Media outlook

I have decided that if I should have the audacity one day to write for a recognized publication, I should build up to it and prove myself capable of the job. To do so, among other tasks that I ask of myself everyday, I have decided that, instead of letting the articles of this blog write themselves whenever the feeling passes, I shall push myself to write... let's say one article a week to start with. It should be a worthy article of course, not a little paragraph stating that paradoxes are running amok and it is hard to handle them all at once. It could be just a long rambling on different thoughts intertwined sometimes.One theme is always preferable, so depth is worked on in it accordingly. The subject might be wide, and only one matter within that subject should be studied, and compared to similar processes. Well, in the chaotic manner that I process things. And if, in any case, I cannot come up with an idea worth writing about, I will take some piece of news that I want to explore.

News are not what they are. The “news” is one of the important

institutions building the groups within our society. News do not
represent information about a recent event concerning its audience.

If news were to such a thing, we would over-value our emotional exhibitionism in social networks. A facebook status represents recent news that could inform me of an event concerning me and my environment. The power disputes in Ivory Coast are sources of interest, but not information. They are useful if you know or meet someone from the region  but the media does not inform you of the ethnic conflict behind the election. Yet we watch it.

Well, I say we. We all watch different news, we watch the news which will be most useful for us in a group, and to build our identity.

If we want to play the cynic and say that politics are rotten, we do not have to read news. If we want to play the man of the world who is aware of the different games played on the world stage, you would read all the political and economic magazines but snob the sports or Hollywood star-system. Academics would read Science or Nature and consider them to be very influential, when a majority of the population has never turned a page of such magazines.   In the diversity of print media we find a diversity of social groups trying to accumulate knowledge-at-hand which can be used to have a better handle of a script in social interactions. It is a form of domination to have more information. Of course it is also a sign of stupidity and possible rejection to show pride in knowing things that we don't know to be false. News are a constant filter used and abused, unconsciously, by society to create a sense of in-group/out-group.

  So every newspaper will present a different discourse for their public. It will also frame the world of the audience to dictate who is good or bad. We don't understand yet to what extend our opinion is build by the information we get. What is obviously and undeniably important in the news that form our world is the selection of the news by the selected medium. Why is the front page the front page? We all have been scandalized sometimes to see on the first page some prince or singer when hundreds have been killed on page 6. Which shows maybe my bias: should it be more important to feel for the damned of the world rather than enjoy the beautiful mediatic theater of fake break-ups between beautiful people?

News, if transformed into a subjective process of acquiring knowledge of recent information (the irony of recent information are archeology news feeds), should probably not be a mass media. The defense for mass media
is, that it levels the field for everybody. Everybody knows as much, and
 it would be a tiny bit totalitarian to forbid any other source of knowledge so there can be no contention. Mass media does not, as stated before, change our opinion, but changes the themes of discussion. That is why changing completely an education system could not be news. It does not require novelty, it cannot bring novelty. It could only present in depth views on the different alternatives. It would be news for everybody, but always on one theme, which does not bring the novelty which sells so well. Of course it is important for democracy to have informed citizens. But the real foundation of society is the engagement of citizens. I am not sure how to resolve that problem. How can we bring political awareness to
everybody? It is impossible to be politically aware at all levels of
all the changes and the possibilities for change. People should perceive some moral duty to find a societal theme, find facts to build a good argumentation that they could then argue between themselves. Of course, facts can never be presented, whatever the medium, in a cold unbiased manner. Hence it is important to also have a multiplicity of point of views on every theme, however hard it would be for us to listen to (when was the last time you've heard the difficulties some harmless paedophiles find dealing with their deviancy?). Well, here is my first article of my now new weekly articles. I hope that it brought up more questions than answers and you enjoyed the reading.

How did we kill the dream ?

                              Current affairs through different perspectives helps me make sense of why the world is what it is. You have circumstances, ideologies and their momentum, and the need for status quo. The need for status quo is what kills the future. What makes change impossible is our need to keep our world as it is. A few month ago, late december, a man desperate called Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself because he was so frustrate about the regime under he which he lived. Tunisia was ruled by one man and his clique and nobody thought it could change. This man was desperate and showed the whole world what desperation lead to. The population of Tunisia understood him, they got touched by him. It was beyond a political preparation, it was beyond a political will.
 
