Videocy/Literacy

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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Pye
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Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Diebert writes in the start-a-fire thread: Personally I haven't much faith in the language of video. Those projects seem a step down in effectiveness as such medium would confirm more than challenge the illusion (of "watching" for example).
This subject has been of intense, if not consuming interest to myself - especially over the past 5 years of witnessing a quantum change in the manner, quality and form of thinking & communicating capacities with which university students enter their studies these days.

Please save your arguments right now that anyone entering university studies is "dumbed down" anyway. They are, however, as each year passes, as products of their social conditions, more pointedly exposed at increasingly earlier ages to the 'language' of video, or rather, the receipt of information through vibrating pixels and visual aids. I don't have a fully baked thesis to present, but a lot of half-baked impressions that are beginning to crowd themselves into something vaguely identifiable.

Firstly, Kelly is correct in assuming that young people are quite likely to respond favourably, if not more-so, to the vehicle of video (regarding whatever project one wants to start or get-across for future generations). That's a done deal, and it is the world they recognize and the one in which they "live."

Secondly, it is also quite correct that generational change is not a stoppable thing - that the 'old guard' will and shall always have to give way to the new, and that it could be to chew one's own foot off to ignore this dynamic.

Having said that, a strange crop of new problems presents itself - at least to myself, who is ever on the alert for the thinking 'pathologies' extant in the students I encounter. Something quantum is happening there, and the response of some educators is "if you can't beat them, join them," whereas another response from other educators is to double-down on the old-guard disciplines through which they themselves learned.

The Words Are Dead on the Page

Many persons are unaware that even whilst they are reading long passages of words on the computer screen, these words are moving. After all, they are delivered by light waves; they vibrate imperceptibly, and in so doing, are providing extra stimulation to the brain. This stimulation is not necessarily connected to the stimulation of thought. It's just stimulation, and as with all stimulants, when it's missing, it becomes more difficult to stay engaged. Present a student with print media (you know - a book), and they will report all sorts of difficulties about getting into it. It looks "dead," they can't concentrate, cannot sustain involvement, is missing all the colour, movement, is boring, and for some, nearly impossible.

So far, I have not found this an irreversible situation. Can't tell you how many times a passage read aloud in class, discussed deeply, re-referred to word-by-word will cause innumerable students to remark something like "geez, I didn't get that out of that at all when I tried to read it." Not infrequently do they quip good naturedly that I've given them a headache by the end of class. It appears that they themselves can recognize the use of synaptic effort that otherwise lays dormant without use. It makes them 'sore' with the effort to hook into and stimulate meaning on their own, but they can do it. They can. So far, at least. Needless to say, I also see this as a step back - recovering cognitive processes one assumes that prior education has already jump-started.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

The power of an image is known by us all. Some educators have given-in entirely to the image-orientation of the age, and their classes are filled with short youtube videos, illustrated powerpoint presentations, playing movie clips, and otherwise engaging students with as much visual stimulation as they can muster. A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed, but what I've noticed is that a picture replaces a thousand words. The problem after all this full-on visual delivery is that students cannot SAY anything about what they just saw. It's just there; it just is-what-it-is. If the so-called 'end' of all wisdom is resolved in silence, then this is the ticket. But it's a different kind of silence, in my estimation. A cessation of thought, but for perhaps the wrong reasons.

Too, the visual distractions. The guy speaking on the video looks weird. Or, I couldn't stand the sound of his voice. Or, those were lame graphics, or, I really liked the soundtrack, etc. etc. That's the kind of comment evoked. Up to our ears in postmodernity, these are savvy viewers who live Marshall McLuan's observation of the age that "the medium is the message." It's not necessary for them to look any further than that. It is what it is. End of thinking.

The Disappearing Attention Span

This one's a no-brainer (pun intended). I have heard of students complaining of video presentations that last longer than the accustomed youtube length, or the duration of a popular song. Taking their world in small bites has affected their digestion for the feast. There's no stomach for it, no well-stretched brain cells to endure the marathon, and most importantly, no center - no central thrust identifiable to them, just a moving on to the next thing, the next thing being the thing itself. They want to "get it" and be done, and video seems to deliver this to them the most effectively (see comments above).



