Zak Shareef's Blog, page 2
July 17, 2013
My New Novel Is Available
Wands are for pretenders. Staffs for the impotent. Magic is an Art, and the only thing a real Wizard uses to create is his mind.
Joshua Awen used to cast spells as easily as he'd argue the theory behind them, but now he's lost his Wizard's power. These days he has access only to the rougher and less prestigious Magician magic, and he's met a beautiful cursed girl who needs saving.
Joshua embarks on a quest to help this girl all the while certain that something or someone is behind his meeting Ananda and stumbling upon a magic city.
This novel is set in a future where technology has given most people limited access to magic. Think Max Frei's "The Stranger" meets Charles Stross's "Accerlerando" with a dash of martial arts thrown in for good measure.
The New Novel is Available!
Wands are for pretenders. Staffs for the impotent. Magic is an Art, and the only thing a real Wizard uses to create is his mind.
Joshua Awen used to cast spells as easily as he'd argue the theory behind them, but now he's lost his Wizard's power. These days he has access only to the rougher and less prestigious Magician magic, and he's met a beautiful cursed girl who needs saving.
Joshua embarks on a quest to help this girl all the while certain that something or someone is behind his meeting Ananda and stumbling upon a magic city.
This novel is set in a future where technology has given most people limited access to magic. Think Max Frei's "The Stranger" meets Charles Stross's "Accerlerando" with a dash of martial arts thrown in for good measure.
July 12, 2013
The Supreme Court, Continuum, and Obselesence
The Supreme Court has ruled that drugs companies are largely exempt from law suits. I don't know the Law well enough to evaluate this ruling. I could dig into it. I could argue the point from the perspective of what is truly legal. Or, I could just shove my world view at the issue. If yours is similar enough, this piece might get a Like from you. If mine and yours are sufficiently different, then this post might earn a nasty comment. Neither of these modes of inquiry really appeal to me. This obvious implications of this ruling serve not as proof of the failure of the American legal system, but they serve as a means of exposing the way it functions as a mechanism and how the mechanism if fundamentally broken.
The Law cannot adapt quickly enough. The Law draws its power from stare decisis. It's flaw is in its name. The Latin betrays the problem. Our political system solves problems by relying on tradition. The entire system must combat an historical inertia in an era that's largest challenge is one of acceleration.
Whether the Supreme Court's ruling is an example of partisan decision making, corporate influence, or pure legal reasoning, it does not matter. The end result is that a certain kind of corporation which influences the ways the brains of Americans functions is less open to direct critique by citizens. This closing down of a legal means of addressing a corporation furthers the distance between the citizen and the corporation. It is not simply that corporations have the rights of people, but rather the corporations have precisely that kind of sovereignty which all true subjects ought to have. The corporation exists as a fuller entity than the individual as citizen. The Supreme Court, in limiting the individual's, in his or her role as citizen, capacity to address the corporation through legal means has either stripped the individual of a measure of sovereignty or the government of a level of legitimacy.
All of which resonates oddly with a television show I've been watching recently, Continuum. The lead if a female detective in 2012 who is secretly from 2077. She's arrived back in our present due to an escape by an anti-corporate terrorist organization. The corporations have replaced the government by 2077, and this terrorist group wishes to restore our liberties and does so through acts of violence. I'm only a few episodes in, and there has certainly been enough foreshadowing to suggest that the corporate leaders might have souls and wish to fix the situation in 2077. The show also includes a certain anti-tech theme as trusting her tech is what makes Keira an excellent Protector in 2077, but to become a good detective she must learn to trust her instinct. It is not the show's anti-tech theme nor it's hinting at redemption for certain individuals within a corporate body that I'd like to draw attention to.
Science Fiction ought to expose the threats to our society that can only be seen when present decisions and trends are taken to predictable extremes. This show functions as engaging pro-corporate propaganda. It does so not simply by making the anti-corporate terrorists the antagonists of the show rather than the protagonists but also by suggesting that the corporations are somehow reducible to the people who run them.
It misinforms the viewers and misconstrues the problem. The future in 2077 is run by corporations which have revised history and stripped citizens of rights. I acknowledge this dystopian effort, but it does not go far enough. It makes it seem as though the problem is one of imbalance. The reality is that corporations can adapt more easily than governments, and because our era's primary problem is one of acceleration it is this adaptability which makes them dangerous.