And so the revolt started.  Inspired by this revolt, already inspired by the sacrifice of one man, the Egyptians followed. The Egyptian were even more important as they all found themselves in different cities, put their religious difference aside (something that was problematic in the months in before) and go on a general strike. Supporters of the Mubarak, the leader of that country, did try to get into a fight, the police did attack them, but they resisted. Their courage inspired, just like they were themselves inspired by the Tunisian.

The domino had started in the regions: Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Gaza and finally Libya. In all these countries with horrible conditions, the people thought it was time for a change. A fearful change, a change that would change our perception of these Muslim. Muslim are not democrats in our imaginary. How could they rebel for something like democracy when we so carefully managed to make them our own private devils?

   It has to be noted that in Europe, with the help of big media corporations who manage to distort the language of politics to a language of managers, the right wing started stripping out rights difficultly gained and we thought about protesting. It took us time to decide and it is still possible, but there is a need to be comforted, a need for our habit to go undisturbed, we need the status quo.   Luckily, we were not the only one to need a status quo. The Arab League is a club of rich dictators representing a bit part of the Muslim world. They did not like to see the people rising against some of their members. Since September 11, the Arab world had a good other in the American, someone they could blame for their problems, just like we blamed the Muslims who can't integrate as we make things harder for them. They needed the old  world we new, they didn't want the uncertainty, especially since most of them did used violence to bring down the beginning of revolts.

The solution was simple, though the consequences not well thought off. The Arab League went to the United Nations and sacrificed one of them. Colonel Kadafi of Libya was the perfect scapegoat. He had oil, that would insure that whoever would go to war with him could expect a revenue at some point. He was crazy, so he couldn't be morally defended. So a resolution passed at the United Nations to protect the people who wanted change their fate, something honourable if we do not count the consequences.

  The European leaders in need of a diversion and the American leader needing at that time to appear strong jumped on the occasion when the Arab Leaders sat back and shut their own revolt down. Everything is back to normal. The people of the regions have lost their precedent stating that they could with perseverance change their fate. More than that, they went back to hate we Westerners who can't stop taking a moral stand because it makes us feel superior. We on the other hand do not worry about the laws passing by because the war is our interest. Everything back to normal and we lost the dream of change.

blog 1

Everybody is a writer, everybody is a thinker. Well, people express themselves in different ways and most people do not dare to do so. I know I lack the corońes to express everything on my mind. I sincerely do not know where to start and how to start. I do not even think a confession to a priest would be what I need. Is repressing all my feelings, all my thoughts, all my desires, all my hatreds, everything I despise what builds me and the way I think? Or is there nothing in me and everything I repress is actually the stuff that is worthy to come out and the only thing I should work on is the form in which it is going to come out? 

I do not know where I stand. The real trauma of life is trying to understand that everybody else is also the centre of the universe. It is to see that everybody finds their ways to deal with life. No one knows how to deal with life so we all invent excuses. We legitimize the way we think in a way we think is reasonable and what we do not want to accept is that reason has no grounds to stand on. Reasons is just the universal lie to deal with life. The only frustrating thing is that the most popular the reason, the bigger the lie.

The French existentialists did try to share the idea that life is what you make of it, so deal with that freedom. Nietzsche held a more or less equivalent speech though he did not have much balls most of his life to act on his impulse, to run and get the girl he wanted, and the one time he got to act as he wanted people got surprised by the inconsistency of his behaviour and locked him up. Why do we freeze in front of the unexpected? We are all pussies. And we gang up on the cocks to drown them. But the cocks are to be admired! The real cocks, not the wanna-be cocks who dress in a fashionable ways for their bohemian ways.

Deal with the impossible should be our life motto. But there are so many me's. I suffer from my humanity and strive to accepted as well...I know that so many facets of my life would displease one or the other person. Where does this fear of rejection comes from? Are we only confronting ids and superegos? Are they one and the same? Should I really care? Should we really care? I find that not so many people care. Not many people realize that news are the same, wither it is about politics, economics or film stars, it is all some form of entertainment which will never change us until each of us try to make a single analysis, a real point of view on the questions. Knowing facts amounts to nothing except for our scientific mind. And for our scientific mind, everybody wants to be an expert. What about the real strive for universal knowledge where everything is interrelated as it is in reality?

