exciting movement in scholarship that seeks to bridge exclusionary zones of specialization for the betterment of knowledge... this article discusses the pauli/jung relationship as seminal, cautionary, but ultimately a hopeful model for translateralism in research and relationships...

Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and the Acausal Connecting Principle: A Case Study in Transdisciplinarity
By Charlene P. E. Burns

The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
[Werner Heisenberg]

still working on a response to ferguson's 'six killer app' theory of western civilization, the research for which has proven a bit more massive than i expected even though my purview and ambitions are seriously modest. my attention deficits and lack of skill with respect to analysis, compilation, and reference organization have finally come to oppose me. good. i like a challenge.

yes, my mind is unruly. yes, in the absence of formal education, i've avoided the ordeal of serious scholarship, making the excuse that by doing things my way, strident and without backup, and unapologetically so, i could keep the kook visionary within alive and unfettered and, most of all, happy. truth is, if i'm to develop and grow as a writer, my habit core, my use of resources, my experiences and presuppositions, these must be turned into an electional architecture.

the main of my approach for the killer app deconstruction will be to demonstrate the archetypal dramaturgy in global systems... in spite of efforts in the humanities to make history seem like a series of unrelated, haphazard and discreet events, there's a very coherent story unfolding... what's more, its accurately and eerily reflected by the one macroscopic array worth examining, the cyclical movement of the planets in the heavens.

its by no coincidence, for example, that every single period of revolution and upheaval occurs in EXACT conformity with the alignment cycle of pluto and uranus as they move through mutual conjunction and opposition. this will be where my examination begins since the factuals are rather incontrovertible and put conventional historical analysis on its ear...

competing for focus, i can't help but let myself get drawn away into an uptake of content i sorely need if i'm to do some writing on one of my pet causes, universal nuclear disarmament and the end of nuclear energy. i'm biting into research summations provided by the global consortium on security transformation, and learning up on the history of the NNPT.

challenges

the world always forces us to confront and play with our edges and definitions. well.. let's say the 'world,' yes, but the 'world' when engaged and given the respect of being perceived thru the lens of loving open-mindedness, and an assumption of fundamental coherence and meaning, even when this coherence and meaning escapes or transcends our powers of seeing and interpretation (and, it bears pointing out, this land beyond our powers of seeing and interpretation is where old-fashioned mystery used to live).

you _can_ walk the parallel road of finding the world empty of these cues as to significance and meaning, but that's like walking among the richness of recorded poetry and viewing it with the myopic rigor of utilitarian prose conventions and lowbrow demands for literal transparency.

thing is, i have a horror of violence, i have a terror of feeling revulsion towards things, of saying no to life. yet, this fear and inability to 'kill' certain things off in the matrix of possible can actually rob you of any satisfaction, especially if you wish to be an agent for love and peace in maximal ways. in the same sense that the unchecked growth of nature (which chokes off diversity as often as it rises, free, in differentiated splendor) differs from the cultivated garden that partakes of intersecting nature and human ingenuity (an ingenuity that tries to better the vectors of nature), sometimes we must act and change outcomes by saying yes to the dance, putting on the yoke of our distinct ableness for manipulation, for violence, and the power to make difficult choices.

i have never felt more aware of the burden of being both a tool of civilization and an expression of the deepest roots of nature than i do in a current forced encounter with the asian cockroach. i am a 'trap it and deposit it outside' kind of personality. so its very interesting when the old routines of one's least-examined personality runs into a situation that, well, challenges the blanket righteousness of those old behaviours and personal commandments.

its always the most creative and character-forming challenge, when the old ways of doing things meats (sic) meets with an immovable spot beyond itself which, to be dealt with successfully, may need to be engaged with the very qualities we stealthily reject in the world and ourselves.

i remain a militant pacifist this hour. i don't think problems can be solved by carpet-bombing them, which always struck me as simpleminded, shortminded, and lazy. which makes this encounter doubly interesting, since these insects can go from a couple intruders to swarming thousands in very short order. thusly does the world goad us to make ourselves flesh by making irreversible choices, testing our constructs and mettle in a living labyrinth governed by other, incontrovertible laws.

