Dear Diary Moments:

Dear Diary Moment 1/31/2021:

I have, as of late, been listening to the audio book for Kurt Anderson’s Evil Geniuses: a book I highly recommend: and came up against a concept I had encountered in a previous audio book I cannot recall the name of: the Overton Window. As it was explained in the previous book, what rightwing factions had done is work persistently to make fringe belief systems more mainstream. Think: Tea Party –the very Tea Party we dismissed as being so frivolous as to not even worry about. And basically what the Tea Party did was do the footwork of stacking government at all levels and use contingent events in order to put their selves in the middle of Overton’s Window. A similar approach was used in the 70’s (as Anderson suggests and Naomi Klein describes in her Shock Doctrine (when Neo-Liberals (kranked on Freidman (charged into the 80’s through the Overton Window created by the stagnation of the 70’s.

But as Anderson also pointed out, we may be looking at an Overton Window for progressives given the self-destructive path Republicans seem to be going down. He even, Lewis, connected it with a Kuhnian Paradigm Shift. On top of that, we as progressives and social democrats have time and demographics on our side as my fellow white baby boomers are dying off and have no way of avoiding what is coming: whites becoming a majority/minority.

This is our Overton Window, our Paradigm Shift. But as Anderson also pointed out, when societies come up against a crisis (such as the emergence of fascism in America (that could change things, people generally turn to the orphan ideas that happen to be lying around (much as America did when the great depression hit: the New Deal based on previous Marxist ideas about how to create a more just society.

This is why we as progressives and social democrats have got to be patient and persistent, why we have to keep hitting the right in the voting booths (at all levels), and why we have to keep having these discourses in the good faith of the democratic process and what is best for all parties involved: the very ideas that might lead to the kind of society we could live comfortably in. Once again: time and demographics are on our side. This is our Overton Window as long as we don’t fuck it up.

To put it in more nominal terms, guys: we are in the fight for our lives as citizens of a democratic society. We either meet the challenge and exploit this opportunity (this window (or we are fucked.

Dear Diary Moment 2/5/2021:

Presently, in my process, I find myself going back to Walter Kaufman’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, a book I haven’t read since the 90’s. And in this particular run (what, having been a wannabe artist, could be called a layer), I find it appropriate that Kaufman chose to start with Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ in the sense that it demonstrates (and I apologize for my blatant (if not outright vulgar (cherry-picking (what I have thought for some time now: that Existentialism is basically an expression of the nihilistic perspective that has haunted our cultural history since the beginning of civilization. Romanticism, for instance, was the recognition of the lack of a solid foundation for Greek classicism. Skepticism was an application of that lack of a solid foundation while Existentialism was pretty much the nihilistic perspective with an excuse. Postmodernism seems, to me at least, like a form of play in the sandbox that the nihilistic perspective offers.

And we can see this in the way that ‘Notes from Underground’ picks at the underlying foundations (that is if they ever existed in the first place (that prop up some of our basic assumptions. The underground man, for instance, goes after the assumption that reason must (by its very nature (seek the welfare of the individual. But as he also pointed out, the human capacity for chaos and destruction is undeniable: what Freud would later refer to as the “death instinct”. He argues that our capacity for reason does not assure an optimal outcome: an anti-enlightenment position. And America should be really privy to this given the Trump era and what followed from it.

In this sense, the underground man seems almost prescient.

Dear Diary Moment 2/14/2021:

Just started reading the new issue of Philosophy Now today on Time, Identity, and Free Will. And I’m a little surprised that they’re still speaking in terms of “free will” which I think outdated, that is since the term “participation” (that is since Ken Taylor of Philosophy Talk fame introduced me to it (seems a much better and practical (albeit lower (target to be achieved in the face of determinism. I mean if you think about it (in an analytical manner even), if there is a chance for participation, it has to lie in some vague no-man’s-land between the determined and the chance (or aleatory as Deleuze would put it. And given that, we can think of it in terms of evolution and the feedback loop that occurs between the body, its brain, and the environment it is always attempting to negotiate. It seems to me that it would come out of a kind of inductance (what Deleuze and Guatarri would refer to as the disjunctive synthesis of the unconscious (that involves the tension that might emerge within the individual events at work in any given situation.

I’m mainly bouncing off of Kevin Loughran’s ‘Free Will and the Brain’ (which amusingly sounds like Pinky and the Brain which I own for my granddaughter (but I digress (and have brought Deleuze and Guatarri into this for a reason. In it, Loughran lists, among the kind choices we make, improvisation. He immediately refers to a jazz band. And as luck would have it, I have a little experience with this as I, in my early years, though it my manifest destiny to be rock star. I know what it is to jam. And it is as John Cage described it: not as spontaneous as one might think.

