Arquivo para a ‘User interaction’ Categoria
Small actions, lack of thought and big disasters
01
Apr
I read it from a psychologist: “It’s not big actions
that cause big effects!” We need to pay attention to small vices, small faults that we think are tolerable, because over time they become big problems. The idea of letting everything around us off the hook makes us more vulnerable to frustration, life’s difficulties, disappointments and obstacles.
It’s also not about the rigid discipline of dictators and people with little dialog, owners of the truth, pseudo “thinkers” who are increasingly common in the daily life of media society.
The ideas of simplification, of doing what “feels right”, freedom without obligations, a world without obstacles and without pain (Byung-Chul Han: The Palliative Society: Pain Today), create a world of rebels without measuring consequences, gratuitous hatreds, intolerance, bubbles and obstacles to dialog, to the right of the Other and the different, in short, the society of hatred and war.
The idea that every action is external is characteristic of non-thinking, acting impulsively and this is not only linked to the new media, but also to the absence of reflection, meditation and contemplation (Vita Contemplativa, Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han), verbose thoughts without reflection.
Han explains by quoting Arendt: “Hannah Arendt’s Vita activa begins with the distinction between immortality and eternity” (Han, 2023, p. 144), and continues: “Surrounded by the infinite, the human being, as a moral being, seeks immortality by creating works that remain” (Han, p. 145), but “in contrast, the objective of the vita contemplativa is not, according to Arendt, to persist and last in time, but the experience of the eternal, which transcends both time and also the surrounding world” (Han, p. 145).
She clarifies that Arendt herself may have intended to be immortal when she wrote, but “even writing can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the search for immortality” (p. 146), and she is surprised that Socrates didn’t write, thus renouncing immortality, she doesn’t quote, but Jesus didn’t write either, the gospels were only written by his disciples.
Small actions, lack of thought and big disasters
I read it from a psychologist: “It’s not big actions that cause big effects!” We need to pay attention to small vices, small faults that we think are tolerable, because over time they become big problems. The idea of letting everything around us off the hook makes us more vulnerable to frustration, life’s difficulties, disappointments and obstacles.
It’s also not about the rigid discipline of dictators and people with little dialog, owners of the truth, pseudo “thinkers” who are increasingly common in the daily life of media society.
The ideas of simplification, of doing what “feels right”, freedom without obligations, a world without obstacles and without pain (Byung-Chul Han: The Palliative Society: Pain Today), create a world of rebels without measuring consequences, gratuitous hatreds, intolerance, bubbles and obstacles to dialog, to the right of the Other and the different, in short, the society of hatred and war.
The idea that every action is external is characteristic of non-thinking, acting impulsively and this is not only linked to the new media, but also to the absence of reflection, meditation and contemplation (Vita Contemplativa, Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han), verbose thoughts without reflection.
Han explains by quoting Arendt: “Hannah Arendt’s Vita active (active life) begins with the distinction between immortality and eternity” (Han, 2023, p. 144), and continues: “Surrounded by the infinite, the human being, as a moral being, seeks immortality by creating works that remain” (Han, p. 145), but “in contrast, the objective of the vita contemplative(contemplative life) is not, according to Arendt, to persist and last in time, but the experience of the eternal, which transcends both time and also the surrounding world” (Han, p. 145).
She clarifies that Arendt herself may have intended to be immortal when she wrote, but “even writing can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the search for immortality” (p. 146), and she is surprised that Socrates didn’t write, thus renouncing immortality, she doesn’t quote, but Jesus didn’t write either, the gospels were only written by his disciples.
Accepting small setbacks, starting over and thinking about why you stumbled helps you move forward.
Han, B.-C. (2023) Vita contemplativa: ou sobre a inatividade. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Narrative, languages and orality
28
Mar
Taking up one of Byung-Chul Han’s words: “Narrative is the capacity of
the spirit to overcome the contingency of the body”, this capacity to overcome the contingency of the body is linked not only to the memory of poetic and conative language, but also to the spiritual meanings and values that modernity has abandoned under the pretext of creating an “objective” vision (A crise da narração, Byung Chul Han, Vozes, 2023, brazilian edition).
