Sorglose Nacht

It is always a fine moment when I pop down Clay Shirky’s newest addition to his Networks, Economics & Culture mailing list, and the newest edition is no exception. Titled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, it takes a well-balanced look at two organization systems that have existed for the web, one of which Shirky refers to as “ontological”, the other “organic.”

As it is clearly not Mr. Shirky’s intention to deal in any depth with what the “is” is, I thought a look at this document in terms of a more wide-scope “philosophical ontology” might yield something interesting, at least terminologically-speaking. To begin, let me show you how he delimits the term ontology:

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations … What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? … The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition … something like “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” … The common thread between the two definitions is essence, “Is-ness.” In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?

Using this working-style definition, he proceeds to give some examples of “real-world” ontological classification systems: the periodic table of the elements, the Dewey Decimal System, and finally the DMOZ/Yahoo post-library heirarchy. It is interesting and funny, well worth a read for anyone interested in organization systems in general. After witnessing in pictures the transformation between the rigid heirarchy of the DDS and a graph that represents something like the “ontologically” unstructured reference map of Google, he goes through the del.icio.us system of classification by aggregation of user-”tagged” references, finally suggesting and for the most part convincingly showing that a combinatorial system of user-input works better than a dictatorially controlled “ontology” for a large unstable set of data accessed by a great many non-expert users, such as the web.

Ok. Now, the question I am asking myself is this: Ignoring unproductive definitional quips, and simply accepting Shirky’s last question for ontology, that is, “what kinds of things can we say exist in [this] domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?,” to what extent is del.icio.us (un-)ontological?

Now, clearly, taking the scope of the question above as the entire scope of what Shirky names “ontology,” del.icio.us is nothing less than entirely ontological. It is a way in which someone, Joshua Shachter, answers the question “what kinds of things exist and how can we say these things relate to each other?” It is, to be sure, a distributed ontology, and our point as follows will be in general that ontology is already “distributed” in the first place.

Contemporary ontology is always an engagement with Heidegger. What is at stake in this particular case is the feasibility of Heidegger’s “authentic” and “inauthentic” Dasein. The “inauthentic” Dasein is the mode of being in which Dasein finds itself engaged (immersed) in the so-called “idle talk” (das Gerede) of the “they” (das Man) while in the “authentic” mode (eigentlich^*) Dasein hearkens to the call of and is individualized by its own uncanniness (cf. ¶40, 235/191). In an unsympathetic - or careless, or incomplete - reading of Heidegger, it is easy to allow oneself to read this as a sort of übermensch ontology - again in the popular and not properly Nietzschean sense - which would itself allow room for something like a fascist ontology (a danger one always skirts with Heidegger). Meanwhile, and in a seemingly contrary way, Heidegger had already explicity suggested the following: Being-in-the-world, that is, Being-in-the-world-with- others-in-the-world is the “basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined.” (¶26, 153/117)

Or, that the determination of Being is already co-determined. Given this, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why access to Being, that which is most properly at play in existence, would be in the provice of an authentic understanding, that is, in a severing of Dasein from what has already been established as its co-constitutive condition of determination (it’s “I”) by its others in the first place. In other words, since “ontical experience takes place right at the ‘they,’ and nowhere else.” And as the ontological is nothing but the logic of the ontic inside the ontic, we can only frame the determinitive origin of the practice of ontology right at the “they” - better: “Moreover, there is no ‘elsewhere’: that is the ‘meaning of Being,’ …” (Jean Luc-Nancy, The Decision of Existence)

Or, again, ontology (the logic of existence) has already never been the province of some God-like categorizer, but has always indeed taken place right at the absolutely inescapable distribution of existence. I won’t, but I think you can basically find this thread in not only Heidegger and Nancy, but also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and, as Heidegger himself displays, in the pre-Socratics as well. In another form, Richard Rorty and the American pragmatists say something just like this, albeit in a less strong sense.

