LADY ONE 

Clavicus: hello
Lady1: hey..
Clavicus: how are you?
Lady1: i’m great.. =]  you?
Clavicus: pretty good
Clavicus: I have a headache though
Clavicus: I’m about to fix it
Lady1: aww, i’m sorry bout that..
Clavicus: Ok, I took some bc powder
Lady1: some what?
Clavicus: it’s a kind of headache medicine
Lady1: oh, really? i’ve never heard of it..
Clavicus: so how’s it going with Lee?
Lady1: great.. =) just amazing.. i talked to him today, and i’ll most likely talk to him later tonight after he gets off of work..
Clavicus: oh cool
Clavicus: I wish I had a job
Clavicus: I need money
Lady1: me too, lol.. i never have any..
Clavicus: So I got to hang out with Hollie last night. She’s one of the only friends I have here
Clavicus: I’m pretty happy about that
Clavicus: and it was her idea to hang out, too
Lady1: oh really? sweetness..
Lady1: i have my little cousin coming over and my friend tonight..
Clavicus: word
Clavicus: hey, I want to try something with you real quick, okay?
Clavicus: it’s easy
Clavicus: ready?
Lady1: ok..
Clavicus: ok, read this sentence: “Mary and John walked by the bank.”
Lady1: okie.
Lady1: i did..
Clavicus: now in your mind, did you imagine them walking by a financial institution or by a river bank?
Lady1: i imagined them walking by the institution thing..
Clavicus: PERFECT.
Clavicus: thank you
Lady1: ok, lol..
Lady1: would you mind telling me why i had to answer that?
Clavicus: it has to do with consciousness and awareness. you can secretely put key words in someone’s head in order to plant ideas. by mentioning money earlier, I made you more likely to think of a financial institution. If I had used a word like water, you would have probably imagined a river bank.
Clavicus: make sense?
Lady1: oh, yeah, it does make sense..
Lady1: that’s cool, lol..
Clavicus: yep

LADY TWO

Clavicus: hey buddy
Lady2: heya
Clavicus: what you doing?
Lady2: just woke up
Lady2: cereal
Clavicus: mmm
Clavicus: I’m fighting this headache
Lady2: that sucks, got any tylenol?
Clavicus: I took some BC Powder
Clavicus: so it should be ok
Clavicus: but I had to go and buy a Dr. Pepper so I could have something to drink with it
Clavicus: cuz I didn’t want to take it with water
Clavicus: that would’ve been gross
Lady2: why would it be gross?
Clavicus: BC Powder and water just taste horrible together, I don’t know why
Clavicus: do you know what BC Powder is?
Lady2: seen it, my aunt uses it
Lady2: but not realy
Clavicus: ah
Clavicus: can I try something on you real quick?
Clavicus: it’s easy
Lady2: um ok
Clavicus: ok, read this sentence: “John and Mary walked by the bank.”
Lady2: ok
Clavicus: now, in your mind, did you imagine them walking by a financial institution or by a river/lake bank?
Lady2: at first river lake thingy an then I thought of building
Clavicus: the first thought was the lake bank?
Lady2: yep
Clavicus: hmm
Clavicus: okay then.
Lady2: >.> ok
Clavicus: how do you think your mind decides which image to settle on when there are two equally valid meanings like that?
Lady2: no idea
Clavicus: did the lake bank really stick out more than the building at first?
Lady2: yeah
Lady2: an then I was like oh maybe he’s talking about a bank like the building bank
Clavicus: ok then
Clavicus: that’s perfect.

What does it mean to put information to work? Information is put to work in computer models so that it might be used to predict events. The ability to predict is central to the concept of security. Analysis of information then becomes the production of security. The worldview of security, or making-predictable, recognizes that the movement of life, resources, and information is chaotic, yet it seeks to anticipate the movement of the noise by analyzing noise and patterns in a joint effort to win wars and make profits.

However, there is only so much value one can place on predictive models, and eventually, information bubbles burst.

This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study on fruit flies involved placing them on hooks with wires tying them down in a white environment devoid of resources. It turns out that their behavior formed a pattern. specifically, a Lévy distribution. If anyone out there can explain the math on this, that would be great because I’m definitely lacking in that area.

What I don’t understand is that how that implies free will. The scientists quoted in the article seem to be saying that the flies exhibited spontaneous behavior, but how does that jive with being a Lévy distribution?

Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy’s distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals, as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in the flow of e-mails, letters and money, and in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brembs said.

I understand that this is a news article about a scientific study, so it’s going to be an imperfect representation of the study’s findings, but it seems as if these scientists would benefit from a dialog with philosophers, preferably philosophers that I personally find interesting.

I’ll return to this idea later, most likely. I’d like if I could get some dialog going on this before I come back to it though, so… what was I saying? I was distracted while trying to kill a fruit fly. Those little bastards are fast.

Suppose instead that you had already made up your mind that the intellectual is an impostor, and you just wanted to demonstrate that he or she had nothing important to say. Would you quote a difficult passage out of context? Would you find a short, jargon-laden passage and then leave it up to the reader to make sense of it? Well you could, but that would be intellectually lazy and disingenuous.