The telling of the stories of peoples, their cultures and religions are thus key factors in overcoming such a dramatic moment in the history of communication.
The languages developed for machines are capable of producing narratives with a set of words that are part of their vocabulary, but without the imagery of the voices that perform the storytelling, especially in oral cultures, where writing is secondary.
The dramatic text is also a genre in which acts, scenes, rubrics and speeches are presented, which is why it is part of a theatrical form or a-presentation, in the sense that the presentation is both a telling of a story and its negation, since it involves fiction, storytelling always has a present aspect, this is the meaning.
The dispute between nominalists and realists in the lower middle ages (11th to 14th centuries) ended up neglecting the importance of language, but the linguistic turn of the late 19th century brought back its importance in studies such as grammar, semiotics, etymology and, more broadly, linguistics.
The beginning of modernity is marked by the break between the metaphysical function of language and the use of objectivity as a mode of expression, but this is only one of the functions of language, the Russian linguist Roman Jacobson recalls the functions: phatic, poetic, conative and metalinguistic, in which modern codes are inserted by example: Morse, digital and quantum, where “the code explains the code itself, that is, the language explains the language itself”, and this should be the only context where the concepts of sender/receiver apply.
The linguistic turn occurs in the midst of the crisis of idealist and positivist thinking in modernity: Husserl, Heidegger, Hanna Arendt are fundamental, although they are most remembered: Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Ferdinand de Saussure.
In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky wrote variations on these linguistic styles that are more technical, involve a restricted grammar and regular expressions. It is used in computer science and formal language theory.
When proclaiming texts in an oral culture, such as the Bible, it is necessary to have meaning, and in particular to make a hermeneutic of its presentation (repeat it when telling).
Thought and information technology
12
Mar
The origins of almost all realities (if we don’t
consider the divine and eternal) come from human thought, the idea of politics in the Greek polis, the idea of the “art of war”, from the law codes of Hammurabi (1792 to 1750 BC) to modern contractualists, compilations of religious treatises, epistemological constructions of the sciences and computer science could not be left out.
In 1900, when physics and mathematics seemed to give an air of precision and certainty to the scientific universe, positivism still reigned in law, a German mathematician David Hilbert proposed 23 “final” problems for mathematics at an International Congress in Paris in 1900.
Among these was the second problem: the finitist solution to the consistency of the axioms of arithmetic, which together with the sixth problem, which was the axiomatization of physics, seemed to give a logical and precise finish to all of science, but there had already been a return to the question of Being through Husserl and Heidegger, and this returned thought to human complexity.
Kurt Gödel, a member of the Vienna Circle who eschewed this logic and for this reason was called a neologicist, proved the incompleteness of the second problem, that arithmetic was either consistent or complete, thus remaining in a paradox, called Gödel’s Paradox.
The question of arithmetic is important to understand the origin of the idea of algorithms, which were previously just formulas like Bhaskara’s formula (for 2nd degree equations), complex solutions to differential equations, while physics had the problem of formulating all of physics in a single theory, the so-called Standard Theory of Physics, but quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity, where time and space are not absolute, changed this scenario.
The meeting of Claude Shannon and Alain Turing, who were working on secret projects to code transmissions (made for the Roosevelt government) and decode the Enigma machine captured from the Nazis (Turing’s secret project) will create a new event.
Unable to talk about their secret projects (Gleick, 2013, p. 213), they talked about Gödel’s paradox and wondered about the possibility of the machine elaborating thoughts, even if it was something limited, and both developed theories about language and algorithms.
While Turing devised a state machine that, through back and forth movements of a tape recording symbols, would produce intelligible sentences, Shannon worked on a similar model (using a theory called Markov chain) that, through finite vocabularies, could compose sentences and formulate broader ideas.
