Is a craftsman an artisan?

 September 27, 2022

Is a craftsman an artisan?

New York Review of Books made an interesting point on what to my mind, was a distinction between the craftsman and the artisan. (Gorra, 9/22/22.) The craftsman, has, it was asserted, a mastery of the tools and skills of his trade. The ultimate goal was or is, the essay asserts, to do the work so as to develop his self and to improve at what he does. The artisan, so it is imagined in this distinction (-is it true? I am not convinced.-) also masters materials and the use of materials underlying his work. How could this be a proper distinction between the real as personhood, and the real as product of work of persons? I think it's a mind-body distinction that neither the possibly-fallaciously-distinct categories of artisan and craftsman, but especially the artisan, would in truth rather avoid. But if we set aside the fact that the current speculatively-tinged moment would prove, that the mind belongs to the craftsman, the very simple and much more basic and fundamental fact, that use of craft requires tools that are in their very essence also material, as the body, the voice, and the brain are all material tends to erase the distinction between craftsman and artisan if taken properly to a conclusion. And a conclusion can never be put off.-

But deeper than this is the extensively material aspect of all of our actual experience. The world, material as it is, can't be put off, in it's materiality. To see the potential in a material object to transform into another thing, is not to not see, or not deal with, it as it is. The absolute wood-ness of some thing, the quintessence of wood, is another material transformation, of wood, that cannot be fully reached its fullness and completeness. There is no purity, and in fact the quintessence of wood could actually be, and is probably, not wood in itself.

This is an example. The quintessence of stone, too, may not be stone in the material transformation that we are used to seeing it in. But it is assuredly not, stone in its raw form that allows the mind to understand that material. And so with metal, or clay, the same way. 

Does the craftsman want to, in the end, turn himself into the material he works on? I think this is the canard, or confusion to be charitable, endemic in the article. This is not, to my mind, what it is all about. Rather, it is to turn himself, in a manner of speaking, into the tools by which he works on the materials he works on. But this is the simply worded, but complex thought that is the distinction: the craftsman strives to become what he works with, and not what he works on. Not the distinction between the craftsman and the artisan at all, but between what a craftsman works with and what he works on. And this does mean he becomes his material tools, but also, he uses the tools of his mind and his body, his hands and his brain, as tools, as well. Being an artisan is an incidental but unavoidable fact of being a craftsman. But it is not at all dispositive of it. In fact, the two are imbricated in the work of it all. Materiality does not mean without mind, it means with brain.

…Water

September 27, 2022

...Water

Ecosocialism or barbarism: that's the stark choice that is faced to us by the hard lessons of the mid-Sixties. The choice of a better life, or not, is laid out in delineations like that. But, now that Ecosocialism itself is co-opted, properly I might add, by the Powers That Be, the problematic, continuing on to this issue, most broadly described is "how do you explain a simile?"

"This is water", said David Foster Wallace as he read a lecture to Kenyon College for their commencement a long time ago now. What's the point of it, I wonder? Is it a blank? Or, I do wonder, is it, after all, a sort of admonition to excellence by dealing with the now, the stuff that touches your skin it's so close.

You have to admit, all round, that what matters is always, has always been, what gets us to where we want to go, even if there is resistance from it.

DFW's analogy is to fish in water; so what to the fish is water, is not what to us is water. The impetus to think comes not from the concern, what is water, but what, to us, is like what water is to the fish.

The explanation of the explanation disposed of, the real work is to interrogate, if you will, the existence of the almost daily resistance that allows you to push against it, to swim. As it were…but not through water, but through life.

The concern leveled at the graduates of Kenyon College that year by David Foster Wallace was actually: do you have a personal code, that you follow even if it limits you? He, as a novelist, probably stuck to the admonition "don't act, just think" while in public, no matter how hard it was. But, that day he was not a graduate, he was the fish of his own simile, and he was really asking: what do you do?

A friend and I read parts of that speech at a high school baccalaureate, long long ago. For those who might still be wondering what I read to you – what we read to you that day: so it was, so that was.

Taiwan politics proper

September 27, 2022

Taiwan politics proper

No, given that people may want to engage productively with Taiwanese politics on a productive, state-to-state basis, it is completely true that the political system there does not make as much sense to Western eyes, and sense. But it's actually fair to understand, although it exists on the spectrum of what we, here in America, might call political economy rather than politics "proper".

The two main parties there basically represent two ends of a spectrum about political economy. On one end, the KMT, Kuomintang, or the Nationalist Party in English translation, is on the more mercantilist end of the spectrum. The DPP, or Democratic People's Progressive Party, Minjingdang, is far more toward the physiocratic end of the political spectrum.

