danielcoffeen's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Daniel Coffeen
In Part 1 (see below), I proffer the conditions of the contemporary moment, what I'm calling the Age of the Argument. There is no clear source of truth, no ground of certainty: all there are are arguments. It's not that some are false and some true; it's that all of them make claims, all of them are "true." So how do we make decisions?
That's the subject of this video. We're always making decisions without certainty — about what to eat, what films we like, what sex position to indulge in the moment. Things like what to believe about the corona virus are no different: we make decisions as individuals based on emergent factors and the needs and wants of our bodies. Rather than seeing truth or certainty, we make decisions based on our health and vitality, what serves us best (I borrow this from Nietzsche).
This, in turn, yields a different way of standing towards what we believe and towards others' beliefs. There is an ethics of rhetoric, an ethics of argument, that is dramatically different than morality. It's time, I believe, to use new tools of making sense that befit our times. By relying on antiquated tools of sense making that rely on certainty, we are creating a violent, bile filled culture.
Seeing is not neutral or natural: it is taught. As John Berger argued in his incredible, Ways of Seeing, men have a tendency to gaze at women, at life, with a certain will to penetrate, dominate, and such — the so-called 'male gaze.'
To see is to be undone, necessarily. Seeing takes place in the middle voice. Ask yourself: is seeing active or passive? Do you see that tree? Is that tree having its way with you? The phallic gaze is an attempt to wrest control from the world, a transparently absurd gesture.
The painter, psychoanalyst, and theorist, Bracha Ettinger, posits a different gaze, what she called the matrixial gaze, coming from the womb: a pre-subjective mode of holding the other as constitutive of oneself.
I refer to to this as 'soft eyes' which I borrow from The Wire: to see generously, without judgement. I also reference Merleau-Ponty's The Intertwining.
This is part of one of a longer essay entitled, "Making Sense with Pleasure in the Age of the Argument." This part focuses on establishing what I mean by the Age of the Argument—and what I mean by an argument.
An argument is not based on proof. In fact, arguments begin where proof leaves off. If there's proof, there's nothing to argue about! Arguments assemble data and the relations between all the data points. They slice and dice the world—inevitably ignoring most of the world—and create a little engine that makes sense. That's what arguments offer—not certainty, not proof, not truth, but sense.
Sense is a local shape of things, a way things can hang together. It is a nebulous form but a form nonetheless.
Arguments don't lack certainty. They're just not interested in it as certainty is impossible (in this case). It's not that we're uncertain; it's that we're a-certainty.
So how do we make decisions without a ground? That's part 2! Hold tight!
Inspired by this great Erich Fromm quote, “Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice," I riff on taking acid, being in a relationship, meditation, the way capitalism coerces it all — and how to do it all differently.
Not surprisingly, this documentary perpetuates the very problems it thinks its revealing.
Rather than a government and public discourse that navigate and legislate the good or profit, I want to imagine a government and public discourse dedicated to facilitating Nietzsche's great Yes — facilitating the ecstatic.
Often, when I get excited about an idea — Nietzsche's amor fati, Kierkegaard's knight of faith, Deleuze's fold, and now Guattari's machine — I am often met with a certain confusion by those around me. Their instinct is that whatever I'm saying is "academic" and hence of no real interest.
Believe me, I understand such a reaction. But I believe it's an instinct that's been bred by a certain ideology that makes new, strange sounding ideas suspect. The fact is we deploy concepts all the time in how we make sense of the world, of ourselves, our relationships. Ego, the unconscious, freedom are all concepts that we just take for granted as true things. But they're concepts that were created and perpetually recast — except when we just assume they're true and so never question them.
Concepts are art but, like, really pervasive art in that they inflect everything we see. Sure, seeing a Van Gogh might have you re-seeing the viscosity of the atmosphere. But a concept like the ego has you rethinking yourself and the motivations of everyone all the time.
Concepts aren't true or not true. They can work in that they can explain. They can jibe with you. They may not jibe or explain but they can be beautiful, odd, exhilarating. Long before Maturana's "autopoisesis" began to work for me, it sure exhilarated me!
But why machines in particular? Well, I think it's a concept that radically recasts the very possibility of change in the social or personal or environmental. But there's something else about machines: it's a concept or figure that refuses any sure, natural, or true ground. Everything from atoms and fleas to me and my son to the experiences of love and confusion to airplanes, solar systems, and cosmic undulations are constitutive of ever-shifting machinic flows and distributions. And so, as a rhetorician, I take pleasure in having all my paradigms be up for grabs. It's, once again, exhilarating.
