So now I am relaunching this blogspace, with the main criteria being that I have to make it less pretentious. Which should be pretty easy. I have always been aware of my authorial responsibility not to waste people's time, but now more than ever, when I discover by reviewing our statistics that we had over 13 page views in the last year and a half I feel ultra compelled to make a linguistic product that is not only high quality, but also high entertaining.
"Yeah yeah, easy for you to say," I hear literally you (singular) saying: "You mark my words, this is going to be the most readable blog ever...yada yada yada...it's all just introductory talk of reminiscent of the hyped stylings of that professional hyperbolising tendency selling enthusiasm cheap and sincerity dear, the excitable MC, the desperate PR man, the DJ as the drowning grotesque parody of superlative enthusiasm with ever declining hopes of becoming an articulate sound rising above the pseudo keen babble reaching out across all dimensions of the human sensory spectrum that is the advertising worlds only aggregated contribution, driven on by the ever imposing imperative to sell sell sell the fucking world of every ounce of whatever creation of our minds can be commodified, bundled and shipped into the consciousness of another. In return for the requisite fee, paid in whatever consensus reality fiction the markets have confidence in."
Yeah well fuck you. I'm about to upload three essays. They are about neoliberalism and the past 20 or so years of the NHS, the postcolonial tanglings of the City of London Corporation, and then my favourite one - biopolitics, affect and the self. You can read them and then you'll see exactly what kind of a vacuous electron thief I am.
Thursday 28 March 2013
Monday 14 May 2012
Truth and Desireability
Hello again internet.
You can see that not a lot has happened on this blog since my first post. However lots has happened away from this blog, and it seems time to inscribe again, but in a different way. Reading the first post back, although I talk about beauty and knowing beyond what is verifiable, the whole tone seems cold to me.
When I wrote that post I was just back from a fairly isolated year in Poland. I had grown used to being a stranger looking in, and didn't have the personal know-how to properly integrate myself into soft life there. Perhaps my habits of thought had become more abstracted from day to day social sharing and caring. Perhaps I was reading too many books.
Now I have been living in Bristol for a year and a half. I have never been more aware of the positive power of human cooperation and love. I know amazing people, have helped build amazing things and participated in too many beautiful experiences to remember. I am also aware that there is a depressing group of people actively trying to rearrange the way that we share and care with each other. These people want to make our hospitals run for money, nudge young parents back to work that makes money sooner, carve up our green space for the 0.3% that own 50% of land in Britain to build more money making machines on and they can't seem to understand why we wouldn't want to dedicate 36 hours a week of the only life we'll ever have to working for Tesco. These people call themselves government and unfortunatly them and their mates get to have a say in a lot of our lives.
Anyway, basically when I think about all that sort of stuff I realise that there's no use arguing with these people just in terms of truth. I mean we can use truth to argue about all these policies of course and the facts about what they will do on the ground, and the assumptions they are based on, and the inequalities that they deny, and all that. We can, and we can get a long way with it. But it's not enough.
We need to use all those other things that are desireable aside from just truth. Building an economy that gives loads to some people and not much to other people, and then aggressively expanding this system into more and more facets of our life so that we have got no choice; making a system that obliges a few powerful managers to economise at the expense of the working conditions of the large number of people that are crucial to building their system; seeing people that are doing good work caring for people that are vulnerable (as we all are without social supports) and cutting their capacity to do that work. The main thing about all these things is that they are mean.
So from now on this blog will not just consider a truth criteria for good knowledge that helps expand our positive capacities. I want to say that truth means nothing without kindness.
Have a good evening internet.
You can see that not a lot has happened on this blog since my first post. However lots has happened away from this blog, and it seems time to inscribe again, but in a different way. Reading the first post back, although I talk about beauty and knowing beyond what is verifiable, the whole tone seems cold to me.
When I wrote that post I was just back from a fairly isolated year in Poland. I had grown used to being a stranger looking in, and didn't have the personal know-how to properly integrate myself into soft life there. Perhaps my habits of thought had become more abstracted from day to day social sharing and caring. Perhaps I was reading too many books.