The Supreme Court's decision is an acknowledge of its own incapacity and obsolescence. This is not to say that the corporate paradigm is the correct solution to the problem of acceleration, but rather than a government which is formally designed to be as stable as possible (like America's) may need significant restructuring if it is to remain a viable organizational structure for meeting the needs of the people it exists as a representation of.
The Law cannot adapt quickly enough. The Law draws its power from stare decisis. It's flaw is in its name. The Latin betrays the problem. Our political system solves problems by relying on tradition. The entire system must combat an historical inertia in an era that's largest challenge is one of acceleration.
Whether the Supreme Court's ruling is an example of partisan decision making, corporate influence, or pure legal reasoning, it does not matter. The end result is that a certain kind of corporation which influences the ways the brains of Americans functions is less open to direct critique by citizens. This closing down of a legal means of addressing a corporation furthers the distance between the citizen and the corporation. It is not simply that corporations have the rights of people, but rather the corporations have precisely that kind of sovereignty which all true subjects ought to have. The corporation exists as a fuller entity than the individual as citizen. The Supreme Court, in limiting the individual's, in his or her role as citizen, capacity to address the corporation through legal means has either stripped the individual of a measure of sovereignty or the government of a level of legitimacy.
All of which resonates oddly with a television show I've been watching recently, Continuum. The lead if a female detective in 2012 who is secretly from 2077. She's arrived back in our present due to an escape by an anti-corporate terrorist organization. The corporations have replaced the government by 2077, and this terrorist group wishes to restore our liberties and does so through acts of violence. I'm only a few episodes in, and there has certainly been enough foreshadowing to suggest that the corporate leaders might have souls and wish to fix the situation in 2077. The show also includes a certain anti-tech theme as trusting her tech is what makes Keira an excellent Protector in 2077, but to become a good detective she must learn to trust her instinct. It is not the show's anti-tech theme nor it's hinting at redemption for certain individuals within a corporate body that I'd like to draw attention to.
Science Fiction ought to expose the threats to our society that can only be seen when present decisions and trends are taken to predictable extremes. This show functions as engaging pro-corporate propaganda. It does so not simply by making the anti-corporate terrorists the antagonists of the show rather than the protagonists but also by suggesting that the corporations are somehow reducible to the people who run them.
It misinforms the viewers and misconstrues the problem. The future in 2077 is run by corporations which have revised history and stripped citizens of rights. I acknowledge this dystopian effort, but it does not go far enough. It makes it seem as though the problem is one of imbalance. The reality is that corporations can adapt more easily than governments, and because our era's primary problem is one of acceleration it is this adaptability which makes them dangerous.
The Supreme Court's decision is an acknowledge of its own incapacity and obsolescence. This is not to say that the corporate paradigm is the correct solution to the problem of acceleration, but rather than a government which is formally designed to be as stable as possible (like America's) may need significant restructuring if it is to remain a viable organizational structure for meeting the needs of the people it exists as a representation of.
June 20, 2013
June 11, 2013
Fanfiction Crossover Idea
There's a minor character in the novel whom I've written a fragmented backstory from. He hacks the government regulated Tech that makes magic available to the masses, and develops a way to cast spells from within Constructed Reality. I was thinking it'd be fun to write some stories with him meeting up with digital versions of favourite characters from Scifi/Fantasy.
I'm learning toward starting with the 11th Doctor from Doctor Who.
If anyone has a request for fanfiction crossover to my universe, please leave it in the comment section.
I'm learning toward starting with the 11th Doctor from Doctor Who.
If anyone has a request for fanfiction crossover to my universe, please leave it in the comment section.
May 30, 2013
Manifesto on Interventionist Art
Artistic Interventions: Moving from Uselessness to Failure
“All art is quite useless.” --Oscar Wilde
All art was quite useless. No more. Now all that can be art has a function, if only to be Art. Art can no longer become itself by virtue of the excellence of a piece's production yielding beauty. Advertisers are, perhaps, the most technically proficient artistic creators today, and what they create is as far from art as rape is from love-making.All that is produced is produced with the techniques and tactics that artists have developed. This art in and of production is not limited to pieces meant for spectators. If a boundary can be placed between creating a piece of art and creating a piece of technology, it parallels that boundary between -do and -jutsu in Japanese Martial Arts. That boundary is at once dissolved and reformed through a moment of conflict, and a moment of conflict is precisely what an intervention creates.
