Failure Is Freedom

This season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is called "Hermeneutics" after the Greek messenger god Hermes. Interpretation can close, but only retroactively since the present is always open to a reinterpretation of the past, which means to change one's relation to the past, and thus, change the relations of the past. Closing on a particular interpretation is to determine or objectify, but every determination or realization of possibility actuates more open possibility. AN Whitehead explained that each "Actual Occasion," which was something like a spatiotemporal slice or droplet of experience was comprised of an intention for novel experience or novel affect, which was often embodied in the body of the creature or "Superject" that chose what to ingress into an Actual Occasion, the "physical pole," which were the concrescences ingressed from the past, and the "mental pole," or open virtuality of the actualized possibility that was yet to be fully realized. Interpretation is possible because of the incomplete determination the mental pole. This incomplete determination allowed the Superject access to actuate possibility through the process of conceptualization, which might be thought of as making what has already beed determined or concresced less determinate or as intervening in the causal chain by determining the incomplete determination of its causal necessity. Determination is a retroactive closure that is always reopened in the present by the mental pole's access to virtuality and the Superject's intention for novel affect, concepts, and experience.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowable identities or definitions cannot completely reduce all of what is given by our experience, which is the "too-much givenness" of phenomenology, to objective or whole phenomena or concepts. The classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl attempted to eliminate the mediating concepts of perception via the "Eidetic Reduction," so that what appears might appear from its own initiative, or so that phenomena may appear in-themselves, as themselves, and from themselves, stripped of the obscuring mediation of concepts. But this return to some sort of primary naivete has proven elusive because the conceptual mediation of experience seems to be the ground of any possible experience, even though Kantian categories aren't really concepts but the internalization of the natural laws, which ground whatever appears. Raw or unmediated percepts have to be copulated with other percepts to be perceived, which means that at least the categories of relation and difference are necessary mediators of whatever appears as given. The primary relation, or category, of cause to effect is given by the relation of space-time to matter-energy according to the categories of the natural laws. But causes cannot be directly observed, as David Hume famously pointed out, and effects, especially those considered as what appears as the phenomena of the world, cannot be reduced in total to material causality as is demonstrated in the work of Jean-Luc Marion by his concept of "Saturated Phenomena." The too-much givenness of Saturated Phenomena leaves any possible reduction to physical causality or to conceptual reasons constitutively incomplete, and therefore, they produce the non-objects of "Counter-Experience," rather than the objects of the material reduction or to the phenomena of the Eidetic reduction. This incompleteness, which Marion describes as the mismatch between intuition and intention or between what is given as affective, or felt, phenomena and what can be reduced to causes, leaves room for the virtual space of the subjunctive Imaginary in which possibilities can be actuated and realized, but also in which these realizations actualize more open possibility, which Deleuze thought of as the difference given by a repetition without a concept and Meister Eckhart thought of as God's revealing by withdrawing deeper into His infinite depths. This is the infinitely open, constantly multiplying possibility that does not mean a hermeneutics of anything-goes, but rather of a dialectic with the creative processes of being's becoming other than itself in the relation of identity to difference or self to other or interior to exterior or the One to the many, and so on. Hermeneutics is then where we will turn to next in season three because it is how we participate in creation by making being eternally new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to reduce to the phenomenal and conceptual objects of the intention. Being is too excessive to be reduced to intentional phenomena and conceptualizations. No matter how many intentional percepts we may copulate with percepts, or percepts with concepts, or concepts with concepts, we will never reduce being to either the perceivable nor to the knowable because what being is becoming isn't determined. The indeterminacy of nonbeing cracks open being's becoming in being's procession into the entropic abyss of space-time, while concurrently, the abyss speaks "on" and "in" the matter of determinate being's energetic resistance to it as the binary opposition of the impermanent, material somethings, on the one hand, and the nothing of pure potential, on the other. The One becomes many in a glorious failure to contain itself, like Beckett's "incontinent void" or Paul Valéry's "blemish on the perfection of nonbeing." Perhaps, nonbeing's victory will eventually be absolute in its ultimate, self-defeating, heat death. But until then, the void will speak in the deformations and clumpy configurations wrought in matter's inconsistent dispersal into the abyss that birthed it. For now, being's excess coincides with its lack, which is its lack of oneness, or its inability to unify all of its multiplicity under a single intention. The One that "fails to be at one with itself" is being's intimacy with the nonbeing endemic to it. Let all things be made new in the continual baptism of the dialectic of love, in which the beautiful, sublime, and horrific erotically twist around each other in Blakesque songs of experience.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Lacanian excessive enjoyment, or "jouissance," is enjoying what is unenjoyable. The excessive part of excessive enjoyment refers to the irreducibility of jouissace to mere enjoyment or pleasure. The ground of whatever there is, is contradiction. The contradiction of dialectical, binary opposition doesn't resolve into a third thing or object, but into a third non-object. Jean-Luc Marion wrote that the subject of "Counter-Experience" was the irresolvable ambiguity of the counter-object or of the non-object. The non-object is that which lacks objectification because of its excess, or because Saturated Phenomena produce too much intuition or affect to reduce to intentional objectification or conceptualization. The subject of jouissance is also the non-object, which is formed by the Lacanian "non-relation." Binary oppositions such as visible and invisible or darkness and light or enjoyable and unenjoyable constitute each other in a mystical co-arising from their ground in the absolute contradiction of binary opposition, which is the absolute resistance of the Lacanian Real to representation. It is the irresolvablity of this primordial double negation that produces the excess of lack inherent to jouissance.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

An identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment about what something was because any possible ground for a judgement was itself incomplete, which Lacan put as "There is no metalanguage," and Leotard put as "There is no meta-narrative." For Deleuze, any interpretive closure, like a phenomenological objectification or an intentional conceptualization, contained the illusion of wholeness given by the appearance of a repetition, which was the illusion of "resemblance," but there was no true repetition because resemblance was the imposition of a transcendent identity onto what was ultimately immanent difference, which for Deleuze was the differential background that underlay all reality and any possible foregrounding of an objective unification. Lacan saw the projection of the virtual object, which he called "Objet-Petit-a" in a similar manner, as a fantasy projection of wholeness onto what was essentially incomplete, disunified, and ambiguous, like Deleuze's differential background from which any temporary repetition emerged, which Deleuze called, "Difference-in-itself." Lacan's phenomenology can be said to be that of object-small-a because it was a fantasy projection that unified a multiplicity or positivized a lack of oneness as if a one, which was the oneness imagined in Lacan's register of the Imaginary. Badiou, referring to the work of Meillassoux, called this projection of oneness the "take-as-one" function of Set Theory, in which oneness is imposed by defining what belongs in the set and what doesn't. The outside definition of a set, or its externally given intention, functions as a classical substance because it defines what it contains like a substance used to contain its attributes. In Kant's phenomenology, the subjective intention "synthesizes" objective phenomena via intuitive categories, and then projects these objectifications as what appears as the objective, exterior world. This intuitive synthesis accords with the general structure of the take-as-one unification because it synthesizes a one from perceptual difference, as in Whitehead's definition of a perception or a conceptualization as at least two percepts joined together according to a rule. However, this synthesis isn't complete as Hegel showed in his dialectical double negation, which didn't resolve into a synthesis but was always left with an irresolvable remainder, which could be called "irreducible ambiguity." Irreducible ambiguity might be thought of as a contradiction that cannot be resolved into a synthesis, but a nonetheless, productive irresolution. If irreducible ambiguity is what withdraws from any interpretation, then, perhaps, it is a productive withdrawal, just as the Lacanian Real is what resists symbolic identification but is also the ground of the Symbolic, or as the void is the negation whose inability to negate itself produces whatever appears as the world.