cai's truth

group dynamic?

2011-11-11T02:52:00.001-08:00

On reading of another deadline passing in which to prevent catastrophic climate change I began to consider the possibility that our collective structures evolve at an alarmingly slow rate in relation to the minds of their constituent members, this being the case, we must consider that groups intelligence is not in fact an amplification of individual will/wills, but rather a separate consciousness and one possessing alarmingly infantile tendencies: violent self interest, inability to empathise and lack of foresight to name just a few.

Has this been the problem for transcendent systems that require a maturity not only on the part of the individual but on the part of the group; is it possible that the failure of the last centuries revolutions was due not to a deficit between political aspiration and individual self interest but an immaturity on the part of the state itself? An immaturity that then fed down to the individual, a feedback that aggravated the counter revolutionary tendencies already present; the cynical gap between propaganda and truth is thus eroded, individuals utilize the most simplistic reading of revolutionary doctrine (reading not easily refuted: as complexity itself is seen as bourgeois).

This brings us to the persistence of capitalism; how is it that we remain tied to a system even though aware that it is dangerously flawed: promoting inequality and destroying the ability of the planet to support humanity? We are often told that capitalism is the most accurate reflection of human nature, is this not again the feedback from a collective mind still in its infancy? We now have the technology to create a genuinely progressive state but we are constantly told that transcendent politics leads to brutal dictatorship, the truth is that while we have individually matured to the degree that we can perceive the problems we face, collectively we are still trapped in an infantile matrix, what is more due to the advanced nature of communications the feedback from our collective self is now eroding the very ability of individuals to transcend our condition. There has always been paradigmatic space between the collective body and the individual, perversely the danger arises when we see the state as accurately reflecting our will; for at this point our aspirations have reduced to the simplistic self interest of the juvenile group mindset.

on unfair exchange

2011-10-21T03:44:00.000-07:00

on hearing the news that isreal was to exchange 1000 palestinian prisoners for a single i.d.f soldier i must confess my first reaction was: my god what an uneven exchange how unlike the isreali administration we have come to know and love. indeed the rhetoric surrounding the exchange alludes to something akin to an outburst of groundbreaking benevolence and long term pragmatism for so long absent from this arena, could this be the kick start the peace process requires and has thus far been so lacking? it was not long however before i found myself cynically searching for an underlying motive in this unexpected turn of events; the conclusion i have reached is that the true purpose of the exchange is the radical devaluing of not only the palestinian state but more ominously the very humanity of the individual palestinian. the first thing to appreciate is that this exchange was inevitable; politically the corrosive effect of abandoned soldiers is highly undesirable for the administration and a boon for the kidnappers, that being the case the question then becomes how to resolve the issue without losing too much political capital. perversely an even exchange would set up by far the most dangerous precedent as it creates a rational basis for the capture and release of soldiers: once established such a framework is incredibly difficult and costly to dismantle. the second option that of an uneven exchange of a magnitude of 2/1,3/1... would lead to accusations of weakness on the part of the administration and could also maybe begin to set another precedent as above. having accepted these points and the necessity of the making some form of trade the isreali government cannily opted for an almost ridiculous ratio, one that cannot be seen to set a precedent as non would expect any isreali government to repeat an exchange on this level, thereby to some degree nullifying the value of further hostage taking by declaring its response to be arbitrary and unpredictable. a useful byproduct of this action is the international adulation that has accompanied this; isreal has long proved itself adept at managing the discourse in relation to the occupied territories and in this instance the celebratory mood in gaza actually plays into the hands of those on the right of the isreali administration.

for these reasons far from being an act of benevolence the release, represents the cynical maximization of emotional and political capital and the regressive dehumanization of the palestinian subject. this dehumanization is explicit in the qualitative value placed on an individual palestinian life: put simply 1 isreali is worth 1000 palestinians. this is the value in exchange and by inference this is the value in life should a palestinian kill an isreali. such dispropotionality is cosistanly employed in the occupied terrotories and in this extraordinary exchange of prisoners; the isreali state has further normalized a diminution of human worth as regards the citizens of palestine

