Unwritten Essays

Four essays I will probably not write

On my todoist I keep a list of essays I plan to write. This past year I have been writing a lot less than normal so I may not get to all these essays and these essays may not be “alive” in me any more. But I feel like I want to commemorate them in some way so here we go.

Faceticity

So I actually thought/think this is a term. I used to teach a class called Computers, Robots, and Film and often times one of the first exercises would be too look at all the close up of faces. The face is one core difference between film and theater (and I would add TV). You know who does not have faces - a robot. They have commodity faces - all faces are the same. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has theories about the face, and ethics and how ethics stems from a face-to-face with the other which introduces both difference but also a connection with the other. What does that leave open for AI ethics, with technologies that have no face. I still would like to write this essay. Maybe I will.

Hauntology

I was talking with a developer recently and he said it was so hard to maintain code because the older developers that had contributed to the code base were no longer around. I called this haunted code. This comes from Derrida’s notion of Hauntology, which is a play on ontology (the theory of being), and also the idea of traces, that what is absent or unsaid also leaves a mark. Mark Fisher, a theorist and blogger who died too soon, engaged with the haunted, he wrote a book called Ghosts of My Life, and explored unrealized futures. We could say we are haunted by futures that never came to be. Hauntology in Derrida comes from his analysis of Marx, who asserted that Europe was haunted, by the spectre of communism, and my children also are obessed with the TV show Ghost, in which a house is haunted. As you can see I dont really have a point of view with respect to hauntology, only that it is this concept that appears to be haunting us right now. Maybe that is why I never wrote anything.

The Artemisian

Years ago I did not write an essay for which I was commissioned, on solar punk and lunar punk. I was attempting to connect this with Nietzsche and his conception of Apollonian and Dionysian cultures in his essay The Birth of Tragedy. He explores why is it that only Greek culture developed Tragedy. We could say why did Greek culture develop Greek Tragedy and then we could have a tautology. Anyway, there is a notion of a rational culture, with perfectly crafted plays and then an ecstatic culture of rapture - we can call this perhaps rave culture. Nietzsche’s analysis depressed me. Although there were some beautiful images and metaphors the whole concept was deeply fascistic as is any concept that involves art based on indoctrinating people towards a cultural mythos. I was sort of interested though in a third way, and began to think about an artemisan culture. Artemis, Apollo’s twin lesbian sister, goddess of the moon, is also the goddess of trivia, where three roads meet. This is very famous in psychoanalysis, and is also the place where the Sphinx met Oedipus. The idea that there is a third culture, a culture that exists in the light of the moon, a metaformic culture - to invoke the brilliant Judy Grahn. I still think there is something here but I probably wont develop.

Technics and Awakening

I am very inspired by Jaques Elluls’ The Technological Society in which he distinguishes between material techniques, like cement, and spiritual techniques, like meditation. I am giving a lot of talks these days on what I am calling herbal theurgy, the use of herbs to make us “godlike” or to awaken, and I am interested in those techniques material and immaterial that help us experience more consciousness. I think of the microcosmic orbit, playing music, meditation, singing, chanting, dancing, writing, even math (think pythagoras), as practices leading to awakening and always wanted to explore these different paths and their history. Alas, even writing this little blurb makes the endeavor feel exhausting. Perhaps I should stick with chanting.

A 33rd degree Mason

As I said I have a list of at least 33 essays Many of which I will never write. But at least I can blurb them here. I do want to write about how magic squares provide a framework for thinking about determinism, free will, time, and cellular automatons. So maybe that will be a full length essay.