Aphorisms XXXIII

A Modern War of Choice – Free of a racialised and propagandised justification (and often in spite of one,) aggressive war happens against the wishes of the majority of the population. This should long ago have given the lie to its geopolitical justification – or at least giving political the status of a bogus affix – not telling us anything other than they are geographical wars, basically a tautology. (Of course, sometimes geopolitics is just a euphemism for imperial concerns.) No – war is a game, played by the political oligarchs, around elite concerns and makeup. One could say it was and remains an extension of wargaming – (from the elite perspective, of course. For the soldier and civilian casualty, it isn’t a game.)  There is an ideology of war which has its own history and goes back beyond the birth of modern democracy. It has persisted through institutional inertia, and military virtue ethics, and has herded elites into a prisoners dilemma mindset, which they cleave to even in situations where it would take a vague gesture to break through its gossamer thread of a  justification. Be it in material, honorific or imperial interest, they hold to it because it shores up their importance – they see their importance through its lens.

Then there is the adventurist side, the wanting to play with the toys, to see, after everything, how I would do in a real war. To see if I can play the game for real… To finally, finally pull the trigger. And this side is given free reign by the former considerations.

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Aphorisms XXXII

We have already misstepped when we ask, in music, what is the reason for this or that. Or have we? We’re talking about analogy in reasoning about music.

Tempting to look at music as if it were a logical argument, or a story, or an equation. It’s one of the most productive examples of language on holiday. Notes and chords are not numbers, nor are they words, and nor are they logical units. They have this kind of logic – that in a non-figurative painting, you may choose to paint in light and dark, with smoothness and noise, with edges and lines, in connecting lines between parts of the canvas.

But when you begin to systematise music (draw out its relations to maths) it gives you a goal – and this becomes productive.

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Aphorisms XXXI

Those who say the work of decolonisation is a sideshow aren’t cognisant of the legitimating work the conceptual colonisation is doing – nor the sheer mass of the undoing work that has been done already by patient archivists and those with fine toothed combs (teasing out imperial nits and crushing them between their fingers for a sad and delayed justice. Or those who cut through to the bone – finding the torturers who are still alive. Finding the drone civilian casualty lists.)

Imperial officials knew it, and still know it. “If the truth comes out, we’re finished…” And so, their souls hollowed and skins crisped by laughing off atrocity as conjecture, they never let it out. They burn it down.

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Aphorisms XXX

Progressive Luddism – AI content creation will hit this hard barrier, the one between people and objects. We saw Deep Mind beat Kasparov, then forgot about Chess computers while chess became more popular than ever (witness the ngram). All the chess players I know care about is their rank relevant to other human players – and evidently the joy of chess. When an AI can beat anyone, it comes under the category of cheater. And, therefore, no one wants to play with it. A robot player of a game, when it exceeds humans, becomes a half-forgotten curiosity, or a training device for humans (- or an annoyance on online games, it’s not interesting when a rock crushes a plant on the way down a hill).

I guess the hype misses this, that AI in its generative, algorithmic form, statistic generalisation form, is a tool, and is about as interesting as any tool. Calculators became widespread, and replaced their basic human form, but now we consider them a tool. They didn’t stop maths being taught, because we need to know how to use them and what for.

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Aphorisms XXIX

Why do we hold unalloyed engagement with a show, an act, to be the most valuable form of engagement? Especially when the matter of the art is smooth and brushes at the attention with a feather.

If you do things with your phone, to engage, it can result in a deeper engagement with the matter of the art. To make pictures while you listen to the jazz. To read the mythology in the background of a painting (here to simply look is to completely ignore the painting.) To play the videogame.

To call your friend and have them hear the music through the phone. Rather than sit, absorbed, where you will forget to be with the art, and instead just watch it. Often the alloy, hardly the element.

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Aphorisms XXVIII

Condescension of Revolution – It is so easy when you look at what such an upheaval costs, first, in violent reaction and, then, the counter reaction which tends to follow. But when a political arrangement will not change, has no inbuilt manner through which to change it to make it more democratic – when the tantrums of imperial powers set their unwieldy mass behind autocracy and freely exercise and defend their monopoly on violence – then what else is there left to do? As the gridlock tightens, as reaction tightens, the temptation grows and grows…

And when democratic revolution can be undertaken peacefully, for the most part, the arguments against it are dulled to a whisper.

What am I saying here? I’m saying that there is space for a democratic revolution even in a nominally democratic system, a system which bears traces of democracy already.

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Aphorisms XXVII

The death of the author as a movement in cultural production had a performative bite – given that it was concerned with authority, simply to doubt from a position of economic or authorial power undid some of the power of the author. It’s an anarchist position in literary studies.

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Aphorisms XXVI

Build up your pretentiousness, but smash your pretensions.

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But you’re just repeating the points made by X… – thinking my own life after my own manner. And this objection is only raised in my own head. There should be no need to attribute ideas that have use-value in my life, or at least, it shouldn’t be the primary thought. Maneuvering on the surface, rather than diving into the logic of concepts and the forging, shaping, reshaping and tempering of concepts.

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Obsession with form in poetry is exactly like obsession with the folds in origami.

Aphorisms XXV

There’s something cleansing about watching old papers burn, something similar to watching a big long delete bar progressing on the screen, things being overwritten with randomly generated strings. The process of scrunching up letters, and then seeing them turn to ash, the randomly generated strings of the earth. Like we will!

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Aphorisms XXIV

Can’t hear this suggestion to live among the dead, a la Machiavelli and Montaigne, without also taking into account that this was their way to relax after a day of politics, making it doubly twisted.

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It’s such a human feeling, or feeling of the human, to have your brain scramble for excuses as to why you have failed, or why it is unjust that you should suffer like this. And you watch it like a toddler in tantrum, and when it stops for a moment you ask – are you done? And it screams NO! Or stops, tired out. There are good reasons to despair sometimes, but when this kind of thing happens, you know there are no good reasons involved.

If you fail in love, and feel everything crashing around you, and think, this is the end, I’ll never X again, this is an example of that grasping after straws. It is so hard to be your own parent, to pick up your toddler-brain and say – it’s okay, don’t worry, let’s go get something to eat and maybe you imagined it all, but even if you didn’t, you’ll definitely meet someone new.

This might all be a little harsh, but our world really encourages us not to care too much. Searching for someone who will be special and care for you like a breathing comfort blanket, this is all well and good. But we should be careful not to undervalue ourselves. Again, the base of this kind of despair must be a lack of self-confidence. (Insofar as there isn’t an economic or material side to love – but of course there very much can be.)