Why raise the question then? Because it gives context to a query I’ve had for some time: to what extent does technology belong only to the economic system that created it? Basically, I want to know what we can take with us. If this ship is sinking, what can we use to construct our lifeboat? Allow me to tip my entire hand: I want to know to what extent social media is a capitalist instrument. What role, if any, can it play in a brighter, better future?

Few would dispute that capitalism uses social media to produce value. But are Facebook and Twitter always and forever instruments of alienation and exploitation? Rob Horning, over at The New Inquiry (a fantastic blog, btw), seems to think so. Here’s a snippet of his Marxian critique: “Our Facebook updates don’t allow us to express ourselves so much as allow consumerism to express itself through us while we provide the labor that sustains it as a communication system.” Point taken–and there’s a lot more to his argument by the way–but what about the role that social media has played in providing first-hand news during the Arab Spring? What about the way that Twitter told the story of OWS movements around the U.S., before mainstream news sources jumped on the bandwagon? This too belongs to consumerism, as a news source, but doesn’t it also have emancipatory dimensions?

We could at least invoke Michel de Certeau and say that while corporations may have strategic control over social media platforms, consumers have tactical control.  Those who use Twitter and Facebook can use social media in surprising and even emancipatory ways. Yet the deeper question remains–is there something inherently capitalist about social media (other than the fact that it emerged in a capitalist society)?

In Capital, when Marx critiques the machinery of large-scale industry he contends that large-scale industry converts “the worker into a living appendage of the machine” (614). [OMG you guys, are those human bodies feeding the illusion of the matrix!?] In Marx’s day the human-appendage phenomenon would have been easier to see. The machines belonged to the industrial revolution. They were visibly made for a specific mode of production, a specific division of labor. Can you imagine using the power loom in a system devoid of an antagonism between capital and labor?

But we can’t think social media in the same way we think a power loom. Horning doesn’t. To get at the “work” done in social media, he marshals Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor, which “seeks to involve the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value.” By his lights, capital dictates and exploits our virtual ego-maintenance. [And I thought my pictures of macchiatos and updates about my son made the world a better place!] Again, while I do see social media working this way, I don’t think this represents the entire story. Social media poses a challenge to both capitalism and communism because it functions neither as private property nor as a true commons. Twitter owns the site, but who owns a private tweet? Many people can see my Facebook page, but only I can change it. Is it public space?

I suspicion then that social media belongs to a class of technology which has outpaced current economic forms and ideologies. In a letter to Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan writes, “If one says that any new technology creates a new environment, that is better than saying the medium is the message. The content of the new environment is always the old one. The content is greatly transformed by the new technology.” Doesn’t social media function thus? Social media has created a new environment.  What is the content of social media? To a large extent, it is the “private” lives of individuals, the humdrum rhythm of the personal, displayed in streams flowing down screens. My life is now, at least partly, enveloped by the environment of social media. The question then becomes, how has this changed the way that I live? How has it changed the way you live?

I don’t want to jump to an answer here. Why raise the question? Because it can give context to my initial queries about OWS. Perhaps we should not ask Occupy Wall Street to create an alternative system solely from the wreckage of the old. Perhaps we should view its first task  as catching up with where we already are. How do we build a system that makes sense of our current realities? In any case, I still don’t think this begins with a list of demands. What say you?

I noticed the plateau effect first in Black Up, the Shabbaz Palaces record. Many of the tracks find Lazaro rapping over hodgepodge–buzzes, clicks, off-kilter beats, chopped loops, sounds that belong more to post-dubstep than to mainstream hip hop. It is Lazaro’s flow that gives the tracks coherence. The pieces depend on his rhymes to make sense of otherwise unsteady alliance of sounds. [See especially A Treatise Dedicated . . . and Yeah You].

