Failure Is Freedom

CS Peirce taught how semiotics related to ontology, or put more mystically, how our words become flesh. Peirce's semiotics can be related to the history of mysticism to show how his notion of "creative evolution," which he called "agapism," worked. In Part One of "How to Make the World New with Your Mouth," we'll try to fill in some of the background metaphysics necessary to follow Peirce's radica...

Peirce's notion of "Hypostatic Abstraction" was formulated to reflect the "Hypostatic Union" of the history of Christian theology. Both relational schemas reflect the necessary dependence that oneness has on multiplicity and that multiplicity has on oneness, which can also be formulated as the dependence of self on other(ness), or presence on absence. The immediate, given...

When Ron Hardy said that House Music was Disco’s revenge, this is what he meant:  Cosmic Stew   The voice of Q, Q : At the sound of the interplanetary voice of Q, you will be shot straight into hyperspace, which is strange because Michael Forte and Bruce Weeden wrote this for their “South Philly” record label as a novelty track response to the popularity of 1982’s E.T.   Magic Midnight, Beam Me Up...

Does AI dream? If dreams are just the unnecessary detritus of the day, then probably not since dreams then would serve no real purpose in information processing. However, if dreams are a kind of information processing, as some sleep researchers now claim, then they might be a useful mode of scenario rehearsal that AI could employ to reduce uncertainty as any prediction machine looking to maximize...

So Deep that It’s at an All Time Low   In Chicago in the 90’s, I learned about House Music from Derrick Carter. I had first heard House Music on WBMX, Oak Park like most Chicago area youth. My mind was blown in 1987 when I heard Armando Gallop play his song “Land of Confusion” on the radio. I felt strongly that the aliens had landed and that nothing would ever be the same. I already loved Chicago’...

If you ever wanted to know how the alchemical Nigredo sounds, here's your chance. This was mixed by hand, so beat matching isn't perfect and volume shifts may be a little rough because I have the same mixer as I used in the 90s, but hopefully it adds character, or something like that. I had to sign many incomprehensible contracts with the unseen realm to get noetic direction on track sel...

It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index...

Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror:  Pagan horror , such as Wicker Man , The Witch , and Midsommer , are the horror of the World-for-Us because pagan techne is for the instrumentalization of the world. In Pagan religious praxis the spiritual realm is studied to transact with according to the intentions of the practitioner. From the perspective of Demonology, which is how the Christian...

https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/ Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? “I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.” “When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about...

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated the shift from knowing being as it is in-itself, or as it is essentially, in the sense of without relation to a knower, to uncovering being as a process of relational interpretation, which might be thought of as the shift from the Husserlian "Eidetic" reduction to the Heideggerian "Hermeneutic Circle." Edmund Husserl hoped to disclose the things-in-the...

I moved back to Chicago after my undergraduate years in Southern Indiana at Indiana University, and my roommate and partner in all things philosophical Scott moved to Detroit where he discovered the Detroit warehouse party scene that I had been traveling to since 1991, especially for Richie Hawtin's Packard Plant parties. I even wrote a Cheesy article about going up there for the techno scene...

What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, "Quest for Fire" and the "Clan of the Cave Bear." Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropol...

In this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old people hosted by my friend "Chicago Tommy" at his company's warehouse. We painted, thanks to Tommy's homemade easels and canvases, and dance...

Here is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both deal so strongly with the ambiguity of identity, including the ambiguity of the apparently determinate nature of our genetic inheritance. My...

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a...

This season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is called "Hermeneutics" after the Greek messenger god Hermes. Interpretation can close, but only retroactively since the present is always open to a r...

We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowable identities or definitions cannot completely account for or make intentional all of what is given by our experience, which is the "too-much givenness...

The Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to reduce to the phenomenal and conceptual objects of the intention. Being is too excessive to be reduced to intentional phenomena and conceptualizations. No m...

Lacanian excessive enjoyment, or "jouissance, " is enjoying what is unenjoyable. The excessive part of excessive enjoyment refers to the irreducibility of jouissace to mere enjoyment or pleasure. The ground of whatever there is, is contradiction. The contradiction of dialectical, binary opposition doesn't resolve into a third thing or object, but into a third non-object. Jean-Luc Ma...

An identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment about what something was because any possible ground for a judgement was itself incomplete, which Lacan put as "There is no metalanguage," and...

Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism.  In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because...

Kant's use of the term "intuition" was different than how we might normally think of it. By intuition we usually mean something like having been registered affectively in the body but unanalyzed or without conceptualization. We often intuit a situation as an affective whole before we have analyzed it rationally. However, Kant meant the synthesis of whatever is "before" our...

There is no thing without the dialectic of some-thing and no-thing. Whatever was before the binary opposition of something and nothing, was neither something nor nothing. When this primordial non-thing, perhaps an "inconsistent multiplicity," or an absolutely unified, absolute nothing, was separated into something and nothing, then binary oppositions gave us everything that is, which is...

Being is birthed by nonbeing, and nonbeing is birthed by being. Whatever is "before" this simultaneous co-arising is a nothing that "proceeded" the dialectic between something and nothing, sometimes called the "absolute" nothing because it is without relation to something, so that it isn't even nothing because nothing needs something to negate to be nothing. What...

The Symbolic is not at one with itself, which means that knowing through representation is not only mediated through language but also shifty. However, it is the immediacy of this "shiftiness" that allows for knowing to be a dynamic, experimental flow that reflects the dynamism of being as a process of becoming. Hermeneutics is the sort of shifty knowing that reflects the provisional nat...