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism.  In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because the "natural stance" of our subjective experience categorizes the world, or divides it up into discreet objects, which seem to reflect "real" divisions of types of things. However, these "clear" borders between types are growing confused as the intrusions of the Lacanian "Real" cause the identities of things to fail. It is hard to ignore how traditional categories no longer work, as the particularly predominate example of gender shows. In the US a nostalgic longing for the return of easily identifiable types has played no small part in the return of authoritarian populism. The desire for the "Big Other" to tell us what we are is strong here, which is the desire for repression and control that is imagined as the return of the lost Eden of a once great America.But this Eden in which "men were men and women and minorities knew there place," like all other fantasy, lost objects never really was. There has never been a time when the categories of the "Big Other" didn't encounter their failure in the Real. It is just that the repression of this failure has been more or less successful, and with the distance of time, it becomes easier to imagine through the lens of nostalgia that there was a halcyon time when the world knew what it was. But what about the a priori categories that Kant taught were necessary to have even our most basic perceptions? Do those internalizations of the natural laws also fail? Harmon shows that something is lost in what he calls the "overmining" of Structuralism and Process Philosophy, which is for him the withdrawal of the "thing-in-itself" from the relations of symbolic difference so essential for language users to make a world through the copulation of the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic with percepts. The thing-in-itself also famously withdrew from the pre-conceptual, or intuitive, perceptions of Kant's phenomenal representation in the subjective intention, which he saw as the synthesis of the things that appear to us from the intuitive relations of the categories and the noumenal things-in-themselves. This "withdrawal" at the level of the natural laws had been the focus of much of Zizek's recent work on Quantum indeterminacy in which the causal categories of perception fail to determine the things-in-themselves. This failure at the level of the internalized natural laws is mostly due to the unavoidability of the most basic category of cause and effect and its basis in space-time for perception, which is sometimes described as the "observer effect." Quantum fields do not seem to be determined by causes in the same way that the macro level of reality is, which means that they do not seem to be in space-time in the same way either. How can observers totally dependent on causality to either perceive or conceive, know anything about a thing-in-itself that withdraws beyond the a priori categories of quantity, quality, mode, and relation? Let's get into it.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Kant's use of the term "intuition" was different than how we might normally think of it. By intuition we usually mean something like having been registered affectively in the body but unanalyzed or without conceptualization. We often intuit a situation as an affective whole before we have analyzed it rationally. However, Kant meant the synthesis of whatever is "before" our perception of the world that makes the world appear as if given in immediacy, even though this immediacy is given by the mediation of his a priori categories. Kantian intuition and phenomenological intention in general, are the largely unconscious processes of consciousness, or of how phenomena appear as the world to us by "filtering" the "noumenal" realm, or what Kant called the "things-in-themselves," through the physical laws often lumped together under the general groupings of quantity, quality, relation, and mode. This filter is not learned but given as the "transcendental subjectivity," or evolutionary interface, that allows us to learn about and construct ourselves and the world through the binary opposition of an internal self to an external other, or the world of phenomenal objectifications. The interface of the subjective screen is the natural laws, or at least those that are relevant to our instrumental interactions with the Universe, internalized as the categories by which the world appears to us.The Lacanian Imaginary register does something similar because it is what makes the whole and complete objects of the phenomenological world that appear on our intentional screen. However, the perceptual or conceptual unity of a "natural" category according to the physical laws or of a virtual category according to the dictates of the concepts of a given Symbolic are projected into the noumenal realm in the Imaginary register, this unification covers over a fundamental lack of oneness constitutive of the "inconsistent multiplicity" of whatever is "before" this imaginary projection, which is how the fundamental binary opposition of indeterminacy, or space, and the determinations of the physical laws on matter / energy "synthesize" whatever there is, or the Universe as a whole. However, there is no complete synthesis, or determination, of being because being isn't a one, except in the imaginary "take as one" function of Set Theory. The Lacanian Real is the inconsistent multiplicity, or the deferential background, of any possible foregrounding of an objective whole in the Imaginary register. The Real exposes that both the wholes of the Kantian intuition as well as the Lacanian Imaginary and the signifiers of the Symbolic are incomplete, which means that the noumenal is the differential background that is always breaking through and warping the foregrounded phenomenal "world." Joan Copjec calls the warped phenomenal objects of the subjective intuition "object-small-a's" because they are the incomplete "wholes" that Lacan outlined as his "abject-petite-a."Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

There is no thing without the dialectic of some-thing and no-thing. Whatever was before the binary opposition of something and nothing, was neither something nor nothing. When this primordial non-thing, perhaps an "inconsistent multiplicity," or an absolutely unified, absolute nothing, was separated into something and nothing, then binary oppositions gave us everything that is, which is just like saying being is a relation to nonbeing and not a thing-in-itself. However, this cut into the primordial void didn't accomplish a complete dichotomization of differential relations because it couldn't entirely eliminate whatever ambiguity was "before" this separation. The incompletion of this separation reflects the inherent incompletion of the determination of being into either the positivity of presence or the negativity of absence. The irreducible ambiguity of what is, is that it also "isn't," which is reflected in such bizarre quantum phenomena as "interposition" and "non-locality," as well as in macro level phenomena described best by Jean-Luc Marion's adumbration of "Saturated Phenomena." Saturated Phenomena produce indeterminable hermeneutics from this irreducible ambiguity that resists determination because it resists separation into the most basic categories of being and nonbeing. Binary oppositions give whatever there is to being's self-knowing, but the resistance to knowing in the Lacanian register of the Real allows that self-relation to move. Becoming's continual movement through the dialectical relation of difference is without complete separation, so that knowing, like the being it represents, is a flow, rather than a static determination.