I do not know where to put myself. I feel like a chameleon sometimes, having the knowledge at hand to perform a social interaction as expected. My mother taught me that it was an essential skill. She actually taught me that creating the improbable was a blasphemy. And I do, most of the times when I am with her, suffer from that repression. I do repress myself normally and my hypotheses is that everybody do. Could it be that it is only the 2^nd siblings that do? I am not sure. As I said, the first trauma is the misunderstanding that the centre of the universe is relative. My second trauma was my position in my family. It is normal to be a younger brother and an older brother at the same time. Is it supposed to be? There are so many researches on 2^nd siblings that the trauma gets wider.

Anyway, I rarely blog ( as put a purely personal segment of my frame of mind at a given space-time) but felt like it. I am writing at the moment a short history of the world where I am trying to understand what holds a society together and what are the processes of change. Synchronic/Diachronic;Wave/Particle- one of the real problems of contemporary philosophy alongside the existence of the fourth dimension (a dot lives on a page, how can he ever notice us?)

a first draft to a beginning of a theory of everything

Here is the outline of a phenomenology of the world as we know it. It is based on different esoteric sources, acclaimed or ignore by our history, from the Bible to Zizek, only understood by the initiated and the learned. I will try to write a vulgarised version of the world we see. I will take 7 basic principles, as 7 has historically been one of this number easily remembered, a number reaching the sky but still balancing on earth, before the fall into eternity. 

The first principle is the one of the verb, the one that settles this long long philosophical dialectic, probably the first one : all is mind. It is a very solipsistic approach, one that denies maybe the existence of others, therefore unsympathetic. But it is one of the truth maybe of our specie, we grew out of empathy. I am not stating that I am not in favour of the consideration of the other, but it is not in our essence any more.

The second principle is the power of the verb to hide the lack of subject. There is nothing if we don't put a name to it. The tree in the forest does make a sounds when he falls is true when I state it. It isn't true if I'm there and I am incapable of naming anything, but I am just an observer that doesn't externalize whatever can be externalize with words and meaning. A sign hides the lack of sign, language is both our power and our lie. There is no “I” whenever I do something, but only when I instantaneously look back to create this “I”. The micro-second based between the past and the future is this lack.

The third principle is that everything is changing, as language is changing, as meaning add to each other, everything moves and will move and multiply as everybody share their verbs and their meaning of the world to transform everything constantly.

The fourth principle is that opposite meets over and are just the opposite side of a Möbius band trying to reach the lack, the unreachable emptiness. For example, sex and death are opposite only in our mind, as they are only both sides of the spectrum that is life, which doesn't exist without either.

The fifth principle is that everything has a rhythm, a frequency, a wave. Historical dialectic exist in our lives, where we first want to live the life now with others, and other times we want to reach the heavens by our own self-development. Humanity will fill part of him-self at some point, to fall back onto a localistic mind. The faith in the “economy” will be more powerful than the politic to then see the politic be more powerful than the faith in the “economy”.

The sixth principle is the gender bias of every action. We are sexualized by our condition so we observe every actions from a gender perspective. This does not mean that men see the world in one way and women in another – but simply that there is always two way to see an action : pushing and pulling, constructing and destroying, leaving coming...

The seventh principle is the empowerment of causality. Everything in our mind has consequences. Emancipation is just the knowledge of all the rules we created in our mind. Once ourself mastered, we understand the relativity of regulation to change the rhythm of everything we see unfolding under our eyes. Pushing one way the balance to have a reaction, extending the space of emptiness to create complexity on a spectrum or closing it to create tension.

But empowerment is nothing, it is just a word put over the nothingness of life. Anything is worth being done, for the sake of being done. Jeecee, Fat B'dda, lil Epictetus all found these truths before me. It is just that since Bearded Marx came in, he changes the balance for a while, and it is good thing as wisdom was disappearing under the verbs of uncontrollable institutional vehicles. We just need to find truth in ourself. Just do not tell too many people I am spiritual ( for god sake I am not – only for mine). It is just useful principles to understand why the rest is complicated and senseless...