Perhaps in the end, it will have to be a can't-beat-them-join-them affair. Perhaps visuals, faces, graphics, sound, light, colour and brevity will have to be the delivery vehicle of the future, the litmus of value over the words dead on the page. Perhaps it is time to give-over to the next generation and release the old guard.

But for the reasons above and many more, I have not been able to measure these quantum changes as progressive, or even very effective - at least for my own philosophical aims. Presently, they manifest as quite the opposite to me. They've gotten in the way. If consciousness and linguistics are as deeply related as many of us suspect, then succoring the appetite for videocy will well and truly change what it means to be wise or reasonable, much less enlightened. Perhaps intelligence itself will have to take on a new form in response to its confinement to the megamachine.

I've not joined, nor have I been beaten. Still we can unearth the cognitive capacities that seem to atrophy at an ever-growing rate. I've yet to have a student with bloodshot eyes and a headache tell me that their efforts netted them nothing. Quite the contrary. They're sleepless and awake and aware that what is happening to them does not happen to them anywhere else. Once in a blue moon, one of them comes to reject on their own the movement, colour and noise of videocy as the hampering, hectoring, sensuously indulgent and potentially empty thing it just might be.

Still, as old guard, I have to give over to projects such as Kelly's and the ilk. Many have determined that this is unbeatable and must join. Might be right. Might not be. I guess we'll just have to see . . . . In any case, the goalpost has been tampered with, moved . . . .
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Hello Pye.

There's some "bleeding over" with the topic of dissemination of information online. A popular book delving into this is The Shallows -- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. A good summary of the diverse issues of the medium and impacts on neurological activity and patterns.

It's interesting you mention the stimulating "vibrations" and light waves emanating from the various display screens. There might be a whole different "hypno" effect to screen flicker, intensity and movement. Or just the "daylight" glow. Usage and addictions might arise just centering around that. Perhaps it also ties in with the brainsucking Hollywood blockbuster movie where visceral avalanches of noise, movement and primal senseless battle scenes have become the norm. Some directors will talk about "visual storytelling". Yes, story my ass! The medium starts to boil down to its mechanical essence: pure excitement, pure neurological stimulant. But isn't that what is desired, the Producer would ask? An industry of desire?

In the end I'm not in opposition to video or hyper-linked page but about how generally these things appear contextless and without attached the will, a story, a sweating, the puzzling or perhaps just a sitting. Like those saturdays in the library as a kid: scanning spines, flipping, check a back flap, shelf position, the carry home and finding a nest. Isn't that part of the story too? How you come to it? How you arrive at it, access it and close it again? In that light the short video has become a crude and disruptive form of communication unless it's designed to be nothing but, like a video clip, existing only in context of the music it carries.
Pye
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Yes, familiar with Carr.
Diebert writes: It's interesting you mention the stimulating "vibrations" and light waves emanating from the various display screens. There might be a whole different "hypno" effect to screen flicker, intensity and movement. [1.]Usage and addictions might arise just centering around that. Perhaps it also ties in with the brainsucking Hollywood blockbuster movie where visceral avalanches of noise, movement and primal senseless battle scenes have become the norm. Some directors will talk about "visual storytelling". [2.]Yes, story my ass! The medium starts to boil down to its mechanical essence: pure excitement, pure neurological stimulant.
Two things here:

1. Ingestion also takes place through the eyes, not just the nose (cocaine), mouth (food/alcohol), lungs (weed, tobacco), veins (needle drugs). One is still ingesting a substance, in this case, visual stimulant. Ask any garden-variety internet porn addict if that's easier to leave-off than any of their proclivities acted-out in life. It's especially harder because it's a one-way dialectic: subject consuming object (visuals) without phenomenal exchange. That's part of my critique of video learning, too.

