The Teaching Machine.

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Absolute value. Both positive and negative collapse into a single vector that measures quantitative distance from zero, and zero might need to be attained before we can really mobilize any higher order project. Not sure though.
 

luka

Well-known member
you've lost me. i'd need to know how this operates on you. how you experience it in your day to day life. or it just looks like mathematics to me.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
But that kind of string-of-thoughts rewinding might hold the key, or at least be near it. The vast majority of psyches move back to front without interrogating their impetus or their trajectory. Is what I think is true more effective that what I could think is true? Of all the things I could think of as true, which of them boast the best prospects for success?

The point at which you start rewinding your string of thoughts, that point is the end of a probe, a probe that you metatemporally send out to feel into contingency and report back. After reporting back, the decision is a binary one: do I take that road or not? If not, you move in another direction, and at some point start rewinding to report back. Another probe, following by another binary decision. This might be what a higher order cognition looks like, but I'm not nearly familiar enough to be confident in a statement like that.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
By "majority of psyches" being lost, I mean that we are more or less adrift in a one-way stream that we have no real say in navigating.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
But by exercising the ability to map out what thought led to what thought, perhaps one can gain insight into what is at work across all thoughts, what determines their character.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Nietszche said conviction is a prison. Conviction mitigates the decision-making ability at these nodes, the ability to will your own direction. Upholding convictions is like accepting a preordained path that is more or less bind to the bulk of the maelstrom around us. In a sense, at least.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The camera, the lens and their volume of influence has corrupted our habitus/habits in such a way as to deform to conform.

The teacher is a warped mirror. The Devil’s in the details. Oh no, I’ve got a grey eyebrow, better pluck that cunt out. Oh no, my lips are too thin compared to x, y and z, better get some filler in. Oh no, my stomach is bloating, better get liposuction etc.

The frame can be broadcast to indulge set designer whimsy, or it can be any number of people staring at themselves in a mirror wondering how things can be improved. The set designer reflected back at us. The Critic is fully on board with the madness of this logic, due to its deregulation from changing social norms. The resulting culture process swallows individuals whole.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So just as the multilinguist can switch between languages, the schizo-subject can switch between value frameworks, testing one by riding its probe into the immediate future of the stream, then rewinding and switching to another value framework, and then trying that probe. The switch from one to the other is the same as deciding "No" on the first. In a sense, the first of the binary choices should always be no, so as to establish a choice. Two probes, statistically speaking, will amount to a doubly effective ontology.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
The camera, the lens and their volume of influence has corrupted our habitus/habits in such a way as to deform to conform.

The teacher is a warped mirror. The Devil’s in the details. Oh no, I’ve got a grey eyebrow, better pluck that cunt out. Oh no, my lips are too thin compared to x, y and z, better get some filler in. Oh no, my stomach is bloating, better get liposuction etc.

The frame can be broadcast to indulge set designer whimsy, or it can be any number of people staring at themselves in a mirror wondering how things can be improved. The set designer reflected back at us. The Critic is fully on board with the madness of this logic, due to its deregulation from changing social norms. The resulting culture process swallows individuals whole.
I tend to read this as a symptom of neoliberalism, but maybe I just have a strange understanding of neoliberalism.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Wyndham Lewis talks about this stuff a lot long before the neoliberalism existed
Could just be an unrefined understanding on my part. But I'm not saying that neoliberalism is the original cause of this sort of phenomena, perhaps just that it exhibits it with greater frenzy and momentum than previous cultural manifestations of capitalism. Not very informed historically, so there could very well be one or several eras that exhibited a more pronounced mass narcissism, but not in a way that seemed guided by some archon-like Capital.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
I tend to read this as a symptom of neoliberalism, but maybe I just have a strange understanding of neoliberalism.

I tend to read it as a symptom of a society driving itself mad through some perceived all-seeing gaze, compounded by the likes of Instagram and Facefuck, the tip of a certain capitalist spear invoking narcissism.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
I tend to read it as a symptom of a society driving itself mad through some perceived all-seeing gaze, compounded by the likes of Instagram and Facefuck, the tip of a certain capitalist spear invoking narcissism.
I agree. My only point with neoliberalism, is that neoliberalism seems to be a sort of meritocratic systematization of this kind of individualism. So greater success almost necessarily requires a deeper narcissism.

How can best market myself, ad how can I make myself more marketable?

That is, how can I sustain my current fitness, and how can I raise the fitness even more?

edit: so in a sense this kind of taking-oneself-as-a-project isn't anything new. Whats new is that it is now a kind of default ontology. It is the mode that you are socially pressured into upholding.
 

luka

Well-known member
shiels can you please make a post summarising Stan's posts and putting them into language I can understand? I want to think about them and respond.
 
Yes that’s true to a degree, thinking about social media. The lees a cynical view that as we shift down these self gamification pathways were seduced by the idea of communion with others via praise, validation or connecting around shared interests etc. but these ‘communities’ have mostly shallow connections and serve the purpose of making you easier to target
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I tend to think of neoliberalism as economic liberalism gaining clearance into the next inner tier of the psyche, and thus taking a more robust form.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yes that’s true to a degree, thinking about social media. The lees a cynical view that as we shift down these self gamification pathways were seduced by the idea of communion with others via praise, validation or connecting around shared interests etc. but these ‘communities’ have mostly shallow connections and serve the purpose of making you easier to target
Yeah "community" in that sense sounds more like a category to be filed under and accessed whenever needed.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
@constant escape Blair’s meritocracy was v different schematically.

The marketable is a capitalist pretence, offering supposed values over losing out. Buy in or get left behind.
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Blair, at all really.

But based on what you've laid out here, I don't necessarily think what I laid out is essentially different. You may be playing a role that is different from the role you would want to play, but in the meantime you do want to be better and better at playing that role. At a certain point, perhaps, the latter desire may have eclipsed the former desire.

That is, the desire to be better at pretending may have overpowered the desire to not pretend - or at least the former may have buried the latter, perhaps out of sight, perhaps leaving a finger squirming out of the burial mound.
 
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