Alain Turing’s definitive contribution was the so-called Finite State Machine, whose model was completed by Alonzo Church, while Claude Shannon left the contribution of a Mathematical Theory for Communication, his theory establishing the amount necessary for the information transmitted not to be damaged, but within the limits of the “machine”.
The reductionist idea that it is possible to carry out actions without a necessary, elaborate, meditated and tested thought is part of current pseudo-scientific narratives.
Gleick. (2013) . Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Transl. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Pure heart and overcoming
13
Feb
Only those who manage to maintain a pure heart,
a desire to always move forward, need to go beyond the world full of hurt, resentment and hatred, of valuing the “I” and not the Other, overcoming is possible if we don’t look at what passes and is of little value.
Challenges, pains and difficulties are part of life. Winners are those who go beyond these contingencies and, more than that, show solidarity with those who pass by them.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote: “Thus, every critique of society must carry out a hermeneutic of pain. If we leave pain to medicine alone, we miss out on its character as a sign” (Han, 2021), because we don’t know how to overcome pain and we don’t have solidarity with those who suffer.
In his book The Palliative Society: Pain Today, he wrote: “The art of suffering pain has been entirely lost to us … Pain is now a meaningless evil that must be fought with painkillers. As a mere bodily affliction, it falls entirely outside the symbolic order” (Han, 2021, p. 41).
Society finds it difficult to experience empathy, happiness and and affectivity, it is condemned to silence, and “the palliative society does not allow us to revive, to verbalize the pain in a passion” (Han 2021, p. 14), emphasis added, so passion seems to lose meaning or to be “a weakness”, when in fact it is from it that we draw the desire to persist and move forward.
In this way, we can transform pain into love, and better than this, we can better understand what passion is and what com-passion is, feelings that are becoming less and less the order of the day. The desire to diminish the other, as haters, memes and the denial of the Other do, makes society more aggressive, valuing not pain, but ´haters´, mockery and humiliation.
Believing and persisting in the belief in fundamental values for true humanism is an essential source of civility, which can contribute to a positive civilizing process in which what is most human can be valued.
In the photo above, System of Pain/Networks/Networks of Resilience, curated by Cecilia Vargas, at the Dickson Center at Waubonsee Community College, 7 June, 10th July, 2018
Han, B.-C. (2021) A sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje: Trad. Lucas Machado. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes, 2021.
Love: the neighbor and the partner
08
Jan
One of the hardest chapters in the fall of
civilization is the transformation of the concept of love. There are even pathologies that live off the cancellation of this relationship, but the basis is the transformation into interest, where interests matter more than any kind of empathy or affection.
Paul Ricoeur was the philosopher who directly addressed this issue in his book “History and Truth”, which I would say is a complement to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book “Truth and Method”.
Selfishness, closing oneself off in vicious circles, opens up chasms of separation with the Other, there is no other word that better defines exclusion, it is this that leads to disbelief in love of neighbor and paves the way for relationships of interest, in short, relationships of money.
What might otherwise have seemed unthinkable, now economic relations create concentric circles, power structures and even urban gangs related to money, and it is these that deteriorate the social base, destroy empathetic relations and create relations of dispute and hatred between groups, at the base of the “brain rot” is the whole of these social relations.
To explain this, Ricoeur talks about charity: “Charity does not have to be where it appears; it is also hidden in the humble and abstract post office, the welfare office; it is often the hidden part of the social”, Paul Ricoeur in Le socius et le Prochain (1954), and is translated in the 1968 book History and Truth.
In Gadamer’s book, what we will find is how to make these relationships when reading a text, or in an ongoing dialog on a given topic, we need a “fusion of horizons”, before the dialog, what the Greeks primarily called époque, that is, making a void in order to listen and dialog with the Other.
This exercise is difficult, not to say almost impossible in a polarized society and any discourse on love is mere rhetoric, at the root of which is “segregating” the Other.
So those who remain in charity, in dialogue and in understanding, have the property to speak of Love.
