Random Genius

My friend over at To Someone Likeminded posted this link on her blog the other day to Random Sentences from the Virtual Academic Lab.

Well, here was my FB responses:

Post #1: This is amazing. I can't stop creating sentences. I see a blog post coming soon.

Post #2 (seconds later): This kind of saddens me after being amazed briefly. Is this saying that all we really do is Mad Libs when we create new thoughts. That our work is nothing more than jest or game. ???

Well, I am still mulling over this idea. I do think that it is a neat site and generator of thoughtful discussion. But is it? I am still questioning all of this.

Can productive thought be produced by the random generator / mad-lib-esque-ness of the virtual world?

The epistemology of praxis invests itself in the systemization of the public sphere.
The emergence of normative value(s) may be parsed as the authentication of print culture.
The culture of consumption functions as the conceptual frame for the historicization of pedagogical institutions.
The fiction of the natural invests itself in the fantasy of agency.
The poetics of post-capitalist hegemony may be parsed as the systemization of power/knowledge.

You get the point.

I am trying to think about this more and more through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz's work, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, which I am reviewing for class. I wonder if there is this sense that the virtual allows us understand things more clearly, or blatantly. But one thing she returns to again and again is that we somehow tie the virtual with the technological, and we need to reconsider and (re-)understand how the virtual is part of the everyday. We occupy a virtual space in real space. It is not just something that is created in the world of the Internet.

I send you out into the ether.

Zizek!

I found Zizek! online. Astra Taylor's quirky documentary follows the philosopher around his daily routine as he expounds upon the many facets of his own philosophy as well as his reaction to politics and Lacan among other things. I fell in love with this bit at the end. This film isn't exactly for people who are unfamiliar with Zizek or, for that matter, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. While the film does provide cursory explanations, I think it best to approach the film with some knowledge of the topics, and for that reason, I think Taylor's documentary often anticipates an educated, engaged audience. Well, I certainly wanted to read some more Zizek after watching the film. Hope you enjoy the clip!

Moving Home

“To sum up, what we have discovered through the study of motility, is a new meaning of the word ‘meaning.’ The great strength of intellectualist psychology and idealist philosophy comes from their having no difficulty in showing that perception and thought have an intrinsic significance and cannot be explained in terms of the external association of fortuitously agglomerated contents. The Cogito was the coming to self-awareness of this inner core. But all meaning was ipso facto conceived as an act of thought, as the work of a pure I, and although rationalism easily refuted empiricism, it was itself unable to account for the variety of experience, for the element of senselessness in it, for the contingency of contents. Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain contents. My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general function, and which nevertheless exists, and is susceptible to disease. In it we learn to know that union of essence and existence which we shall find again in perception generally, and which we shall then have to describe more fully.”

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1958. 170.

Philosophers on the Move

I nearly peed my pants just now when I saw the trailer to this new movie, Examined Life. [I'd like to thank Feministing for sharing this info on their Thank You Thursday.] Director Astra Taylor's new documentary features eight contemporary philosophers "in motion" as they discuss a number of concepts about life, thought, movement, etc. I really wish there was a theatre in Tulsa that was playing this film. I've read tons of Zizek and Butler, and it would be great to see them in action, philosophizing and discussing life, class, and gender. I would be there in several heartbeats. I love this vein of contemporary films that are intellectually stimulating while also having these interesting strains of narrative or documentation--like Waking Life, Derrida, or Before Sunrise.

Check out the trailer: