Here are the top 10 most common tags on my delicious bookmarks.

politics, humor, sociology, culture, blogs, economics, religion, tech, science, and of course, sex

what are yours?

wish i still lived in Tucson.  Wil Wheaton is DM-ing the Dwarven Dungeon Delve of Doom for charity at RinCon.

applications complete: 2 of 5
GREs: thanks to dad, signed up for nov. 11
letters of recommendation: working today on the first of 3
application fees: OUCH
letter of intent: 90% done

2 days ago i woke up with Stromkern's Night Riders going through my head.
yesterday it was some Black Eyed Peas song I don't know the name of.
today it was Fiddler On The Roof's If I Were A Rich Man.

before this, i don't ever remember literally waking up with a song playing in my brain... strange.

well, now to change into my alter ego... bureaucrat-man!

i happen to know the 54-year old Wauwatosa man who thwarted this bank robbery!  but i can't release his secret identity.

best thing i've seen in a while!

I, for one, welcome our new levitating mouse overlords.

how to write a comment on a scientific journal article in 3 easy steps.

I can't believe I never had to read Zizek in all of my religion courses. Just started The Puppet and The Dwarf. it gets right at some central issues of modernity.

Intro: The Puppet Called Theology
"religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures." This allows a religion to globalize itself. Of course, there are still individual cultures that do integrate and identify with their religion, but he is speaking of the generalized secular worldview, at least since the Enlightenment (age of Reason). Here, the price for this globalizing ability is that religion comes to be viewed as epiphenomenal, a kind of modular organ than can be grafted onto or conceptually removed from a social organism without really altering its fundamental constitution. Religion has two roles in this system: "therapeutic or critical." It can be a tool for subjective individuals to cope with their lives ("I may not believe in God, but I know religion can help some people tremendously"), or it can be a kind of tool for social forces to critique the existing socio-political order (a theater for discourse). This seems to be a pretty accurate dichotomy - it catches the ways most intellectual people think of religion.

The effect of the triumph of Reason is to: de-emphasize rituals, traditions, dogmas, etc as irrational, non-essential cultural ballast. The integrated, organic mode of religion falls apart as these historical artifacts come to be "alienated" from the individual who no longer takes them for granted, but subjects them to the criteria of Reason. the authority of these rules (representing a universalized morality) is then logically questioned, and what remains is a kind of essentialist, emotional, feelings-based "sense" of morality or the divine or what-have-you, divorced from culture and tradition. But this emotional sense is also subject to Reason's criticism, and seems irrational too. So, why then does religion persist if it fails the test of rationality on both fronts? "The standard answer is: rational philosophy or science is esoteric, confined to a small circle; it cannot replace religion in its function" of maintaining socio-political order. So we are left with a functionalist explanation of religion emphasizing control of the masses. But this doesn't seem sufficient, for religion is too heterogenous in the modern world, and many people don't know what they believe.

Zizek wants to begin by exploring the "unwritten prohibitions that define the position one is allowed to adopt." He says one is supposed to harbor a kind of amorphous, ineffable "deep spirituality" or at least open-mindedness. "Consequently, when, today, one directly asks an intellectual: 'OK, let's cut the crap and get down to basics: do you believe in some form of the divine or not?," the first answer is an embarrassed withdrawal... then usually explained in more 'theoretical' terms: "That is the wrong question to ask! It is not simply a matter of believing or not, but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, or the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension, of the way our openness to radical Otherness allows us to adopt a specific ethical stance...' What we are getting today is a kind of 'suspended' belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret." In this case, it seems even more of the "right question to ask" is: do you believe in something or not? What is desired is not equivocation, but a declaration of the taking of a position.

Zizek wonders if there was ever a time when most people "really believed." He discusses the archetypal "primitive" tribe who is criticized and called naive by anthropologists for believing they had descended from a magical bird or other totem animal. But did the individuals really "directly" believe this, or did they just indirectly accept it as part of culture, as we implicitly accept the existence of Santa Claus by putting up a Christmas tree every year? The anthropologists in question here seem to be imposing their understanding of "belief" on the tribesmen - their "modern" understanding of belief, as being something "Other" people do because they lack a rational, critical perspective. Perhaps then, belief is not necessarily a direct affirmation of an ultimate truth, but rather a kind of polite acceptance of a cultural norm that takes the form of acting "as if" one really believes. This puts the very act of "deconstruction" into question as a hallmark of skepticism, for it relies on the perhaps mythical figure of an "Other" who "really believes" (constructed as a kind of straw-man by the one doing the deconstructing).