It rather involves the model Deleuze lays out in Repetition and Difference: a matter of repeating a thing until the momentum of the repetition moves one beyond the repletion: difference. Jamming is a matter of repeating what you know (which is why most jams sound, at a fundamental level, the same (until you somehow get to something you’ve never done before. And every creative act I’ve engaged in since has pretty much followed that pattern. Furthermore, it seems to me that the self transcendence involved is analogous to what I’m describing as participation above. In adapting to our environments, we repeat until novel circumstances forces us to tweak the repetition.

Dear Diary Moment 2/19/2021:

“We believe the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous truths from us— concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of AIDS, the 9/ 11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more. We stockpile guns because we fantasize about our pioneer past, or in anticipation of imaginary shootouts with thugs and terrorists. We acquire military costumes and props in order to pretend we’re soldiers— or elves or zombies— fighting battles in which nobody dies, and enter fabulously realistic virtual worlds to do the same. And that was all before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality. We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.” -Andersen, Kurt. Fantasyland (pp. 5-6). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Just started on Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland: How America went Haywire: a 500 Year History. And it’s been a bit of revelation meeting his work:

For one, he’s working in the zone that I want to: that which straddles theory and common social/political/economic criticism. This is why, while I’ve pretty much dived into high theory, I’ve always expressed a certain amount of hesitation in doing so. There has always been a question at the back of my mind:

“How much of this do I really need to understand?”

For another (and closely connected to the above), he writes in a style I aspire to: not hard to understand but clever (even humorous (in its offhand references. I mainly started with him with audio books in which he did the narration. And I’m amazed at the writing style I should have seen at work in the banter I listened to him engage in on the Studio 360 podcast.

But most important here is his exploration of something I’ve been seeing at work for some time: the surprising extent that fantasy is playing in the sensibility of the right. It’s like they have been watching way too many Rambo movies. And nowhere was this clearer than in their invasion of the Capital Building. They clearly thought of their selves as modern day patriots fighting off their version of the Brits. But fancy met with reality and they developed authentic imaginations. And note how many of them are renouncing their association with the group that instigated it, including QANON Shaman.

And the sad thing about that is how many of those people, who would have never had any encounter with the law were it not for getting caught up in that moment (that fantasy), are now facing extended jail sentences.

Dear Diary Moment 4/10/2021:

Having just embarked on Rorty’s Truth and Progress for the second time, I am starting to see more clearly the bias at work in my claim of a pragmatic overlap between Rorty and Deleuze. It’s just that they both seem to give me license to do what I’m instinctively inclined to do (that is not being formally trained: take in a lot of different information from a lot of different sources (the rhizomatic approach), let it churn around in my head, see what happens and what I produce, and see what withstands the test of time and reality: the pragmatic approach.

Dear Diary Moment 4/22/2021:

As I ride up to the end of Rorty’s Truth and Progress, I’m starting to better appreciate what a radical break he made from his analytic roots. It was as if he found Jesus and decided to convert to the Continental approach in that he chose to bounce off of philosophical history (very much like Deleuze, BTW…. Once again: the pragmatic overlap (while abandoning the more a-historical approach of the analytic movement –that which works in the spirit of science by working off of the latest and greatest research.

Even more radical was how good he got at explaining that history (as well as the historical context of the given philosopher (going back to more ancient forms such as Plato right up to his contemporaries such as Davidson.

Dear Diary Moment 4/29/2021:

In this run through Claire Colebrook’s Routledge guide to Deleuze, I’m starting to get a better understanding of Deleuze’s univocal being, something that stuck to my filters on the first reading. Of course, these types of experience often end in frustration. (Once again: it’s often like a hot French woman who makes you think you can have her then, when you approach her, walks away –that very much like one of the final scenes in Sartre’s Nausea. And I mean it: damn the French and their weird/obscure philosophies anyway.) As I understand it now, we have to let go of this idea that there is a subject (some distinct thing observing its experiences) and an object (the outside world that is “out there”). What this results in are dichotomies like that of Idealism and Empiricism that seek to establish some kind of hierarchy based on what Rorty referred to as Ontological Status: an issue of what kind of things are more real or are a truer expression of being. This is why Deleuze rejects Baudrillard’s distinction between the real and the virtual, the days when things were more real and the eerily ubiquitous Simulacrum. As Deleuze saw it, the so-called Simulacrum was always with us as can be seen in the syntheses he offered in Difference and Repetition (based on Kant (that starts with the sensible, moves on to the imaginary (I’m guessing in the spirit of Lacan), then to memory and on to recognition.

What Deleuze asks us to do is see the observer and observed as one and the same thing in a situation in which neither has a higher status. For instance, when we embrace Idealism, we see the mind as having more ontological status than what is out there. When we embrace empiricism, we see what is out there as having more ontological status than what we experience. But if we see ourselves as little more than a collection of experiences in a causal (even fractal (matrix of exchanges of energy, we work our way beyond the competitive evolutionary mode we started out with and take a major step towards a more cooperative mode in which we see our interests in expanding circles of the other’s interests.

And, at first, I saw univocal being as a threat to my own conceptual model of the Perceiving Thing: that which is looking out of (in an isolated way (objects occupying each other’s space. But I think it survives it much as it did Dennett’s Multiple Draft Theory (think Deleuze’s variation on Kant’s synthesis), that which he presented to undermine the notion of the Cartesian Theater. Much like Deleuze’s univocal being, all Dennett’s Multiple Draft Theory does is make the actors observers (perceiving things (of their own play.

Dear Diary Moment 6/5/2021:

I recently started a 2nd run through of the audio book for Bertram Gross’s Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America w/ an intro by Chris Hedges. And listening to Hedge’s intro, I started to realize how different I am than when I first got excited about Hedge’s work. I tend to judge a writer’s worth in term of what they have to offer that I can use. And Hedges has given me a lot.

However, this particular listening to Hedges’ intro felt a bit alienating to the extent that he seemed to be offering a scenario of America that was, basically, irredeemable (frightening even). And don’t get me wrong: I have no intent of abandoning Hedges or dismissing his point in the intro. It’s just that his radical cynicism is not only not productive, but not totally accurate as well. It assumes that all people who go into public service and make it into the public spotlight are somehow different than the rest of us and are naturally inclined to acting in bad faith. And that seems as silly to me as the idea back in the 70’s and 80’s that the only reason rock stars could have achieved rock star status was because they sold their souls to the devil or engaged in human sacrifices.

It just seems to me that we have to be weary of this kind of radical cynicism. Isn’t it what got us in the trouble we faced with Trump (what made him seem so “authentic” to his followers (and the threat we face to our democracy?

Dear Diary Moment 6/11/2021:

It’s getting harder and harder to come up with responses to the two philosophy magazines I read. Philosophy Now only offered one article I think I might be able to respond to with a letter to the editor and I completely failed to offer a submission for New Philosopher’s contest based on the subject of space. I thought about it. I just couldn’t bring myself to make it happen.

However, I think I may have something with New Philosopher’s latest contest based on energy, one that may give me a way to insert my own golden egg: The Metaphysics of Efficiency: into the general discourse. And I can bring into it something that came up frequently in this particular issue: the Laws of Thermodynamics –mainly the first two: the law of conservation and the law of entropy. (Can anyone help me w/ the third one?) The cool thing about it is that it has added a whole new (and deeper (dynamic to a model I have been developing for some time now.

Bear w/me here. I now realize how the second law of entropy might lead us to embrace the Metaphysics of Power we started out with. It makes sense that we would tend to interpret energy distributing itself into areas (as if conquering them (that lack energy –as if a hot cup of coffee would give up its heat in order to conquer the cool air around it.

But it seems to me that we can do a Derrida(ian d.construction in recognizing that this dynamic may actually be about distributing energy in such a way that all expectations involved in a given coexistence have the resources they need to meet the given expectations they have. In this sense, it becomes the rich who are in violation of (to the extent that they are working against (the basic laws of thermodynamics in that they channel all flows of energy to their interests/their expectations: to their own voids: at the expense of everyone and everything else.

Dear Diary Moment 6/24/2021:

Started, the other day, on my new book (a collection of essays (on Phenomenology and Marxism. And it has been a tough going. Up until today, I was having a hard time figuring out how it was that Phenomenology and Marxism could mix or support each other. Plus that, it is really technical and involves a lot of references to thinkers I’m not familiar with such as Lukács. Its intentions are clearly academic as compared to informational to the general public. It’s not trying popularize anything. I was even beginning to wonder why I needed to understand any of it.

However, sometimes you just have to reread the text to realize it’s saying more than you originally thought -as today’s study point reminded me. I realized that I had been mixing the two for some time now. The most obvious one was a line out of Fred Dallmayr’s ‘Phenomenology and Marxism in historical perspective.’ As he points out (referring to Enzo Pazi: also unfamiliar to me:

“The core of the crisis is the progressive alienation and reification of human relations and the reduction of to an object among other objects, a process which is propelled by the pressure of the capitalist methods of production and the scientific idolizing of the objective world.”