Ode to the Jungle of the Virtual

Science-Fiction must be my favourite genre in literature. Science-Fiction has suffured for a long time, and still does, from a stigma. This stigma has origins somewhere, and I will try to think of a few hypothesis for it in this personal essay. I will also try to explain and outline different argument for my liking for this genre. This doesn't sound much like a personal essay, but it is because I write in parallel a book review for uni, so I am a bit lock in an academic frame of mind. But we are living in a future world where academic frame of mind is annihilated by itself. Thanks mainly to French thinkers, we know that everything that is done by pretending to know better has no justification but the one it gives itself. Observing this self-reference mechanism destroy the power held in such discourses. So I might sound like an academic, but I know and should let you know that it is idiotic.

Academic discourses are scientists lying to themselves not admitting that objectivities can be reach only be reached by shared honest subjectivities. As such, every truth we want to share, we have to do it in our own language, and not in an adopted one. It is in a ideal situation then that these shared subjectivities can be transformed in objectivities – theories on how the word is truthfully, knowing the truth exist and doesn't exist. This is more or less where epistemology is at, or should at least be, nowadays. This paradoxic state of collecting knowledge we are now was outline by Lyotard. No more meta-narratives, no more generalized way to see the world, a lot of ways of observing are good, even better, in knowing that they hold some truth when one single way to observe/tell the truth serves only to blind ourselves from other ways to understand our world.

Another similar way to see where we are in our observation of the world is by adopting Baudrillard dark lense. In his view, because all truth are appreciated, reality doesn't exist anymore. But has it ever existed ? Hasn't it been 5000 thousand years that we have transformed reality through constantly changing meaning ? Of course, Baudrillard is scared of the accelerating way through which objects have different meanings, the fight over meanings become more important ergo the real object is forgotten. Look at Christmas: who knows what it is about ? Anyway, for Baudrillard, everything loose its meaning by being too meaningful and paradoxic. But reality has always changed meaning. For Baudrillard, looking back is now reconstructing a false past and imagining the future is building a false present – the present then not existing anymore. But the present has never existed, has it ?

So what is left for us ? Well to tell each other how our life is, how we want our life to be, how we see our world, how we would want our life to be and more importantly how it could be. Wouldn't it be only an exercise in dreaming utopia that could never exist ? Yes and no. It is an exercise in dreaming utopia, but it is also an exercise in creating future societies. Projecting is the first step towards creating. That is when science-fiction come into play. Science-fiction displays possible and impossible future. The chances for the possible world to happen are objectively unknown to us. We can say that as science is today, we can't recreate a science-fiction world. Of course that is not entirely true, has science has reached today far more than what Jules Verne could imagine a century ago. Science sometimes come to bit science-fiction, but to do so, it needs to know what challenge science-fiction offers.

That is a good point for Science-Fiction, which does here as much as environmentalists and economists at predicting possible future. Of course, environmentalists and economists do not pretend to look so far into the future, but science fiction never pretended to make the future so quickly. We have reduced the size of the world in our mind with the internet. Information is the same everywhere at the same time. 3D printers helps neurology-surgeons operates. Tactile screens helps us communicate kinetically with computers. We can operate moving vehicles with chips in our head. We can produce energy unseen in our solar system in more than a million years. Robots are walking and hopefully artificial intelligence will be self-learning.

But how did we come up with these technological inventions ? By inventing, imagining, observing and changing reality. None of our forms of knowledge are not the source of imagination. Of course, imagination was the source but not the end product. The end product was constructed by making the imagination participate with reality. Ideas and imaginations are more and more conflicting in some fields of thoughts, but that make more realities possible.

The stigma of science-fiction might be held then in a strictly pseudo-materialist perspective. Enlightenment was afflicted by this burden this view: the world is full of pseudo-mysteries. Mysteries since only exists as unresolved natural fact that can be explained through in depth empirical research. Therefore, creating mysteries is deemed useless. The only mysteries we thought we had to work on were the one observable in reality. What was the point of talking about dark-matter before it could be observed? The concept though came before reality. Same thing for robots or pretty much anything discovered/invented in the 20^th century. The imagined uselessness of science-fiction came from the blind we have put on our eyes when we thought that it is entertainment – when we don't understand its potential as a tool.

