Kode9 : portrait of the artist as a... writer

[epithet]

M theory for example, can be explained in simple language?

I don't know.

Interesting theory though. Thanks for pointing that out to me.

It would help for starters if they decided what the M stood for. I'm going with MESSY.

[selector.dub.u]

M theory for example, can be explained in simple language?

I don't know.

Interesting theory though. Thanks for pointing that out to me.

It would help for starters if they decided what the M stood for. I'm going with MESSY.

Doesn't it stand for master?

[epithet]

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm... theory

[Tekki]

could this material be rewritten for clarity? The strings of clauses tend to muddle up the meaing for me. It's seemingly unapplicable to real life; i.e an example of the function and dynamics of a theory in observable events. OR am I missing the point that it's abstract and therefore contradicts empirical theories. Confused writting is surely a symptom of confused thinking? In this case, if it aims to entertain, can't the material be made more enjoyable to read? Borges wrote fantastic stories with a myriad of references; but they are enjoyable. I'm sure there are interesting ideas in there, but it trips itself up with the insitence on being unfathomable. Compare it with an article in the Lancet, which is 'a model of clarity'

'Since 1984, there has been an explosion of enthusiasm for superstring theory, motivated by indications that this theory will not only lead to a consistent understanding of quantum gravity but also necessarliy unify all the fundamental particles and the physical forces. The basic principle is that the fundamental particles (eg, the electron, the quarks and other particles) are extended, string like, objects rather than the structureless point-like objects that appear in all previous quantum theories...'

[epithet]

could this material be rewritten for clarity?

Which material ?

[ikeaboy]

So is the language here used to make the reader reach harder with there mind so they have to make more of a personal invetsment in understanding? or is to create a true meaning so obscure that only an approximate understanding can be reached by intuition, reflecting the nature of the truth? Or is it a form of intellectual elitism?

I'm going for intellectual elitism. They could dumb it down for the masses real easy.

Good thread (maybe should be in SNH?). For my part I have to resist the sour grapes reaction when I see people discussing stuff i don't understand. I'm happy enough with various harmless elitisms in my life (i.e. underground music) why deny others the same. Even so I don't want anyone to think I'm labeling something i don't understand as elitism, I'm just going to label it something I don't understand for now.

[epithet]

Thing you gotta understand is the upper echelons of academia are an old boys club. Doesnt get much more elitist than that.

Imagine how pissed of they were when a patent clerk from switzerland rocked their world. Or how about a surfer dude from hawaii with E8. Talk about a theory of everything with pretty pictures

Its like i dont need to know how the car works just that its gonna go when i put the keys in and turn it over.

[lilt]

I remember reading in an interview with Foucault that the reason his style was often so complex and not straight forward was in part due to the academic climate of the 60s. If you didn't write in a convoluted manner than people wouldn't take you seriously.

Is that why Deleuze is so hard to read?

I don't think I will ever make up my mind as to whether some of this stuff is
A. mental wankery;
B. people using words without knowing exactly what they mean, or understanding their point well enough to explain it in layman's terms;
C. Deep thoughts that are necessarily difficult to explain because they are talking about things far beyond eating, drinking, and constructing tangible things - as I do for a living (engineer).

Most likely it's a combination of the above, depending on who you're talking about and what day of the week it is.

I like the thought that there is more going on than a group of kids (actual kids, or kids at heart) listening to music. Don't get me wrong, that is awesome, and a straight-up visceral experience is great - but maybe there is more to it, sometimes. How do you explain that weird mental states that come from listening to something the first time, the 50th time, African jazz mixed with sounds produced by cutting edge technology, mental images produced by music, rhythm's effect on your heartbeat, your state of mind, what tunes go well together and why, music and politics, music and culture, blogs, forums and media... All of it.

