Post Conscious

Sometimes I need to be grounded back down to earth by something. I thought I wasn’t being anchored down properly during Easter break, which is fine because holidays are when people let loose. I thought I was just missing the stimulation of university obligations. So I went to search for this something.

Having been away for about 5 weeks, I took the initiative the get an early start on my academic pursuits. Summer term starts next week and I thought it would be wise to get a week’s head start ahead of everyone by spending time in the library working on my draft and job applications. I want to believe everyone’s too busy doing the following things: enjoy the sun after what felt like the longest winter, over analyze each god damn political debate, come up with more cliche stories about how they overcame the volcano ash madness, and panic about final exams (which I have none, thankful for a research oriented course, until the day before a deadline when I’ll say I’d have preferred exams instead). Fumbling over words in between day dreams (week off intellectual musings equals mental rust), I spent a good 8 hours in the library with about 1000 words and 3 job applications to show for.

In the evening I decided to meet up with a good friend Mr. C who always says what my mind thinks but in the simplest ways. I am grateful for his ability to put some things at rest for me. I am now up 2 things in my organizer; buy that Don DeLillo book and visit the Barbican birds. Mr. C, I will remember your words about how cold Gorky left you feeling, so it might affect me when I go, but I will try.

Before I turned in last night I decided to dust off this website and give it a bit of a refurb. Some ideas popping here and there and it is always useful to tie in all your work together so they become part of each other instead of doing all of them separately. When they complement each other, it becomes seamless. You would have thought after such a long day, I’d be anchored down properly by something. So I was surprised this morning when I was still looking.

Fast forward to now. An hour ago I had received a package from home. In it was a card written by my lovely (often times monstrous) 5 year old sister. It read:

BW,

Love,
D

Ah, found it.

As we ease into the season changes, the world keeps on spinning regardless of numbers and spreadsheets we have created to make sense of chance and probability. I’ve been busy over several projects and mostly I’ve been away visiting places.

If you’ve written in about the Post Conscious presentation, I will write back very soon. The essay aforementioned in the last post has been put on hold as the paper I’m trying to write now is more pressing and demanding.

If you’re interested, it is on Nietzsche and education, and it is about values which have devalued themselves which Nietzsche said in Will to Power. It follows the work of Nigel Blake et al. in Education in an Age of Nihilism. However, I also want to bring back what Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy about apolline illusions and dreams. I will use his idea as a way of describing the predicament of certain educational developments and theorize that institutions in some countries have to face more than one deceptive illusion. That is, following an illusory (often Western) market-made standard (league tables, mission statements etc.) as well as aligning this with whatever domestic goals there are. Domestic goals meaning whatever religious, cultural, political, nationalistic conviction an institution might have.

So it’s like onions. Many layers. Makes you cry.

Also, looking around for jobs at the moment, which could also make one cry. So instead of recreating my CV every now and then, I think I will make a portfolio section on this website so I can point potential employers to stuff I can’t fit on a CV.

Cheers, real content soon.

Symposium went well yesterday. Thank you for being there.

There is a piece of work written on post-conscious/supraconscious by J. B. Oates on the internet. I have never read it prior to my work and came across it yesterday. It is not the same as mine. I will produce an essay on the comparison and differences shortly.

The story of DV does not end in that state of confusion. Some of you have been baffled by the ‘pointlessness’ of my theory which should also make one wonder:

1. Why always think in terms of end goals rather than means?

2. The whole thing is designed to make you think (differently) and you’re already thinking … which is good. Hopefully differently.

There are no existing literature on this (so far I have searched) so if you want to read something now then I suggest you read: Nietzsche, Foucault, Frankl, Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky. There are much more which are to me the foundations on what my thought was built upon. Recent recommendations (by my professor) which I haven’t looked into and thus don’t know if they are relevant to the post conscious also include Lyotard, Levinas and Derrida. You might also want to look at poets such as Rilke, Rumi and Chris (found on my links).

Have a good Sunday everybody.

Preparing for the symposium next week … going to talk about Post Conscious.

Mostly trying to get nothingness out of my head.

Oh, that could be DV up there.

I guess things will unfold.

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/ – interesting but discussed this for far too long in the seminar.

Plus a never ending discussion about education and therapy – in which they were ironically indulging in a therapy session themselves last night.

Had to put aside Illich for another day – you should see the expression of this person who read the whole book.

Tired and bored of the locally contextualized discussions which have become very eurocentric, western and British.