the love/hate delusion

the neurotic content of our mind dominates, especially on those occasions when we think ourselves above or in control of our unconscious. truth is, we never _ever_ encounter objective facts in the world, this in spite of the hubris of all scientific methods. we encounter instead the illusions we spin but forget our hand in, the expectations we're hardlocked into but deny of ourselves, the delusions we've lost touch with but once spawned in the mist and orphaned in time.

to the extent that these subtle organizing agents of the small self dominate our perception, the world of phenomena, in all its irrational and impossible to predict mysteries, will arise to match our skew on vision point for point. as jung said, the objective of neurosis is to prove itself true.

the most telling investigative device for the conscientious researcher is to watch how chance circumstance organizes around you when you enter the circle of influence and interested gaze of another. how things dispose by context, what rises to the surface as wardrobe for the encounter, these tell you everything you need to know about how the other person needs to see you, how they need to see themselves when they're with you, how you need to see the other person, and the role you feel compelled to play in the dynamic. if the projection is strong, there will be nothing you can do to offset the arrangement of 'facts' that suit the distortions. in fact, the more you struggle to assert your own truth against that of a projection, the more you become ensnared in a web of appearances.

when the projections serve our idealizations, we fall in love. when they serve our fears, we fall in hate. the aim of inner work and outer yoga is to get wise to the game of the unconscious and to arrive at constantly improving judgement about who to dance with in the veil of illusions, and who to leave twisting in the wind with their script and moviemaking. this applies to ourselves more than the other, since we can only ever take responsibility for our own projections. and if you feel unfairly viewed by the world around you, the question then becomes, what does this serve?

in the end, have the courage to be open to those encounters robust enough to handle the burlesque peeling away of veils. but also have the strength to leave those where the web is too thick and sticky to allow for movement and growth. friendships are like muscle tests. some make you stronger, some make you weaker. choose wisely, enjoy your mistakes, don't give a shit for consistency or fear the trials of finding your own voice and values. authenticity and honest inquiry are the best companions.

yin yang

as i was bringing the laundry back to base camp the sun seemed to follow me and for once i did not tense under his glare and heat. today it felt lush and vital and i liked the way his energy waves were releasing the smells from the flowering trees and furious leafing out around me. and then something inside me thought, 'everyone to their own labyrinth goes to toil that we all might experience the circuitousness of perceptive errors, flawed reasoning, and mistaken choices in the same territory where our own escape lays hidden but ever waiting. retain your commitment, be brave, and never fear to discover...'

yo.

on this day

shoe diaries. i was making a quick run to kensington market when i happened on a bad boy chef sunning himself in the cool spring sun. we'd once talked of my returning to the kitchen as his apprentice in a new project, and tho this no longer has any real appeal for me (i'm stubbornly trying to find a way to live by other wits), i felt obliged by my lack of economy to leave no invitation unexplored. and since spotting him there was a chance occurrence, i didn't feel i could turn my nose up at it. certainly i like to at least leave room to be lead by life more, my headstrong nature less. well, sometimes...

as we caught up and came round to broaching his previous comments, it became apparent he'd moved on from the idea and i felt a certain relief. if i'm really honest with myself, it seems plenty reasonable to conclude that nature's intelligence doesn't wish to see me tied to a stove making violence into plates for a living, and a squalid, unhappy living at that. just then another gentlemen joined the chef. i recognized him as a snobby hipster who owns the art gallery that egresses across the alleyway. and to be even more eviscerating and uncharitable, i'd describe him as a gay man who hates women and so therefore is, well, uncomfortable for anyone with tits to be around. i introduced myself and reminded him of our proximity. he said, 'oh yes, you're the woman with the dog,' with an intonation perhaps better suited to the phrase, 'oh yes, you're the woman with the weeping sores...'

he looked down just then, in that de rigeur effort to be pointedly devastating by taking in an appraising, full-body sweep of someone's person, his dime a dozen but thousand dollar thick black frames rising an inch as he flared and scrunched up his nose, pausing at my rotted out runners, his breath freezing on the inhale. he let his look linger just long enough to leave space for my discomfort and presumably kill any further conversation.