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Being is birthed by nonbeing, and nonbeing is birthed by being. Whatever is "before" this simultaneous co-arising is a nothing that "proceeded" the dialectic between something and nothing, sometimes called the "absolute" nothing because it is without relation to something, so that it isn't even nothing because nothing needs something to negate to be nothing. Whatever is before "the relation" of Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy isn't even what Alain Badiou called an "inconsistent multiplicity," referencing the work of Quentin Meillassoux, because inconsistency co-arises with consistency just as multiplicity is simultaneous with the One. The ground of knowing is the cut into GWF Hegel's Being-in-itself, which is the dichotomous concurrence of being and nonbeing related without the resolution of synthesis across the cut of difference as a twice negated becoming.Binary oppositions are the necessary ground of knowing because when light is separated from the dark, as it is in Genesis, both the dark and the light retroactively create each other. And while they can never be put entirely back together, so that the "light shines in the darkness without the darkness overcoming it," as the Gospel according to John says, there will always be an irreducible remainder of the ambiguity from before the cut. The darkness is also not overcome, and whatever it is that resist the separation of binaries is both the limit and the ground of their dichotomization.The same is true of the determinate negation of knowing through identification. There is no determination without indeterminacy and no identification without difference. Knowing's limit and horizon is the irreducible ambiguity of what is unknowable, just as the Symbolic co-arrises with the Real. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The Symbolic is not at one with itself, which means that knowing through representation is not only mediated through language but also shifty. However, it is the immediacy of this "shiftiness" that allows for knowing to be a dynamic, experimental flow that reflects the dynamism of being as a process of becoming. Hermeneutics is the sort of shifty knowing that reflects the provisional nature of both knowing and the experience of becoming. The shiftiness within is not disingenuous but the abyss from which all hermeneutical ingenuity emerges, and what allows us to become constantly new by becoming other than ourselves.Jean-Luc Marion divides "Saturate Phenomena" into those aspects that can be taken in to ourselves through the intention and those that are intuited. There is a mismatch between intentional, phenomenological representation and immediate, affective intuition. Saturated Phenomena are defined by the too-much-givenness of the intuition that cannot be reduced by the symbolic intention to phenomenal and conceptual objects. The intuition then is a kind of awareness of "over-proximal affects" that can't be symbolize, so that they are in the Lacanian register of the Real, which is the absolute resistance to symbolization. It is this unsymbolizable otherness that connects the abyss within to the abyss without, and which allows being's becoming to be the experimental interpretation of the hermeneutical circle. The shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics is the shift from intentional identification in the Symbolic register to the provisional, shifty interpretation in the resister of the Real through the Lacanian Imaginary.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Formal Phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl's attempt to discover the ground of phenomenal appearances and the relations between these appearances and the "things-in-themselves." His "Eidetic Reduction" hoped to reduce the internal intention of the subject to increase the external intention of what shows itself to the subject, so that what is other than the subject might show itself from its own intention without the interference of the subject's presuppositions, which are a reflection of the subject's intention and not of the Other that appears on the subject's intentional screen. The problem with the Eidetic reduction was that it was the subject's presuppositions that allow the Other to appear at all. What is outside and other to the subject must be brought into the subject, or appear to the subject, via an interpretive frame work, starting with Kant's "A Priori Categories" for basic perception and ending with the concepts given to human subjectivity by their collective Imaginary and Symbolic registers for more advanced "understanding."Things-in-themselves aren't things or objects. They must be in relation with an outside or with otherness or with the intention of another because objects are reified by relations of difference according to physical rules, perceptual apparatuses or concepts. The outside co-arrises with the inside as a relation of difference governed by the natural laws, perceptual categories, and by the signifiers of minded things. The internal parts of an object are made whole by the intention of the whole, but the wholeness of an object isn't isolated within its objectification, but rather it is a relational intention or an intention extended into its outside environment. Evolution by natural selection is a principle that relates bodily objectification to "niche" intention, so that the body of an organism reflects its niche in its biome.In phenomenology this co-arising of inside and outside as objectification is articulated as the necessity of consciousness to be about something, or to have an object, so that internal subjectivity is given by the difference of external objectivity, or otherness. Unconscious, or reactive, co-variable arising, or causality, is the physically determined intentionality of material objects. Non-physical, conscious intentionality is awareness-of, which in phenomenology is awareness "of" a different or other intention outside of the internal intention. In psychology the "Theory of Mind" is the awareness of the "mindedness," or of the "subjectivity" of the Other. However, the psychoanalytic subject does not have an objectifiable intention as other objects do. There will always be a remainder of irreducible ambiguity after an Eidetic reduction is intentionally performed. And this resistance to identity or to intentional conceptualization is what is singular or different or other about the psychoanalytic subject, not only about the outside other but also about the internal other of the subject itself. Psychoanalysis is hermeneutical in natural rather than phenomenological because the irreducible otherness of subjectification requires interpretation rather than phenomenological reduction to objects.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The self / other relationship of being's becoming is the center piece of both phenomenology and of hermeneutics and can help explain why there was a general shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics in theory beginning with Heidegger and culminating in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. This shift was not a total rejection of Phenomenology but an acknowledgement that the goal of Husserlian phenomenology of the "Eidetic Reduction" wasn't possible given the inherent perspectivalism of the showing of being and of the knowing of being. Things may show themselves "from" themselves but they can't appear "as" themselves to another without the other's interpretation of their showing. Any possible appearance of being must appear through an interpretive apparatus or some kind, whether that be a biological mechanism like a sensory system, or a symbolic system of differences like a language. But mediation doesn't necessarily lessen the immediacy of being. It may be that mediated being is being showing itself to itself as another, but it may simultaneously be true that the interpretation of being is the immediacy of being's becoming through the mediation of perception and conceptualization, a becoming in which some degrees of freedom are actuated by the immediate distantiation of being from itself as an object for itself. This distantiation of being from itself injects indeterminacy into determinate being, which is the space of nonbeing necessary for being to appear to itself and to know itself as itself through otherness. The relation of being to its other, which is nonbeing, is being's becoming as an immediate, dialectical process "for" itself, or "Being-for-itself" rather than "Being-in-itself," as Hegel outlined. In whatever way Being-in-itself is "immediate," it is so immediate that it can't be "for" itself because it is without the relationality of "for-ness" or any other sort of prepositionally given appearance or knowing.The relationality of "otherness" is the ground of any possible appearance of being "to" or "for" itself, so phenomenology must included hermeneutical interpretation without the totalizing reduction that Husserl called "Eidetic," which would mean the identification and defining of an eternal, unchanging essence or substance. Any reduction of an appearance to knowing must include the indeterminacy of otherness's irreducible ambiguity and thus precludes any complete determination of an identity. Every possible identification includes the otherness of misidentification.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