Perhaps we have reached a point where the survival of the fittest have transcended the physical. In our race to become the fittest we have hit a glass wall, and through it we see nothingness in the distance. At the finish line, we wonder while we wait for the late finishers to arrive. We are now the fittest, there’s nothing more to do because of this glass wall which has stopped us, but there is something on the other side so the race must go on. We, amongst the finishers, suddenly make our own rules in our interpretation of a phenomena. A phenomena that is the abyss at the other side of the glass wall.

Upon the late finishers’ arrival, they get bombarded with the interpretation of the ones who were there first – the ‘winners’. Even before they get to see the abyss. Some of them will never even see the abyss at all. Lost – in both sense of the word – amidst all that have been said by the winners.

Some winners will tell them it has ceased being a race while they continue on … in their minds.

Suppose you and I realized this and we were amongst the late finishers. We then try very hard to muffle the conversation of the ‘winners’. Making our way through the crowd we stand in front of the glass wall. Suddenly we find ourselves staring into the abyss.

Tell me, what do you see? More importantly, will you tell the others?

Continuing from my previous post about Cushions, I wrote a piece for a student-led newspaper at the Institute. Here goes:

I am sitting in front of a computer in one of the Institute’s computer labs. It doesn’t take forever to log in but it does take enough time to form thoughts about how things could be different and better. After some time I could almost see the vague allegory dancing in front of my eyes; working on these computers can give you a gist of how questionable some things actually are.

The bulk of the time that is needed to log in to the desktop involves the process of policy and services. It is a very slow one and it’s hard to tell what’s going on here since you can’t access the root of this problem – I wish things were more transparent.

Eventually I get in, after such a long wait, and I am greeted by important messages. One of which telling me that I need to start using my designated Institute e-mail address so that the Institute could have a proper medium on which to contact me officially. I have not been here long but it does suggest to me that in the past, perhaps there have been a lack of communication. It’s quite unfair to enforce this in my opinion, Outlook Web Access is behind the times and very rigid compared to most web mail systems. I wonder how many people are capable of setting up e-mail forwarding and the alternative of setting up a program for your e-mails of course does not give you the portability of web access.

Getting this out of the way I can at finally start using the computer. I am presented with an aesthetically pleasing workspace; the polished looks of the desktop which by the way would require more computer resources to run. I am amused by this because there is no functionality whatsoever in fancy looking desktops, in fact no matter how fast a computer is, it would end up running at a less optimal capacity when compared to one that is run without any unnecessary resource hogs. I wonder too at the choice of Internet Explorer over Firefox or Chrome – it is widely held that the former, IE (Internet Explorer!), have security issues and is less efficient than it’s latter counterparts.

On occasions I am caught off guard by some interruption of an automated function, asking me if I need to create an Ink Layer amongst other ‘useful tools’ this computer is telling me it has. It was as if this computer thinks it knows better than me, acting like a guide to try and dictate my actions in some way. This is alright and can be ignored but it does beg the question who wanted them there in the first place. The most you ever see people do is work on a word processor. Of course you don’t get to see a lot though, because there aren’t enough computers.

I am almost done and there is one thing left to do – I have to print. This is perhaps the worst part (if you are already used to the slow log in) but is one I optimistically look forward to. This is the time where I take the opportunity to validate my frustrations by immersing myself in the grunts of the bewildered masses who congregate at the printers. Amidst all the sophisticated helter skelter, you arrive at an almost primitive conclusion to your IT experience. Papers get lost here, probably taken by someone else who is equally confused by the disorganized printing process. Even if you get it right, there is still a nagging feeling that you have to check every page of the one hundred you printed because you are never really assured. After which I am left to wonder why they had not let me do multi-page printing or printing on both sides to save paper, ink, time, trees and everyone’s conscience.

Upon leaving, I get a rush of feeling mostly that I’m glad the ordeal is over. I begin to wonder why, like the computers, resources are mismanaged here. I asked a technician about this, he couldn’t give me an answer and instead gave me a piece of paper where I can write my suggestions down (more paper). Who’s in-tray will this arrive at? What kind of answer will I get? I am apprehensive at this kind of correspondence, the bureaucratic and template response type. I exit the library past the barriers, into the aesthetically pleasing open space of the Institute and suddenly forget all that I had thought about.

23/02/3010
Time unknown

Full entry:

It wasn’t so long ago when I woke up next to you. Awake from a dream into another much sweeter. A kind of realization that maybe we could stop looking. Then we kissed. Our heads meet in a kind of congregation of two. Maybe we should stop wondering? Our noses rubbed, transcending talk, into a world of touch. This was it, I thought. Then our eyes met … I blink, you blink … like a kind of dance. I caught your heartbeat, then I sunk myself into its rhythm. I’m floating in a sea of you.