this got me to thinking about how the art scene has lost its soul. it used to be about art, now its an extension of social panache and design cliques. where once there was tangible passion and transfigurative conflicts on the canvas, now there's mere cleverness, technique, and awareness of trendy furniture matchings. the elevation of fashion contexting, the social savvy-meter of the 'artist' proposing their feckless, masturbatory products accounts for why this gallery owner would choose to present the following on his coveted front window as an indicator of what has value in our local creative river...

wow. really?

so it makes sense that one of the leading arbiters of what has significance in the toronto art scene would look at me in my rags and commitment to perhaps obscure personal principles and never imagine that i might be an artist, much less someone worth talking to. its one of the reasons i don't even bother trying to flush out the full scale of my manual art abilities. i've already been told on a couple of occasions by men and women with fine arts degrees that my work is merely decorative and of no significance and i can see the logic of this assessment. but i also think there's something vapid about it. certainly i'm not going to let it stop me from going from typepad, to instrument, to brush and pen whenever it suits me and for however long i can manage it.

and yes, its true i've been very foolhardy, drawing out to a maximum the amount of time i can devote to my music, art, and studies of late. i'm beyond bankrupt and will probably loose everything i own in the gamble. but, truth is, i don't care because i don't know how. i don't understand the game the world demands so i just pretend not to give a shit. and while the game is master of us all and will surely make me pay for my insufficiencies and negligence, and probably dearly, there is still a slim chance that i'll somehow manage a rabbit for all my insubordination. for the moment, its not so bad playing the pauper in a downtown of affluent hipsters. for all the withering looks of scorn and judgement, no true heart ever bothers themselves beyond a passing wince with the barbs of dead-eyed automatons.

evolution is not a line

the dramaturgy of transitions which mark the unfisting of a newly separative, self-aware human consciousness (the fall) from the dominance of an earlier unification with nature viz. mythosymbolic-instinctual mind, characterized by a lack of "I" (garden of eden), gives us insight into the liabilities of the experiential posture and garb of visioning we've inherited.

examining this lens of perception and its injunctions to action gives us an archimedean point, a distinguishing leverage against the topor of convention. it permits us to think afresh about how we 'see' the world and entertain perhaps for the first the wild extent to which the values we've carried forward and set into stoney infrastructure are not quite beyond renegotiation.

violence, consumptive paradigms and war-making are concomitant with the psychical pathways established by our first precautionary movement away from a unitary field of consciousness. to the student of human symbols and the inner and outer researches, this seems poetic, given the sword cut of intellection utilized to achieve this great expulsion from the dominance of chthonic forces, the laws of field and jungle with which the plasticine of human ingenuity could not much modulate and dialogue. but it is certainly, without doubt, an adaptation gone astray. that it has crossed into the borderland of recursive dysfunction is the way of all creation. this is not a negative nor some tragedy. its but the failsafe of the unruly promise of nonlinear evolution which presses ever for the novel improvement and the genius of greater internested, multivalent complexity at the expense of outdated, lateral, single-dimensional ways.

just as we can imagine the horror of Kubrick's Hal, the androidal terrors of technologies mastering in distortions of unintegrated functions their human creators, so too do the times, the weather, and the psychic atmosphere permit us to see as if for the first the malformed grotesquerie of the concepts which carry us forward and shape civilization, culture and its environmental theater of operation.

retro spatial assignments and our 'libido of belonging' are pressing for replacement by more evolved, integral concepts

"Human beings, like all living creatures, take up space; they are driven to occupy particular portions of territory by the libido of belonging. Collectivities cement themselves through place, just as place confirms the singularity of the collective. That this impulse is perpetual also makes it paradoxical. It seeks to confine space and to confine itself to a space, but the impulse to confine and contain is itself unconfined and uncontained. Its tendency is not to sit still, to rather to propagate, to expand irresistibly into other territories. All living creatures are in essence imperialist, in that only the limits of the environment or other beings prevents their infinite expansion to fill all space – the head of the sunflower, blindly discovering and illustrating the Golden Section in its rage to pack as many seeds into the space as possible, aptly demonstrates this. But, if the imperialist is always in search of new territories to annexe, he is also for that reason always looking beyond or taking leave of where he is. Indeed, Serres distinguishes human beings from other species on precisely this principle: ‘Living species are sites of memory; humans take leave of these sites’ (Serres 2003, 58). Or, as he put it in the course of a conversation about his book on angels (1995a), which takes the form of a philosophical dialogue set in an airport, ‘we are the dasein in the sky, not in the land. Do you see what I mean? We are wandering. We are nomads. This is not a new state of things. It is a very ancient state of things. I think the dasein is in the atmosphere’ (Serres and Kunzru 1995).

