Hello, yes, + thank you for asking! I'm an essayist, published poet appearing in journals such as Hobart + Rust + Moth, former ghostwriter, dabbler in fiction, critic, + sometimes journalist. This blog has largely become a site of experimentation in a form akin to personal essays, though more closely resembling the persona of what I name as the public diarist.
My work is philosophical, associative, lyrical, + in constant conversation with the literary traditions of confessional writing, Modernism, Aestheticism, Romanticism, Appalachian Gothic, + the lyric essay alongside the philosophical, political, + psychological movements + traditions of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, humanism, American pragmatism, Jungian archetypes, attachment + trauma theory, feminism, moral psychology, post-structuralism, metaphysics, + the aphoristic.
Through the above, I circle witness, misrecognition, power, control, surrender, desire, grief, mortality, home, exile, exposure, perception, moral evasion, intentionality, responsibility, the ethics of attention + relation, the rescue + failure of language, the instrumental wound, + the fracture between the exterior + interior life.
You can read one of my poems here + a piece from the journal project here.
"What is immanence? A life… No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a "Homo tantum" with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life …"
The ontology of text refers to the study of the nature, structure, and being of text, focusing on what text is at its most fundamental level. This exploration can span several philosophical and theoretical perspectives, often addressing questions about the existence, identity, and categorization of text as an entity. Here’s a breakdown of key aspects:
1. Text as an Ontological Entity:
Material vs. Abstract: Text can be considered both as a material object (e.g., a book or a written document) and as an abstract entity (e.g., the content or meaning conveyed by the text). The ontology of text thus involves understanding how these two aspects coexist and relate to each other.
Text as a Work vs. Text as a Document: The distinction between a text as a work (the conceptual or intellectual creation) and as a document (the physical or digital manifestation) is crucial in ontology. For instance, different editions of a book may be considered different documents but the same work.
2. Identity and Persistence:
Sameness and Variation: The ontology of text deals with the question of what makes a text the same across different instances or versions. What remains consistent between different editions or translations of a text? How much can a text change before it is considered a different text?
Temporal Aspects: How does the identity of a text persist over time? This includes considerations of how historical context, authorial intent, and reader interpretation might affect the identity of a text.
3. Structure of Text:
Hierarchical vs. Network Structures: Text can be seen as having a hierarchical structure (e.g., chapters, paragraphs, sentences) or a network-like structure (e.g., hypertext or intertextuality). The ontology of text examines how these structures are constituted and how they affect the nature of text.
Units of Text: What are the basic units of text? Words, sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps even smaller or larger units? The ontological inquiry involves defining and categorizing these units.
4. Function and Intent:
Authorial Intent: The role of the author's intention in the ontology of text is a major consideration. Is the meaning of a text tied to what the author intended, or does it exist independently?
Reader Interpretation: The ontology of text also considers the role of the reader or audience in constituting the text. Is the meaning of a text something inherent, or is it something that comes into being through interpretation?
5. Intertextuality and Contextuality:
Intertextual Relations: Texts often reference or build upon other texts. The ontology of text considers how texts are related to one another and how these relationships affect their existence and identity.
Contextual Dependency: The meaning and existence of a text can be dependent on its context, including cultural, historical, and situational factors. The ontology of text examines how context shapes what a text is.
6. Digital and Hypertext Ontology:
Digital Texts: The advent of digital texts introduces new ontological questions. How do digital formats affect the nature of text? How does hypertext, with its non-linear structure, change our understanding of text?
Versioning and Fluidity: Digital texts can be easily modified, leading to questions about the stability and identity of texts in a digital environment. What does it mean for a text to have a version, and how does this affect its ontology?
7. Philosophical Perspectives:
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: These schools of thought provide frameworks for understanding the ontology of text, focusing on the underlying structures of language (structuralism) and the fluidity and instability of meaning (post-structuralism).
Phenomenology: This approach might consider the experience of the text, focusing on how it appears to consciousness and the role of the reader in bringing the text to life.
The ontology of text is a rich and complex field that intersects with many areas of philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, and digital humanities. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about what text is, how it exists, how it maintains identity, and how it relates to both its material form and its interpretation by readers.
Michel Foucault at postmodernmas simulating a simulation of a simulation of himself down the chimney to socially construct your presents and perform an epistemological deconstruction of the plate of coffee and cigarettes left by the fireplace
Living the Interdependent Self: From Conceptual Realisation to Embodied Wisdom - Part 2
In the first movement of this exploration, we confronted the illusion at the core of modern subjectivity: the atomised, sovereign, self-determining individual — the Cartesian res cogitans reanimated through liberalism, capitalism, and the psy-disciplines.
Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com
We traced how this idealised subject, far from being a neutral construction, is inextricably entangled…
Finally is primitivism motivated primarily by a desire to return to a more innocent time in one’s childhood?