Maybe this stuff (Kode9's writing, Kodo Eshwun, etc) is a way to explain it - but damned if it's not incomprehensible to the casual reader. And I would hate to think it's intentionally so. Clarity can be a good thing.

i only just read up unto this point in the thread and needed to add my two cents (sorry for the giant quote)

ive been rereading thousand plateaus in the last few weeks and must say 'i get it!'

so maybe i dont get EVERYTHING
but as far as where i am in my life, my thoughts about the universe, life and all there is... i fucking get it!!!

and im over the moon

and sick

but being sick doesnt stop me from enjoying it

fuck






yeah

[lilt]

oh yeah, and i forgot to add the reason for quoting those posts

they use the language they do to show the plasticity of the 'different' sciences and 'specialties'
there are no differences, only what we choose to say is a difference

there are no specialties, only when we choose to ignore all but one thing does a 'specialty' emerge

language is a toolset itself
and when the saw doesnt work, try a blowtorch
try a colour
try a hiccup

fuck





yeah

[lilt]

Joe - I must admit, the problem we're having here is that my grasp of continental philosophy is very limited. Almost all of my reading and therefore the linguistic and philosophical tools and dogmas I have aquired are from analytic philosophic, which, in most cases, favours systemisation. We've just got different ways of going about things, I'm afraid.

Isnt that the thing though. Philosophy is culturally specific. Can you reasonably apply deleuze and guattari to a tribe of guineamen and expect it's tenets to hold true ? In which case, doesn't it serve them better to remain ignorant of western philosophy as a whole ? If the solution is to study for years and still battle for enlightenment i'd rather hear the trite idiom for the dumbed down masses that applies to broader cross section of society. It is after all merely a jump off point for further exploration. Entities need not be reproduced beyond neccessity. Too much philosophy and no play makes for dull playtime. Seems all there is is differnet ways of saying the same things.

well the point with deleuze and guattari's post structuralism is that they are positing ANOTHER WAY to look at the history of western culture and then saying that it is ONLY ONE OTHER WAY, theirs is not the be all and end all

in a sentence i would boil it all down to them saying 'no, fuck you, youre ALL WRONG'
then giving one alternative, THAT IS ALSO WRONG
because its all wrong

but all we can do is posit more and more in an attempt to understand: nothing is ever complete
its all in the journey, not the destination

deleuze and guattari want you to rethink everything for yourselves, and give one example of how they rethought everything for themselves...

(caps used in the place of italics)

this is only my reading of their work, their lives, their thinking

fuck




yeah

[ufo over easy]

Thing you gotta understand is the upper echelons of academia are an old boys club. Doesnt get much more elitist than that.

Yeah, the kind of philosophy being discussed in this thread is largely ignored by academic institutions in the UK. There's a strong bias towards the kind of rigourously analytic philosophy MacPhellimey was talking about earlier on.

[macphellimey]

Joe - I must admit, the problem we're having here is that my grasp of continental philosophy is very limited. Almost all of my reading and therefore the linguistic and philosophical tools and dogmas I have aquired are from analytic philosophic, which, in most cases, favours systemisation. We've just got different ways of going about things, I'm afraid.

Isnt that the thing though. Philosophy is culturally specific. Can you reasonably apply deleuze and guattari to a tribe of guineamen and expect it's tenets to hold true ? In which case, doesn't it serve them better to remain ignorant of western philosophy as a whole ? If the solution is to study for years and still battle for enlightenment i'd rather hear the trite idiom for the dumbed down masses that applies to broader cross section of society. It is after all merely a jump off point for further exploration. Entities need not be reproduced beyond neccessity. Too much philosophy and no play makes for dull playtime. Seems all there is is differnet ways of saying the same things.

well the point with deleuze and guattari's post structuralism is that they are positing ANOTHER WAY to look at the history of western culture and then saying that it is ONLY ONE OTHER WAY, theirs is not the be all and end all

in a sentence i would boil it all down to them saying 'no, fuck you, youre ALL WRONG'
then giving one alternative, THAT IS ALSO WRONG
because its all wrong

but all we can do is posit more and more in an attempt to understand: nothing is ever complete
its all in the journey, not the destination

deleuze and guattari want you to rethink everything for yourselves, and give one example of how they rethought everything for themselves...

(caps used in the place of italics)

this is only my reading of their work, their lives, their thinking

fuck




yeah

See to me, that, like existentialism, is obvious and trivially true. The sheer act of engaging in critical examination requires at least an implicit belief that previous theories can and possibly are completely wrong. If one didn't have this belief in the first place, why bother engaging in examination instead of just taking things at face value? To presume that a given thinker or theory is correct is not only arrogant, it's an indication that you don't really understand what's going on. It's when you can see the flaws of a theory that you really begin to understand it, in my opinion. Having a philosopher say to you "you've got to analyse things for yourself" seems to me inherantly pointless because if you didn't intend to do that why would you have any interest in reading their work in the first place? Philosophy is the act of investigation and analysis, not quest for definative answers.

