the phenomenology of obedience

What do I study you ask?

What do I write about you ask?

What motivates my research you ask?

What frames my questions you ask?

What initiates the search you ask?

I seek to understand the phenomenology of obedience within technopolitical social orders.

'What in the hell is that?' you ask.

It's many things. Owing to the focus on phenomenology, I'm concerned with action, where it happens and how it happens--the lived event.

Why obedience you ask?

That's the focal point of what I'm studying. Granted how we interpret action is an orthogonal grab bag of valences, values, salience, and outcome. That's how anyone invests meaning in a rather amorphous and unresolved set of behaviors. Any interpreter sets the boundaries and implies the outcomes as a process of turning toward the phenomenon under study. I merely question the assumption that free will drives our human behavior.

The mechanistic, biomechanical discourse is becoming ascendant in understanding human behavior as brain-dependent. That flushes out the ghost in the machine. The machine is being used to describe the projection, the ghost, that was once human nature.

Those who are apologists for free will still find space for human intuition invested in temporality. Owing to our reflexivity we are unstuck, so to speak, from the mere machinery of action, but we're not completely untethered from it. It functions as a yang of determination to our ying of agency. That's the tension underlying any interpretation. These apologists, finding their free will in the space of afterthought and forethought intentionally cannot look to the present, the now, and to do so is to try to parse the brute data of activity into the categories: reflex, tendency, and agency. So even the apologists haven't denounced the mechanistic determination of human behavior; they've merely added some slack in the tether between action and substance. That is where I enter.

I too see the notion of human action as this combination of behavior and the lag time of retrospection being put into future action. That's the messy dialectic that underlies our own struggle with our humanity and the researcher's struggle for understanding. Obedience is my watch word. I see us both in our machine and in our reflection upon the machine as being fed by a tendency to short circuit this reflexivity in a constant buzz of gadget-obsessed, information aware, metaknowledge hopping activity.

The phenomenology of obedience is transparent. You see the glass as half full. I see it as half empty--same thing. My hopping off point is that I don't see us heading in a positive direction but one toward which our brains, our culture, and our activity coalesce around an ever tightening loop of interactivity with dramatized information management. Having the world at our fingertips is posed as a triumph of the western idyl of citizen as both consumer and free agent in a free society. Instead, having the world at our fingertips deadens our perception to our surroundings, adjusts our attention, and refocuses our recursive behaviors.

Our obedience occurs first to the interface. Then it's a matter of understanding how that interface is defined, described, and determined, which challenges our freedom of thinking. We're beginning to mistake judgment for selecting from a set of pre-defined options. We're beginning to mistake thinking for search. It's our mistake that we can modify the interface cosmetically that gives us freedom, but it's the same thing, only in a new configuration. We mistake having the world at our fingertips with the world. In order to journey we search. In order to understand we search. In order to reach out to others we search. In order to make a community we interface with each other as information. A status update is a phatic datum of being thereness, that isn't really thereness.

We mistake our obedience to an interface as free will, our own doing if only because we're flooded with options for exploring, customizing, and returning to it. Our obedience is never registered as such because we never recognize our cage; it's fictional in that our activity makes it. But as long as I return to the computer, check the same sites, return to e-mail throughout the day, double check a few forums then I've merely milled about my cage. If the cage accepts some input and, importantly, provides some output, we return.

obgligatory november post

Hi self who reads my shit caked commentary on culture, society, self, science, ad nauseum.

Nothing new really to report. I work here. I work there. I save money. I don't spend much other than what I blow on restaurants. Oh boy. I am getting fat. That's nothing new. I expect to if all I eat is restaurant food. Blah blah. Gorge, gorge. Work, work, cash, spend.

The cycle is in full motion. I do various odd kinds of work. Nothing could be more odd than to teach public speaking to engineering students only to turn around and work on their projects as an iron worker. Thus is the strangeness of life. Our economy is a no-economy. I am unsure what will come of the future of labor in the United States. Now it seems that absence makes the heart grow fonder for low-wage jobs--the same ones that left briefly only to return as non-union and no promises jobs. A different ethic reigns where people who complain are labeled as such while the larger picture of who benefits and under what conditions goes unstated. If we are the labor our only recourse to garner an honest wage is to do what our forebears did--strike. We have to organize and demand a better wage. This is a democracy. We can't merely hold that notion up and practice it for a few minutes every major election while we spend the majority of our lives toiling under the capricious hand of capital. That's a farce. It's an ideological smokescreen. We cannot for one moment think that hard work will produce riches. Hard work produces a wage decided by the person creating that job. 'Suck it up' is the motto of the day.

