(MEDIA) This Blog [1]

The idea for this collection of texts had its origins in some thoughts toward a book.  For several reasons, I decided to present this material in a blog, rather than than the more “traditional” format I had originally envisioned for it.

This change occurred for several reasons.  I'll admit, part of my motivation is a desire I've had to play around with the blog format for some time now.  Paired wit this is an interest in digital formats as information technology.  The advent of widespread computer access has opened new vistas in textual construction and presentation; modeling reality is an ongoing process—our individual and collective models are constantly changing and encountering novelty.  The blog format allows an ongoing dialogue with the topic, in place of the bounded territory of a book.

In this entry, I want to write a little about the blog as a piece of textual technology.  A blog, short for web log, necessarily makes use of the internet, and, thus, may make use of the hypertextual format that is native to this territory, to the extent that its creator sees fit.  The hypertext blends media, and makes use of the web shape.  Though I will not totally dispense with the possibility this early in the project, it is not likely that I will not make much use of video or audio additions to the texts that make up this blog (though, I may very well include an illustration or two—but the inclusion of illustrations, unless they are animated in some way, does not differentiate the hypertext from the printed text).  It is highly likely, however, that I will make use of the web—using the ability to supplement this text by linking it with others within this blog, and outside of it, all over the internet.

More than merely an illustration of the interconnection of texts, the hypertext allows the actual formation of a web of texts, each supplementing the other.  I thoroughly enjoy the printed text, and would be loathe to see that format fall by the wayside; but, the hypertext allows for a melding of media into a single piece.  Digital presentation of texts need not replace the book (the main format for textual information for the last several hundred years, however, we make a grave error if we do not use any and all available methods to transmit information—particularly in a field such as philosophy, which as a community, is made from the sharing of thoughts; accomplished at a distance through the text (as well as through oral transmission and conversation, and with the advent of digital technology increasingly through audio-visual mediums, which can be included in the hypertext—both directly embedded within it and as a link in its web).

Here, I mean to explore the use of a blog as an extended meditation on a single subject; in this case, on the construction and use of philosophical models.  As, itself, a model of textual presentation, I would describe the “blog” as a book without horizons: as an unbounded book.  Rather than being a collection of ephemera, this “work” has a theme which brings it together; which is more specific than simply “philosophy” (I should note, that I do not think this project to be totally unique; while I will admit that I am not personally aware of them,  I am quite sure that his is not the only “book-like” blog).  This is an exploration in both subject and form.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

(Introductory) On Models: In General and, Briefly, on Their Abuse

e make sense of our experience of being-in-World with models.  Our experience of individual human being-in-World is constantly moderated by both private and public instances of language that index and identify things and experiences.

Many thinkers (I do not think it wold be out of order to say all skilled philosophers) maintain an overt awareness that we process and share experience through representing the thing itself, rather than summoning that thing to hand, expressing it, or even (generally speaking) experiencing “the real”.  The question is not whether or not we make use of models to navigate or World; rather, it is appropriate to question which models we make use of (the answer to this inquiry will always lead us to a subjective answer), how we make use of these models, and whether or not a given model is effective as a tool for organizing and easing individual human being-in-World?

On this subject, I am in the habit of turning to the work of Jean Baudrillard, who is beyond par as a thinker at the intersection of the real, and our understanding of it (which is, for our purposes, the thing itself, even in the presence of the realization that it is not).  In the next entry I will begin looking at the models of other philosophers (beginning with on of my favorite examples of a representation of the presence of a territory which predates territoriality, and is indifferent to any identification—the real, which we are constantly describing (Quentin Meillassoux writes wonderfully about our ability to conceptualize the space from which the possibility of conception itself arises, what he calls, “a world capable of subsisting without being given,”(28) in After Finitude).

For Baudrillard, our reality is “virtual”(this is, it should be noted, not the only reality, nor is “virtual reality” singular—that is, it does not necessarily form a universally shared, objective territory).  In The Intelligence of  Evil, he writes, “We have moved, then, from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultra-reality that puts an end to both reality and illusion.”(27)  Baudrillard's work, in fact, foreshadows this project: “The philosophical idea is, then, simple and radical: it is the idea of fundamental illusoriness, of the non-reality of the 'objective' world.”(40)

There has always been a current in philosophy that is conscious of the artificial nature of the real—since the real that we are concerned with is always a real that, first, we must think.  We may approach this realization with either suspicion or trust, and may wield the power that it gives us with either treachery or love.  Over the course of this work, we will examine the work of several philosophers; both their models of the real, and their thoughts on modeling.

I intend this as a work of inquiry, it is not written as a work on morals; it is not, however, not an amoral work.  Briefly, I could generalize the moral content of this work as pro-modeling.  Our access to “the real” is constantly mediated, we are always building and playing with (making use of) models.  Though I am skeptical of the very idea of anything universal, which includes schemes of universal rights, from the point of view of believing that human individuals should be allowed to have a spontaneous sort of being-in-World (which includes a great deal of plurality at the margins of the set of “the human”), I think that I can reasonably take the position that each individual be allowed to model their reality freely in a way that is beneficial to their interaction with “the real”, and with other, model building individual humans.

In the intersection of our models is where we find what I am referring to as “abuse”.  This is a matter of power, of a dominant model overcoding the models that it comes into contact with, and while, to a certain extent, this is inevitable (if we are to share the worlds we each inhabit and create, and to join them together into World, requires a “dominant model” of some sort)—the real question is whether this model, which binds together, and thus, to a certain extent must set parameters and / or limits on the models which it is in communion with, was instituted by consensus or by force?  Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, refers to the model instituted by violence, as “identification”.

The pull of dominant models is felt strongest where it is a force that identifies us; meant very literally here, a force from the outside that establishes a part of what we are.  Adorno tells us, “If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time.”(146)  The path to freedom from the violence of identification through the abuse of the power that a well constructed model of “the real” may provide (both to its creator(s) and / or current master(s), and for those who are able to make skillful use of it) is through self-modeling.  In this regard, the most insidious models are the grand socio-political narratives, including the winner of the wars spawned by competing models in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Liberal-Democratic-Capitalism.

For this reason, it is necessary to make a close examination of the models that we may encounter, and of the way that these, and our, models of “the real” interact and combine.  Only through a critical look at the models which constantly shape, and are shaped by, our being-in-World can we hope to make the most of our modeling abilities, while throwing off the chains of violently instituted dominant models.  Adorno was keenly aware of the centrality of ideology (and what is “ideology” but fancy terminology for a model) to human being-in-World, as, indeed, are most proponents of critical theory:  “The critique of ideology is thus not something peripheral and intra-scientific, not something limited to the objective mind and to the products of the subjective mind.  Philosophically, it is central: it is a critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.”(148)  



Works Cited Here:

Adorno, Theodor W.  Negative Dialectics.  Trans. E. B. Ashton.  New York: Continuum, 2000.

Baudrillard, Jean.  The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact.  Trans. Chris Turner.  New York: Berg, 2005.

Meillassoux, Quentin.  After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency.  Trans. Ray Brassier.  London: Continuum, 2008.