As such, we might say that with something like del.icio.us, we can finally think the practice of categorization as properly ontological.

^* It has been suggested that “ownness” would be a more fair translation, inasmuch as the existential analytic specifically excludes something like a purity of origin or provenance, which the English “authentic” implies. So “authentic Dasein” is perhaps more properly thought as “Dasein in its ownness”. For what it’s worth.

Pitchforkmedia, bastion of flowery independent music reviews, has posted a feature by comedian David Cross (of Mr. Show with Bob and David fame) entitled Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews. It’s funny, and besides picking on Pitchfork for their sometimes elaborate-to-the-point-of-nonsensical reviews, it diagnoses a symptom that has seemingly become endemic to the serious independent music scene, a kind of impossible completist syndrome that has given way to the oft-heard accusation of “music snobbery.”

May I suggest listening to Until it Happens/You Let it Happen, by Maximum Minimum. The fourth album (not counting the re-release of the first three 7-inches on HugTown Records) reaffirms the band’s status as the godfathers of the Taos, N.M. “crying scene.” Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid).

There is something definitively psychological about this kind of completist syndrome in music. In this article, it is suggested that completism stems (perhaps originally) from a “part of the nature of improvisation that breeds the completist in us,” vis à vis jazz. Sumera seems to think that it stops there, though: “There are not too many pop completists out there. The ephemerality of the music cannot sustain the interest of the completist syndrome.” As it were, the Pitchfork scene and your friends deftly testify to the mistakenness of this.

The completist urge is doubtless a radicalization of the simple collector’s urge. It’s not enough (though it is great) to keep listening to Dusk at Cubist Castle when Mississippi Luau exists too. And thousands more. Doubtless, one tries to hold together the indefinite and constantly surging history of a genre, a style, an artist - one thinks these things historiologically. A touching example of this completist phenomenon is the fabulous John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame. But why? Why is enough never enough?

Humor and philosophy are all tied up. Things that we know are true and scare us make us laugh. Sometimes it’s the only reaction that can save us.

It’s no mistake that Heidegger makes his most substantial mention of Nietzsche in Sein und Zeit under the heading of historicality (See: Mcquarrie translation, Part II Section 5, ¶76, 448-49/396-97.)

The beginning of his [Nietzsche’s] ’study’ [On the Use and Abuse of History] allows us to suppose that he understood more than he has made known to us.
…
But the ground on which authentic historiology is founded is temporality as the existential meaning of the Being of care.

That is, our discourse on history is grounded in our existential temporality, being futural, being-toward-death. And indeed, according to Heidegger, on the anxiety that would paralyze us in the face of a death which is each time ours alone. In the face of this anxiety, the state of what Heidegger calls “inauthentic” Dasein is something akin to the frantic forgetting of its futural being, a plunge eyes closed into the quiet waters of Das Man: the world of measure - clocks, calendars, investment, record collecting. And with David Cross, we laugh at the extensivity with which this plays itself out. As Camus once quipped, “When one has no character one has to apply a method.”

Meanwhile, 1892, Turin. Nietzsche, in the early throes of paralysis progressiva, (he was paralyzed for the last 11 years of his life - during the last seven he could not speak) only repeated phrases: “I am dead because I am stupid,” or else simply “in short, dead.” During those last seven years, eyes wide open, he perhaps lived death as few have - a model of courage for Heidegger’s “authentic” Dasein - registered a silent laugh at the very thing from which we distract ourselves until we are overtaken with it, eyes wide open.

In one of his last meaningful correspondences in 1889, a letter to Peter Gast (a composer who moved to Basel in 1875 to study under Nietzsche and Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche’s “editor” and proofreader in 1876) he wrote:

To my maëstro Pietro:
Sing me a new song: The world is transfigured and all
the heavens are full of joy.