That’s exactly what Richard Dawkins did in this ten year old review of Fashionable Nonsense, a book that supposedly “outed” French intellectuals for abusing scientific terminology. You can think of Dawkins’ review as a condensed version of the book. In it he focuses on Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigary, and Jean Baudrillard.

Dawkins apparently takes issue with the Deleuze and Guattari, not for their ideas, because he’s hardly tried to understand them, but for their writing style. In a strange turn, he then decides to quote scientist Peter Medawar, because apparently his style is something to be emulated:

“This calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar’s own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought… ”

That’s elegant and clear? Really? I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. But, that’s the thing about style. It’s like taste. Who cares what you like? It has little to do with intellectual rigor. As for the charge that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari are meaningless unless they can be phrased in an easier to understand language, I would recommend reading Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda.

There you go. There’s your magic bullet, Mr. Dawkins. The same applies to Noam Chomsky (whom I just noticed is erroneously placed in the philosophy section of Wikipedia). Chomsky says here that, “The proponents of ‘theory’ and ‘philosophy’ have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a ’secret’ to me: I’ll be happy to look.” How intellectually lazy can one be? Here, I’ll provide a link to the MIT Library, just for you.

Slavoj Zizek makes a strong case against the over-celebration of Chomsky’s political writings and rejection of theory and philosophy,

Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren’t “the facts” enough?

Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already known. This is what I’ve referred to as “postmodern cynicism.” Let’s take Chomsky’s analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. Ok, a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It’s exactly what I’d expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it’s more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don’t think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don’t think that merely “knowing the facts” can really change people’s perceptions.

But, let’s get back to Richard Dawkins. He makes a few good points in his review. I agree to a point that some “postmodern” writers are full of bull. But that’s no reason to lump them all together. The most audacious accusation that he makes against Deleuze and Guattari is that they abuse scientific concepts. I would argue that it is more accurate to say that they use scientific concepts speculatively, in new contexts, in the hope that they might later become useful. And we all know that a pure scientist like Dawkins would never do anything like that. Oh wait…

I almost forgot about memes.

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

“I have always believed that the scientist’s most sacred obligation is to continue to do science. Now I know that I was dead wrong. I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today… A Congress which is overwhelmingly dominated by lawyers and MBAs makes no sense in this 21st century in which almost all issues have a science and technology aspect.”

via.

While Dawkins’ idea delves more into anthropology than genetics, it leaves us with the question of whether or not memes actually do function similarly to genes.

First, we have to give ourselves a sense of how genes function when interacting with the world outside cells, tissue, organs, and body. Genes are effected by outward stimulus, often creating more common (dominant alleles) in one geographical area as opposed to another. Immunity to localized bacteria and viruses is probably one of the most commonly noted geographical factor of genetics. Genes may or may not be inwardly expressed. The majority of genes are inwardly expressed and have no defining phenotypes.

Memes are always outwardly expressed in human organisms, which makes them actually more akin to being like a phenotype more than being like a genotype. In fact, for a meme to be successful (dominant), it absolutely has to be expressed outwardly in culture to even have a possibility of copying the “allele.”

Now, often geographical location also effects culture and the exchange of ideas. Consider a town in a valley which has no communication with the outside world. The memes and culture of this area will wildly differ from those found elsewhere. When exposed to different culture, dominant memes may quickly become recessive while originally recessive memes may become a staple of local tourist culture.

So far, memes seem to have at least a foothold in genetics, but the question remains: what science do we have that proves this conjecture? What do we know about what makes a meme aesthetically pleasing and makes it re-create itself in culture. We exchange ideas in spoken word, written word, drawings, and a myriad of other ways. How do we define how each one is accepted as stimulus? We know that the cadence of speech can effect the acceptance of speech. The structure of language in an essay or a poem effects its intended audience. An experienced painter knows how to draw the eye to important parts of an artistic piece using color and lines. How do we define these scientifically?

While we have strong evidence as to how genes function, interact, copy, and change, we have little to no evidence as to how ideas do the same in a cultural environment.

I fail to be able find any relevant scientific studies which actually define the flow of cultural information mathematically. What I would like to be able to do is compile charts of waves of memetic influence and compare those to charts of waves of genetic influence. That is just one idea of how to compile and compare the information, but I would like to be able to do more solid research on this subject.

Maybe I just don’t have enough background in Neuroscience. Is there a neuroscientist in the house?

well today not only did i find out what it looks like, but i also learned there is a name for it: analemma

via Astronomy Picture of the Day

shes even gone as far as saying seperation of church and state is a “lie we have been told” to keep people of faith out of politics.

if thats the case, how the fuck did we end up with that fucktard gwb as president? last i checked he was a dedicated bible humper. (altho he has been reported in his passtime to hump moloch.)

for more info on this batshit crazy congresswoman, go here for her wikipedia entry.

i strongly urge everyone to edit the entry to focus on the crazy shit she’s been saying.
—-

EDIT: and also, for the record, just because im not a christian, does not mean i ‘dont know any better.’ in fact, i am completely insulted and think i probably know a hell of a lot better than you, katherine harris.

i know i shouldnt feel this is a personal attack, but somehow right now it feels that way. id really like to slap the shit out of this silly bitch. id like to deface her and show the world what a worthless cruel and hateful person she must be to say those kind of things.

but i suppose that she accomplished that without my help.