2. Now we shall really sound like the old guard since I'm compelled to bring up Aristotle's Poetics and the 6 features of story (tragedy) in their order of importance. Spectacle he listed as of the least importance (plot/story, first). In postmodernity, spectacle ("special effects") frequently overrides all-else, even Character. People can feel they've left a 'good movie' solely on account of its visual stimulation and measure its impact on the scale of adrenaline alone.
In the end I'm not in opposition to video or hyper-linked page but about how generally these things appear contextless and without attached the will, a story, a sweating or perhaps just a sitting.
This is what I meant by no-center to the experience. I am trying mightily to stave off my own opposition to video qua video, but it's getting less and less easy to do so. I'm suspicious of the relationship of image-saturation, speed, and short attention span to these pesky forces of capitalism that drive most corners of the internet. As you say, it's courting the desires of the pause-less world, lest we accidentally stop moving money for a moment and notice what's actually happening to us. No time for that. The megamachine barrels onward, courting our thoughtlessness, diverting our attention, and demanding we not tarry anywhere for too long . . . .
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Implicit in your 'private soliloquoy' there shared Pye is a context that it may or may not be dangerous.
Pye
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

It's going to depend, isn't it.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Indications are there's something at stake

Traditionally, enlightenment shows up in a bespoke conversation based in listening out for it.

a rational dialectical process in order to for the sake of.
an Inquiry.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Leyla Shen »

Pye wrote:
1. Ingestion also takes place through the eyes, not just the nose (cocaine), mouth (food/alcohol), lungs (weed, tobacco), veins (needle drugs). One is still ingesting a substance, in this case, visual stimulant. Ask any garden-variety internet porn addict if that's easier to leave-off than any of their proclivities acted-out in life. It's especially harder because it's a one-way dialectic: subject consuming object (visuals) without phenomenal exchange. That's part of my critique of video learning, too.
Yes, this is the case, stimulant both as means and as end. But I’m not sure how anyone can derive anything dialectical from a process (of ingestion). The essence of capitalist ideology; “opposition” as lack in the isolated subject/self and fulfilment as “fetish”—as mystical rather than material origination. This, to me, is not a “one-way dialectic”. Rather, it’s a total absence of opposition, of material and metaphysical dialectics. I am of the view therefore that the scales need to be tipped more towards materialist dialectics.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Yes, Dennis, we could discuss (again) the nature of the armature, but right now I'm interested in what's hanging on it.


The invasiveness of the corporate business model as suitable for an educational model is not a hidden affair (See anything 2011 and beyond written by Diane Ravitch). This model carries with it an enormous amount of technological optimism - optimism that requires enormous investment purchases of computers, software, gaming, services, contractual obligations to spend, etc. as the default response to this (self-perpetuating) world in which we live. This is thought to be the only way to "reach" today's youth; the incremental production model the only way to measure educational success. Search "technology in the classroom" and you will be inundated with hundreds of these cheerful submissions to this corporate invasiveness. Universities are now in the back pockets of the capitalists, unwittingly or otherwise in lock-step with many of their aims. And not just universities. People, too.

The megamachine is not just the computers we type upon or the internet en totale. It's the relationship between these and capitalism itself. We now cannot "get by" without the hardware, the software, the upgrades, the cellphones, the trending of trends or the newest of bells and whistles without being accused of being out-of-step with the 'needs' of the current world. It is not possible to reach anyone anymore without it, so we say.

For the sake of some rhetorical sizzle, we've all become button-pushing, pixel-drunken chumps, mistaking information for knowledge; confusing busy-work with thought, or wow-factor for profundity. All the while we perform the task of moving money around for the capitalists - providing them for free our demographic footprints; laying forth large expenditures of our own money for the equipment, the upgrades, the service providers, the software programs, the cellphones, the apps, the power companies, etc. and we cannot leave out the expenditure of our time. The internet might once have been referred to as the 'information highway' with all just and due excitement for the democratization of information, but conceivers and promoters of it have understood all along what a sexy bed-partner for money-moving it is, how readily the virtual will become the actual.

(still on the rhetorical hot plate) Like bottles of unshaken salad dressing, we sit forth day after day, settling into layers of oxidizing fluids, breaking down our living health, hatching sitting-diseases, addicted to so-called 'communication,' driven by fear of missing something or falling out-of-the-loop. Day after day, the impossibility of living on the other side of the digital divide presents its urgency to us at the same time it cleaves those who truly cannot afford further away. So given into it, that we go all the way to not being able to "ignore" by virtue of our own character and will a poster that disturbs us on an internet forum without a button to help us do so, and perhaps even an announcement about the button regarding same. The button seems to make it 'official.' The button seems to make it more real. Our backbones built not of vertebrae, but buttons.