bruegel, bocsh, hell and all that

2009-03-05T04:42:00.000-08:00

images of hell dominated by the egg, the orb, the embryo; interiority: the mouth (belly of the beast). Re: foucault- madness: hell as a paradigmatic space, headless forms: hell as proxy consciousness, a shared consciousness a construct subjective, relative and omnipotent: universal hell: its signifiers instantly recognizable: flames, fever, delerium.
hell as the feminine: pit, gap, gape, hole, womb, eve, original sin. again: the egg, birth, re-birth, re-incarnation, cycle, the circle, Dante?
birth as the first step toward damnation; the inevitability of the fall and the inherant evil of the flesh.
the horror of these images is their equating of fertility and hell; far from being barren and devoid of life this is a place of growth and mutation: a self perpetuating wilderness the compost of which is our present world; hades is not merley a receptical for the fallen, it is a rhizomic continuum inseperable from creation; both breugal and bosch confuse the cronology of existence both heaven and hell are engines of our reality; why do we see hell as subterrainian- hell is the soil in which we grow and though we may temporarily appear to escape its hold, we remain rooted in it and we will certainly return to it.

bertie russel

2009-03-04T04:13:00.000-08:00

my grandfather followed bertrand russel to north wales in the aftermath of the war, clough ellis provided a number of his old Cambridge acquaintances with freehold tenancies: my mother has told me that BR's childeren were strcken with problems throughout their lives; given that they may well have been as close to something approaching philosophical truth as any member of society the question must arise: how much comfort can the truth provide? does philosophy offer any assistance at all in our lives? does living matter?
PS: pandas may constitute the only species living what could be termed an authentic existence, given the choice between compromising their ascetic lifestyle (eating nutritionally dubious and physically joyless bamboo whilst abstaining from gratuitous sexual activity) or simply lying down and dying: the panda will often choose the latter. human interference in the lives of these creatures is not an honest endeavor to prevent the demise of a hapless teddy bear, but a vicious intervention the consequence of which is the undermining of millions of years of evolution and the sabotaging of the pandas attempts to find a final, true species wide transcendence. we should view captive breeding programs as forced rape camps and see our interventions in the panda world as aggressive imposition of our flawed ideals on a far nobler breed than our own. why? the reason for these atrocities is simple enough: the panda offers a window into our own ultimate evolution, we must cease proliferation and attempt perfection now within this generation, having children is spiritual death and existential denial of any possibility of transcendence and perfection. KILL ALL THE KITTENS AND BUDGERIGARS!

WHAT THE MANIFESTO?

2009-02-28T04:02:00.000-08:00

Having found the market driven critical discourse of contemporary art to be at times both distorting and arbitrary (though at times it does seem to provide a certain symmetry: with openings feeling something like an illegal dog fight: bloody lino and hand licking.) and having seen the opportunities that art may provide for paradigmatic transcendence confounded at the point of its proliferation; I must now attempt an autonomous dissemination of my own work.

As the amount of information increases beyond the capacity of individuals to comprehend it, any single part of the data available can be accessed and analyzed instantly; the problem we now face is that we have reached such a saturation of information that specific information is subject to so many possible relations within the data stream that it immediately losses any autonomy of meaning (google etc) and so we find ourselves forced to integrate artificial or spurious peripheral relationships when considering any single area of data. Rather than triggering a reductive process whereby we mine the pool of data for comprehensible specifics whole areas are taken together and summarized by engines powerful enough to link these abstract families of disparate information. Any specialization losses the possibility of a dialectical opposite as huge tracts of knowledge are integrated into larger and larger webs of information, the mechanisms whereby these fields might be made useful move further away from the skill set of the human mind. As the amount of accessible data grows we approach a state of binary dependence, but one in which the code is lost, we may comprehend the referent but we can no longer conceive of that which it signifies. Knowledge must be made palatable for an increasingly plural and superficial cultural paradigm.

Ideas lose currency in a society obsessed with production. The longevity of concepts is inextricably linked to the time given to their consideration, not to their production. It is the duty of the artist to create the idea; it is the duty of the society to preserve it. Galleries should act as repositories for artistic truth. The market should function as a tax system levied on the willing for the maintenance of a shared cultural legacy. The artists’ only consideration should be the proliferation of their truth. It is the artists’ position in society that provides the paradigmatic base for the work: at times detested, adored, but always at odds with the governing ethos of wider society. The critical establishment should exist to catch the windfall of those who create.