Just to give you a heads up on what's going on with this blog-thing, basically I like to build my websites in two parts:
On the left hand side you have a blog on what interests me generally, plus other musings with things I'm writing, philosophy, critical theory, all that stuff.
Then I have a separate index on the right hand side of what's going on practice wise. Not necessarily there to be a binary distinction in theory/practice, but I've always used these terms indistinguishably as both can resemble each other in every discipline. The structure of any academic website is integral to how you generally present yourself, and it should show in every structure how you map things, thus each should 'side' melt into one another.
That basically is the general focus, to play off certain blogs posts on one side with some unexpected consequences.
I'm also tying with the idea of a third index involving a public mobile blogging service, which would allow anyone to post any detailed issues, at any time, about anything. Is this too democratic? hmmmmmmm we'll see. Its always a fine line between democracy, censorship and decency.
To reaffirm the DIY ethic of hacking outside of computing, here's Ikea Hacker. Quite chic in its nature, but for me a constant source of amusing furniture / material hacks you can do with some Grade-E chipboard.
Here's some of my favourites;
Fine tuning a 59p Idea bag into a evening dress.
Using a £7 Lack table for a Graphic Design work board,
And the best one, (the ones where you don't have to do any work, just conceptually re-frame it for a practical purpose) Doll bed = Cat bed.
I can't even begin to fathom how you would organise an artistic intervention as ludicrously poetic as this. Simple idea well executed, very simple, wait till the Google Maps Street View Mini-car comes round your neighbourhood, then round up some participants and stage some amateur Google Street View dramatics. No commentary needed on this one, just enjoying the play on exhibitionist intervention of the carnival vs the privacy inhibition of Google Street View. Superb.
I'm a bit of a YouTube video sharing fanatic and I always have been since Yahoo started decentralising video sharing back in 2002/2003. This was generally how I made artworks in my undergraduate, linking videos through arbitrary systems.
In the last few months however, my attention has 'lasered' (quote Gordon Brown) on this little topic, which has been generating a lot of views in the online Christian fundamentalist community. The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (as if there was a Christian Immanent Argument for the existence of one), the lynchpin of which is Rev Matt Slick, below;
I'll do this quickly. Now this post isn't about falsifying TAG (although its kind of implicated in the following discussion) but rather mapping its rational argument in line with Quentin Meillassoux's critique of Correlationism, which has become flavour of the year in most Continental philosophical circles. Even when the most half-baked, conservative theories about God are cooked up like this one, it still serves some purpose for useful philosophy.
Although its long winded on the embedded YouTube link heres a summary of the TAG argument;
1.) How can the atheist mind-world account for the existence of logic?
2.) Where can we find the essence of classic (I'm presuming) Aristotelian logic which we find so helpful in our day-to-day existence. It isn't physical, dependent on human minds (slightly dubious but I'll allow for the aid of this post), a product of language. In other words Slick identifies that logic is in some way absolute. It seems that A is A and Not-A is Not-A wherever and whenever the universe is at all moments. They transcend all space and time and physicality, (ok some problems, but granted).
3) If logic isn't physical nor dependent on a materialist view of human minds strictly using it, then what is it? Slick however employs a bizarre world dichotomy of Physical/Conceptual, i.e if logical absolutes aren't material/physical, they MUST be conceptual hence, if they are transcendent, then God can account for the author-ability of them. So the whole world is one huge determined logical concept of Gods own thoughts.
What stuns me is how the rhetoric of the argument is bolstering its popularity rather than the clarity of argument. It seems Christian apologists have been fooled into finally having the 'clever' detailed explanation of how God exists.
Now Meillassoux's principle argument relating to the history of philosophy since Kant is that the vast majority of ensuring thinkers have adopted an unsaid rhetoric of (his term) correlationism. Namely, it
"consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object 'in itself', in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object" (p5 After Finitude)
In other words, for correlationists, the world as appearance for subjects is either completely or partly conceptual, if we don't exist neither does the world as phenomena. The world may exist in its meaningless physicality, but we will have no knowledge of it, hence almost 250 years of rigorous study into the alchemy of subjectivity (consistent or non-consistent) within philosophy, art, politics and later its centrality within cultural studies and media studies. In some strange cases, even the thing itself or World-as-it-is is abandoned. As Bruno Latour would have it, it is the 'modern' turn of human civilisation, splitting the cosmos into two illogical foundations of human and 'world' that were never meant to co-join in the first place.
My point is this; if you hold the correlationist 'world-as-sole-appearance-for-humans' idea as a basis for ontology, isn't TAG the logical conclusion of this? Or perhaps maybe the majority of Continental philosophy has, in the last 100 years, adopted this handed-me-down ontology in more acceptable limited secular fashion?, i.e the world as it appears to me, is of my own conceptual domain projected outwards with no God involved. But TAG goes one step further, stipulating that the World 'is' out there but it is completely conceptual authored by a transcendent being. (Proponents of TAG have never actually made their ontological statements very clear here, either ontology is completely conceptual ( theological panpsychism), or there is brute matter and it is 'conceptually caused' by the logical laws of God.) Perhaps it even pushes correlationism so far into a theological corner that perhaps just a simple secular shift is all that is needed to transform TAG into the speculative contemporary philosophy we are studying today. (perhaps a TAEO, Transcendental Argument for the Existence of Objects?)
I think here, Graham Harman would advocate that objects are conceptually caused, but through A) all objects have some degree of conceptual 'being' through occasional cause and B) it is completely secular.
To start with, I'll post some links of my upcoming paper that have sprung up in Dec. Firstly Graham's here and Paul from A.N.T.H.E.M blog here.
I'm writing this feverishly at the moment, with about 15 books strewn all over the place, plus about 50 web-links which I need to link. But I'll update soon on more concrete ideas concerning Graham's thoughts on how vacuum packed objects communicate aesthetically (in general terms) and algorithmic artworks.
As its early, and I'm trying to generate new a readership for this blog I'll (cynically) label this post in reflection on Graham's post regarding popular topics for his blog.
So whilst I'm busy constructing the other half of my P.hD research, social and work website/blog thing, I'll start this first and get the ball rolling. I'm going to create a new version of my old website, in which I constructed two table structure, of blog on one side and work on the other. Always believed that conceptually, the two worked well side by side and not implicated.
I'm usually ridiculously suspicious of popular blogging platforms and not really got on with Wordpress, Blogger for some reason, lack of simple features for one (although to be fair they have improved lately). I'm often too busy to construct my own version, plus it takes up too much time when they have been hacked into.
Typepad however has always been superb for functionality in the past, and now its free, I have no excuse.
To end, I'm currently snowed in here near the Moors, so heres a picture.