There may be actual degrees of freedom in the register of Imaginary if it is possible to relate determinate being to the open indeterminacy of the void. Jean-Luc Marion's Saturated Phenomena relate the objective determinations of the intention to the failure to determine of the affective intuition as the indeterminable hermeneutics of too much givenness, or of too much aboutness for the intention to reify into phenomenal or conceptual objects. Is it possible that this affective intuition cannot be fully determined because it intuits the irreducible ambiguity of actual indeterminacy, something like the indeterminacy or superposition of Quantum? If this were the case, then this irreducible ambiguity would contain actual degrees of freedom, particularly the freedom of the non-local, symbolic imagination to project itself into the abyss of meaning to generate new semantic meanings and virtual worlds that have real effects on being, or are ontologically real themselves, as virtuality is for Deleuze. For Hegel determinate being can step outside of itself, or self-alienate, to imagine itself as an object. It is the lack of total objectification of and in the subjective intention, or the lack of symbolic interpolation, that constitutes the subject's "singularity" in Zizek's formulation, or that allows for some relative degrees of freedom in the register of the Imaginary. The Real is the absolute resistance to the symbolization and the objectification of the intention, but the Imaginary can imagine into, or across, the open spaces of the Real outside of and within determinate being. Lack of interpolation can also be seen as the excess of indeterminate being that allows for an excess of interpretations, which is too much being to determine. There is too much being because being is an indeterminate becoming, which is always becoming more than what the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic can frame, so that there is an ongoing need for concept creation. It is this excess of being beyond objectification that allows for the imaginary freedom of interpretation. The interpretation of determinate being is the freedom of the symbolic imagination given by the indeterminacy of the void.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Whatever degrees of freedom we may have, they seem to be "contained" in the Imaginary. The Lacanian Imaginary makes whole and complete what is neither whole nor complete, which is the Real. But it is this "non-relation" between wholeness in the Register of the Imaginary and "lack" in the Register of the Real that allows our imaginary projections into the void to be somewhat indeterminate, or to contain relative degrees of freedom. These imaginary projections are types of illusions, which might be thought of in terms of the Lacanian virtual object that he called "Object-small-a." Virtual objects appear as if real, even though they are imaginary projections. Lacanian psychoanalysis was to open up whatever degrees of freedom are available to the analysand by "traversing the fantasy" of this virtual projection. The analysand must distantiate from the virtual object enough to realize the difference between the object of desire, which is what the fantasy is projected on to, and the object-cause-of-desire, which is the obstacle that constitutes the imaginary projection as a positivization of lack. The freedom of the Imaginary is given by the realization of this gap because it is the gap of indeterminacy in determinate being that is given by the void of nonbeing. And it is the indeterminacy of desire that allows for a reinterpretation of a determinate symptom.The relation between being and nonbeing gives the open indeterminacy of virtuality, which might be thought of as the relative degrees of freedom contained in "actual possibility." The virtual does have a sort of reality because as Deleuze put it, the virtual is "actualized" but not "realized" possibility. The phenomenological intention works in this same way. It imagines noumenal reality as phenomenal objects. We perceive the world in Gestalt Wholes, not as it is "in-itself." Our freedom is given to us when the wholes given by the concepts of the Symbolic fail to be whole, which is the gap given by the relation of whole objects to what resists objectification completely, which is the Lacanian Real. Zizek formulates this freedom as the failure of the Symbolic to interpolate being in the register of the Real. For example, our personal identity is singular because our "irreducible ambiguity," in Levinas's famous locution, cannot be interpolated into the Symbolic. We are the relation formed at the intersection of the Symbolic and its failure, and this relation is indeterminate. Our freedom is exactly here with this indeterminacy, which Heidegger formulated as determinate being's relation to the void, or the creativity of the imagination. Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics demonstrate how this imaginal freedom is properly employed.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Phenomenology is the study of how things appear. Both studies have had to concede a sort of "perspectivalism" because disclosure, or "unconcealment," is always through the "thrownness," or particularity, of a given position that Heidegger called being's "facticity." The sciences have tried to rid first-person observation of perspective by claiming "third-person" objectivity, but intentional objects, including the objects of the sciences, have a remainder of ambiguity, or "difference," that will not be completed or made whole because of the ineluctability of perspective's locatedness. Every identification has at least a bit of misrecognition about it because there is no omniscient position from which to view a situation objectively without aspects of the object "withdrawing" from the observer, like the back sides of three-dimensional objects. Even though the withdrawn aspects of objects can be inferred, there is no meta-position to directly verify that they are there. Because being cannot be seen all at once, there will always be room for interpretation. Hermeneutics is the freedom of the symbolic intention to hold being's indeterminacy differently without closure. It is in the clash of interpretations that new concepts are created and being is renewed. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon" produce "indeterminable hermeneutics." Indeterminable hermeneutics can either be a blessing or a curse because they are counter to our intention. What we cannot intend is what Marion called the "non-object," which is the "object" of all saturated phenomena. Soren Kierkegaard was perhaps the first to articulate the anxiety produced by the non-object of the void. Sigmund Freud defined fear as having an object and anxiety as without one. Jacques Lacan then positivized this negativity with his formulation that "anxiety is not without an object." Because the hermeneutics of the non-object can't be determined, no one interpretation can become totalizing. The gift of the negativity of non-closure is that interpretations can be put in relation with each other without one becoming dominant. The "clash" of interpretations, as Paul Ricoeur might have put it, produce "semantic innovations" in the irresolution of their relations. But how does one avoid the "lazy relativism" of intellectual tolerance that David Tracy warned about. In the patronizing acceptance of all interpretations, including indefensible ones, one loses sight of the truth. If the public relating of interpretations are to make a community of interpreters, then they must offer public reasons for these interpretations?The disjunction between the intention and the intuition in Saturated Phenomena are not so much a disjunction as a relation, in particular, the relation that Lacan outlined as that between the Symbolic and the Real. Every attempt at an interpretation is an attempt to symbolize the Real, but the Real's resistance to symbolization is absolute. But the gift of the Real is the constant renewal of the interpretive intention. Paul Ricoeur thought of this relation as that of the dialectic between language's universality and the particularity of difference that allowed for  imaginal creativity. Much like the Lacanian Imaginary, Ricoeur's imaginal creativity makes whole, but by bringing difference into relation without the resolution of completion, which is the non-completion of the Lacanian "Non-Relation." For both thinkers this wholeness can be the relation between wholeness and its failure, which might be thought of as wholeness without completion or intention without oneness, which would be the necessary ground of the multiplicity of a possible hermeneutic community.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither directly referred to each other's work in majorly significant ways. Ricoeur developed a sort of theology of hermeneutics by changing the project of Husserlian phenomenology from the "eidetic reduction," which identified the objective essence of a phenomenon, to the hermeneutic interplay of multiple, irreducible interpretations or meanings. For Ricoeur what a things was, was indeterminable accept through the clash of multiple semantic meanings that produced a sort of revelation of the "things in themselves" as not in themselves but in the clash of interpretations of them, which bares some resemblance to Husserl's technic of "eidetic variation," but without out any reduction to a single intentional stance towards the essence or identity of a thing. Marion also changed the end goal of the "eidetic reduction" but he kept the language of "letting things show themselves as themselves." However, what showed itself was from elsewhere and therefore invited an interminable play of contrary hermeneutic variations. For both Marion and Ricoeur, the too-much-givenness of elsewhere, which might be thought of as the too-much otherness of the Other, results in the failure to reduce otherness to a single intention or identity. But otherness is both the failure of identity and the ground of it, or put in a more Levinasian formulation, as Ricoeur did, the ground of becoming of "self as Other," in which the interior intention and exterior other become in dialectical relation to each other's unknowable intention, like Meister Eckhart's God beyond God who reveals and hides in the same movement.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