End of wars and the magic of Christmas
09
Dec
Can this time of year infect the world in such a way 
as to turn the tide of war, the scenario of this first week of December seems to say yes.
The dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, who ruled Syria for almost a quarter of a century, has fallen. While the London Observatory for Human Rights says that he fled in a private plane, the Russian Foreign Ministry, a traditional ally, has declared that he has “resigned”.
The leader of a coalition of opponents, Abu Mohammed al Jolani (he now goes by his real name Ahmed Al-Shara), led the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant (Hayat Tahir al Sham, or just HTS), from extremist origins (he was linked to Al Qaeda) and adopted a more moderate stance, gaining allies.
Syria’s Prime Minister, Mohamed Ghazi al-Jalali, has declared himself willing to collaborate with the insurgents, saying that he will extend his hand to “any Syrian who is interested in the country in order to preserve its institutions”, but it is likely that he will also resign or be removed from office.
Talks are also progressing under the patronage of US President-elect Donald Trump, a meeting with President Makron of France and Zelensky of Ukraine, and the international scene has been gripped by the prospect of peace that is now apparently possible.
In Latin America, at a meeting in Montevideo last Friday (6/12), after 25 years of negotiation, the leaders of the South American bloc signed an agreement with the European Union. For Brazil, the agreement makes strategic sense to promote learning and improvement in how our productive sectors generate commodities, which are the primary goods in the production sector: agricultural, livestock, mineral and environmental, in which the country is abundant.
In short, everything seems to be building a new harmony and fostering the Christmas atmosphere, but we need a lasting peace where the sectors involved don’t feel “defeated”, we need a balanced global economy without protectionism or unfair competition and, above all, we need a frontal attack on serious social and environmental issues.
Christmas exists, the beautiful illuminations in Lisbon (video), for exemple, and many others across Europe are trying to recapture a climate of hope and peace, there’s even a movie from the film industry (it’s not a theological movie) about the Virgin Mary (it was released on September 6th) and therefore the birth of Jesus.
Thought from on High and Communion
06
Apr
What kind of knowledge is this that encompasses knowledge “from above”,
beyond the human, but without contradicting it, Morin’s response and others such as Martin Buber, Emannuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur seem to lead to the same point, to go towards the Other without reservation.
Two mystical falsifications are possible in this direction, one that denies conscience and respect for the Other, those who appeal to a false Christian religiosity, the Bible is clear: “If anyone declares: “I love God!”, but hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John, 4:20-21), but there are those who cry out for the extreme opposite of the materiality of faith, to these the biblical answer is also clear: “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4 ,4), curiously opposes and does not dialogue.
Curious because the vision of the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, his great memorial and his eternal presence in his materiality (flesh and blood), is the cause of much controversy and divergence, both true that he broke the bread, and true who declared his divinity.
Thinking things from above cannot fail to have its concreteness, its materiality, you see that bread is not wheat, but wheat transformed by human hands into bread, just like wine.
It does not fail to have the most sacred and divine aspect when asking the disciples to do this in his memory and in his name, thus it is renewed and divinized by the human hands that repeat it.
How to understand communion without the presence of the Other, without dialogic with the opposite, without this paradox of understanding that even with opposition, new horizons are possible, as advocated by the hermeneutic circle, which asks that preconceptions be left “in parentheses” before .
We have a vision of truth, logic and rationality, but true communion is only possible with a step further, the belief that something divine also belongs to the Other, to the different and the opposite of my worldview, there is no communion without this , there is only tolerance.
I have always asked myself why wars, hunger, misery, injustice among men, my answer today is that there is no true communion among men, perhaps some small tolerance, some respect that hides true interests, perhaps a respect that is even human but not divine.
The forest bordering the clearing
10
Mar
Modern man, victim of ideologies, cultures and religious apostasy lives only with the awareness
of individual freedom, without really understanding who is the Other who is not equal, the Korean/German philosopher Byung Chul Han developed this in “The expulsion of the other : Society, perception” (Editora Vozes, Brazil) in which he talks about the adipose emptiness of fullness.