"The postmodern need for the permanent use of the devices of ironic distantiation (quotation marks, etc) betrays the underlying fear that, without them, belief would be direct and immediate..."

Does this skeptical criticism, deconstruction, and automatic distancing of intellectuals actually then indicate a secret belief or at least uncertainty about disbelief? Does the scholar's choice of subject matter betray a subterranean belief system, or is merely an artifact of socialization within a specific culture?

So this is what religion in a secular society may be all about. "Culture" is the "central life-world category" of how we think about the world we live in, and "when it comes to religion, we no longer 'really believe' today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the 'lifestyle' of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules 'out of respect for tradition' etc)."

So, perhaps "culture" is just a name for all those things we practice without really believing in them or "taking them seriously." Is science separate from culture then? Is this why fundamentalists who profess to "really believe" in religion are sometimes viewed as "barbarians" who threaten culture by daring to take their beliefs seriously?

Then Zizek begins to apply all this thinking to the case of Christianity, calling attention to its early days, its split from Judaism, the meaning of Paul's work, Gnosticism, the Holy Spirit as symbolic, ideal-plane envoy, and more...

OK so that's it, I am going back to finish my doctorate.  I'll apply first at the closest schools (madison, chicago) and work my way out. 

Unless anybody has any advice and good departments these days?

hey does anybody need to record some music?  i ran into a guy in Mequon who owns his own recording studio, which is MAD TRICKED OUT, and he  gave me a gift-certificate for a free hour that I probably won't use.  willing to donate it... any takers?

PREFACE

the quote Foucault begins with bears reproducing.  he wants to demonstrate how systems of organizing are cultural, even though ours may seem natural and objective to us.  he quotes Borges, who found the following classification system for animals in an old Chinese encyclopedia: "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that form a long way off look like flies."  Foucault points out that this sheds light on our own rigid thought structure: "in the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking THAT."  And yet people clearly thought that at one time.  He then expounds on the fundamental "codes" of a culture, or the grid of characteristics or perceptions that we plot things on in order to classify them.  He sets out to conduct an archeology to discover the sets of conceptual tools used by Western cultures in the past few hundred years (the Classical period, Renaissance period, and the Modern period).  He will focus on three domains: language and grammar, biology, and economics.

with most of my time spent at CAW and a busted computer at home, i haven't much chance for writing.  but i've begun reading a library copy of The Order Of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, which I can't take notes in.  so here will be some notes.


FORWARD
so Foucault is hypothesizing an epistemological system of discourse (over-arching paradigm?) in the 17th-19th centuries that affected all scientific thought.   "...one finds in the Classical sciences isomorphisms that appear to ignore the extreme diversity of the objects under consideration..." (xi)  He wants to reveal the unformulated rules of formation of: definitions of proper objects of study for a science, concepts, and theory building.

For example, certain wildly different sciences were known to have suddenly and thoroughly re-organized themselves in the same ways at the same time.  He does not really want to explain the causes of this, but rather wants to describe the process of this isomorphism without invoking a "spirit of the age" or "new technology" or "individual genius" argument.  In other words, what regularities might exist outside the customary boundaries of epistemological and scientist-biographical histories?  "I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come in to play in the very existence of such discourse: what did SCIENTIST X have to fulfil, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical application as scientific discourse?"  This is a very interesting question for someone who has had work published, given all the contortions a work has to go through to meet with approval - it can often become far divorced from the original trains of thought that made it possible.

At work today I won a contest for designing the best campaign to encourage canvassers to get lots of post-cards and hot contacts (non-monetary ways people can get involved in health-care reform).  My campaign takes the form of a Risk-esque strategy game called Citizen Action of Riskonsin.  Basically, when you get certain numbers of post-cards or hot contacts within a day, you can earn soldiers or "canvassers" which you place on the board the next day.  Then everyone gets one turn per day to move or attack counties on a map of Wisconsin.  So, the best way to grow your army is to do well at work during the day.  Winner gets a cool prize.  My collection of prizes for designing the game included a Disinformation book!!!  :D

Going to Camp Awesome this weekend, out in the middle of nowhere, WI.  If I don't come back, someone avenge my death.

facebook is cool because you can learn that the awesome hot girl from college you never actually had the balls to ask out on a date remembers this about you most:  "i remember the first time we hung out it was because you passed me a note in class that said 'do you want to come over and play video games, check yes or no.' haha. i have always remembered that. if that's not a sign of a cool person, i don't know what is. :)"

I'm liking The Nameless Mod of Deus Ex. It's free!