But what happens when space is saturated or runs out, as may happen with our space, even our airspace? Necessarily, Serres argues, this must mean that we will have to take our leave, not of this or that location, but of space, in the sense of locatedness, itself. The network, the gridding or checkerboarding of finite space, with its determinate and mutually exclusive positions, gives way to a topological ocean of changeable relations. ‘[Soft] connectivity replaces [hard] collectivity’ (Serres 2009b, 20)." [Steven Connor on Serres]

postdialectical roots of peace | conflict is frigid

"Thesis is the action of putting something in a place. What is important is the place, and only then the manner of occupying it. Of taking it, holding it, setting oneself up there. Setting one’s foot on it. The foot, here, is the trace of a thesis, and the wall of colors, the noise, is at once battle and racket, the two strategies – material and logicial, hardware and software – of taking place and getting a foot in the door. (Serres 1995b, 53)

This is why, for Serres ‘[t]he form of the squabble is stable and perennial’ (Serres 1995b, 80), and why ‘[f]ury is a classifier’ (Serres 1995b, 82). It is also why Serres has so repeatedly found ways to praise the ceding of place or stepping aside from place-taking:

The blank place is the place of the continuous cession. There is no blank white place, there are only the blank white ones who step aside. There is no blank place, there is only a blank step, the step of giving up a place, there is only the trace of a step, that white foot, exquisite, alive, in the midst of the noise. (Serres 1995b, 78)." [Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft]

on hard and soft

Take a black box. To its left, or before it, there is the world. To its right, or after it, travelling along certain circuits, there is what we call information. The energy of things goes in: disturbances of the air, shocks and vibrations, heat, alcohol or ether salts, photons… Information comes out, and even meaning. We do not always know where this box is located, nor how it alters what flows through it, nor which Sirens, Muses or Bacchantes are at work inside; it remains closed to us. However, we can say with certainty that beyond this threshold, both of ignorance and perception, energies are exchanged, on their usual scale, at the levels of the world, the group and cellular biochemistry; and that on the other side of this same threshold information appears: signals, figures, languages, meaning. Before the box, the hard; after it, the soft. (Serres, 2008a, 129)

the evolutionary vector of war is from outer plane action for the sake of form plays to inner retention for the sake of transcendental theatrics

It appears that life evolved from animal forms whose soft parts were inside, covered by a hard external casing, into other forms, such as ours, in which everything hard is interiorized as bone, cartilage, skeleton, while the soft is expressed as flesh, mucous membranes and skin. Those who love to fight are unevolved leftovers from a very ancient past, from the dark time when we were armoured. The newcomers amongst us become gentle, wrinkle-bearing: we bear imprints. We are clothed in soft, warm wax, we are tarnished mirrors, a warped, scratched, blotched, diverse surface in which the universe is reflected a little. (Serres, 2008a, 74-5)

janus

Steve Connor on French philosopher Michel Serres, "... observing how much the unproveable faith of the realist in the existence of a world apart from him has in common with the mystic’s faith in the existence of God: ‘Despite this weakness I have never known how nor been able to separate myself from realism, hard, for the idealists, soft, seem to me never to have suffered from the world as such; raised in cotton wool, coddled and protected, the rich, the powerful and their children believe that all the things of the world obey them like their servants.’ (Serres 2003, 65)

"Serres will not succumb to what he bitterly decries as the addiction of the soft; will not, that is, conform to the comfortable assumption that human beings inhabit what they call the sphere of culture alone, or that we are alone in the world (hard). To understand the work done by the ideas of the hard and the soft in Serres work is to measure the reach of the remarkable statement to be found at the beginning of The Natural Contract: ‘global history enters culture; global culture enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy’ (Serres 1995c, 4). For the first time in the history of the world, human history has begun to act on nature; for the first time in human history, that bright little shred of time, nature has become a protagonist in human culture. This makes the separation of the natural and the cultural, of science and the humanities, of things and signs, henceforth not just inconvenient but literally inconceivable. "