It has long been noticed that there is a similarity between how the mind knows the world and how the physical world appears. For those in the Idealist camp this similarity is because our minds reflect the mind-like structures of reality. But modern physical sciences are based on the total rejection of any subjective interference with "objective" knowledge. And so those in the Realist camp base knowing about the Universe on the purification of observations from any taint of subjective or perspectival bias, in which a sort of direct knowing of reality is sought in an "a" equals "a" identification of the Universe as it is in-itself. And these scientific materialists just take the miracle that the mind corresponds to reality in such as way as to know anything about it as a given. But the mystical knowing of Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon" involves putting the unknowable in relation to the knowable to produce a kind of knowing about what can't be known that he calls "Counter-Experience." Counter-Experience is the experience that is given by the failure to know. The failure to know in Marion's Counter-Experience is not because too little information has been given but rather because too much affect has been given to the intuition for the intention to reduce to conceptual or phenomenal objects. The gratuity of this givenness reflects the ultimate gratuity that gives whatever appears to the intention, which is the ground of both what can be known about the Universe and what can't. The unknowable ground of whatever there is, is the gratuity of the love that proceeds even God, which is the love that Marion calls "God without being."The excess of God's Love precedes Him, and this gratuitous love shows itself as the beyond of the intention, or of what proceeded any possible knowledge, as Counter-Experience. This too-much-givenness then becomes the gift of endless opportunities for interpretations, which are endless opportunities to consider the gratuity that proceeded both being and the knowing of being. The first gift is the appearance of what can't be determined, the second gift is the ingression of this indeterminate excess into the intention via Interpretation. Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics outlined how what can't be determined must be interpreted. Ricoeur showed how the failure to know gave raise to communities of interpretation, in which God's indeterminate love becomes not only the basis for an indeterminate creation but also the basis for communities of interpretation of the too-much-givenness of being.  Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is the self-emptying of oneness, so that through this self-differentiation and self-distantiation there might be the differential relation of continual becoming. Love isn't a being, but the ground of being, which is the playful relation between the finite and the infinite; the universal and the particular; and potential and its material impressions. Love desires being, or more accurately, it desires the interplay of being and nonbeing as a becoming without end, which means without a unified intention, as all "good" and "true" play should be without intention and without end. But as the ground of the dialectic of being-at-play, it must continually love whatever there is into existence by desiring existence in such a way as not to have a final intention for it, so that becoming might have its own intentions, and as many of them as possible. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because love makes a clearing for being to play according to its own multitudinous intentions, which are the purposeless excesses of the many given by the unbecoming of the one. Love's desire for being is abundance, which is the excessive abundance of love's too-much givenness for one intention to contain. The love that grounds being's play is the utter gratuity of the ambiguity that it gives, which is being to itself as an endless becoming without the conditions of purpose. All lack in being is a lack of oneness, which is the lack of an end given by the without-purpose of unconditional love. Whatever there is: every beauty, sublimity, or horror is the excess given by love's uncontrolled becoming, so that love's counter-intention is indistinguishable from an unintended accident. The experience of love is Marion's "Counter-Experience," so saturated with ambiguous affect that the intuition cannot be reduced by the intention. The Counter-Experience's aboutness is the super-saturated non-object. The self-sacrificial love that grounds becoming is the sacrifice of intention to the counter-intention of the without-objectification of the intuition. Love's excessive becoming is unconditioned, unintended, and endless, but not without any of them.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

According to Acts, Paul went to the Aeropagus in Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers who apparently just sort of hung out there talking shit all day. He conveniently found a placard to an unknown god to illustrate the main point that he wanted to make to them about how the God that he worshipped was beyond their fancy Greek philosophical knowledge. They were mostly true to their sophistic reputations, but they at least condescended to converse with him before rejecting his Gospel, especially the bit about the resurrection of the dead. However, there were a couple of standouts who believed him and joined him, Damaris and Dionysius. Dionysius the Aeropagite would have his name ripped off but nonetheless honored by the Pseudo-Dionysius 500 years later. Pseudo-Dionysius is widely regarded as the founding figure of Christian Mysticism. For whatever reason he borrowed Dionysius's name, the anonymous writer shared a strong affinity with Dionysius for the unknowability of God. Jean-Luc Marion has outlined how this unknowable God is properly represented in the Icon, which is as the invisible made visible without reducing invisibility, or reducing unknowability. When the invisible appears from elsewhere, it is the sort of "Saturated Phenomenon" that Marion called "Revelation," but how does one stay true this sort of incomprehensible event, in which the unknowable makes itself know "as" an irreducible mystery? Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

When too much is given to the intention, there is too much aboutness, which is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a Saturated Phenomenon. Saturated Phenomena overwhelm us with too much aboutness to reduce to either a visible object or to the conceptual understanding, so that there is a mismatch between what intentionally appears and what we intuit about an experience. Marion breaks this too-much-ness into the four categories of Kant's a priori experiential necessity. Too much quantitative aboutness is the excessive information of the Event. Too much qualitative aboutness is the too much affective qualia of the artistic masterpiece. Too much relational aboutness is the over-proximity of sensation in the flesh or the body. Too much modal aboutness is the too many possibilities to be reduced to the possible. And Marion's Revelation is a fifth category that encompasses the other four as that which exceeds any possible reduction to material causality. The irreducible reminder of intuitive ambiguity that cannot be reduced by the intention as an objective representation, produces the "indeterminable hermeneutics" that characterizes a mismatch between what is intuited and what is represented. The gap, which is the same gap of the Lacanian Real between symbolization and what resists symbolization absolutely, is an opportunity for multiple interpretations of whatever it is that has appeared. Paul Ricoeur offered an interpretation of the endless production of interpretations as a possible ground of hermeneutical communities of interpretation, such as those of Midrash in the Rabbinic tradition. An interpretation is an imaginary projection into an indeterminable gap in the mode of Lacan's "abject petite a."  This gap can allow for the play of imagination that is the indeterminable beauty and horror of the sublime  and of the religious experience.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equality or an eidetic identification. It is analogy's productive failure to identify in a complete or total way that makes analogy the proper approach to the divine. But how might analogical knowing give one a direct experience of the unknowable as the mystic claims?Edmund Husserl invented the phenomenological "Epoché" to reduce prior assumptions about what appears to us on our subjective screens, so that whatever appears might appear "as" itself. Prior assumptions can block what appears from appearing as itself because they filter out what doesn't appear according to a given conceptual schema. Giles Deleuze pointed out how concepts can mold reality in such a way as to reduce difference or block it out entirely. But is it even possible to bracket our given concepts in such a way as to encounter what appears in a state of utter Naiveté? For Jean-Luc Marion when something appears from "elsewhere," it appears as invisible, or it is visible as invisible. This is not what appears as visible because of the phenomenological epoché. Reducing or eliminating prior assumptions doesn't reveal its invisible content, so that its "Primary Naiveté," in the words of Paul Ricoeur, is built into its phenomenological structure or way of appearing. It is revealed as unseeable. In order to get a grasp on this apparent contradiction, we'll have to review Marion's phenomenology, especially his great addition to the phenomenological tradition, "Saturated Phenomena." Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché"  would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through an intercourse that does not reduce the "otherness" of the "Other," which is to unify without the equivalences of identification or of objectification. One of the worst and most persistent misunderstandings about Hegel's dialectical synthesis is that it reduces the positive and the negative terms of the dialectic to a unity in which one becomes the other without remainder. No! it is a holding together of a contradiction in which the otherness of each opposing term makes a third thing appear, which is the failure of synthesis, or the productive contradiction of love. The "refractory zone (Deleuze)" of Lacanian "non-rapport" between lovers that forms when these two terms are "brought near (Deleuze)" in the dialectic is a third non-object, which is unable to become an object, or a conceptual object of knowledge, because there is too much about it to objectively unify. The failure of symbolization at the heart of the Lacanian Real's "absolute resistance" to symbolic unification is the too-much indeterminacy of being "as" a becoming to determine through the equalities of identification. Knowing what is indeterminable through the intercourse of love must be done analogically with the phenomenological "as," which is knowing the beloved "as" it shows itself. The "as" of analogy is what allows being to become in relation to knowing without being determined by that knowing, so that love is always a revelation that makes "visible the invisible in its invisibility" without reduction to what intentionally appears, as Jean-Luc Marion would have it.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself for the mystic. Love like God is not good because it is the ground of whatever there is including goodness. Love is what makes any other intention appear, so love's intention is that being be an indeterminate becoming, which is a becoming without the determination of a completely unified intention. Love is the intention that undoes itself because its nature is to be self-sacrificial, or an unintentional intention that grounds other intentions, which is what is meant by the "unconditional" or "non-transactional" nature of "Real" love. If love were determinate, it wouldn't be loving because love requires a free choice, so love as the ground of whatever there is, is a dialectical relation between the determinations of being and indeterminacy of nonbeing. But a free choice also requires the relation of the indeterminacy of pure potential to the determinations of the limits of form or structure, which is what Deleuze called, "an actual possibility." Analogy is this relation between potential and limit that determines without complete determination, which is to make present through absence, or through the failure of representation in the distortion of the intention as the failure to unify the phenomenal and the conceptual objects that appear on the subjective screen. Intentional representation gives us our first-person, subjective experience of a world by unifying whatever there is into the objects that appear to us as the world. But what happens when too much aboutness has been given for our intention to unify into phenomenological or conceptual objects, as is the case when the object of our intention is the ground of intention itself. The subject of mystical experience can only be known in its unknowability as the distortion of the intentional field that Lacan called the "Real."Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Any predication that is made of God, such as "God is a rock," both discloses and hides God. As Meister Eckhart preached, "As God reveals Himself, he hides more deeply in His mystery. The central tenet of mysticism is, as Epistolary John wrote, "God is love," and it is this predication that requires any description of God to be inadequate to its divine referent. Love must be indeterminate because coercion or compulsion isn't love. If there is such a thing as love, it is freely chosen. There must always be an irreducible remainder of indeterminate ambiguity about love so that it doesn't disappear into the equivalency of an identity. If one knows the beloved in full, then one does not love her. The mystic's desire is for the direct apprehension of God, sometimes called the "Beatific Vision." But the mystic's "direct" apprehension of God is in and through the indirection of the "Cloud of Unknowing." The mystic's experience of God is through analogy rather than the equivalencies of identity because analogy is knowing without determination, which is love. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolutely. This resistance can be construed negatively as a lack of articulation. Or this negativity can be positivized as too much to articulate. Lacan adumbrated this disjunction as the distinction between "having" in the register of the Symbolic and the failure to have or grasp "being" in the register of the Real. When there is a disjunction between what can be represented and what is, there is a sense of the numinous and of the noetic. The numinous is the uncanny sense of the presence of something that is beyond representation in the sensual or conceptual intention, so it might be thought of as a present absence. The noetic is the uncanny sense of intuiting what can't be intended, but what is fundamentally unintentional, or beyond one's own intentions. However, bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into the realm of the noetic means that this exterior intention of the unintentional is our interior intention for what is beyond us, which he called "Jouissance" and which Freud called "Death Drive."Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic also produced an uncanny mismatch between what could be known and what resisted semiotic revelation. No signifier could contain all of the meaning of whatever it purported to disclose through language, especially the intention of the Other, which was a reflection of our own failure to represent our intention in a complete way. In the "noetic" experience one intuits something that they can't name. Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomena" were noetic because he described them as having "more than enough intuition for the intention." One could not intend all that she intuited when there was too much given for aboutness to contain. The symptom-like attempt to contain the divine by representing its intentions is the job of priests and the pious, but the awful wonder of the numinous and the noetic demand the respect of an open sort of representation design to fail.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling block not only for Catholics, but also for the Protestants who claim it as the cornerstone of their faith. Unmerited grace is defiled by the economics of "works righteousness" but also by the economy of belief. Whatever is traded for salvation, whether it be outer works or inner faith, vitiates the pure gratuity of what is supposed to be given without conditions. The purity of one's faith cannot purify one's love. Whatever is done in love, is done without expectations, except that love be made immanent, or incarnate, through the "Kenonsis" of self-emptying. The Dark Night of "subjective destitution" is characterized by one's loving willingness to empty oneself of all previous comforts, especially familiar concepts of self, of the world, and of religious piety. And sometimes the Dark Night not only requires this intentional world but also our very lives as well. To enter into the service of the Other is to enter into the Dark Night of the mystic where nothing is pure, except for whatever love brought us there. Piety doesn't purify our love, only self-sacrifice does.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even further back to its Proto-Indo-European root "Kailo," which also meant whole but also "uninjured" and even "wealthy." However, the sense in which wholeness connotes being set apart is how it came to be associated with the sacred. Making whole is a semiotic as well as a religious impulse. The most basic religious impulse is to make holy by setting a part and making different. The most basic semiotic impulse is to represent by individuating a conceptual object through the processes of semiotic differentiation. The mystic walks into the Dark Night to differentiate new concepts from the failure of the old.