Now I have been living in Bristol for a year and a half. I have never been more aware of the positive power of human cooperation and love. I know amazing people, have helped build amazing things and participated in too many beautiful experiences to remember. I am also aware that there is a depressing group of people actively trying to rearrange the way that we share and care with each other. These people want to make our hospitals run for money, nudge young parents back to work that makes money sooner, carve up our green space for the 0.3% that own 50% of land in Britain to build more money making machines on and they can't seem to understand why we wouldn't want to dedicate 36 hours a week of the only life we'll ever have to working for Tesco. These people call themselves government and unfortunatly them and their mates get to have a say in a lot of our lives.
Anyway, basically when I think about all that sort of stuff I realise that there's no use arguing with these people just in terms of truth. I mean we can use truth to argue about all these policies of course and the facts about what they will do on the ground, and the assumptions they are based on, and the inequalities that they deny, and all that. We can, and we can get a long way with it. But it's not enough.
We need to use all those other things that are desireable aside from just truth. Building an economy that gives loads to some people and not much to other people, and then aggressively expanding this system into more and more facets of our life so that we have got no choice; making a system that obliges a few powerful managers to economise at the expense of the working conditions of the large number of people that are crucial to building their system; seeing people that are doing good work caring for people that are vulnerable (as we all are without social supports) and cutting their capacity to do that work. The main thing about all these things is that they are mean.
So from now on this blog will not just consider a truth criteria for good knowledge that helps expand our positive capacities. I want to say that truth means nothing without kindness.
Have a good evening internet.
Sunday 13 February 2011
There's a Law There's A Law There's A Blog
HI THERE INTERNET.
I am carving out a blog on you. I am going to use words to refer to other things that are happening in the world. In this way we can communicate and I can spread truth.
On the internet I am not obliged to have a [Christian name][Surname] like in the real world so instead I am going to be called WARSAW. To repeat: WARSAW is the author. I'm not sure what the implications of this are going to be.
The idea is though, that self expression can be a creative and liberated process. While I will be primarily drawing from my experiences in real life, there will be few effective mechanisms of accountability back to it. As the body of work on this blog grows though I will want to have it stand as something I can be proud of. The work I want it to do is to express intelligibly interesting truth about the world.
Truth is to be found in what we can verify. But what do we mean by verification? Is there truth beyond what is verifiable?
I would like to suggest that there are lots of different standards of verification that we construct depending on what subject we are interrogating. The limits of the standards of verifications are often pragmatic and sometimes theoretical. Pragmatic reasons are to do with doing what we can with the resources (time, concentration, measuring instruments, information etc) we have available. Theoretical reasons might be more about some things being failing to be universally knowable (what is beauty for instance? is the story that Kirsty told me about her weekend definitely true?). But often we want to engage with what we cannot fully know. For example we all live in a world where we are forced to make
Here I am going to present things and demonstrate them and get as close to the truth as possible. I will use words, on the internet, to represent things that are not words and are not on the internet. I will get as close to the truth as I can and let my principles of verification shine through and see where consistency breaks down.
Welcome to WARSAWSPEAKS. It is a truth identifying machine that I will take a leading role building. Please criticise the machine and help me to improve it.
I am carving out a blog on you. I am going to use words to refer to other things that are happening in the world. In this way we can communicate and I can spread truth.
On the internet I am not obliged to have a [Christian name][Surname]
The idea is though, that self expression can be a creative and liberated process. While I will be primarily drawing from my experiences in real life, there will be few effective mechanisms of accountability back to it. As the body of work on this blog grows though I will want to have it stand as something I can be proud of. The work I want it to do is to express intelligibly interesting truth about the world.
Truth is to be found in what we can verify. But what do we mean by verification? Is there truth beyond what is verifiable?
I would like to suggest that there are lots of different standards of verification that we construct depending on what subject we are interrogating. The limits of the standards of verifications are often pragmatic and sometimes theoretical. Pragmatic reasons are to do with doing what we can with the resources (time, concentration, measuring instruments, information etc) we have available. Theoretical reasons might be more about some things being failing to be universally knowable (what is beauty for instance? is the story that Kirsty told me about her weekend definitely true?). But often we want to engage with what we cannot fully know. For example we all live in a world where we are forced to make
Here I am going to present things and demonstrate them and get as close to the truth as possible. I will use words, on the internet, to represent things that are not words and are not on the internet. I will get as close to the truth as I can and let my principles of verification shine through and see where consistency breaks down.
Welcome to WARSAWSPEAKS. It is a truth identifying machine that I will take a leading role building. Please criticise the machine and help me to improve it.
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