That understanding of how capitalism affects us is pretty common among the intellectually and creatively curious, regardless of what point they are at in their process. It mainly has to do with issue of solipsism which, according to Sartre, is both an ontological issue to the extent that, from a god’s eye perspective, we are all objects occupying each other’s space and a phenomenological one to the extent that what results from this situation is a natural tendency to see the other as an object occupying one’s space. To do otherwise requires a leap of faith that sometimes falters. Hence: solipsism.

And capitalism (given its inherent psychopathy: this dog eats dog, every man for their selves’ assumption (tends to amplify this.

:thanks guys; I’m here all week……

Dear Diary Moment 6/25/2021:

It’s starting to feel (perhaps due to the oligarchic forces at work in our lives: the media they control (like everything is becoming an either/or choice between the left or the right. This became evident today as concerns the sentencing of Derek Chauvin. I, being an avid watcher of MSNBC, got Reverend Al Sharpton’s take on it: that he should be locked away and the key thrown away. And I have a lot of respect for Sharpton.

But I’m a little concerned about locking away cops like that based on indiscretions that happen in the process of enforcing the law. Don’t get me wrong. He should have gotten jail time based on the outright malice involved in what he did. But the 22.5 years he just got feels a little more like appeasement of the BLM movement than the 12 years that would have let him know he fucked up and which would not discourage others from getting into law enforcement.

Of course, I’m caught in the middle here:

On one hand the left would chastise me for being a little too sympathetic to Chauvin, which I am not. On the other, the right would chastise me for not seeing how manipulative the left is. It’s like my choices are being reduced to one of two extremes: a kind of pick a side imperative.

I thought the defense team were a bunch of chauvinists, myself…

Dear Diary Moment 6/28/21:

It’s been a tough going on this run through my book on Phenomenology and Marxism. It’s dense and technical and full of references I’m not familiar with. Still, I tend to judge a book based on what it offers me in terms of what I can use for my own process. And sometimes you have to settle for getting to know the individual trees (the individual conceptual models (until it collects into a general understanding of the forest: the primary thesis behind the text.

In that sense (via my study points at the “library”), this particular run has paid off: mainly in some clarifications of terms I’ve been dealing with for some time now. One was, as the title of the book would suggest, phenomenology. As one article defined it: it is a reductive process that traces all possible experience back to consciousness as a product of intentionality. As Phenomenology argues: consciousness is always consciousness of something. Therefore, in order for something to be conscious, it has to be conscious of being conscious. And this seems like a proper thing to trace back to.

The other point (the one that inspired this post (has to do with teleology. And in this case, I have to give Google more credit to the extent that an article on teleology and corporality in the book forced me to look it up. I had always thought of the term in the philosophy 101 sense of a metaphysical goal that all things were heading towards: the Hegelian sense. And that was included in the definition in terms of the theological. But what really helped me was the more secular definition (especially in terms of the book): that which focuses less on causality (the push (and more on the purpose of a given phenomenon: the pull.

Didn’t watch the trial myself, Promethean. But I’d be interested in your take on it.

Dear Diary Moment 7/2/2021:

In my latest immersion (a collection of essays on Phenomenology and Marxism), I find myself confronted a lot with the term “hermeneutics”, a term I was acquainted with through Rorty’s Pragmatism: a term or approach he seemed to advocate. The definition my present immersion offers is that which involves both critique and interpretation. And here we can see the connection with postmodernism which tends to see text as anything available to be interpreted without necessarily having to involve language and involves the explorations of semiology. As long as it involves signs and symbols (signifiers and signifieds), it can be interpreted and critiqued.

My initial understanding of hermeneutics was a process by which we come to know a thing by a kind of unfolding of the various layers (like an onion (until we get to the core (or even the underlying nothingness (of things. And this seemed to be the kind of hermeneutic at work in Foucault’s Archeology or even Derrida’s de (or I’m sorry: d. (construction. And make no mistake about the extent that Hermeneutics played in more contemporary continental culture as well as Marx.

At the same time, I can’t help but think that the book’s description is better or more appropriate. My understanding of an unfolding certainly seems to describe the process described in the book. But my standard seems to apply to any process by which we come to obtain knowledge, including mathematics which is a body of accumulated rules when you first approach it, but becomes more accessible to you as you unfold the various layers. And by proxy, we can say the same thing about science or even applied tech such as being a mechanic. And critique (and interpretation in a limited sense (is hardly applicable to these activities.