Somewhere in memory is a sociological thesis I once read that determined that human beings are capable of knowing and interfacing with a maximum of 143.8 people (:D)(gotta love those sociologists) whilst still keeping more or less accurate perspective and rationality regarding each of them - in other words, whilst still operating with functional care. About the size of a tribe. Anything over that, and we become very sloppy in the perspective exchange, become narrow in our understandings, reactive in our responses, and just generally impoverished in our communications. Perhaps the co-evolution of people and virtual space will improve that perspective/rationality ratio, but I ain't seen it yet. We seem to get stupider in the way we interface with one another; less able to dialectic much more than pixels bouncing off of one another, or irritants in our way. (After all, this Bud's for YOU. Have it YOUR way. YOUtube. Book your FACE). That's okay, though. You can just push another button and bang YOUs with another chump.

Well, it felt good anyway. Now I have to go answer student email; fill out a university-required electronic survey on my paper usage per semester; and supply electronic copies of some documents to some students who lost the original paper ones. godhelpusall.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Leyla writes: This, to me, is not a “one-way dialectic”. Rather, it’s a total absence of opposition, of material and metaphysical dialectics.
You're right, Leyla. "one-way dialectic" is oxymoronic for sure.

You know, I thought about putting "monolectic" instead, but that seemed moronic in another way :)
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Leyla Shen »

:)

Let me just say, for one-way dialectics or a monolectic, I always prefer a pointed polemic.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Leyla Shen »

(Got a great laugh out of it!:))
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Dennis Mahar »

So whats hanging off the armature may or may not be dangerous

that's another story

decidedly tragic
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Dennis: the 80s Child

Post by Leyla Shen »

Dennis Mahar wrote:that's another story
Yeah, and I know your story, Dennis. You're Bastian, stuck in the attic because Atreyu failed to save Fantasia from the Nothing in the Neverending Story.

Same as it ever was...
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Leyla writes: Let me just say, for one-way dialectics or a monolectic, I always prefer a pointed polemic.
O jeez, feel free to jump in and interrupt me. It is just as difficult to cleanly confront the nature of an environment in which one is already embedded and conditioned, as it is difficult to use the mind to understand the mind. Not impossible, though, I guess is the general consensus for all who seek some ultimate understanding.

Link below to David Watson’s seminal piece on this. It’s long, but the first few pages get you the general drift.

http://radicalarchives.org/2010/09/06/d ... gamachine/

Let me ask you this, Leyla, notable graduate of the Frankfurt school that you are: Is Marx’s idea of “material” extendable in our current world to virtual doings? Not the machines and products themselves, but the thought-chunks – the “trends” as the substance of distribution, advantageous or otherwise?

In other words, past Marx, does the “material” fall into a discrete enough category to identify these days?

Enjoyed yesterday a brief lull before the workstorm. I will get back here to read you, at the very least, should you be inspired to reply.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

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Pye wrote: Many persons are unaware that even whilst they are reading long passages of words on the computer screen, these words are moving. After all, they are delivered by light waves; they vibrate imperceptibly, and in so doing, are providing extra stimulation to the brain. This stimulation is not necessarily connected to the stimulation of thought. It's just stimulation, and as with all stimulants, when it's missing, it becomes more difficult to stay engaged. Present a student with print media (you know - a book), and they will report all sorts of difficulties about getting into it. It looks "dead," they can't concentrate, cannot sustain involvement, is missing all the colour, movement, is boring, and for some, nearly impossible.
I'm sure you didn't mean it as an absolute statement, and I'm just one after all, but despite my life-long use and exposure to screens I can only bare to read little on screen and much prefer books.

Who knows, maybe the students are simply taking advantage of the quick scroll and are leading you to believe they have read more, while with books that is less likely.

As a relatively recent student, I'd say about half of the kids who you think have fully read the material actually have. Some good advice may be to push every single page upon them and double check - though I'm not sure how you could do that, if only it were high school students you were teaching and could thus provide relevant threats.

