The "post-theoretical" age and the "reality-based community"

In the absence of data, you theorise. In an abundance, you just need to do the maths. And, because of all those super-efficient search engines, we share more and more data. Data dissolves ideology.

Two further books exemplify this: David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline are rigorous responses to the challenge of climate change. Both work from data rather than theory, and offer systems of management rather than ideologies. Both are number-rich and theory-light, and urge action—now. In MacKay’s words: “We have to stop saying ‘No’ and start saying ‘Yes’.” In Brand’s: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Brian Eno on Prospect, 29th October 2009

Some years ago...

Reality-based community is a popular term among liberal political commentators in the United States. In the fall of 2004, the phrase "proud member of the reality-based community" was first used to suggest the commentator's opinions are based more on observation than on faith, assumption, or ideology. The term has been defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality." Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that there is an overarching conflict in society between the reality-based community and the "faith-based community" as a whole. It can be seen as an example of political framing.

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."[1] [Wikipedia]

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Embodyment and selv-surveillance: able and disable subjects

The supposedly universal subject of much science and philosophy is the subject whose circumstances require him or her to be least aware of his or her body; te able or healthy person is seldom brought up short by the fact of his or her embodiment. By contrast, the disabled, women and members of national ethnic minorities, persons of so-called deviant sexuality, and those with limited financial resources are forced to attend to te potentially incongruous character of their own embodiment and find themselves confronted with "excessive" situations requiring more self-surveillance and interpretation than others may.

HENGEHOLD, Helen. The Body Problematic. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008 p. 6.

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Jean Baudrillard - Ebooks

• Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra And Simulation (ingles).pdf
• Baudrillard, Jean - La societe de consommation.pdf
• À Sombra das Maiorias Silenciosas - Jean Baudrillard.pdf
• Baudrillard - El sistema de los objetos.pdf
• Las Estrategias Fatales (Jean Baudrillard).pdf
• Jean Baudrillard - Olvidar a Foucault.pdf
• Baudrillard, Jean - La ilusión vital.pdf
• De la seducción (Jean Baudrillard).pdf
• Baudrillard, Jean - La guerra del Golfo no ha tenido lugar.pdf

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Maurice Blanchot: The Conquest of Space (1961)

Man does not want to leave his own place. He says that technology is dangerous, that it detracts from our relationship with the world, that true civilizations are those of a stable nature, that the nomad is incapable of acquisition. Who is this man? It is each of us, at times we give in to lethargy. This man suffered a shock the day Gagarin became the first man in space. The event is now almost forgotten; but the experience will be repeated in other forms. In these cases we must pay heed to the man in the street, to the man with no fixed abode. He admired Gagarin, admired him for his courage, for the adventure, and even paid tribute to progress; but one such man gave the right explanation: it is extraordinary, we have left the earth.
[entyre text on atopia]

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Foucault for dummies

?

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Carmen Peraita: A vida fáctica em Heidegger: além da representação

Peraita, C. A vida fáctica em Heidegger: além da representação. Controvérsia - Vol. 5, n° 2: 77-86 (mai-ago 2009)

Faz-se necessário precisar, dada à amplitude e complexidade do pensamento de Heidegger, que este trabalho se centre exclusivamente em sua primeira época como docente em Friburgo (que tem demonstrado tão fecunda e decisiva) e que toma em consideração os cursos e escritos correspondentes a tal período.

Esta comunicação quer manter-se no marco das concepções e narrativas do sujeito. Se não sempre, pelo menos em seus primeiros anos, Heidegger dedicou seus esforços (desde
impulso proporcionado pela filosofia da vida) a proporcionar uma interpretação nova e radical do Dasein humano. É certo ainda que, em seus primeiros escritos, refere-se explicitamente ao ser si mesmo (Selbstsein) e, portanto, ao sujeito. Logo abandona esse tipo de denominação, motivado pelo desejo de evitar a dialética ocidental: sujeito-objeto. Ainda que considerando as restrições oportunas, seria possível (pelo menos em ordem do diálogo) entender sua hermenêutica da facticidade como única concepção ou narrativa do Dasein humano.

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The Workhouses

link: workhouses.org.uk

Title page of the 1834 Poor Law Act
© Peter Higginbotham.

The Workhouse often evokes the grim Victorian world of Oliver Twist, but its story is a fascinating mix of social history, politics, economics and architecture.
This site is dedicated to the workhouse — its buildings, inmates, staff and administrators, even its poets...

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Heraclitus: Fragment 89

ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι

ho Herákleitós phesi toîs egregorósin héna kaì koinòn kósmon eînai tôn dè koimoménon hékaston eis ídion apostréphesthai

To those who are awake, there is one world in common, but of those who are asleep, each is with
drawn to a private world of his own. (Trad. Bywater, 1889)

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. (Trad. Randy Hoyt)

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. (Trad. John Burnet, 1912)

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Nythamar de Oliveira: The Worldhood of the Kosmos in Heidegger's Reading of Heraclitus