It’s exactly this I’m thinking now. Haphazardly holding on to it or grasping for its air. I have to think this now. I need to think this now. This morning I had woken up with a wonderful feeling but it wasn’t you. Awake into another dream, much sweeter.




DV.

Last year, around this time, I was busy preparing a paper for a symposium. My focus last year was on political philosophy and religion, more specifically on the paradox of an Islamic democracy. I argued for a no compromise, a denial of a hybrid – if one were to strictly adhere to either grounding or at least if one were truly Islamic. There is no neutral position because one has to fit in the other framework. If you are to be democratic, then you will have to rationalize religion. If you are to be Islamic, then you will have to compromise the democratic concept. It is a classic Salafi versus rationalism debate which I had to condense in such a short time. It didn’t work well – the obvious criticisms were of course things were not as black/white as I present them to be.

However, I think they were missing the point though. Religion is exactly that – an arena of the uncompromising. If one could rationalize religion, then it would just like be a marketable product tailored for individuality (ironically this will mean the masses). If one could rationalize religion, then belief and faith is really man-made after all (although this deserves its own space for reflection on another day).

Religion is rigidity and it is good at being this. It has to be this and rationalism is the contamination of it. You should be a non-believer (I am one) than rationalize religion. It should be timeless and void of all historical, political, cultural contexts. It is not something which one could use. It is the realm of belief and faith especially for those detached from all worldly things. Otherwise, the religion you believe in is just a string and you’re a puppet.

Religion does not equal God though. God is something else …

This morning I received an e-mail and I will be presenting a paper again this year in March under the panel of Identity and Education. I have a slight worry because of my current fixation on Nietzsche. I already have a long obsession with meaning and an admiration of Foucault. Who knows what I might bring to the table – I might end up saying everything is meaningless, as I tend to do a lot these days in conversations and similarly in seminars.

I think I need to speak to an old friend of mine Mr. A, whose curiosity has always helped me refine my thoughts in an attempt to make him understand. Or Mr. C, whose words often reach into the depths of my thoughts which sometimes I don’t even know some things exist in – did he put them there?

Or Ms. Z, who can roll a fucking good one.

This Institute I am currently enroled in has the facade of all that is righteous and truly good. When you walk in its open spaces, you can almost feel like you’re walking in someone’s cliche – the one that says ”meeting people from all walks of life”. I have met people with such cliches or rather they have met me. I think they need to do less meeting and more walking.

There is minimal security needed here, after all this is the place that is the epitome of all that is virtuous, moral and more more more. Right around the  corner, in a square, is a statue of Ghandi. There’s always candles or flowers there. The square is undergoing some re landscaping work – who knows why? Maybe it has something to do with the way in which greatness has to be dressed up in gold. All the nakedness (with no gold) stand in the cold, in admiration of greatness.

The smell in the Institute is great, the aroma of progressive humanity … if hypothetical unicorns had hypothetical armpits, it would hypothetically smell like this. The colors are easy on your eyes, it seems they have made everything in a light tone … light blue, white, light brown. Sometimes, when I walk in, I feel like I am wrapped in cushion. It’s a very comfortable feeling. When I think about it though, who the hell wants to be wrapped in cushion?

Hey now … they are teaching Education here – but how do you teach Education? The answer is simple; just tell them that the past and present need fixing for the future. What kind of fixing? Well for for starters, things need to be liberal and moral – words which smell like unwashed laundry from last month. Then in the phantom equation, you throw in other concepts like children, freedom, values, equality. Occassionally you get to beat your chest and nod your heads in the dissent of racism, intolerance and all that is bad. All in the style of your modern day heroics – captured in the nearest space for a poster advert.

You do not need to worry here. Everything is great and golden.

It is now 17.45 and I am using one of the computers. On my way in, I got stopped by a student running for one of the Union positions. When asked about 24 hour library times, I questioned the resources and other issues concerning this. He responded by first saying he empathized with all my concerns and there’s more – he’s from the Green Party too – he is very concerned. He continued talking under his cigarette breath for the next 5 minutes.

Now I am in the library about to print hundreds of pages worth of reading. We are not allowed to use double sided printing, multi page printing or low quality printing here. It’s okay – aren’t we doing this in the name of Education and all those laundry words?

Yes … we are too great and we are dressed in gold. We are also wrapped in cushion.