Globalization and a non-partisan unpatriotic global dollar define the terms. No wonder old men are being framed as terrorists. It was set up this way. Crash a few planes, crash the markets, and in the ensuing panic loot away, destroy files, and rewrite the laws by placing metal braces on the Constitution. The Patriot Act is fascism in plain sight. We don't reduce our freedoms in order to be safe. That's ridiculous. We could also limit the speed of automobiles to that of walking in order to reduce crash fatalities to zero, but what's the good in that. The risk a government takes in giving its population freedoms is a risk of control. Prediction and control is being orchestrated. We have a two party system that crowds out any 'fringe' voices. You know those voices. Fringe voices that call for universal health care--that's socialism by the way. They gerrymander districts to place the balance of power between the two parties into predictable cycles of election, incumbent challenges, reelection, and a steady replacement of unpopular candidates with future unpopular candidates. Each one is equally groomed to play to their monied handlers. The level of distrust and distaste for politics is also orchestrated. If you still believe that government is the problem you will work against it without realizing that in a democracy you are the government. You. The anxieties that we feel and the retreat to God and guns is driven by this total lack of accountability which signals a lack of control in the politics of the day. Of course we also have the dying media to grant culpability as well.

I am sick of the same tropes, the same sacred cows, the same demagogues, the same jobs, the same pay, the same fears, the same diversions. I can only disconnect myself so much from the media apparatus. But here I am listening to public radio all day long. I absorb it. I am unsure why I do. It informs my political cantankerousness.

On that note, I will continue listening to the radio. I will continue to teach my class. And I will continue to scrape by.

Lady Gaga in 15 words or less

From An AVclub article about the artist Lady Gaga:

a combination of spoiled arrogance masquerading as simplistic empowerment messages and tediously self-aware “outrageousness”

Call me out of touch with today's youth pop culture, but that pretty much sizes her up.

What happened?

I've lost track of my creativity. I've not done much to contribute to this diary of writing. I suppose that the majority of my writing was driven by alcohol-induced fugue states, depression, or some mental condition in between.

Now, now I have other things on my mind. If I'm not doing some kind of work, thinking about some kind of work, or planning to do some kind of work then I'm just plain busy. It's not the good kind of busy it's just busy for busy's sake. I get involved in gaming just to fill time and to get my mind into that set that occurs when you're obsessive and absorbed. That's what I do. On the weekend I go on date. I spend my money on those dates. In fact what I'm doing is trying to do things right: paying for everything, opening the doors, and being polite. I'm unsure what that really means or if it's important. I suppose it makes an impact. My date treats me quite well. She's a bit older than me, but that's nothing to really remark about. She's pretty, enough said.

So, now that I'm not so interested in getting blitzed off my ass and awaking still drunk to scribble my thoughts I'm not scribbling my thoughts. Could this writing have been merely a transient condition of one's mental abnormality whether chemically induced or over-reflection?

Change is good. I'll maintain my reflection as needed here. I do have a concern not to skip a month. I almost did that. It's been over a month here. That aside. I'll focus on change and try to document it here.

Prisoner of Consciousness

I am a prisoner of consciousness. I think too much. I think myself into a shame-filled bubble of remorse and self-loathing.

I am a prisoner of consciousness. I am too self-aware, all too painfully self-aware. If ignorance is bliss, then awareness is a prison. It's a prison of my own making, and so far I can loose the latch to my gate only when I'm on some alcohol bender. And even that's not a guarantee that I'll be free if only for a minute.

I am a prisoner of consciousness. The rub is that it's a prison of my own making, and in truth I made nothing. I am a prisoner on the envelope of neuronal activity. I'm cresting a wave of brain electricity, but it's persistent stormy cloud of neuronal awareness that is particular to my situation.

I am a prisoner of consciousness. I fight demons that are already impaled on my knife's point. You can't wound a wound. You can't cut a cut. You can remove the life from something that never existed.

I'm a prisoner of consciousness. It's a grammatical prison. It begins with the frame--prisoner. It situates this in an activity--thinking. And it seals the deal with the subjective affirmation--I am.

I am not a prisoner of consciousness, and I know why the caged bird sings. The mind is a prison. The thinking substance cannot transcend the thing which it is. The prison is just one manifestation of the thinking substance coming into self awareness. Self-awareness is the prison, the condition for self-discipline. It's time to go back to counting tiles, anything to take my mind of my situation.

"Fake love to me."