According to Diogenes Laertius (IX, 5), Heraclitus of Ephesus was the author of a "book" (biblion) whose title was, as many works misleadingly assigned to the fusikoi or "natural philosophers," Peri fusewV, "On Nature." Following Hermann Diels's critical compilation of Presocratic fragments and testimonies, scholars have maintained that Heraclitus' original collection of sayings very likely underwent several editorial arrangements, including Laertius's division of the work into three sections (peri tou pantoV kai politikon kai qeologikon)(1). Nevertheless, to speak of the whole (to pan, to olon) in mere terms of a "cosmology" (i.e. as "study of the universe") risks doing a great deal of injustice to the original sense of kosmos in Heraclitus' fragments. In point of fact, the Heraclitean conception of the kosmoV turns out to be very complex and nuanced, to say the least.(2) Moreover, it is precisely to accentuate the distinction between what later became latinized as "universe" (universum) and the pre-Pythagorean understanding of the Greek kosmos articulated by Heraclitus that I set out to examine the latter, with a view to elucidating the Heideggerian conception of Weltlichkeit. The phenomenological problematic of articulating fusiV and kosmoV in Heidegger's reading of Heraclitus, along with his appropriation of Parmenides' alhqeia,(3) constitutes in effect one of the greatest features of the Heideggerian logoV. In order to better understand the Heideggerian conception of Weltlichkeit in its full phenomenological determination, i.e., as the horizonal fainesqai which lets beings come to appear as they are in the world, I intend to examine how Heraclitus' notion of the kosmoV may contribute to a phenomenological "return to the things themselves." Before proceeding to explore Heidegger's conception of the world in Sein und Zeit (in particular, § 14) I shall recall Heraclitus' articulation of kosmoVand fusiV in the very fragments invoked by Heidegger in his 1928 treatise Vom Wesen des Grundes, in the 1935 course Einführung in der Metaphysik, and in the Heraclitus seminar (Winter 1966/67).

/nythamar/

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Heidegger: Eigentlich, Eigentlichkeit

Eigentlich:

NT: eigentlich : authentique, et uneigentlich : inauthentique. — Appliqué à la seule existence du Dasein, ou aux modalités de celle-ci. Sinon, ord. = proprement dit. [ET]

Authentic (eigentlich), passim: Angst, 190; appropriation of untruth, 299; being of Da-sein, 44, 188, 191, 322; being-come-to-an-end, 239; being-guilty, 291; being-one's-self, 129, 184, 263, 268, 298; being-toward-death, 237, 260-267 (§ 53), 373; being toward oneself, 122; being-a-whole, 267; care, 122, 301, 323; certainty, 258, 308; coming toward, 330; constancy of the self, 410; disclosedness, 221, 297, 325, 331, 397; dying, 247; encountering of the un-handy, 73; existence: passim; existentiell possibility, 193, 267-270; face to face with thrownness, 348; "for-the-sake-of-which," 193; future, 329-330, 336-338, 348; grasping of a sign, 79; guilt, 287; hearing the call, 294; historicity, 382, 385-387, 390-391, 395-396; historiographical, 395; occurrence, 382, 385, 387; history, 386; maintaining oneself in a primordial possibility, 306; making present, 410; possibilities of existence, 383; possibility which has been, 394; potentiality-of-being, 233-235, 266, 267-301 (II.iii) 322, 339, 343-344; potentiality-of-being-one's-self, 175, 322-323; potentiality-of-being-a-whole, 235, 266-267, 301-333 (II.iii), 372; present, 338; handiness, 69, 106; repetition, 385; resoluteness, 308, 310, 313, 382; self, 129-130, 433 (Hegel); temporality, 327, 329, 331, 338, 348, 375, 385, 414; "there," 328, 347; time, 329; transparency, 298; truth of Da-sein, 297, 302; understanding, 146, 364, 279-280, 295, 302, 306, 348, 383, 425 [BT]

See also: authentique, authentic

Eigentlichkeit:

NT: Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), in its distinction from inauthenticity, 42-43, 53, 146, 178, 191, 232, 259, 268, 304, 306, 325, 331, 335, 350, 410, 436; condition of possibility of distinction is in mineness, 42-43, 53; "really" versus genuineness, 142, 178; grounded in temporalizing of temporality, 304; are the fundamental existentiell possibilities, 350. See also Genuineness; Inauthentic; Mineness [BT]

Authenticité:

Et le Dasein, derechef, est à chaque fois mien en telle ou telle guise déterminée d’être. Il s’est toujours déjà en quelque façon décidé en quelle guise le Dasein est à chaque fois mien. L’étant pour lequel en son être il y va de cet être même se rapporte à son être comme à sa possibilité la plus propre. Le Dasein est à chaque fois sa possibilité, il ne l’« a » pas sans plus de manière qualitative, comme quelque chose de sous-la-main. Et c’est parce que le Dasein est à chaque fois essentiellement sa possibilité que cet étant peut se « choisir » lui-même en son être, se gagner, ou bien se perdre, ou ne se gagner jamais, ou se gagner seulement « en apparence ». S’être perdu ou ne s’être pas encore gagné, il ne le peut que pour autant que, en son essence, il est un Dasein authentique possible, c’est-à-dire peut être à lui-même en propre. Les deux modes d’être de l’authenticité et de l’inauthenticité — l’une et l’autre expressions étant choisies terminologiquement et au sens strict du terme — se fondent dans le fait que le Dasein est en général déterminé par la mienneté. Cependant, l’inauthenticité du Dasein ne signifie point par exemple un « moins »-être ou un degré d’être « plus bas ». Elle peut au contraire déterminer le Dasein selon sa concrétion la plus pleine, dans sa capacité d’être occupé, stimulé, intéressé, réjoui. [ET 42/54]

Source: filoinfo.bem-vindo.net/lexikon

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Jerome Mandel: Dream and Imagination in Shakespeare

Mandel, Jerome. Dream and Imagination in Shakespeare. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), pp. 61-68

Closed access to non Jstor users (it´s a shame!)

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Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Macbeth (1750 edition)

Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Macbeth, to which are added all the Original Songs. London, Printed for J. and P. Kiapton, S. Sin, 7. Legman, H. Limit, C. Hitch, J. Hulg,,, J. Brindly, J, and R. 7i«/«i» and S, Drafir, B. Dod, C. Corbtt, and J,1750

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