This emptiness has nothing to do with the phenomenological epoché, opening the mind and soul to dialogue and receive the Other, the different, the discourse and the narrative contrary to ours, to later merge the horizons in the “hermeneutic circle”, the emptiness of soul is positive, it elevates us.
Through successive tragedies, the pandemic was the first and will not be the last, and this is not about an apocalyptic discourse, but about the social realization of a civilizing crisis in an increasingly profound and dangerous process, not only in the rulers, but also in personal conscience.
Chul Han goes so far as to say these processes are obscene in “hypervisibility, hypercommunication, hyperproduction, hyperconsumption, which lead to a rapid stagnation of the same. Obscene is the ‘connection of like with like’ (Han, 2022) in short, everything translates into an obscene sameness.
He cites a very illustrative example which is the animation Anomalisa by Charlie Kaufmann (photo), which talks about a speaker Michael who goes to Cincinnati for a lecture and there approaches a person by his voice, Lia is a person who already knows him and came to see his talk and fall in love.
But the hell of the same are the employees of the Hotel, all the same and who want to seduce Michael.
The essay emphasizes erotic love, but this also applies to agapic love, without falling in love and dialoguing with what is different, we live in the hell of the same, in our vicious circle, in an environment full of vices and obscenities, in the worst sense of word.
In the biblical narrative, Moses, who was trying to lead his people to a new path, wanted to stone him and blasphemed against the proposal of a different life (Exodus 17,3-7), even asked for the return of Egyptian slavery (any resemblance to the current politics is no coincidence), and also in chapter 4 of John, Jesus goes to meet the Samaritan woman, a woman and “pagan” and dialogues with her
In the week that women’s day was celebrated, this is important, which is not a biblical detail, but the essence of her message, Jesus, when meeting her, finds her interest strange and says “How come you, being a Jew, ask drink to me, a Samaritan woman?” (Jo 5,9).
The obscenity and sameness of the same not only impoverishes each one, but limits the civilizing process that is enriching the more the different can exist with dignity.
HAN, B. C. (2022) A expulsão do outro: sociedade e percepção. (The expulsion of the other: society, perception). Trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.
Culture and the great crisis
20
Oct
After analyzing the aspects of homogenization and cultural
colonization, Morin will analyze who the average man is and what culture he consumes, he says:
“The language adapted to these anthropos is audiovisual, a language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. Language is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and, therefore, it is not specific to new media that only enhances them, and it involves more an imaginary than “of the game that overflows the fabric of practical life” (idem).
This is because “the borders that separate the imaginary realms are always fluid, unlike those that separate the realms of the earth” (ibidem), so a man can participate in the legends of another civilization than adapt to the life of this civilization, and so Morin prepares to talk about the great crisis or great civilizing night, which Morin calls “great craking”.
As technical quality improves, it mediates artistic quality, says Morin: “they go up in industrialized culture (writing quality of articles, quality of cinematographic images, quality of radio broadcasts), but the irrigation channels relentlessly follow the main lines of the system (page 50).
Morin separates the cultural currents coming from Hollywood into three main currents: the one that “shows the happy end, the happiness, the success; the countercurrent, the one that goes from The death of a Traveling Salesman to No down payment [AC/DC Rock], shows failure, madness, degradation” (p. 51), but there is a third current that he calls ” black”.
This is “the current in which fundamental questions and contestations ferment, which remains outside the culture industry: it can partly usurp, adapt to itself, make publicly consumable certain aspects of, say, Marx, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Freud, Breton , Péret, Artaud, but the condemned part, the antiproton of culture, its randium is left out” (idem).
Morin describes this anti-climax at the beginning of chapter 5 “The great ‘cracking”: “long playing records and radio multiply Bach and Alban Berg. Pocketbooks multiply Mlaraux, Camus, Sartes. The reproductions multiplied Piero dela Francesca, Masaccio, Césanne or Picasso” (p. 53), culture seemed to be democratized by the cheap book, the disc, reproduction, as recommended by Walter Benjamin, but the result was vulgarization, because the “culture cultivated” is neither the mainstream nor the specific in mass culture.