That is where virtual reality is one of the future tools for humanity to discover itself and its possibilities. Virtual realities are not yet what they could be. Google Maps gives us a virtual representation of our world. Wikipedia is a virtual space of shared knowledge. Facebook provides us with a tool to virtualize ourself as we want to be. Games provide us with virtual active entertainment. We are still too passive in virtual worlds, but the internet provided us with examples of a shared virtual realities where we do act. The virtual worlds also hold us with the promise that none of it is real. Consequences and responsibilities disappear in a lot of virtual world – and inconsequential virtual worlds could exist and there, we could do anything we want. It would provide a mirror to our life. We could understand why we do the things we do in the real world. Give our life a new meaning when we understand how our past formed what we are, and paradoxically liberated by this understanding, and the future becomes something to work on and not something we are afraid to be judged on.

The fear that exist nowadays linked to hyper-realities and virtual worlds is because we do live in a real world. But the real world is viewed through our mind. And our mind is not real anymore. We are dependent on symbolic representation of the world. Languages are the best examples of how our world is only symbolically representative to us. Even if, in a face to face interactions, there is more communicated than words but we are learning to control natural communication and to transform it into a symbols. Facial expression are natural reactions to emotions, but poker players are training to control them and read them. So the real has started to disappear a long time ago, to give our mind more power. Acknowledging this power of our mind and working on it, through worlds we can create and live, might prepare us to the next evolutions of humanity. Virtual worlds in cyberspace ( and cyberspace is only an infinite virtual playground) are a lot of time shared, and as such are tools for this shared project that is our future.

Artistic Tergiversation

The first academy was created by Plato. It was the name given to his school as a means to separate it from his Master's ( Socrates) lyceum. Nowadays different academies have been recreated. I won't talk about English academies, which are just semi-private schools. I will talk about art academies and French academies. They are not open to anyone. The entry selection relates them to Plato more than to Socrates. There is this elite position of being able to judge someone's artistic qualities.

This simple initial process prevents changes. There is this totalitarian ideal in Plato's republic, where a Philosopher-King knows better than anyone else. Now, if someone is chosen by this Philosopher-King, it is an honour that when once accepted and legitimized the King's position. No one thinks they don't deserve some honour, some recognition.

But we find at academies different people arguing about different positions. This idea of different people joined to discuss each other's art is an ideal to work on. Reflection behind art provides it with the force for change and a quality going beyond aesthetic.

In the world of ideas though, some are more consistent than others. The extent to which consistency provides quality goes only as far as if the ideas need to be put in practice.

So what is this force beyond aesthetics and consistency ? It is an impossible possibility mirroring our world. A yardstick amongst many helping us to compare our world. It is the force of the virtual, an ideal freedom which can't exist in a secular world.

Would Plato appreciate this idea ? Probably not, as for him, ideas have a hierarchy and are only important if expressed clearly. He had no patience for poets.

Couldn't a beautiful place of art be a Socratic lyceum where only questions are asked, without judgement, just because questions hold more answers than an affirmation? Socrates asked anybody and everybody his questions. If we'd ask everybody to create, wouldn't we offer a tool for every individual's self-development and confidence in the hidden power of art?

For a century now, we have given the tool to read and write to everybody. We are slowly coming to understand that no language is more powerful than another. There are some skills involved in communicating with art, but like anything, practice is the only secret for results.

Shame is probably a symbolically violent tool of the elite to prevent an egalitarian approach to art. Who doesn't think that they are crap at what they try a first time, and therefore doesn't have the courage to persevere, to offer the world what they have imagined ?

Down with shame! If it is balanced by lucidity and sincerity with one-self. Imagine a possibility, an alternative, an original idea, take the tool of your choice (if you don't know your tool, find it, it is the one you love) and practice at representing that idea so you can offer it to humanity exactly as you've imagined it.

In our world now, we have to admit it is great to be part of a collective beautiful and powerful project to produce an unreal. There are some factions who want to have some supremacy, but history has proven elitists wrong, constantly. The only person who can account for the question of the quality of a given piece of art is the artist him-self. Ideas are not attached to reality, can be but are not, and are therefore all worthy of being explored through different lenses and presented as a goal to extend our limitless minds.

Nothing is bad doesn't mean nothing is good in art, only that it is all good.

Afghanistan is the new Ibiza: Everyone comes back fucked up or legless.

On negation of reality through comedy and freedom after a night out. 

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