It just seems to me that the book’s definition of interpretation and critique might be more precise. Still, you have to admit that there is always an unfolding involved in those processes.

Dear Diary Moment 7/16/2021:

Reference: facebook.com/groups/6757450 … 0150816089

“This ability seems to be pretty unique to humans (the mirror test) and occurs at the age of about 18months. It is a tearing apart of body from mind, the start of self-consciousness, but with it comes symbolic thought and knowledge of death. Existential angst but it also releases enormous power and responsibility!” –Steve Brewer

The above quote refers to Dr. Brewer’s book Origins of the Self, a book I highly recommend. Not only is it cheap on Kindle, it gave me a lot I can use (my primary criterion (and it can be a useful steppingstone and guide to aspiring philosophers who must, above all, recognize how important (essential even (evolution is to any conceptual model they might develop. I mean evolution is all over contemporary theory.

What Brewer is referring to is an experiment that establishes a sense of self by putting rouge on the face of a subject (both human and animal (and putting them in front of a mirror. If the subject acts to brush the rouge off their face, it establishes that the subject sees something that is not of their self. And as Brewer points out above: children tend to reach this sense of self at about 18 months. And also interesting to note is that some species of monkeys or apes (what’s the categorization, Dr.? (have shown a similar tendency. This just goes to demonstrate the proximity we have to them on the evolutionary tree.

However: this creates a conflict for me. And hopefully the good doctor can help me with this, given his appreciation of more continental thought; or even my respected peers. The identity experiment conflicts with Lacan’s model of the “mirror phase” –which works equally well for me. In it, the child starts off as a chaos of impulses and needs. But when it first sees its self in a mirror, it finds itself as a coherent whole….

It seems I have answered my own question. Brewer’s point only conditions Lacan’s to the extent that the mirror phase only works at a certain point in development. As Rosannadanna on SNL use to say: Never mind…………

Dear Diary Moment 7/25/2021:

Started today on the book I got from Philosophy Now for getting my answer to the question of the month accepted (

Bragging rights!!! This brain is international, Baby!!!

: The Philosopher Queens, edited by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting. And it’s about time. I always know that I have to open myself up to multicultural studies. And when I do, I’m always glad I did. But as a white, heterosexual male, I tend to attract to “dead white males”. I just relate to them more easily. And as wrong as it may have been, we have to admit that they have dominated the general discourse as concerns our cultural history. But that is mainly because they have had the luxury of exploring deeper issues such as the nature of mind or whether the universe is determined or random or matters of free will. Women (as well as minorities (have always had to contend with the more superficial issues of social and political justice. They end up having to play off of and utilize the more metaphysical musings of those dead white males. And all we can do now is not try to reinterpret or change the past, but try to change how we go forward.

That said, every book is an adventure. You follow the author (or authors (through another world in which you are allowed to mill about and explore and see what happens based on the information you get from it. I look forward to seeing what happens with this particular book.

Dear Diary Moment 8/14/2021:

One of the things that came up for me in James William’s guide to Difference and Repetition is Deleuze’s distinction between “repetition for itself” and “difference in itself”. And phrasing is really important here. The thing is I can’t help but see a correlation between Deleuze’s dyad and Sartre’s (respectively: “being for itself” and “being in itself”. So the question is:

Coincidence?

:I personally think not. Sartre may have been more of an influence on Deleuze than I previously realized. Still I have to ask if my instincts on this are wrong. And if I am right, how do they correlate? It seems to me (according to what I THINK I understand (that repetition should be in itself (that which is associated with common objects (while difference should be for itself: that which is associated w/ consciousness. But then Deleuze had and has a reputation for twisting these things around.

Anyway: anyone?

Dear Diary Moment 8/16/2021:

Reading Joe Hughes’ Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, I’m starting to better understand Repetition in the latent sense that Deleuze describes it as compared to the manifest sense of it that we see in the everyday. As I read it, it’s like an abstract bricolage that is in a constant state of revision (Difference (while maintaining a limited stasis to the extent that a pure repetition would consist of a pure nothing: death. It’s a repetition that requires difference in order to keep repeating itself. In a sense, I was getting at it when I attributed it to a kind of metaphysical/analytic statement:

At best, a pure repetition can consist of the same thing at different moments in time. Therefore, the only thing that can truly be repeated is difference.

: however, I now realize that the description I offered was an expression of manifest repetition. But it was still a useful stepping stone.