However, my thoughts on the plateau effect didn’t fully coalesce until I heard Radiohead’s NPR interview on The King of Limbs. When they started making KOL, the band spent five weeks experimenting with loop-creation using a new software. According to Yorke, they ended up producing tracks that were more “sounds and layers flying at each other, like a collage,” than structured songs. Yet Yorke says that the moment he recorded his vocals, the tracks made sense; that he unleashed latent melodies with his singing. You can hear this phenomenon so well on Bloom, the first track of the album. Yorke doesn’t come in for a whole minute. But when he does, you move from listening to a collection of sounds, to hearing a song.

For me, a song produces the plateau effect with these three elements: 1. an unstable alliance of sounds–you are not even sure if they “go” together 2. an element that lends coherence to the track, but which comes in after the song has begun (Lazaro’s flow, Yorke’s singing) 3. a continuing sense of the precariousness of this assemblage. So for the third point, we still hear the hodgepodge of sounds underneath Yorke’s vocals, and thus remain aware that the song is built of elements that sound like they might at any point just go their own separate ways.

The name “plateau effect” is loosely inspired by philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of a plateau, “an intensive continuity” composed of “very heterogeneous elements” (cf Two Regimes of Madness, pp. 176 – 179). The plateau effect draws attention to the fact that the elements (sounds) that make up a specific intensive continuity (song) are “very heterogeneous” (don’t obviously belong together). At the same time, the plateau effect also highlights (via the vocals) the unity of the “plateau,” and the fact that we have a tendency to see things as units versus assemblages.

The plateau effect is unsettling. Its reliance on an unsteady combination of sounds reminds me that objects–in this case, songs–are composite, and that the composition is unsteady, temporary. Alliances can be dissolved; objects can pass away. Recognizing the plateau effect in a piece of music is like recognizing that I have trillions of microorganisms in my gut that help me digest my food. My body is an assemblage and my consciousness is an element that represents my body to me as coherent, unified. This is not to say that I do not possess a unified body apart from consciousness! The analogy just helps to highlight that uncanny moment where we come into contact with the fragile interpenetrations that make up objects. It is also the uncanny moment where we sense what is alien within the familiar, that which is in some way “in but not of” (like the microorganism in my intestines, or the blip that helps make the song what it is, but still does not quite fit).

But the plateau effect does more than highlight an object’s fragility and strangeness. It also exposes the power of those elements that obfuscate the fragile (and composite) nature of objects, elements like a sung melody, an author, or a logo. We often mistake these elements for the essences or foundations of an object or assemblage, when in fact they are either emergent properties, single elements among many, or fictions posited after an object’s composition. After you listen to Bloom once, you cannot help but hear the melody even before it comes in, as if it was always already there. Subconsciously you might even begin to smooth over the uncanniness in the music, to consider the song itself as smooth, homogeneous, a nice scoop of vanilla ice-cream.

Stay tuned for my Best Albums of 2011 List, which will present shining examples of the plateau effect in a neatly unified list. “Some you play, then move on, couldn’t find the notes/Some friends they groove on you and haunt you like a ghost/You can’t sleep/Always hear that beat/It flow back to mind, every time you breath” (Shabazz Palaces, The King’s New Clothes . . .).

More music and philosophy mash-ups:

• Animal Collective and The New Future
• Rapitalism Part 1, Part 2
• The Age of Adz and Dexter: Or Madness as the New Hermeneutic Part 1, Part 2
• Juana Molina, Sign, and Ecstatic Utterance

If you want to search only one kind of site (blogs, forums, etc):

• SEARCH inurl:blog, SEARCH inurl:site, SEARCH inurl:forum, etc
• Example, how to reach bloggers inurl:blog

If you want to search for sites that have each of the words in your search within the content of the page:

• allintext: SEARCH
• Example, allintext: guessing game creativity

If you want to limit results to a certain domain type (e.g. edu, com, gov), domain, or exclude a certain domain. I’ll just give examples of each, using the search, “google reader hack”:

• google reader hack site:edu
• google reader hack site:happymortal.com
• google reader hack -site:happymortal.com

These tricks should make your searches efficient and fruitful. Happy hunting!