My friend Thomas shares a birthday with me. His is the day before mine. So we shared the celebration together this year. Since we celebrated on his birthdate, he called the shots and we went where he decided. He invited the group, and we all moved together across the city.

Among the crowd of friends was a woman that he used to date. I made a few overtures at her that night. And we danced. I was blacked out for some of this, but I do remember with vivid clarity the end of the night. She drove me home from the bar.

Except we didn't go home.

We drove across the river into Fairmount City and ended up at the Cahokia Mounds historic site. The ride was quiet. No one said a word. I had this creeping suspicion that she wanted me to have sex with her there. I grew anxious, not in anticipation of the event but fearing the inevitable problem--my fear and my impotence and my fear of my impotence.

When we arrived she ducked into some weeds to take a leak. I wandered around in the dark for a minute at the base of Monk's mound--the largest earthen structure on the complex and the largest earthen mound structure in the world. We began the trek up to the top. Upon arriving at the top I found a place to take a leak and we found a bench. Immediately she pulled her pants and underwear down to her ankles and laid on the concrete bench set at the plateau of Monk's Mound. Following through, I pulled my pants down. Knowing what would come of the situation I made the best of it. I went down on her. After a few minutes she faked an orgasm and she encouraged me to cum on her tits. Frozen in fear but mechanically performing what I could do intimately I felt nothing. I did what I could.

We pulled our pants up and walked back down the mound to the car. I briefly explained that I never can get an erection the first time. It's a truth, but in it is a lie. Sometimes, I cannot get hard the second time, or the third time. Encountering an issue I didn't know existed until I first encountered it I was able to overcome it in subsequent encounters. But, since then, the problem has been compounded by my own thinking.

She said something briefly to me on the ride back to St. Louis. She coached me on getting over that fear. The conversation ended. I asked her for her phone number. Instead of saying "no," she told me that she had a boyfriend.

"I understand," I replied.

I did actually. This was a throw-away evening. I was just the lucky recipient of a coincidence of factors--a sexually frustrated woman attending a birthday celebration for her former lover in the midst of his new love interest. She was happy to find a measure of retaliation in me, so she let me flirt and dance with her. She took me to the mound not out of love or interest but out of a need to conclude the evening and to conclude the play of forces between her and her ex.

We arrived at Thomas' house where I parked my car. I noted that he wasn't home yet. I noticed that my phone was dead, and so were my chances at getting her number anyway. But that night is seared in memory and serves as a painful reminder of something that I've yet to enjoy--meaningless, momentary sex with acquaintances.

Liz said as much to me after enjoying this with a fellow Peace Corpse volunteer. I could read the frustration in her story. After all I did one morning to please her I couldn't do that one thing to please her--put my erect penis inside her and eventually cum.

My lack of an erection is wish fulfillment. I intend to be a disappointment, not only to me but to others. My current employment status has a bittersweet component to it that I sip like a fine scotch. Emotional pain is my vice, and so I bathe in it every chance I get. I overthink situations anyway, and so I end up feeling alienated from the scene as it plays out before me. At times, when I'm very close to a woman I become so distant. I want to hide, and so I retreat to the darkest and inner most recesses of myself. I become virtually unresponsive physically, emotionally, and mentally. I enter a state of catatonia.

So here's to Liz and to Eleanor: "Fake love to me." That's all you're ever going to get from me.

facebook

Facebook commodifies weak social ties.

"Hi, you're in my biology lab. What are you doing Friday?"

College does one of those interesting things that only modern institutions do. It brings together a great number of men and women in their prime. Walking the halls and grounds of a university in between classes is a cavalcade of beauty and opportunity. One can suspect that each face has a future, a potential financial success.

Before was the city, a convergence point of people from far and wide. It was a measure of the degraded institutions of family and community that would have placed strictures on intimate contact.

"Hi, you work at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Are you going to the dance Friday?"

Then came modern travel: the steamboat and the steam engine became a recursive social algorithm for those weak social ties.

"Hi, I saw you on the westbound 4:19. Seeing anyone?"

Something intoxicating occurs when I go to a hotel. There among the halls I sense an opportunity to meet and have completely meaningless encounters with others. The freedom from significance is all that I seek. And removed from the strictures of social ties I can be a nobody, a perfect nobody.

Freed from my social body I shed the social anxieties and pathologies of self, which they have created and which become the behavioral automata that I self-medicate in order to mitigate.

Facebook is merely a communication appliance that extends this weak tie. I use something as simple as Google to seek out the names of those missed opportunities. It's a wishing well for the information age. Carving one's name on a tree along an oft-traversed path is the graffiti of one's discontent.