Ishkah: So the last thing was, I read what I thought was a good book by Saul Newman on ‘The Politics of Post-Anarchism’, his take on where we should be going, he kind of values do you know ‘le ZAD’ in France, which means ‘Zone of Defence’, so mostly separating oneself off from cities, but still rebelling, just not in a storming the Bastille way. In the book anyway Newman critiques you I think by saying how the desire for a primitive way of life is often a desire for a more innocent time in one’s childhood:
“Where Zerzan’s argument becomes problematic is in the essentialist notion that there is a rationally intelligible presence, a social objectivity that is beyond language and discourse. To speak in Lacanian terms, the prelinguistic state of jouissance is precisely unattainable: it is always mediated by language that at the same time alienates and distorts it. It is an imaginary jouissance, an illusion created by the symbolic order itself, as the secret behind its veil. We live in a symbolic and linguistic universe, and to speculate about an original condition of authenticity and immediacy, or to imagine that an authentic presence is attainable behind the veils of the symbolic order or beyond the grasp of language, is futile. There is no getting outside language and the symbolic; nor can there be any return to the pre Oedipal real. To speak in terms of alienation, as Zerzan does, is to imagine a pure presence or fullness beyond alienation, which is an impossibility. While Zerzan’s attack on technology and domestication is no doubt important and valid, it is based on a highly problematic essentialism implicit in his notion of alienation.
To question this discourse of alienation is not a conservative gesture. It does not rob us of normative reasons for resisting domination, as Zerzan claims. It is to suggest that projects of resistance and emancipation do not need to be grounded in an immediate presence or positive fullness that exists beyond power and discourse. Rather, radical politics can be seen as being based on a moment of negativity: an emptiness or lack that is productive of new modes of political subjectivity and action. Instead of hearkening back to a primordial authenticity that has been alienated and yet which can be recaptured – a state of harmony which would be the very eclipse of politics – I believe it is more fruitful to think in terms of a constitutive rift that is at the base of any identity, a rift that produces radical openings for political articulation and action.”
Zerzan: Well I know Newman, I mean he’s a classic post-structuralist, post-modern character. It gets down to basic stuff doesn’t it? I mean if you feel like presence is just an illusion, most basically because there’s nothing outside of symbolic culture, right? “Outside the text, there is nothing” Derrida, right? Well what if that’s not true? What if there’s an alternative to symbolic culture? To the whole representational racket?
I mean I think there is quite possibly, there is that possibility. In fact in practice there was… hunter-gatherer life, pre-symbolic culture, right? For over a million years, you know face-to-face community, non-hierarchical, these are generalities here, but they did quite well without symbolic culture, without art, without the concept of numbers, without a lot of things.
So you can make the assertion and you know a lot of it’s traced back to say Derrida or others, but just because you’re saying there is no presence, that’s just a fiction, that the presence cannot exist because you can’t get outside of the symbolic, well that’s one point of view, but I don’t think that’s true.
That’s just, you know it’s part of the general surrender politically, in more or less reactionary times you get philosophies like that, which sort of take over. The whole backward aspect of post-modernism, it really is a way of… at a time when there’s pretty much no social movements you get stuff like that and that’s a crude way to put it, but that’s part of the picture I think.
Ishkah: Okay, yeah I take your point, I think obviously they would say that about some primitivists. But…
I guess I don’t know how they’re defining symbolism, my perspective is animals are using symbols and language going way back to parrots and primates, but…
Zerzan: Well I think that’s more… I mean that is tricky, it is an open question, animals do communicate, but I think it’s more signals than symbols. It’s not really representational, in the way of symbolic culture that the humans have just because they communicate, of course they do, birds, all sorts of animals, they have to for survival, but that doesn’t make it very symbolic, it seems to me, but anyway that’s… These definitions have to you know… they’re sort of problematic because we’ve used these terms in different ways or inelastic ways that then the whole conversation becomes a little confusing, so I don’t want to take too rigid a position, but you don’t have to have symbolic language for there to be communication. Anyway that’s obvious I guess.
Ishkah: Well, yeah it’s tricky for sure, I mean I get into debates all the time with people who want to use language like abolish work and abolish prisons and I guess it’s an attempt to reframe the debate.
But, just in terms of this term presence, whether we should desire an authenticity of a long period of our evolutionary history as humans. I don’t know, like I think potentially we could be suffering more now for sure, but it could be suffering that we we desire to take on if we can get to this left-anarchist, pro technology future. It could be a source of virtue for us, striving for these intellectual skills.
And then authenticity, as a concept it’s only developed recently, like we used to think of authenticity differently as like sincerity. So, the effort you put into helping your family would be an indication of whether you were being authentic to yourself, if you were being just and fair to your family in taking on your responsibilities.
So, I don’t know whether it would be authentic for me to desire hunter-gather life, I know I would desire hunter-gatherer life more than the middle ages, but I think rather than just settling for primitive life or just settling for the middle ages, I think we should try and be aspirational to this future world of still being able to use some technology, like printing presses and penicillin and stuff, so I don’t know.