For a fun google reader hack, check this reconstruct post.

“Why should I go on? I should let sexier, more seasoned experts have their way with this topic. Maybe I’ll get in the game after 10 more years, at least 5 of which will be spent abroad under the sadistic tutelage of a wildly-bearded guru . . .”

Then I remembered that I am writing about creativity. Then I remembered some sound advice from reconstruct: be an ouroboros. Write your book about creativity using the very ideas that you are writing about in your book. Genius. I am writing about using principles from improv theater as a vehicle to unleash your creativity. So, to ease myself out of the quagmire of self-pity, I thought of the best improv technique to use in guessing games (even though this probably won’t be in the book).

Guessing games involve one improviser who is kept in the dark about an audience suggestion–e.g. a crime they committed. During the game, the improviser tries to guess the crime she has committed, while other improvisers feed the guesser clues, all while acting out a specific scene (like an police interrogation).

A prime temptation for many guessers is to keep their guesses vague, so they don’t get it wrong. But this means that the other improvisers have no idea what the guesser is thinking, so they can’t adapt their clues to help the guesser discover the right answer. The more the guesser can make strong, specific offers, the greater the chance of success, because the other improvisers can adjust their hints to shepherd the guesser in the right direction. If I say, “I stabbed a mechanic with a turkey beak.” Then you can snarl, “Yes, but you did something that wasn’t quite so fowl too!” Now (hopefully) I know that I should drop the idea of birds and try again.

Application station! Let’s say that you are the guesser and life is made up of other improvisers trying to steer you in the right direction. It is our job to give the world strong, specific offers. The world’s job is to give us clues to let us know if we are headed in the right direction. In my case, the world was saying, “Hey check this book out. It will let you know if you need to adjust your topic slightly to an unexplored area.” Three implications of this mental model:

• Our environment is not static. We are part of a dynamic network. Creation is collaboration.
• We shouldn’t let fear of failure keep us from getting in the game. In fact, jumping in is the only chance we have of success.
• A blocked path is not always a cease and desist order. It is a nudge in a different direction, and an encouragement to keep going.

Happy creating . . . in the dining room with the candlestick . . .

If we sweep the New York heap of twisted metal, plastic, and bodies under the rug, then we make ourselves more vulnerable to further attack. When we say “never forget,” I assume it refers to learning from 9/11, so that we can protect ourselves from future terrorist acts. I also assume it means honoring the dead and the families of the those who died. Leaving an empty seat at the table, so to speak (cf the World Trade Center Memorial).

I find these common sense meanings take on fresh significance when we consider neurobiological research on human memory. Though we are far from understanding exactly how the brain retrieves memories, researchers have discovered that every time we “call up” a long term memory–every time we bring it into “working memory”–we adapt the memory based on our current state of mind, and that adapted memory is what gets stored again in long term memory. Simply put, humans do not have completely separate writing and recall functions.

Dr. Suzanne Corkin, professor of behavior science at MIT, puts it this way, “We believe that when you remember something it’s really an active process. You’re not tuning into a few cells in your brain where a particular memory is stored. What you’re really doing is creating a memory based on information that you have stored in many parts of your brain” (italics mine). This “created memory” gets created differently each time it is recalled. You add new info, fill in gaps with imagination, and color the memory with whatever emotions you are experiencing at the time. This must be why I can’t for the life of me recall what my picture of Harry Potter was before Daniel Radcliffe came into my life. This is why people misidentify their assailants in police line-ups.

What’s the point? Certainly not that we will distort the “facts” of 9/11 beyond recognition. After all, we got it on video. My point is that we should remember the nature of memory when we “never forget 9/11.” The neural activities associated with “never forget” have just as much (if not more) to do with what is happening in the present than what happened in the past. We are not merely changing our present and future by learning from the past, we are changing the past by calling it into the present.