The Crucified

Critical Inquiry vol. 31 no. 3 is currently on-line, and features an interesting, here in the sense of peculiar, “special section” edited by Dragan Kujundzic, a member of the Advisory Board for the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine. The section, entitled “J”, offers a selection from Jacques Derrida and one from J. Hillis Miller. (Miller holds a place on the Executive Board of the ICWT, and Derrida did until his death. They were friends.) The Miller text [excerpt here] seems to be about the literary kiss, and the Derrida text [excerpt here] contends to begin with the following oneirism:

"How does J. Hillis Miller himself feel himself ?": this is a reverie that I would like to share with you today. What is it to feel oneself [se sentir]? To feel oneself, to sense oneself in the sense in which one lets oneself be affected also by a feeling or a sensation? One cannot imagine this affect without the figure of some contact with oneself, without an auto-affection of touching and, more precisely, without the kind of intimate tactile sensitivity that is enigmatically called taste .

Without having read the article, and as such knowing basically nothing about the text aside from the question in the above excerpt of an excerpt, I immediately thought of Part III of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, ¶403-410, The Feeling Soul. As this is almost certainly not the path that the article took, let me just point out something about sub-part a, The feeling soul in its immediacy.

Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is, because immediate, not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it … a subject which may even exist as another individual. [my italics]

Basically, Hegel here is thinking of a situation which is commonly exemplified by the mother-child situation, but in a sort of three-ring coup de grâce, he turns the problem over to hypnotism in ¶406.

Writing about this almost surreal moment in Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that, “In this state, the disesased subject is ’selfless’: which is as much as to say that there is no subject, that this state is not its own. It is … vacant … devoid of presence and actuality.” That is, a subject essentially constructed by its self-presence, in fact the occasion for presence in general, is suddenly devoid of its constituting factor and is left to exist “formally” as simply the da- of existence.

Nancy also makes the following observation: “If in this way it is presence, it is as a pure presence, which for itself has no present and neither presents nor represents anything to itself, but is merely offered to the other’s representation.” (Identity and Trembling)

Indeed, how might (another) Derrida (in another universe) perhaps flex his mantic musculature, recognizing as he certainly does the knowledge that resists knowledge, recognizing the self-constituting other knowledge, and actually write how "J. Hillis Miller himself feel[s] himself ?" Might I suggest hypnosis?

I just finished watching Samaritan Girl, the latest offering from my local video store by director/writer Ki-duk Kim, who was made known to me last year by Spring, Summer, Fall Winter … and Spring. Watching this film actually ended up giving me a depth of appreciation for SSFWS that was unexpected. I had enjoyed SSFWS when I first saw it, but as I was able to experience a second film in this body of work, I really began to feel like Ki-duk Kim is probably a voice to be reckoned with. [Upon further inspection, this seems true: the so-called “validity” of his work is apparently hotly debated, and Samaritan Girl itself is referred to by at least one professional film critic as “sexual terrorism.” For the record, I think that the same critic’s assessment that anyone who enjoys Kim’s films is caught in “the blind spot that some Westerners have for East Asian films,” or, in an even more atrocious condesention that their (our) “bullshit detectors stop working,” is plainly ridiculous. Eh, caveat lector.] Specific content details aside, I personally found the diversity of the shooting and editing styles of the two films is not only highly appropriate and sensitive to their diverse subjects, but also to accentuate the profound cohesion Kim brings forth to the wildly different worlds simultaneously occupying his seemingly timeless (yet obviously contemporary) Korea. [Re: this cohesion, cf. Deleuze & Guattari’s desiring-machines.] I’ll spare you the exegesis, mostly because I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I would recommend both films highly. Particularly, I feel like a very satisfying experience might come of watching for comparison and contrast in each’s style of direction: hand-cam versus tracking shots, symmetry in frame composition, the way close-ups are handled, the way the landscape is represented, speed of cuts, etc. and the way each of these is clearly thought out in advance with regards their respective subject matter. I personally had to take pause in attempting to understand these two films as a unified (formal?) vision of the world. Even if nothing else, the staging of the films more than pays back the price of admission.