Zerzan: Yeah, it’s needed these different steps, and one requires the other, I mean now technology comes around to promise to heal what it has caused in the first place, so where do you try to arrest that progression?
And what does it all depend on? You don’t have any technology really without the extraction, without the mining, the smelters, the warehouses. And who do people on the left assume is going to do all that? It doesn’t exist without all that? So that’s a form of slavery, but they seem to be fine with that, to have the wonders of technology resting upon what? I mean not only the ruin of the natural world, of the biosphere, but you know wage slavery for almost countless people, for that to exist. That’s not a very liberatory assumption.
Ishkah: Yeah, and if I believed that we were just going the way of machines and we were going to create artificial intelligence and terminate ourselves by just letting them take over or becoming more machine like ourselves I would definitely worry…
Zerzan: And deciding everything and people don’t understand how they work, I mean we’ve swept along in this whole van of the progress with a capital ‘p’ and look where it’s gotten us, it’s just becoming horrible on every front, it’s one large crisis where all the parts of it are kind of merging into a very, very bad picture.
Ishkah: Yeah I don’t know, like I’m still researching, maybe I’m being naive in just advocating for something where that is more likely to happen, but yeah I worry that if people take direct action and try to just separate themselves off from technology and cities, that we leave people to suffer, like we lose hospitals… I mean I don’t know how useful you think hypotheticals are, but so definitely if technology is this thing that just manufactures consent and we get towards robots then that’s definitely bad and if we have a reasonable high confidence that is the future then obviously I would be on board with just trying to collapse the system in order to try and get back to primitivism, but hypothetically…
Zerzan: These are big challenges, you know everybody wants community, right? I mean we can all agree on that, except what happened to it? Why did it go away? Why has mass society all but obliterated that? All but obliterated the face-to-face human contact kind of world? Which I think really did roughly exist before domestication.
You know, this sounded so utopian to me when I first discovered the literature that I first ran into by accident, the whole anthropological deal, but it actually isn’t and it’s just just well known a lot of it.
I mean a lot of it isn’t well known, I grant you we can’t know precisely, or even vaguely, what the consciousness was, how satisfied people were in their lives. We really don’t know that, but I mean there was some pretty good non-lethal developments apparently, you know some contacts that were worthy of lasting for quite some time.
You know domestication, I mean that’s like one tenth of one percent of our of human species, anyway you know all that.
Ishkah: Yeah I really value some nomadic cultures that I’m worried that we’re encroaching on. I think there was a story recently about loggers in the amazon taking away the tribe’s bow and arrows so that they wouldn’t shoot at them, but then leaving them to starve in this horrible way.
What was it gonna say, oh yeah so I don’t know how useful useful you think hypotheticals are but in terms of like, say we realized this hunter gatherer world, but there were still some people who had the knowledge to create assembly lines for things like penicillin and glasses and stuff, and they saw people who were disabled or injured, and they wanted to create some technology to help these people. Would that be a legitimate target for sabotage or would that just be a consent issue, where you let them do that even if you worry that it helps restart technological society?
Zerzan: Well, I don’t know, I think we’d have to, if everybody could pitch in and try to find workable solutions as we go, I mean I think there could be intermediate steps, you know we don’t want people unable to live without certain technologies to just simply die off, but at the same time it’s not clear to me that we need the worldwide grid otherwise you can’t achieve that. I mean I think there are other methods, some of which are just simple things like when you’re peddling a bicycle with the light, you pedal and it generates electricity to light your tail-light or your headlight. So why can’t you do that with somebody who needs a respirator? You know, you don’t have to have a whole world system going may be to fix, you know to to help people in different situations and as we kind of try to go away from the dependency which has been really pretty fatal.
You know something like that, whereas it isn’t just a blanket theoretical rejection overnight or you push a button and it’s something else, I mean that isn’t quite a fair characterization of the primitivist thinking I’m familiar with.
Ishkah: No sure, it’s just a funny hypothetical for like thousands of years in the future, like my ideal feature is a pro-tech society that conscientiously decides not to use technology badly and I know you don’t see that as possible, but I don’t know I see some value in labor movement philosophy of if animals finds a use value in the land that we can just give them large areas to re-wild. And I would want people to have the option of being able to live in bear country and risk getting attacked by bears if they want to.
Zerzan: Sure, but that doesn’t seem likely, that goes against the logic of domestication, the only thing that was left for indigenous people is the most inhospitable places on the planet and you know same goes for other species, that’s why extinction is just running rampart and one species after another is either gone or threatened with extinction. That’s the logic of it, yeah we can dream up free spaces for somebody or another, but where would that come from? Where would you find the basis for that inside this system, which is so all enveloping, I would be in favor of it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just hard to see if there’s a solution within the system.
If this essay doesn’t kill me, nothing will. I’m currently grappling with the concept of connecting Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness with post-structuralism. I don’t know whether I’m being very clever or very stupid. (x)
This episode, Duck presents a #poststructural analysis of #HowlsMovingCastle. Amongst other things, this involved finding out what #poststrucuralism means.
