Caveat: Schemanarrative

Remindme_html_59aa9560Schematic? Narrative?

Regardless, it gave me a sort of a chill, watching this video: a sort of schematic narration of the overwhelming complexity of our world, its interdependencies, the way we exist embedded in multifold schemas that we don't understand and are barely aware of. And in a very short story-line, there's also an actual character created, which seems to possess the rudiments of personality and internal life – perhaps a la Sims. For some reason, I was thinking of Joyce's Ulysses as I watched this. That might seem strange, but I believe some might see that there's a sort of logic to it. "A day in the life…" and all that.

What I'm listening to right now.

[UPDATE 2018-02-03: Video replaced due to having noticed link-rot (old video taken down?).]

Röyksopp, "Remind Me."

Plus, I like Röyksopp.

Now, tangentially – or perhaps in the mode of a constructive, philosophical supplement (and please don't be alarmed if you don't see the connection to the above, as I'm writing here largely for my own future's perusal, because my reading happened to coincide with my discovery of the "schemanarrative") – I will offer an extended quote from Fredric Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic, on the topic of his "utopian hermeneutic" (the chapter is entitled "Utopia as Replication"; the "genealogy" he's referencing is Nietzsche's):

There is so far no term as useful for the construction of the future as "genealogy" is for such a construction of the past; it is certainly not to be called "futurology," while "utopology" will never mean much, I fear. The operation itself, however, consists in a prodigious effort to change the valances on phenomena which so far exist only in our present; and experimentally to declare positive things which are clearly negative in our own world, to affirm that dystopia is in reality Utopia if examined more closely, to isolate specific features in our empirical present so as to read them as components of a different system. This is in fact what we have seen Virno doing when he borrows an enumeration of what in Heidegger are clearly enough meant to be negative and highly critical features of modern society or modern actuality, staging each of these alleged symptoms of degradation as an occasion for celebration and as a promise of what he does not – but what we may – call an alternate Utopian future. [p. 434]

I would only add that perhaps we have to remember that dystopias and utopias, both, are reliant on narratives that are essentially the same, and which may or may not be historical, just like Nietzsche's genealogies (or even marxian dialectics of various flavors). Not historical, and not ahistorical – maybe a good word would be "pseudohistorical" – but why not just call it "narrative"?

Caveat: Election Day in Korea

Election-Sign-250x180Today is election day in South Korea. The sign at right reads 투표소 ["polling place"].

My bilingual coworker summed up her attitude to these elections.

"I've made my decision!" she announced.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I'm not voting."

I'm not sure what the turnout will be today – I'm going to guess it will be low. These are national parliamentary elections, but don't include a vote for the president, which will happen in the fall – the legislative and presidential calendars are out of sync, here. The two main parties recently rebranded themselves, but they are the same as always: a roughly right wing ruling party of nationalists, now called 새누리당 ["New Frontier Party"] and a roughly left wing opposition party of liberals, now called 통합민주당 ["Unified Democrat Party"]. The current president, Lee Myung-bak, isn't very popular, but his nationalist party remains so – that may have something to do with their recent rebranding. Both parties are currently led by women (picture below), which is striking in Korea's historically ultra-patriarchal political system.

I predict that the left leaning democrats will gain seats in the legislature – currently they only hold 89 out of 300 – but not an outright majority. There are minor parties and if they get enough, the liberals might be able to block some of the nationalists' efforts, in coalition. But the president holds huge power – so the really meaningful election will be in the fall.

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