The collective nature of 9/11 could mean that we have more reliable data from which to “never forget”–more testimonies, video, written studies, etc. Then again, the political and symbolic nature of 9/11 makes the act of recall subject to prevalent political, economic, and religious interests (this even includes the control and presentation of the data). What are the memories we are creating as we re-live the planes smashing into the towers a decade ago? What is our state’s “state of mind” as we recollect the images of people flinging themselves out of windows? In what ways are we, right now, shaping this tragic past event by re-articulating it in the present?

Never forget 9/11. Maybe it’s time to replace this static phrase with a question about the dynamics of the present. How are we remembering 9/11?

Google Reader has been one of my favorite tools for aggregating stuff for many reasons. I won’t list them all now, though I will point you to Close to Bliss which does have a nice little write up on the Google Reader Next Button.

The reason I’m writing this blog is that just today I had some trouble executing my favorite little trick. See, as much as I love hoovering, I don’t always have the 2.7 seconds it takes to do a search for the topics/people that I’m interested in.

What I started doing was subscribing to a Google Blog Search query as a feed. Just copy the URL from your query into the add a subscription box, and voila, you have your very own little RSS to a search query that delivers the most recent blogs (with your specified search term) to your reader. At least that worked until today. The URL used to look like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=zizek&ie=utf-8&output=atom

Trouble is, when I tried to add another search query this afternoon, the add a subscription wouldn’t recognize it.

The new search looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=blg&hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=zizek&btnG=Search

I despaired. Then I got desperate. Then I got clever.

All you need to do to subscribe to a search feed is take the first URL and replace the query term. So, let’s say you want to have blogs delivered to Google Reader that follow the search term “coffee”. Let’s see what that looks like.

First you copy the original URL. Then paste it in the add a subscription box. Then ever-so-carefully, you highlight the search term, in this case zizek. Finally, you replace that term with yours. The final would look like this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=coffee&ie=utf-8&output=atom

Zeitgeist Art and Coffee, 171 S Jackson St. Seattle, WA 98101.

Let’s start with the let down–the (drip) coffee. It’s basically weak diner coffee, and it’s the only option besides espresso drinks. Don’t order the coffee. Do order the espresso. It smells like burnt sugar and tastes like honey and tangy tobacco. Delectable. The latte landed right in the middle. Solid, but nothing to write home about. Zeitgeist also sells both its espresso and coffee beans by the pound, and has a menu of sandwiches, salads, and, of course, Top Pot hand-forged donuts. The baristas that served us were like the latte, right in the middle–friendly but not gregarious, knowledge-able but not geeks, skilled but not masters.

Read the rest of my review at cru magazine p. 29, 30.

In my first post on rapitalism I indicated that rappers rep capital because of their drive to earn money and spend it on commodities [bling, swag, etc]. However, as I have continued to read Capital, Marx hit me in the face with why this is wrong. Indulge me a dive into Capital to explain why, and then we will return to rap . . .

In part 7 of Capital Vol 1, Marx turns from the trope of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, to examining class relations. In doing so, he summarizes some key features of the individual capitalist, especially in his section on the theory of abstinence (a classical theory holding that the capitalist earned surplus value by abstaining from spending).

Here are the lines that showed me the error of the simple “make and spend money = capitalist drive” formula:

But, in so far as he [the capitalist] is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake (739).

In other words, the capitalist wants to accumulate more wealth, to increase surplus value. Spending money on personal enjoyment is antithetical to this impulse. Yet, as we would expect from any Hegelian bastard, antithesis is the name of the game. So, Marx goes a step further. . .

But original sin is at work everywhere. With the development of the capitalist mode of production, with the grown of accumulation and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be merely the incarnation of capital. He begins to feel a human warmth towards his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at his former enthusiasm for asceticism, as an old-fashioned miser’s prejudice (740).

So one of the contradictions of capital exists as an internalization of two conflicting drives within the individual capitalist. “At the same time, however, there develops in the breast of the capitalist a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment” (741).