Inspired by reading Félix Guattari, here I am trying to explain what an art machine is as distinct from Foucault's discourse, Marx's means of production, and Althusser's ideological hailing.
I try to bring Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the Body without Organs to life and discuss different modes of access — different drugs, S&M, and mostly yoga. And I play some Boredoms! Fun for the whole family.
There is no word, no thing, that is not always already being expressed. In the common view, we imagine words are these conveyors of preformed meaning that we hurl across the abyss separating me from you. But the expressive field is dense, saturated, multiple, and temporal.
How do different spaces distribute bodies? What things are asked of us? What energy is necessary to find our ease in a bar, a restaurant, a park, a clothing-optional spa?
This is where power, place, and identity intersect in a collaborative event of creation.
Discussed: Foucault, drinking alone, classrooms, city parks, naked hot springs (well, the hot springs aren't naked, the people are).
This is a more personal podcast in which I try to reckon the romance of the solitary man — focusing on Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham and Issac in "Fear and Trembling" — with the very real tugs the human social — affection, grief, kindness.
I begin by talking about how this jew spends his Christmas....
This is the second part of a series in which I read the title of my new book, Reading the Way of Things. In this episode, I focus on how the phrase "The Way" functions.
A way is an action, a trajectory, a mode of going. It is limited and yet emergent and infinite.
I discuss Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai; the relationship between the infinite and the limit with reference to the calculus; the reality TV cooking show, Chopped; Epictetus, the great stoic; Deleuze's notion of the one as many. And more!
I discuss why use the word "reading" in the title of my book (Reading the Way of Things). I reference the implications for writing and teaching writing; Deleuze's readings of things; the pleasure and power of reading as distinct from what we consider literacy.
As far as I can tell, everything is multiple — which shifts the demands of life. For if everything is in fact multiple, how do we articulate it? How do we seek it? Amplify it? The will to multiplicity is different than the will to the definitive; this will can be found in irony, in humor, in Monty Python, Louis CK, Clarice Lispector, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari.
(Thoughts on my soon to be released book on Zero Books)
Before we're even born, we are taught how to process the world. After all, we are prefigured in the womb as a baby soon to arrive as a child, as male or female, as having a name and parents. Which is to say, we come to this world already enmeshed in elaborate cultural institutions, discourses, and ways of operating. There is no such thing as a clean slate, no immaculate birth. We are born somewhere, as something, a cog within a m
This mode of processing is institutionalized in school as well as in the media. But this mode is not neutral or natural. It entails a a certain architecture of relations between people, concepts, and knowledge.
Mentioned here: Geometry, Foucault, Bergson, viewing art, being creative, new ways of making sense, and more!
Some thoughts on the plenum and how the space between things is full, filled to the brim with forces that are social, local, global, cosmic all at once. With reference to Merleau-Ponty and online dating.
Watching The Graduate again recently, I was struck by the hilarity of youth thinking it understands life when it knows, we all know, our perspectives, feelings, horizon changes, relentlessly and necessarily — with some references to Gadamer and Bergson.
Sense is the way bodies cohere, or don't, in a perceptive field.
Sense is not the meaning of an experience; sense is the meaning + the immediate affect + temperature + speed + intensity + color + shape and the diverse terms in which different bodies interact and cohere, more or less, with other bodies (visible, invisible, organic, machine, vegetal (yes, that's redundant)).
Sense happens at the cusp of events, in the seams of bodies assembling and disassembling.
Sense is always at the point of its own dissolution, fragmenting infinitely into chaos or cohering too rigidly into cliché or meaning.
William Burroughs, in his cut-up method, plays at the borders of sense and chaos. It's often a subtle, tenuous, and moving line that separates one from the other. Artists reckon this moment at every moment.
The distinction between sense and meaning....
Meaning is abstract, general, changing very slowly over time.
Sense is an immediate configuration of bodies.
On the notion and experience of having hostility to life with reference to:
- Wilhelm Reich
- Nietzsche and amor fati
- Alan Watts & Taoism
- Derrida and there's nothing outside the text
- Neti pots
It suddenly occurred to me the other day that this cliché of a question has persisted because it's a profound existential, ontological question: If I experience something and no one hears, sees, knows did it happen? The answer, of course, is yes.
A brief discussion of:
-
Why we read important books — sacred books — over and over
-
The power of book spines on the shelf
-
Changing environments when the baby is screaming
-
The power of local spaces with reference to Carlos Castaneda
This is a ranting revelation I had while walking in GG Park, feeling, uh, good, as it were. It is a tad profane but I was just speaking to myself at the time.