John Wise

At the end of our gorging on cultural gruel, we are left with a half-wit festering vocabulary that regurgitates the dander of meaningless jingles and conversations we never participated in but merely passively observed. To that end, we are fattened pigs wallowing in the fecal matter of creators who feast on the caviar of real thought and who are well exercised in the fitness of intellectual rigor.

Communication in the Renaissance relied heavily on imagery and symbolism to guide humanity into the Enlightenment, today this is mirrored in our use of emojis and memes and has me wondering where will our young thinkers bring our species?

Movies, video games, and viral videos drive the new engine of simulacra and simulation. As we invent reality outside of reality, how are the virtual simulacra going to lend influence to the simulation and allow for a simulation that can no longer be based on real-world processes?

Religion has lost its place at the center of control as it became a symbolic representation of archaic traditions instead of being hard rules that dictated how people lived.

The digital age catapults semiotics beyond borders into a new iconography of global motifs that contextualize time and location into a flattened moment reflecting a zeitgeist that may not exist tomorrow.

Modern language is becoming generative as it’s moving further away from traditions and orthodox rules. Words intermingle with images to find fluid plasticity that evolves as global culture co-ops the viral and technology introduces communication with machines. How is the structure altered when that landscape is more often digital and how long before machines create a new kind of shorthand after learning the patterns where particular words can be paired with images and emojis?

Linguistic structures in the future will create tonal spaces similar to those found in music. The Circle of Fifths can be employed digitally in the creation of electronic generative music with pleasant sounds emerging from relative randomness. The math behind understanding the distance between keys is used in creating harmonies and melodies, a similar linguistically aware application might be able to harness a new spatial model where words from various languages are plucked out a vast memory to deliver a new language; the human universal language.

What components of language are dependent and fixed upon other elements and relationships as opposed to ephemeral fragments making new connections that create hitherto unknown patterns and consequently new insight into ourselves? Examples can be found in Hip-hop where stochastic relationships find poetic deep meaning.

What’s the process when we enter a technology that starts the altering of how we talk and communicate? Our species begins architecting the words for subjects and technologies that are evolving allowing the arch we require to bring to fruition our anticipated future. It is as though we are forced by an instinctual process to develop language to take us into tomorrow.

How do we evolve linguistically when repetition of tropes and idioms in popular media repeat ad infinitum thus limiting the evolving breadth of capacity to absorb the foreign? Are these the people who intellectually are left behind?

Our current young generation is the first to have learned more words from smart machines than other humans.

We consume the product of the digital realm to enhance the simulation of the other, of the alien. By feasting on these cultural fragments we are supporting an unknown objective to model ourselves in the composite image of the idealized person we ourselves would like to meet.

Does the world exist aside from my attributing phenomenon and meaning to me within it? Am I the product of a self that finds wandering in nature, exploring words, and cultivating a personality that moves from the coffeeshop to various places that allow John to emerge while collecting bits and pieces of various cultural elements I hold relevant?

If I were to want to fit in with social convention in order to be a more integrated person would I need to layer within myself the constructs of banality and pop culture to better define my compatibility to be boring?

Photo credit: Patient Care Technician

Lacan, Badiou, Žižek, Foucault, and Deleuze might have all been called charlatans by Noam Chomsky, but what he missed is that these are our philosophers and thinkers in the age of larger-than-life media buffoons. To get paid and find the ability to ask questions in the realm of knowledge, they had to become glamorous elites themselves so the wealthy people they could rub shoulders with would support their coded endeavors. Within this cadre of privileged artists, musicians, poets, writers, and thinkers, celebrity politicians and business magnates could demonstrate their embrace by surrounding themselves with rarified examples of personas too complex for the average person. This buffering of their defenses by surrounding themselves with obscurantists added layers to their unapproachability by convincing those on the outside that they do not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend such complexities. Alas, this was all part of a charade to disenfranchise the masses.