Taiwan airspace

September 27, 2022

Taiwan airspace

The latest Taiwan news, coming in the week of the momentous Nancy Pelosi visit, is that Taiwan is still weathering the aftershocks of mainland China’s reaction to the visit, that marked the partnership with Taiwan over the CHIPS ACT.  Taiwan’s “raw” semiconductor chips are going to be essential to the implementation of that bill.

But when this bill is begun to be put into action, the global effect on high-tech industry economics is going to be that the American chips industry takes business away from other countries in the developing world: namely, Southeast Asia and China, also smaller players such as India. And the Taiwanese government is maneuvering hard to reach that outcome.

The growing pains from that are involving an increased “threat level” from China, but mainly, of the nature of China showing off the new technology that it has , As if to say, it is also a high tech power.

The latest is a Rainbow CH-4 drone spotted off the coast of the Taiwan outer islands. “Developed by China Aerospace and Technology, the CH-4 has a cruising speed of up to 180 kph and a flight range of 3500 km; the other was a Y8 anti-submarine war plane” per Taipei Times and the Taiwan Ministry of Defense. The two aircraft were among the 20 Chinese aircraft and five naval ships, and combat air and naval patrols and defense missile systems were deployed in response, although the location of the other 18 aircraft or the location of the naval vessels were not disclosed by the Taiwan government.

This all raises at least a concern about drones in the rules of war about invading sovereign airspace by unmanned vehicles.

Contra Nietzsche

 September 26, 2022

"Contra Nietzsche"

Nietzsche was wrong. Nietzsche does not have some thing that the people need overall, because he never admitted he was wrong, talked, or kept a record of his life, nor did he theorize about that need to have that in the human condition. It is not there, in anything. You go right ahead and doubt. But Foucault had to fix it for him, otherwise he was incomplete and didn't have all four forms of the "paper". So draw your conclusions from that. And don't ignore that that is not how you get to the Foucault, the "ink" and The Way and the subject of the form of the talk/product.

There is a significant correlation between these "nihilist" philosophers and the old Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism (the legalism of Han Fei) too. I'm tired of crying out about this, as if people can't use common-sense to make this conclusion. 

(Nietzsche is an insufficient foundation... is all I'm saying. You can't get started, from it.)

Me and the Left right now.

 September 26, 2022

Me and the Left right now

Me and the Left right now.

We all want freedom of movement across borders. And it is absolutely, an hypocrisy for international corporations to move product freely but restrict the movement of people, across these same borders.

What is a country? Or a nation-state, which the topic will dance around forever. It's many things; at the very least: security, territory, population. What does that mean, at least in the most surface level and readily apparent way? On a basic level, there is a social contract. But, at minimum what is the social contract that makes up the state? That's kind of the problematic that Foucault takes up sometimes, and I merely want to interpret here some thing that he wrote about but very obliquely. "Territory" as in borders. Free movement of people across borders is some thing I support, but to have "open" borders in the sense that the movement is unrestricted and without consequence, is not the actual desired goal. Free movement of people is. What is "territory?" Foucault says that properly speaking it is the pastoral power of WHEN. Telling people when they can and when they can through the standard processes of the modern state, you might say post-Hegel, in the sense of borders; in a more general sense it is always a when in this pastoral power, when governing territory.

Deproblematizing(?) - the Politics of Desire

September 25, 2022

Deproblematizing(?) - the Politics of Desire

What you should have to do to relegate the politics of desire strictly to the purpose which it is socially salutary to perhaps widen it to most encompassing everything possible that can beneficially be desired. Because tho we are all monkeys, monkeys like to have all the things we by analogy to the monkey might also desire. The monkey that said maybe no more fighting and fucking for a little while because I want to go over there to get that tasty fruit and, y'all coming with me to get it? And, no, but that monkey went there anyway because he remembered that that fruit was super tasty; that is still a monkey too! - There is no need to say we are so high mighty supermen; they always make mistakes or at least one of those mistakes, and they always stay around too long and don't get the fruit or they don't do some other thing but just stay there, not doing it… And so on. But embrace what you want in the face of the reality that we are monkeys and monkeys are violent and do politics like chimpanzees and horny like bonobos sometimes too. So, keeping all in mind that social consequences always result from whatever you desire to do and do, but the only difference between monkeys and the monkeys that we are is, us monkeys care about the truth. And that monkey that wants to go get that tasty food store far away will also have to do his thing and… share the fruit or at least where the tree is where he got that fruit. Desire should be thought of as the totality as a crutch or framework too, so called, boil it down to what it is that you really brought back to add to that bubbling cauldron of true culture, that we all keep around as human type monkeys.

Even if that thing is just a rock, it goes in the pot! That is the consequence.