Just curious, is even a mention of any Buddhist related philosophy part of the 'curriculum'?
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Pye wrote:Ingestion also takes place through the eyes, not just the nose (cocaine), mouth (food/alcohol), lungs (weed, tobacco), veins (needle drugs). One is still ingesting a substance, in this case, visual stimulant. Ask any garden-variety internet porn addict if that's easier to leave-off than any of their proclivities acted-out in life. It's especially harder because it's a one-way dialectic: subject consuming object (visuals) without phenomenal exchange.
Ingestion, all ingestion takes places through the I.... but since the nature of I is close to the phenomemon of reflection, it's the reflection of its own mechanic that forms the ultimate draw.
In postmodernity, spectacle ("special effects") frequently overrides all-else, even Character. People can feel they've left a 'good movie' solely on account of its visual stimulation and measure its impact on the scale of adrenaline alone.
Well, it's still the same "Feeling Good" but d̶e̶c̶o̶m̶p̶o̶s̶e̶d̶ deconstructed. The good old story acted as fig leaf, a shared secret, the ironic wink: a fleeting ghost. It belongs to the old guard indeed.
The megamachine barrels onward, courting our thoughtlessness, diverting our attention, and demanding we not tarry anywhere for too long . . . .
Only because thoughtlessness has been elevated to idol & ideal. Only because of that the facsimile machine keeps delivering what's desired...
Last edited by Diebert van Rhijn on Sat Nov 16, 2013 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Leyla Shen
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

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Pye wrote:
Let me ask you this, Leyla, notable graduate of the Frankfurt school that you are: Is Marx’s idea of “material” extendable in our current world to virtual doings? Not the machines and products themselves, but the thought-chunks – the “trends” as the substance of distribution, advantageous or otherwise?

In other words, past Marx, does the “material” fall into a discrete enough category to identify these days?
Ah, the chemistry of thought. (: What happens if you put the same substance into two different mixtures?

To answer your question directly: it does for some (though despairingly granted, not a lot!) of us.

To go past Marx is to go past civil (bourgeois) society—to go beyond the secular nation-state. Until then, as with the good Mr Watson, we’re dumbstruck always by the looming reality of an absence of materialist dialectics. Hence it is you ask: since we live in a technocracy, can it truthfully be said that there is any material relation between modern systems of production and a human life? Is there any material relation between me, paid to teach philosophy in a university classroom, and the labour activist oil workers in Kazakhstan shot in broad daylight for protesting lower than subsistence wages?

To dissect the foreboding ethereality of estrangement, Marx drew the distinction between base and superstructure; the means and forces of production comprising the former, and legal, political and all intellectual life (religious/philosophic/ideological) the latter, and, as a materialist antithesis to bourgeois ideology, suggested that social consciousness (which has nothing to do will but arises in opposition to it)—the manner in which we each relate to all others—is not a product of superstructure, but rather superstructure can only ever result from the base, and that human societies (both base and superstructure), therefore, proceed primarily by virtue of the base; from “earth to heaven, not heaven to earth”.

These formations thereby have historically come into conflict with each other and painfully produce, in fact, the very problems and concerns which drive us forward as species; as "human". The nostalgic lament over the loss of primitive forms of society and production is exactly that; a nostalgic “looking back” which attempts to undermine the modern base by ignoring it, just as it does the relevance of inseparability of the archaic superstructures of primitive societies.

Any supporter of Luddism as ideology is for the continued exploitation of the working class; for the continuation of employment, of mindless wage labour from which are garnered the profits supporting the very modern superstructure he likes to present himself as opposing. That is a materialist dialectic.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

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Leyla Shen wrote:To dissect the foreboding ethereality of estrangement, Marx drew the distinction between base and superstructure; the means and forces of production comprising the former, and legal, political and all intellectual life (religious/philosophic/ideological) the latter, and, as a materialist antithesis to bourgeois ideology, suggested that social consciousness (which has nothing to do will but arises in opposition to it)—the manner in which we each relate to all others—is not a product of superstructure, but rather superstructure can only ever result from the base, and that human societies (both base and superstructure), therefore, proceed primarily by virtue of the base; from “earth to heaven, not heaven to earth”.

The conclusion does not follow from the premises. The idea posits as reality a state of affairs in which a) its very existence would be impossible and b) it would be an absolute and unfalsifiable empirical assertion.