An artistic intervention must restore art and in so doing humanity without denying what both have become: Contemporary reality is mankind's collective creative endeavor produced through and with technology. This reality is experienced, is felt, through the application of the same aesthetic principles which allow any piece of art to generate an emotional response in its viewer.
Hierarchies of complexity and tradition seem to provide a way to distinguish Fine Art from pop-art and pop-art from a homework assignment, but such efforts mistake a diffusion of artistic practices for a fragmentation of art itself. The problem facing art is one of diffusion not fragmentation, and the solution to diffusion is concentration not formalized division. A re-concentration of what is truly artistic about art requires an injection pure of uselessness.
Uselessness is that which resists functionality, efficiency, and acceleration. All of which are essential attributes of that system on which contemporary reality runs. Uselessness demands slowness which sets the stage for contemplation. Uselessness, however, does not translate into the language of systems. Error does: Error as an indicator of that failure which an intervention must generate.
To speak of the System is to evoke the antagonist of the conspiracy theorist or the teenage rebel. That whole which such evocations represent does not exist. There is no system outside of that which can be represented not as such but by such a term. The System is the representation of that internal pressure the contemporary citizen responds to when existing as a user. This response is trained through a person's interactions with various systems: the education system, the healthcare system, etc.
Interventionist art must expose the fine print of the user-agreement spelled out through a person's training while receiving the benefits of these sundry systems which contribute to that pressure represented by The System. In so doing an intervention reminds the user that he is a person first and a participant in these systems by choice - if not necessarily his choice. Interventionist art must expose the artifice of those institutions which have been naturalized through the inscription into the subject of his role as a user.
To illustrate this type intervention with a metaphor, let us imagine that being the user of a web-browser is analogous to being a user of The System. Interventionist art is never the image, text, movie, or song which has been browsed regardless of its quality. A piece of interventionist art is that which generates an error message in the place where the image ought to be. This error message suspends the virtual experience of browsing. It frustrates that in the user-system relationship which is equivalent to the willing suspension of disbelief in theater's relationship between audience and play.
Reality is our interface for The System. We login through those documents and identities we accumulate while living: birth certificate, social security number, passport, nick-name, Facebook profile, mental health diagnosis, World of Warcraft character.
There are naturally occurring errors. These are moments when the human being making use of its identity feels misrepresented and yet bound to the representation. These errors tend to manifest in acts of violence toward oneself or others. Artistic intervention must recreate that intense experience of misrepresentation, but in place of pain, panic, or violence, the artistic intervention must offer a way to heal and liberate. It must return to the user its humanity, where humanity represents consciousness with the potential for empathy and imagination. The artistic intervention must accomplish all this without denying the functional importance of reality or the systems it allows us access to.
May 26, 2013
The Simulacrum of Objectivity and the Schaible Case
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wi...
The Schaible's have now lost two children who might have lived had the children received medical care. Instead, they received prayer. After the death of their first child the parents were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and they were put on probation for a decade.
The death of an infant child is not an appropriate topic to make sport of, and I do not intend to ignore the intensity of the tragedy, but the more abstract forces at play in this situation ought not be ignored.
I value freedom, and if either parent chose prayer for himself or herself over "proper" medical care, I could respect that decision. There is an ethical argument to be made which suggests that as an infant is unable to choose medical treatment over prayer, the parents are obliged to make the correct decision in the child's place. The jury's having found the family guilty for making this decision once suggests that prayer alone is an incorrect, an illegal, way to deal with health problems.
The proof for this choice being incorrect is, of course, that the child died. The value of prayer is determined by its observable functionality. Had prayer "worked," the case would never have been brought before a court. Had the parents taken the child to a medical professional, and the child had still died (assuming no negligence or malpractice), then this would simply be a blameless tragedy or an act of God depending on one's perspective.
The court's decision that prayer alone makes one an unfit parent is a judgment against prayer that places a limitation on freedom of religion. I do not, personally, believe in the value of prayer as a means of healing. I would not make the choices these parents made, but this case exposes the limitations on freedom that are in place and those limitations suggest the touch of the Simulacrum of Objectivity on the American legal system just as the position of the fundamentalist Church to which the parents' belong is a reaction to it.
