New Aesthetic Spectacle

Picture the scene: a stadium built in secret behind a labyrinthine shopping mall, filled with eager spectators clutching tickets authenticated by bar code and hologram.  As they take their seats around the oval, each finds a device embedded with lights - not only are they there to have an experience first hand but to create an experience for those watching over the telly by turning themselves into a human screen, pixel-glitched in ways that are physical as human bodies are physical - gaps for aisles and stairways.  

In the centre of the stadium, a metonymic representation of the city they themselves are in, glued over in faux newspaper, quoting broadly drawn phrases from a centuries old literary tradition, recombining constantly as the set comes to life, juxtaposing one half remembered referent with another.  What follows, shot half the time from an ariel point of view, is a tumblr equivalent of musical performance: choreography, costume and chorus pasted together into the ultimate three dimensional playlist.  The curation of imagery is as jumbled as if it had been outsourced to a bot - an octupus unfolds from a bus, athletes are kettled like protestors, branded billboards appear, Edwardians and Eric Idle and Bollywood dancing with morris men and nuns on rollerskates, like a technicolour yawn of Blairite-brand Cool Britannia.  

The Pixel is omnipresent - on spectators, on taxis, on pianos, on dancer's unitards.  It is there in shots of athletes' phones playing an electronic tickertape of thanks to family and friends.  It is there in all the pocket rectangles raised above heads as the participants both participate and record from an indeterminate viewpoint for future use - for future proof - for dissemination and finality.  It is a spectacle recorded from all possible angles, infinitely remixable; it is the London Olympics Closing Ceremony; it is the New Aesthetic writ large and televised.

And I say, in common with so many, what does this mean?

Hey Epistemay

Knowing is central to the practice of philosophy in everyday life.  For me these days it’s the question I most often run up against.  I like for things to have a one, true and for-all-time answer.  That kind of knowing makes me feel secure and unassailable in my decisions or opinions.

However, very little in life is actually knowable in that way.  This is distressing to analytic philosophers of a certain bent – we would prefer to fit the world to our theories, even going so far as to lop off limbs as necessary.  We like to stick numbers onto things.  So, in making a decision, I will customarily assign P-values (assessments of probability) to possible outcomes, rate my preferences on a scale of ten and make a daisy chain of conditionals and biconditionals (if . . . then . . . and if-and-only-if statements) in order to determine a decision.  It lies somewhere between objective assessment and witchcraft.  On some days my lunch decision looks like this:

Givens:

1. Assume no real time for a full lunch hour.

2. Desire to leave office for lunch = 8.5/10

3. It may rain P=6.5 or greater.

4. Desire for warm food = 9.5/10

5. Desire to spend less money = 6/10

Conditions:

1.      If there is no real time for lunch, then I will eat at my desk.

2.      There is no real time for lunch.

3.      I will eat at my desk.

4.      If I must eat at my desk, then I prefer to have better food to make up for eating at my desk.

5.      I ought not to spend too much money on lunch.

6.      If I ought not to spend too much money on lunch, then I ought to buy a sandwich at the Tesco.

7.      If I have to eat at my desk, then I ought to buy a proper sandwich and not just have one from the Tesco.

8.      My preference for a decent lunch is stronger than my preference to save money.

9.      3 (I must eat at my desk) and 8 (my preference for a decent lunch is stronger)

10.  Therefore I will buy a proper sandwich to eat at my desk.

This is a nonsense, of course[1].  There is no knowable necessity in my having a more expensive sandwich at my desk – all that this is is the fanciful expression of a preference I already felt, and the apparatus of deductive logic does nothing to strengthen or weaken the preference.  And so it can go with many an experience based theory; the theoretical apparatus, the scientific language, is used to make a preference or opinion sound like true-for-all-time fact.

The difficulty is, how to know which is which in the wild?  Where is the field guide to epistemological red herring varieties?

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[1] Those among you with overly sharpened eyes may notice the amphibole-ish way that statement 7 works – The ‘if’ part of the condition (P; the antecedent) is true in a fact way while the ‘then’ (Q; consequent) part is true in a preference way.  It is questionable at best to say a fact can produce a necessary preference – P could well be true and Q false and yet I’m still going to run off and spend £2 more than I might.

Ontologics - What It Is

As the origin of the word might imply, pragmatist philosophy tends to emphasize the relationship of praxis to theory, experience over idealism, a posteriori truth over a priori.  As a school, it is anti-hierarchical and anti-dogmatic, and places a high value on the relationships among things: multiple persons, an individual and his or her environment, theory and reality, thought and action.  Pragmatist thought resists abstraction and seeks rather to delve into the actualities of a given situation and, following reflection, change it to a more desirable one.  Whilst modern analytic philosophy models its form on physics, pragmatist philosophy takes its shape from biosciences, especially ecology and evolution.  Pragmatism also does not fear to admit ethics into its theories, rejecting positivist neutrality.  This shows particularly in its interdisciplinary approach to philosophy, making use of the social sciences but questioning their claim to neutrality.[1] 

It Is Perspicuous is intended to be a blog about philosophising life.  As a student of philosophy, I have over the years sought to understand my own experiences through philosophical concepts and to understand philosophical concepts by drawing on my own experiences.  It is the intersection of philosophy with daily life that has always interested me the most.  The world may be made of monads, but what does this mean?  Can it explain why I lose my socks in the drier and misplace my pens?  Philosophy is, to my mind, the involving and accommodating science that does not lay claim to facts (as the natural sciences do) but to truth and doubt.  When it is practiced, and practiced well, philosophy reveals meaning and understanding and possibility.  It is a force that opens up rooms in our house that we did not know were there. 

It Is Perspicuous, then, is my way of remembering to look at life and to think about it.  I miss the pub and coffee house discussions, I miss the presentations and conferences of my student days because I miss the opportunity to do philosophy in public.  I want to carve out a corner for it and all are welcome.

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[1] I paraphrased this paragraph from my own undergraduate research.