At least that's how I think of it. I recognise a lot of philosophers with physicalist, logicist or other reductionist tendencies might disagree.

[macphellimey]

Thing you gotta understand is the upper echelons of academia are an old boys club. Doesnt get much more elitist than that.

Yeah, the kind of philosophy being discussed in this thread is largely ignored by academic institutions in the UK. There's a strong bias towards the kind of rigourously analytic philosophy MacPhellimey was talking about earlier on.

I don't actually know of any well regarded institutions that teach continental philosophy seriously in the UK, do you Ben?

[bribkin]

Don't get me wrong, I love a good chin stroke as much as the next man and there are plenty of things I pretend to understand but don't. That said, what's important to recognise is that when you condense a theory like that you can never understand it's meaning properly because nothing so complex can be explained so simply. It's like pointing at a transistor and saying that it is a simple explaination of a computer. Sure, with a certain amount of interpretation and background knowledge of the subject that's true but when you're speaking to someone who's completely ignorant of the subject they're hardly going to be englightened, are they?

No it's not. Language doesn't work in the same way as computers. Ie. the differences between different linguistic expressions are not the same as the differences between different types of computers. It's much messier than that.

Plus this point assumes that there is some kind of level plain of understanding which everyone would attain universally, whereas I very much doubt it is the case that two people no matter how learned they have have exactly the same understanding of a text.

[slothrop]

they use the language they do to show the plasticity of the 'different' sciences and 'specialties'
there are no differences, only what we choose to say is a difference

there are no specialties, only when we choose to ignore all but one thing does a 'specialty' emerge

Try replacing 'use language,' 'sciences' and 'specialities' with 'make music,' 'genres' and 'niches' here...

Hmmmmm.

[ufo over easy]

I don't actually know of any well regarded institutions that teach continental philosophy seriously in the UK, do you Ben?

not sure really, Warwick possibly?

[lilt]

See to me, that, like existentialism, is obvious and trivially true. The sheer act of engaging in critical examination requires at least an implicit belief that previous theories can and possibly are completely wrong. If one didn't have this belief in the first place, why bother engaging in examination instead of just taking things at face value? To presume that a given thinker or theory is correct is not only arrogant, it's an indication that you don't really understand what's going on. It's when you can see the flaws of a theory that you really begin to understand it, in my opinion. Having a philosopher say to you "you've got to analyse things for yourself" seems to me inherantly pointless because if you didn't intend to do that why would you have any interest in reading their work in the first place? Philosophy is the act of investigation and analysis, not quest for definative answers.

At least that's how I think of it. I recognise a lot of philosophers with physicalist, logicist or other reductionist tendencies might disagree.

having been a philosophy student on and off for 6 years i can tell you it depends greatly on the philosophical lineage of the lecturer/course/subject so on and so forth

deleuze and guattari did actually put theory into practise and wrote a good couple of thousand pages in capitalism and schizophrenia where they reanalysed the history of western thought, they practised what they preached
and you will notice that afterwards mostly left the theories and methodology of capitalism and schizophrenia alone, not turning back on them, reevaluating or trying to refine for approval

also, try explaining to a scientist that what they practise is merely theory and philosphy, that nothing of it is concrete
the vast majority will tell you to fob off
its only the ones who accept that (and do as you have mentioned) that will get somewhere beyond their little laboratories

(sorry if im rambling, im sick, my heads throbbing and im tired )

[stanton]

not sure really, Warwick possibly?

Yup Warwick. My Chum is doing his PHd there on Deleuze & The Death Drive.

[slothrop]

I don't actually know of any well regarded institutions that teach continental philosophy seriously in the UK, do you Ben?

not sure really, Warwick possibly?

I think so. Nottingham does, but it's in a seperate department (critical theory) rather than philosophy.

[lilt]

See to me, that, like existentialism, is obvious and trivially true. The sheer act of engaging in critical examination requires at least an implicit belief that previous theories can and possibly are completely wrong. If one didn't have this belief in the first place, why bother engaging in examination instead of just taking things at face value?

oh oh oh
now i remember what i was initially going to say

there is a large gap between critically examining anything from the inside to critically examining something from outside of its grips

we are all products of our own environments and to rethink everything, free from the bonds of those environments is a very difficult thing