniel Coffeen has pointed out that, Derrida views a thing at the point of its dissolution, and Deleuze at the point of its constitution, than Harman views it from the point of its solidification, and immutability.  

 

Harman's claim that all "Objects" are ontologically the same in their "tool-being", what is called flat ontology, has led some theorists to accuse him of diminishing human dignity to the level of house hold objects, but these theorists miss understand Harman's claim. Harman doesn't mean that the value of each "object" is the same, quite the contrary, he means that a thing or persons essence or value is not derived solely from there interaction with others, because no interaction fully encompasses their essence. It could be said that OOO is an increase in dignity for humans from other ontological perspectives, because not only is it very likely that humans will tend to consider the interaction of other humans more important than interactions with other entities, but the essence of this or that person is never reducible to even the sum total of past interactions.    

What needs to be understood when reading Harman is that "Object" in his texts have a specialized meaning distanced from general use, this is a good thing to remember when reading any philosophical or otherwise specialized text. That said I will hand it to the critics, even if Harman means something different than other people, calling someone an object is rude!