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a circle in the midst of the endless repetition of a desert landscape. The circle was a sort of marking of a sacred space, which was set apart by its divergence from the profanity of the same. But marking can be ambiguous as religious history has shown. What is marked is set apart, for better or for worse. Being a "chosen people" can be as much of a blessing as it is a curse. Those who have been foregrounded by the blessing may be different from those backgrounded by it, but this difference curses the blessed to a repetition of the same nonetheless. An identity is a much sought after boon, but once obtained, it reduces difference as it binds its receivers to the same practices and beliefs of the group. Individuation can either be a convergence on an identity or a differentiation of something new. The mystic walks into the Dark Night not for an identity but for the failure of identity that clears the way for something new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneous is profane and what is heterogeneous is holy. Eliade's prime example was drawing a circle amid a homogenous landscape, which marks that space as different from the rest. But this is also the primary move in phenomenology as well. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that the most basic perception foregrounds an object against a background. Perception is the marking of difference. For example, one doesn't perceive temperature until it changes or becomes different. This way of thinking about the sacred aligns Homo Religiosus with humanity's most definitive trait of symbolization. To make holy is to make perceivable through symbolization, and then speakable through a symbolic language. Martin Heidegger called language the "house of being" because our access to being is through the symbolic differences of language, which is the connection between Eliade's Homo Religiosus and Heidegger's "Shepard of Being." Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies, practices, and systems. For example, the concept of the "dying god" and its "eternal return" seems to be found as a repeated theme through many religious and cultural traditions. However, the problem with comparison in religious studies, as Johnathan Z Smith famously pointed out is that it tends to flatten real difference. Giles Deleuze perhaps put this problem best when he described the loss of divergence's intensity or vivacity when difference's divergence is flatten in the procrustean bed of a concept acting as mold. Let's explore whether comparative religions is a doomed endeavor, or if there is perhaps some fruit that can be grasped when one experience, mythology, practice, or system is compared to another.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at Gobekli Tepe over 10,000 years ago. This comparison is a part of my effort to outline two different types of religious experiences. The first is religion as a binding to the Symbolic order, but the Second is religion as a binding to what breaks our bonds to the Symbolic by breaking the boundaries of the Symbolic, or what Jacques Lacan named "The Real." The first religious impulse is for the uncertainty reduction of prediction machines, in which the Symbolic Order is reinforced by an "automatic" repetition of the same. The second religious impulse is to transcend the Symbolic Order as it touches the Real as a "Repetition of Difference." Let's review the underground, electronic music scene in the wake of the Post Industrial Collapse of the Midwest to give ourselves a concept for how to break concepts.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface like an unconscious fantasy for millennia waiting for its uncovering and subsequent reintroduction to the modern world. When uncovered in the Mid-Eighties by Klaus Schmidt and his team, it didn't fit the categories of how human progress had been previously conceived. And it remains a wonder of liminal ideation and of the enigmatic expressions of human intentions to this day. The illegal warehouse parties that I went to in my early twenties had nothing in common with Gobekli Tepe, except, perhaps, an intention to encounter something novel and unreadable. In the post-industrial collapse of the Midwest, what was available was what was left, which were lots of abandoned industrial spaces. They were left to rot unlike the intentional manner in which Gobekli Tepe was carefully preserved. But was what we encountered in those dark, forgotten places anything like what those tribal nomads found when they descended into the various chambers at Gobekli Tepe? Join me on this highly problematic endeavor of religious comparisons.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the masses because our lives were so terrible that only the promises of a better world after you die could get us through this one. Nietzsche wrote that the Judeo-Christian tradition was a reactionary revenge narrative in which those on the bottom got to fantasized about being on top. Freud thought of religion as a kind of illusion about a perfect father figure who would make everything right. And Emile Durkheim taught that religion was to create a shared sense of identity that would hold together a society. But the mystic seeks a different sort of religious experience altogether. She seeks the wonder and awe of the transcendent or the sublime. A further analysis of the religious impulses behind Gobekli Tepe may help to clarify what we seek when we seek the liminal, uncertain, and dangerous.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because they're what I've really felt in terms of my own spiritual experiences. But the main thrust of all of my life's work has been to develop a theology of a sort of religious experience that is about encountering what cannot be known. I've found this in my life mostly in the mystical service of the unknowable Other. The most simple reason for this is that I can forget myself for a while when I serve others. I can use some of what I "know" in this service, but the outcomes always surprise me. Grace abounds when knowing is left behind. Service purifies my intention for specific outcomes and opens me to mystery. This has been the meaning of my 31 year career as a public school teacher in situations of "high need." I've always been in over my head in the sense of not knowing what to do but having to do something anyways. Gobekli Tepe was a place where our ancestors voluntarily went to be with the liminal and celebrate the tricky company of others. This is my first attempt to differentiate an impulse for the holy that isn't about ordering the Universe according to our own intentions.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as being directly knowing itself without mediate, enlanguaged beings, such as ourselves, have mostly lost access to it, which is why Jacques Lacan thought of our entrance into the Symbolic as infants rather grimly as "Symbolic Castration." Being that has been alienated from itself by language will always experience a gap between the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan this is a lack inherent to the Symbolic itself. It simply isn't capable of representing all of being to itself. But in a further bizarre twist currently being studied by Slavoi Zizek at least part of the failure of the Symbolic to know all is inherent to being itself. The relation of the Symbolic to being reflects being's own incompletion. This incompletion within being can't be completely represented because it hasn't been determined yet. This is the direct challenge to Einstein's Block Universe that was leveled against it by the Copenhagen Interpretation of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and by Henri Bergson in his famous Debate with the stubborn genius. We do not live in a finished Universe, part of what is, has not yet become.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Deleuze and Lacan are incompatible, but I use them both to imagine how renewal occurs. Deleuze's "Desiring-Production" makes the world new by the purely positive desire for difference. However, Lacan's notion of ingressing difference into the world is through the negativity of the Real. The Real's absolute resistance to symbolization is the irreducible gap between "being" in the register of the Real and "having" in the register of the Symbolic. The failure that the Real causes in the Symbolic allows for the constant movement of the Symbolic into new concepts from the failure of old ones. Lacan's notion of renewal is through the lack that the Real forms in the Symbolic while Deleuze's notion of concept creation is from the excess of desire for new flows of intensities that is intrinsic to being's foundational "Difference-for-itself." Let's see if I can explain why I think that Deleuze's excess and Lacan's lack form the contradiction that makes the world always new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coMixed and reverberated tracks may include: MMMD - Egoism, Biosphere - Houses, Basic Channel - Radiance, Heathered Pearls - Beach ShelterBaddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

June Tyson chanting "Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world, it's not my idea of things as they are," is a sacred mantra, which functions as a divine "no" hovering above the futuristic vibrations of Sa Ra's Arkestra. This divine "no" opened a D&G style "line of flight" for new flows of melodic intensities upon which astral projections were streamed and communique with other worlds were reopened. When James Baldwin wrote about getting caught up with the music of the Black Church as a child in Go Tell It on the Mountain, he described his entrance into a different reality that had been closed until the Holy Spirit came riding into the congregation on the hallowed sounds of the church organ, the drums, and the voices of a people set apart. Let's explore how renewal works by considering the root of the word "radical," which reveals the hidden route back to our roots. But let's keep ourselves from the mistake of a reactionary nostalgia that fantasies a lost object that never existed, which is a weaponized nostalgia decrying the decadence of the modern age.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coElements of Ghost Dubs - Chemical, Pole - Berlin, MMMD - Egoismo, Biosphere - Houses on the Hill, and Basic Channel - Radiance decelerated and run through the mystical midnight echo chamber.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