To make the complex simple, we listen to Beethoven or join Ishmael on the deck of the Pequod as he battles tyranny and danger in the quest to capture the prize. Look at Mona Lisa and wonder what is the intrigue of the face of an unknown woman that nonetheless pulls us in. How did da Vinci channel the complexity of finding light and character to create a piece of art that has enchanted us for over 500 years now? Beethoven was in love with the ancient pre-language state of hominids, where the song was our means of transmitting information. Melville was in love with the sea, especially the fragile relationship of man with the constant threat of the abyss, the monster, and the monster of the abyss that lies within our souls. Maybe what the Mona Lisa belies in its simplicity is that she is secretly in love with Leonardo, but he didn’t know it while he painted.

Barriers that isolate and segregate need constant reworking and refinement. Their bulwarks are society’s defensive sculpture, but they are not impenetrable: they can be chipped away at and reshaped. Knowledge is the chisel that does that work, but for too long, it has been kept in rarified institutions and made expensive to maintain cultural and racist order. When we talk in terms of fear of what artificial intelligence can bring, we do so in order to alienate a class of people from its benefit. Swayed to hold deeply negative opinions they will not be able to take advantage of A.I. when it becomes more and more apparent in our daily lives. While formal education is everywhere, there is still a large body of the population that holds a negative view of it, believing that it will remove them from the real and the important.

The pedestal of who gets to stand on the shoulders of great minds is intentionally kept small for the purpose of allocating privilege and allowing a small cadre of elites to better demonstrate their greatness while standing with and supporting genius. This is archaic and broken and excludes the common persons who simultaneously take pride in distancing themselves from those they can’t identify with due to groupthink that says that kind of power is corrupt.

We need creators, artists, and thinkers to do some heavy lifting during times of cultural convulsions, and this is the beginning of one of those eras. Being smart is not a tarnish on legitimacy, nor is it a guarantee of participation, but ignorance and the inability of people to adequately participate with the foundations of building a healthy society is a recipe for more chaos. Out of the tumult of the late ’50s through the ’60s, philosophy, education, civil society, human rights, and cultural expression all went through a profound upheaval, and here we are once again at the beginning of one of those moments. Embrace education and self-expression, everyone; clean out the cobwebs that were scattered in your minds from the past 50 years of breeding stupid consumers, and try to understand how your minds and bodies are both victims of the injustice brought by the war on individuality.

Photo Credit: John Minihan

I’m not Dix nor Bacon. Burroughs Kant help me find my niche. Nitsch was no philosopher nor Nietzsche, an artist, though he explored tragedy with the best of them. Artaud might alight my sense of the absurd but the stupidity of power exploiting the power of the crowd might be the worst theater that goes on with form. Our Will is shattered by a fear of scarcity that doesn’t exist but is forever threatened. Fear neutralizes our outrage, robbing us of the fire used to carve space out of the mind. Anger doesn’t arise from the gut but is now a learned behavior adopted through mimicry of how it’s supposed to be performed by those in front of the lens. This stage of the obscene and surreal is no longer a canvas in the gallery as we’ve moved into the roles of idiots performed by ourselves. We are without bodies and our organs sacrificed on the pyre of quick communication without meaning. Context is decontextualized to make room for consumption without direction, divorcing the idea that you own the brand that owns you.

The mutilated limb of the ape grips a cigarette with nobody certain if it had ever been part of something else because Schrodinger hadn’t opened the box, but Bacon did. Deleuze wanted to follow these antics while Žižek became the twitching embodiment of this uncertainty, but we won’t know without our eyes if it’s simulation or simulacra. When LaTour speaks of the ANT and questions our modernity, he couldn’t have done so without the foundation laid by Algirdas Julien Greimas, but who cares about semiotics or ontologies as long as mindlessness is a hot commodity? Not to say any of this is easy, but with Object-Oriented Ontology on its way, I might glean a little something from Mr. Harman that the Enfant terrible Žižek missed. Maybe had Bela Tarr made a movie dealing with OOOs and ANTs, it would have all been laid out in one long black-and-white shot that explains all, but that hasn’t happened, though I did see a nice documentary about Bacon recently.