Back to rap. The above clarification does not mean that rap doesn’t often promote capitalist lyrics. Rather, it gives us a more complete picture of the capitalist-drive-made-rhyme. What we would be looking for then is the expression of both the drive to amass more wealth and the drive to enjoy that wealth, and both of these within the context of a capitalist mode of production, where the capitalist gains surplus value on the backs of the working class.

In rap this constellation of themes most often appears in the context of drug dealing, sex trafficking, and/or the music industry. Examples . . .

• “Who the f*** you think you f****** with, I’m the f****** boss/Seven forty-five, white on white that’s f****** Ross/I’m in the distribution, I’m like Atlantic/I got them mother******s flyin’ ‘cross the Atlantic/I know Pablo, Noriega, the real Noriega/He owe me a hundred favors” (Rick Ross, Hustlin’). Rick Ross rapping about his rare car and his drug trafficking prowess.
• Here’s Lil Wayne spitting about his own jewelry and how he makes money as a pimp (totally gross and misogynistic) “And my chain Toucan Sam, that/Tropical Colors, you can’t match that/Gotta be abstract/You catch my girl, legs open/Better smash that/Don’t be surprised if she ask where the cash at” (Lil Wayne, Fireman).
• I got stock in your flow and crops to sharehold/Crops with the prose where cops won’t dare go/Got top centerfolds too hot to wear clothes” (Inspectah Deck, Back in the Game). A little braggadocio about business acumen and popularity with females (suggesting sensual enjoyment).

One thing I want to point out is that in all three of these examples it is implied that the rapper’s surplus capital is derived from labor, whether the labor of drug dealers, prostitutes, or other rappers. This element is key for making these lyrics uniquely capitalist.

Now, just because certain rap lyrics illustrate capitalist drives, does not mean that all rappers are part of the capitalist class, or that the capitalist class is monolithic. My point here is only to highlight a cultural phenomenon that creates a conflict within me. I love a lot of rap music. I loathe a lot of its themes. Thank goodness there is some rap out there that promotes positive and revolutionary content. Though, even here we find contradictions . . .

“We be reading Marx where I’m from/The kids be rocking Clarks, where I’m from” (Digable Planets, Where I’m From).

“Cash rules everything around me/Cream!/Get the money/Dolla dolla bill y’all” (Wu Tang Clan, C.R.E.A.M).

The naked celebration of money–and the drive to get money (hustlin’)–permeates mainstream rap. It’s long seemed to me that if capitalism had a soundtrack it would be rap music. This might offend some, and of course, we need a touch of nuance at the outset. I’m talking about one theme within a genre, and by no means does the theme “I’m rich/I get money” cover all rap. But there are many lyrical moments in rap where I feel like the voice of capital is spitting flow directly into my ear. As Marx puts it:

“As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value . . .” (Capital 342).

In rap, the “money theme” takes a distinctly capitalist tone, because it is not just about the accumulation of capital, but rather about capital’s circulation (most often by earning capital and then putting it back into the market through purchasing extravagant commodities). “Thinking beyond deeper than Ghandi/While I’m in the Diamante/Counting my G’s/I’m out to be a millionare/Dipped in gear/Flickin’ hundred dollar bills in the air/Oh yeah, Cuban Link is into getting benjamins/Cuz if it doesn’t make dollars/Then it doesn’t make sense” (Cuban Link, Glamour Life).

Often this “money theme” appears in rap in a “rags to riches” narrative that involves moving from poverty to crime to rap. “Blame Reagan for making me into a monster/Blame Oliver North and I ran contra/I ran contraband and they sponsored/Before this rhyme was stuck, we was in concert” (Jay-z, Blue Magic). This “worker-turned-criminal” becomes a member of the capitalist class by leaving crime (or not) and turning to hip hop music. After all, when your collar turns from blue to white, your crimes get whitewashed too.