The imaginary leaves the rites, parties and dances and goes to radio, television and cinema, there “those ghost spirits, geniuses who permanently pursued archaic man and reincarnated in his parties” (page 62), now they are “rushed away by printed culture”, mass culture breaks “the unity of archaic culture which, in the same place, all participated at the same time as actors and spectators in the party, rhythm, ceremony” (p. 62), spectator and show are physically separate.
This transformation of a “party man” follows what we call audience, audience and spectators: “the immediate and concrete he becomes a mental tele-participation” (p. 63(, this mass media (now confused with the networks, which is something else), while “reestablishing the human relationship that destroys the printed material”, “it is at the same time a human absence, the physical presence of the spectator is, at the same time, a physical passivity.” (page 63 ).
Mass culture maintains and amplifies a “voyeurism”, more broadly: “a mirror and glass system, movie screens, television videos, glass windows in modern apartments, Plexiglas in Pullman cars, airplane shutters, always some something translucent, transparent or reflective separates us from physical reality” (pages 72-73) and all this was prior to the new media, depositing to them only this great “cracking”, is to ignore the construction (or historical deconstruction) of the imaginary , folklore and festivals, which began even before the last century with printed culture, enlightenment and idealism.
Attempts to reactivate “cultivated” culture are not lacking, as we have already discussed, through the same mass media that vulgarize and destroy the substance of human culture, there is no lack of vivid works by Van Gogh that Akira Kurosawa animated in cinema, of large public events with “ animated video-mapping” by Vang Gogh (made at the Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, photo), who presented in 2018 the work of Gustav Klimt, also animated.
The cultural crisis is not just its own work, its root is the thought and development of a mass culture of idealism, of an objectivism that ignores the human.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
In the pleasure of the text there is a dialogue
02
Sep
In the previous post there are Barthes’ expressions on
literature, writing and text, and we have already conceptualized the idea of inscription which is supposed to be supported, writing and the cognitive aspect and in the text the linguistic, artistic and “installation” aspect, and it is this is where his book “The pleasure of the text” is analyzed.
The book despite theoretical aspects is in fact a pleasure to be read, there is dialogue and mainly pleasant surprises, such as, for example, a semiological space, a kind of place between two margins: “an obedient margin, according to, plagiarism (…) the canonical state of the tongue and another movable, empty (…) these two margins wax, are necessary ”(page 40).
It yields more classic literature: “by Zola, by Balzac, by Dickens, by Tolstoy) it carries with it a kind of weakened mimesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, leisurely, with little respect for the integrity of the text ”(page 17)
Proust, Balzac and Tostói deals in a single line of ruptures, “the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that produces the pleasure of great stories: Proust, Balzac, Guerra e Paz will sometimes have been read , word by word? (Proust’s happiness: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages) ”(page 18).
He recommends how to do the real reading: “Read slowly, read everything, from a Zola novel, the book will fall from your hands; read quickly, in fragments, a modern text, that text becomes opaque, timely for our pleasure: you want something to happen, and nothing happens; because what happens to language doesn’t happen to speech: what “happens” *, what “goes away”, the gap in both margins .. “(page 19).
Contrast the text with the theater or the cinema: “In the text scene there is no limelight: there is no one active behind the text (the writer) nor before anyone passive (the reader); there is no subject and object. The text prescribes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye that an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) speaks: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me.” (pag.52).
It reveals the secret of another book of his: “Old, very old tradition: hedonism has been repelled by almost all philosophies; only the hedonistic claim is found among the outcasts, Sade, Fourier; for Nietzsche himself, hedonism is pessimism ”(page 74), the book quoted in the previous post that goes far beyond hedonism.
BARTHES, Roland. (1987) O prazer do texto. Trad. J. Guinsburg. Brazil, SP: Editora Perspectiva. (portuguese edition in pdf, in english edition pdf)