When authenticity is defined by its opposition to performativity, it ironically becomes a performance. And as much as we in the Generation X loved irony, we preferred to enjoy ironically rather than get caught up in it ourselves. But, when you're reduced to performing your authenticity by calling out phonies and sell-outs, you become an ironic caricature of whatever authenticity you think you represent. In this episode we will explore the positions of the Lacanian "Psychotic, Neurotic, and Pervert" to see if we can uncover any authentic performances, or if we're all just stuck in the ironic performance of authenticity.Badass Remixes by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coThis episode contains heavily decelerated and filtered portions of Armando's "Land of Confusion" and Levon Vincent's "Late Night Jam." Two members of the Generation X who figured out how to get sonically free.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

I am continuing to try to develop the concept of an "authentic performance." My generation set up a false opposition between authenticity and performance, and the resulting failure didn't lead to freedom but to a regular-ass failure. I go on a not-to-be-missed rant about this failure to get free in this episode whose target is Generation X in general, but also me specifically. The generation that was defined by its quest for authenticity, mostly just collapsed into a bunch of sell-outs calling out sell-outs until it was undeniable that our whole generation had sold-out. It was more fun when we could point the finger at the sell-out boomers who had capitalized on the "free love" and cultural production of their so called "revolution." And so, it is incredible to me to see Generation X memes popping up all over social media promoting our generation as the last "real" generation. Time to end this fantasy once and for all. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coElements of Armando - Land of Confusion, and Levon Vincent - Late Night Jams decelerated and run through the midnight echo chamber.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

A much younger friend of mine told me about a social media phenomena called "Performative Male Competitions," which unfortunately I called "men's performative competitions" throughout the podcast. Apparently these are competitions held unbeknownst to the participants in which the most "performative" male wins. The joke of these events is that men are clandestinely filmed as they are transparently performing what they imagine would be impressive to women, such as adopting feminist positions that they don't really understand or staging "quirky" character traits such as visibly reading books that are clearly not of interest to them. This sounded exactly like what my Generation X would have called "trying too hard," but fortunately we didn't have social media competitions to ruin people's lives, but I'm sure that we would have gleeful done so if the technology had been available. These performances reminded me of Judith Butler's concept of "performativity" that got her into so much trouble in "Gender Trouble," and that she has continued to have to explain ever since.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coElements of Armando: Land of Confusion decelerated and run through the midnight echo chamber.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

How do I know what I like? This is the question at the center of this podcast. Do I like what I like because it's what others like, or do I like it because I like it. Another form of this central question is, is it even possible to be authentic? The language that you speak, the concepts that you think, and the desires of your heart, all came from outside of you. So, what can authenticity even mean to a self that has been determined by outside forces since before it came into being? Let's try to get to the bottom of this, is authenticity an illusion, or is it possible to get free? And let's use 70's DeeJay culture to show us the way.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

The sorts of collage art that we in the Generation X made at school involved cutting up magazine pictures and gluing them in bizarre configurations on a piece of paper. Sometimes they were just random, but sometimes we tried to make a statement, like when we were supposed to make collages about "what it means to be an American," as I had to do multiple times in Social Studies Class. The collage shares a lot in common with the concept of the remix. The remix allows one to put different pieces in different places to different effects as well as to different affects, while retaining some fractured continuity with the past. Remixing the past is the only way that we can intervene in what already has been. Nostalgia is a desire to repeat a past that never was out of hatred for and fear of difference. The remix is a desire to reinterpret that past to renew the present as a presentation of difference. Sample-based music was the heart and soul of Generation X's love of pastiche, and its desire to rearrange the past to make the world new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Generation Jones may have been cynical because they came of age during the 70's economic downturn and after the failure of the Hippies to produce a revolution, but they weren't reactionaries. Their most enduring musical productions, Glam Rock, Punk, Disco, and Hip Hop were testaments to openness, inclusivity, and exuberance. It was the reactionary Boomers of the Love Generation who tried to squelch their high spirits by proclaiming, "Disco Sucks!" The "Disco Demolition" at Comiskey park in Chicago witnessed the destruction of records that had little to do with Disco per se, and more to do with a barely disguised hatred of Black and Latin music, and of the Queer Culture that these bigots associated with Disco. Unfortunately, the 80's also saw a growth in the reactionary punks of the "hardcore" scene who just like the reactionary bigots of the Right sought a return to some sort of lost purity. However, the Disco and Funk party of the 70's couldn't be stopped. Dance music went underground and became house music, and Funk and Jazz got sampled and became Hip Hop and Electro. And Punk fractured into a million difference "Post-Punk" subgenres that you were only allow to like with something like detached irony rather than direct enjoyment.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Generation X includes those folks born between 65 and 80. But the stage was set for the new forms of art and music that defined us in the 70's. Particularly by the "deterritorialization" of cities affected by the death of manufacturing jobs and "White Flight" to the suburbs. Punk, Disco, Hip Hop, and Electro were all birthed in the 70, and not by Generation X. It was the generation in between X and the Boomers, called "Generation Jones (54-65)," that made something beautiful and new out of the urban squalor and general failure of Hippy Culture that they inherited. The famous economic down turn and stagflation of the 70's became the ground of one of the most intensive inflows of new forms of expression the world has ever seen. Let's explore the causes and conditions.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Sometimes the things that don't work right, work perfectly. Artificiality used to be the measure of inauthenticity, but "synthetic" sounds became the currency of Generation X's triumphant failure to repeat the music of the past. Electronic equipment at the beginning of the 70s did not do well at replicating "real" musical instruments, and it cost a shit-ton of money, just ask Rick Wakeman. But by the early 80's there was cheap and readily available electronic equipment a plenty at the local pawn shop, "readily available" because it sounded artificial, and "real" musicians didn't want it. How did artifice become the "authentic" sounds of the future? Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

How did Generation X's obsession with authenticity turn us into a bunch of posers? The 50 year old dude who demands that a 20 year old wearing a Nirvana teeshirt name three songs is a poser, and he has been made such by his obsession with authenticity. The trick about "being-real" is that it can't be too intentional; otherwise, it looks like the "trying-too-much" of a "phony." Unfortunately, Holden Caulfield's ability to pick out phonies became essential to Generation X's definition of itself, and we suffered for it. Come with me on a journey to find out how Generation X's desire to be free of the values and conventions of white-bread, consumer culture became yet another failed attempt to get free. However, this retrospective doesn't end in the cynicism so associated with my generation. We will be learning from the artists, musicians, and philosophers who influenced Generation X about what freedom, authenticity, and love can mean for our desire to be made new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co