Once the rapper has entered the capitalist class, s/he often has no problem becoming part of the establishment, usually the entertainment industry.  “What I’m doin?/Gettin’ money/What we doin?/Gettin’ money/What they doin’?/Hatin’ on us/But they never cross/Cash Money still a company/And B***h I’m the boss” (Lil Wayne and Birdman, Stuntin’ Like My Daddy).

Herein lies the most insidious side of rap’s money theme: it reinforces the current capitalist system (and its inequalities) by offering salvation through the system itself, saying, “I’m the biggest boss that you seen thus far” (Rick Ross, The Boss), and so implying that the listener might also find success, wealth, and meaning in climbing the capitalist ladder.

At the same time, rap is testament to the great creative force of capitalism. The fact that the simple theme “I’m rich/I get money” can be expressed in so many different ways, that it can continue to circulate in new permutations, shows how the circulation of capital demands the shattering of limits. But at what cost? “In this white man world/We the ones chosen/so goodnight cruel world/I see you in the morning’” (Kanye West, Power).

Let me start by saying that I don’t know. You might think that this lack of knowledge would disqualify me from pursuing this line of questioning, but you would be wrong. After all, I am a human being. Or, to say it another way, since I am the being in question, there is no one more qualified to ask.

This is the genius of Heidegger’s analytic. First, ontology can only ever really be the phenomenology of ontology. And second, Dasein is always and forever my own.

To put still another way, I am/you are/Dasein is the only one who can formulate the question concerning the nature of being.

So, I put it to you again–what is a human being?

The question of being is perhaps a silly question. Or maybe I just feel silly posing it. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the question is something I want to work towards, or circle around–or at least sit on for a while.

Depending on your -ology of choice (no pun intended), being functions quite differently. Is it an empty signifier? A collection of attributes? Is it fundamental laws of nature?

Traditional philosophy tried to save us from the impossibility of this question by positing a Real behind/beyond the real. Metaphysics.

Essentially, thinkers concerned themselves with the nature of stuff. The what. But what about the that? What about the fact that we exist? What is that?

Heidegger took it one step further, asking a terribly curious question: what is is? Believe it or not, this simple play on words changed everything. It was Nietzsche who proclaimed the end of metaphysics; but it was Heidegger, less than a century later, who brought it about with his silly double verbing. Silly or not, it seems that contemporary philosophy has not yet dealt with the end of metaphysics.

Contemporary thinkers have tended to return to classical ideas looking to erect a scaffolding of being somewhere exterior to the human in question. Badiou has taken up refuge in the analogy of set theory. Zizek in dialectical materialism. Baudrillard in the desert of the hyperreal. Brilliant as their thought is, I think that we have to come to it after we have dealt with Heidegger and his folly.

If we are to move forward, or circle, or sit on the question of being, it begins (as Heidegger suggests in Being and Time) with the one who is concerned with the question. Furthermore, taking into account the mine-ness of Dasien, the question of being belongs to you in the same way it belongs to me.

Putting it another way, the question of being qua being begins with the question of human being.

As we will be approaching this question–at least in part–through language, one caution. When we try to explain the existence of something, we “naturally” try to put it into words. There is a tendency then to confuse the rules of grammar with the way of being.

Ontology…really, all the -ologies have fractured our perception of the world in an effort suture names and patterns to our experience. And if it’s the wonder of experience (or the anxiety of it) that draws us to the question, we should be leery of approaches that break wonder into bits just for the sake of putting it into appropriate categories.

As I close I want to invite all of you to share some of the mine-ness of your being. Don’t bother getting too deep into the question. I’d love to hear your first thoughts and impressions on the question. The more nonsensical the better. I don’t have this all scripted out yet. It’s a little daunting to call this a first installment, or a series of blogs, but I suppose it’s something like that.

I leave you with a quote from Alan Watts:

“I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder…as soon as I open my mouth I find I’m talking nonsense…”