For 83 days, I’ve pretty much stayed within 3 miles of home, and over one 8-day period, I didn’t venture more than a mile from home. What I’m learning about this decreased mobility is that my imagination is starting to have profoundly quiet moments where I’m not feeling very motivated to delve into thinking. I’m beginning to wonder what the impact of experiencing the larger world outside of the overly familiar is for feeding my creativity. This then triggers the question: how do poverty and not having the means to explore further than your own neighborhood impact our critical and creative minds? Or, how does illness that limits mobility negatively impact our recovery and mental health?

I guess this is what others call boredom. Seriously, privileged me can honestly say I’ve not been bored in decades, but after this extended need to remove myself from the public, I’m starting to suffer the effects of not changing up my routine and getting out to gather new experiences. I can appreciate that there was enough momentum in my life that it’s taken me this long until these hints of boredom have started making themselves known, and I can’t say I want to be too quick to put it behind me. With all experiences, there are lessons to be discovered, and while there are fleeting moments of urgency to stem this creeping unease, I also feel obliged to see where it goes.

If my brain continues to draw blanks and I fail to find inspiration or motivation, does this defeat that part of my optimism that propels me to want to grasp in all directions? Hmm, this starts to sound like depression on the horizon, and that’s no Bueno.

Well, enough was enough, and so I ventured out. Went as far as Mekong Plaza nearly 30 miles away. I took my notebook along with the idea that if I found a relatively secluded place, I might try sitting down to work on this blog entry, but instead found the place crowded and experiencing a minor bout of agoraphobia. So, I grabbed a few things in the market, which was a challenge, too, due to how many people were shopping, and then headed over to In-N-Out Burger for some junk food therapy before going home. All of a sudden, home isn’t so boring, well maybe it is, but at least I’m happy to be back.

Back to this idea about mobility and the brain. I’d posit that when we move away from the familiar, inspiration strikes. If you are growing up in the inner city and your life is school and home, going to a club awakens your dreams. If you are in the countryside and visit a city, your perspective may be so shifted that upon returning home, your rural existence will have lost some of its charm. On the other hand, if you discover drugs and alcohol along the way, you could become lost in the numbness of complacency as you opt to stay home or at the bar, where your routine is dulled by the fog of inebriation.

So it would seem that if the stars align just right and you have access to a requisite amount of disposable income, along with the wherewithal to push yourself into new experiences, you may find yourself craving the novelty and making efforts to ensure you can continue to discover the part of life that inspires people to accomplish something extraordinary. But why is this the way I think it is? We are pattern recognition machines meant to wander through life trying to understand how things work, but when on a treadmill of a simple routine existence without much variation, our humanity is dulled, and we become addicted to our habits. In that addiction, we grow intolerant of those threatening to move us out of our comfort zone.

We have to move, we have to go places, and when we do, our mind goes with us and then wants more. But there’s a danger with this idea, as much of our culture is based on repetition that brings society to complacency. We are conditioned to watch the same sports, the same themes in movies, iterations on a theme regarding television and music, and frequent visits to our favorite restaurants. These habits are the filler for those times when we can’t go out to the lake, to France, or up the mountain. When we fully embrace our intellectual and physical mobility, strange things occur in us humans, our tolerance expands, our desire to try new things grows, and our need to seek out others who are also on a path of discovery becomes more important.

I’d venture to say that I want to believe that this is part of the spark of life, meaning we have an inherent need to get out. If we reach that station in life in which age or illness hamper our desire, we start to move towards giving up the ghost. If we are excited by what tomorrow might bring, a kind of zest drives us into that day, but if we dread the misery it could bring, we kill a little bit of ourselves.

This isn’t good enough to recognize this possible situation, what could a solution be? Obviously, we cannot all get on a plane and head into the many corners of the earth, nor can we all simultaneously set up camp in the national parks and hope to have a pleasant experience if we are surrounded by 1oos of thousands of people. We can sign up for a cooking class, try a new restaurant, go to a concert by a band from outside our country, join a book reading club, visit a guild to learn a craft or commit to doing any number of many things we’ve never done. Maybe there should be a self-help book for adding novelty to our lives on a regular basis. A one-year plan where the reader must choose from multiple choices of the things they’ll seek out over the course of the year and then commit to experiencing it.