Marx was right in pointing out that there are always competing socio-economic classes in society, but fell down badly when he tried to interpret this competition as a dialectic. Indeed, the progress and development of Marxism, and its irrelevance beyond the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries is evidence of how utterly wrong Marx was in doing so.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by jupiviv »

SeekerOfWisdom wrote:Who knows, maybe the students are simply taking advantage of the quick scroll and are leading you to believe they have read more, while with books that is less likely.

That's understandable. They're philosophy students after all. Playing WoW or even sexting on POF is more productive and intellectually stimulating than reading academic philosophical drivel.

On an unrelated note, the students who probably read the most (whether on the dreaded Glowing Screen of Capitalism born, or books) nowadays are those in the STEM fields.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

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Seeker writes: I'm sure you didn't mean it as an absolute statement, and I'm just one after all, but despite my life-long use and exposure to screens I can only bare to read little on screen and much prefer books.
good for you/good for thought. And of course it's not an absolute statement, hence the presence of words like "some" and "many" etc.
Seeker: Some good advice may be to push every single page upon them and double check - though I'm not sure how you could do that, if only it were high school students you were teaching and could thus provide relevant threats.
Not into policing students, but rather inspiring them. As soon as you start policing, all is lost. Or rather, all was lost to begin with.
Seeker: Just curious, is even a mention of any Buddhist related philosophy part of the 'curriculum'?
Courses in Buddhism are offered by both philosophy and religion departments. Two Buddhist nuns teach there. The philo dept. has 2 Asian philosophy persons, one 'specializes' in Buddhism, the other in the Tao. I personally teach the Tao in my Intro level classes, which, not infrequently inspires a tiny handful of students to lifelong pursuit. I don't know what happens in universities 'downunder,' nor can I speak for all uni's in the U.S., but the big uni where I get hired contracturally year after year is quite involved in these things.
jupiviv writes: Playing WoW or even sexting on POF is more productive and intellectually stimulating than reading academic philosophical drivel.
Buddhavacana? The Pali Canon? The Sutras? The Tao? Nietzsche's Gay Science? Zarathustra? Birth of Tragedy? Aristotle's Organon? Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling? Socrates? One guy does some Otto Weininger?

I'm the first to critique the idiot-aspects of higher edu in American, not the least of which is how stupid it costs. We can leave uni's to do what they do, or we can exploit the opportunity for better things. I exploit. So do a fair few others. The rest around us is just noise anyway, no matter where we go. You create the opening; you steer it as rightly as you can.

Digesting, Leyla.
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Leyla Shen »

The conclusion does not follow from the premises. The idea posits as reality a state of affairs in which a) its very existence would be impossible and b) it would be an absolute and unfalsifiable empirical assertion.

Marx was right in pointing out that there are always competing socio-economic classes in society, but fell down badly when he tried to interpret this competition as a dialectic. Indeed, the progress and development of Marxism, and its irrelevance beyond the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries is evidence of how utterly wrong Marx was in doing so.
I know you think very, very highly of yourself, jupiviv, but I think you’ll find, Popper notwithstanding, that “Marxism”, empirically unfalsifiable as you may assert its position is, is nevertheless bubbling away globally together with the sprawling fetters of secular nation-statism.

What is conceived by scientific materialists such as Popper as a refutation of dialectics and therefore Marx himself—e.g., the failure of the English working class to usher in the next revolution—isn’t a refutation of the truth that dualisms are not mutually exclusive opposites, but rather constitute interdependencies; in this case in particular, capital and labour. You know, a bit like good and evil. A bit like emptiness. Bing! Dialectic.

The English working class is to this very day active everywhere that it should be, and productively so---all over the world. But how would you know that, eh, sitting in that chair of yours snorting your scientific theories up your nose?
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Leyla Shen »

Pye, I wonder if you've come across Wallerstein and World System Theory?
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by Pye »

Leyla queries: Pye, I wonder if you've come across Wallerstein and World System Theory?
Have now, ta :)
Leyla writes: isn’t a refutation of the truth that dualisms are not mutually exclusive opposites, but rather constitute interdependencies
I reckon all of this is owed to phenomenology: that philosophical moment where mind and world became understood as rising together. Consciousness is always consciousness-of something. Mind as entity, or world as entity are both incorrect.; they are mutually created in dialectic.

