http://lehrman.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/345

"Since the task of teaching is not reducible to data transmission but includes teaching "attitudes of the intellect," respect for dress goes along with the forms that "make up the habitus required for intellectual life." If one respects the humanistic understanding of knowledge, which is not simply knowledge transfer, one wears a tie, he states.

I'm especially intrigued by his claim that the in world of equality by default "virtues, customs, and forms recede in favor of methods, rules, and procedures." An interesting statement: the "uniform" of academic regalia or even just the necktie doesn't depersonalize nearly as much as wearing whatever one wishes—if dress is one's own business, "an expression of the Self," "autonomous," one might expect this to express one's own personality, but doing so reveals a tryranny of method and procedures which govern the transmission of data and the institution rather than the customs and vritues which encourage and allow the encounter of persons in a relationship of a certain form. The form allows the persons to act as persons, the formless allows Selves to operate within a technique (the pajama-clad online instructor as evidence?).

I wonder if I can ask my Dean for a clothing budget? It is, apparently, for the good of the student."

Gentlemen,

When one talk about 'Pseud's' one really needs to look no further than a certain type of French intellectual: The post-modernist.



Psychoanalyst Félix Guattari thrills us here with his deep insights.

'...We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously...'

More deep meditation here, this time from Gilles Deleuze:

'...In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable,' endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast...'

Then we have the number theorist extrodinaire Jacques Lacan:

S (signifier) = s (the statement),
s (signified)
With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1)

Therefore, it follows...

That the erect penis = is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

This however, may be true in Lacan's case as the square root of -1 is the imaginary number i.

Are you keeping up. Good.

Next, the master of deconstruction himself, Jacques Derrida.

Here, the intellectual heavyweight gets his brain box in gear and gives us his opinion on.....er....

'...If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious...'

More to follow.

Jeezuz babbling christ, after reading that I'm going back to downloading porn...

I'm putting bits of the above nonsense on my Facebook page to see how far I can kid people along.

Here's the Wodehouse gag. It occurs in several of the novels.


“Types of Ethical Theory” caught my eye. I opened it, and I give you my honest word this was what hit me:
"Of the two antithetic terms in the Greek philosophy one only was real and self-subsisting; and that one was Ideal Thought as opposed to that which it has to penetrate and mould. The other, corresponding to our Nature, was in itself phenomenal, unreal, without any permanent footing, having no predicates that held true for two moments together; in short, redeemed from negation only by including indwelling realities appearing through."

Well — I mean to say — what? And Nietzsche, from all accounts, a lot worse than that!

Now that I think about it the woman I now think of as Bitchzilla was very Florence-like.

Last edited by Patrick (2010-12-09 12:47:27)