Marx beefed at Hegel for restricting this dynamic to the world of "Absolute Spirit" rather than the material of life. This in itself is a signal moment of understanding. I'm thinking, though, that Marx's distaste for the so-called abstracted spirit over concrete material reality led him into exclusions of his own. Here we have the heart of the material and the spiritual as also "opposed," instead of mutually arising and created. Insert me, with "the spiritual IS the material, vice versa" I have been fond of mentioning here.

So, if the landscape of ideology in America is any litmus, Leyla is quite correct: Marxism is very much alive in philo-socio-politico-economic consideration these days. Even increasing, I'd say, having had the pleasure only in recent years of some of the most sane, non-reactive, critically alert classroom discussions with students these days than ever - students more soundly saturated in capitalist ethos than they've ever been.

Now, I may have my own concerns regarding the persistent belief in the duality of the spiritual and the material, but in every other setting, this thought is coming to the fore: capitalism is only beginning its fullest saturation of the world. What Marx thought we would be sick of by now and already revolted-against has really only begun to reveal the depth of its perniciousness, the breadth of its human impoverishment. In my estimation, the untenable distribution-dialectic that Marx recognized in the thick of the industrial age is to become even more untenable than he could ever imagine in the technological one. The Marxist-socialist revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries were mere dry-runs - half-baked, because the forces of capitalism were not-yet fully baked out. We ain't seen nothing, yet.


by-the-bye, the good Mr. Watson's implications toward primativism interest me less than the attempt to speak about a system from within a system, and all the twists and turns that might entail. His attempt interests me as much as anyone who seeks to understand the mind from within the mind. The kind of alertness needed here and there is astonishingly nuanced and difficult. We could stand all the help we can get :)
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jupiviv
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

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Leyla Shen wrote:I know you think very, very highly of yourself, jupiviv, but I think you’ll find, Popper notwithstanding, that “Marxism”, empirically unfalsifiable as you may assert its position is, is nevertheless bubbling away globally together with the sprawling fetters of secular nation-statism.
I have no idea who Popper is. Marx's claim that the class struggles in society are always neatly divided on economic lines and have a dialectical nature is clearly an absolute empirical claim that denies the existence of any other valid perspective.

I don't think any successful system of government has sincerely embraced Marxism until now, not even the Soviets. I doubt it is even possible. They may contain elements of it, and they had even centuries before Marx was born, but not ideas like - an economy should be a function of how people wish it would function.
What is conceived by scientific materialists such as Popper as a refutation of dialectics and therefore Marx himself—e.g., the failure of the English working class to usher in the next revolution—isn’t a refutation of the truth that dualisms are not mutually exclusive opposites, but rather constitute interdependencies; in this case in particular, capital and labour.
Capital is as much dependent on labour as it is on Shazbot. To say they are somehow more interdependent upon each other than upon other things (like Shazbot) is actually a refutation of the idea of dependent origination.
The English working class is to this very day active everywhere that it should be

Then why are they being assraped by Cameron and Osborne? Also, why do 0.2% of banks in the USA own 70% of the bank assets in the country?
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jupiviv
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Re: Videocy/Literacy

Post by jupiviv »

Pye wrote:
jupiviv writes: Playing WoW or even sexting on POF is more productive and intellectually stimulating than reading academic philosophical drivel.
Buddhavacana? The Pali Canon? The Sutras? The Tao? Nietzsche's Gay Science? Zarathustra? Birth of Tragedy? Aristotle's Organon? Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling? Socrates? One guy does some Otto Weininger?

I don't think any of those books are inherently wise. The only way they can foster wisdom is if they are read carefully, critically and heavily interspersed with one's own thought. The philosophy department of a university does not provide the environment for doing this, since it is populated by fools.
I'm the first to critique the idiot-aspects of higher edu in American, not the least of which is how stupid it costs. We can leave uni's to do what they do, or we can exploit the opportunity for better things. I exploit. So do a fair few others. The rest around us is just noise anyway, no matter where we go. You create the opening; you steer it as rightly as you can.

Sorry, but no. If you think that spending a bunch of money to play at changing the system from within by attending the philosophy course of a rebellious and sassy assistant professor is productive in any way whatsoever, then you are either a fool or a wanton hypocrite.
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