Cultural Relativism is the buzzword which represents the coping mechanism our culture has developed to deal with the ethical consequences of globalization and the challenges technology poses for traditional religious world views. Clogs are cute. Female genital mutilation is evil. The whole notion of accepting difference is false. It is not accepted. There is little genuine plurality of values. Pain, suffering, and death mark the boundaries of our acceptance of difference. Be different so long as no one gets hurt. Believe as you wish, so long as your beliefs threaten nothing.
Believe in God or don't. Just take your sufficiently sick kids to the hospital. This is, of course, not true belief. These parents' actions were the actions of true believers, and the court's response amounts to an outlawing of that kind of belief. Belief that does not conflict with the observable, measurable, functional world is safe. Belief that conflicts with it is dangerous or silly depending on the consequences of the conflict.
As much as we pretend to be governed by nothing or God, again depending on perspective, it is pure functionality which reigns in contemporary America. The autopsy of the most recently dead child will determine whether the parents are murderers or just foolish believers. It is the application of science which will determine what truly happened, and whether the parents are guilty of something.
We respect people's right to believe in God however they choose up until that belief conflicts with something functional, like applied biology, medicine. Beneath the functionality of the medical field lies the theoretical chaos of Science made into something objective by institutions and by the performative value of its application.
This is the Simulacrum of Objectivity at work. Traditional faith has nothing to do with functionality or the empiricism that it descends from. The validity of the parents' belief cannot be determined from any position of knowledge available to living human beings. Their right to make decisions based on their faith is limited by the functional consequences of their actions, and to compromise one's faith for such reasons is to deny it. This case says it is illegal to be a true believer.
True faith in a traditional religious sense is illegal because only faith in objectivity can allow for a unified and functioning world. Thankfully, objectivity provides its own miracles (from the heart transplant to the iPad) to make this neo-faith easier to accept as it is far less comforting than its traditional antecedent.
The Schaible's have now lost two children who might have lived had the children received medical care. Instead, they received prayer. After the death of their first child the parents were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and they were put on probation for a decade.
The death of an infant child is not an appropriate topic to make sport of, and I do not intend to ignore the intensity of the tragedy, but the more abstract forces at play in this situation ought not be ignored.
I value freedom, and if either parent chose prayer for himself or herself over "proper" medical care, I could respect that decision. There is an ethical argument to be made which suggests that as an infant is unable to choose medical treatment over prayer, the parents are obliged to make the correct decision in the child's place. The jury's having found the family guilty for making this decision once suggests that prayer alone is an incorrect, an illegal, way to deal with health problems.
The proof for this choice being incorrect is, of course, that the child died. The value of prayer is determined by its observable functionality. Had prayer "worked," the case would never have been brought before a court. Had the parents taken the child to a medical professional, and the child had still died (assuming no negligence or malpractice), then this would simply be a blameless tragedy or an act of God depending on one's perspective.
The court's decision that prayer alone makes one an unfit parent is a judgment against prayer that places a limitation on freedom of religion. I do not, personally, believe in the value of prayer as a means of healing. I would not make the choices these parents made, but this case exposes the limitations on freedom that are in place and those limitations suggest the touch of the Simulacrum of Objectivity on the American legal system just as the position of the fundamentalist Church to which the parents' belong is a reaction to it.
Cultural Relativism is the buzzword which represents the coping mechanism our culture has developed to deal with the ethical consequences of globalization and the challenges technology poses for traditional religious world views. Clogs are cute. Female genital mutilation is evil. The whole notion of accepting difference is false. It is not accepted. There is little genuine plurality of values. Pain, suffering, and death mark the boundaries of our acceptance of difference. Be different so long as no one gets hurt. Believe as you wish, so long as your beliefs threaten nothing.
Believe in God or don't. Just take your sufficiently sick kids to the hospital. This is, of course, not true belief. These parents' actions were the actions of true believers, and the court's response amounts to an outlawing of that kind of belief. Belief that does not conflict with the observable, measurable, functional world is safe. Belief that conflicts with it is dangerous or silly depending on the consequences of the conflict.
As much as we pretend to be governed by nothing or God, again depending on perspective, it is pure functionality which reigns in contemporary America. The autopsy of the most recently dead child will determine whether the parents are murderers or just foolish believers. It is the application of science which will determine what truly happened, and whether the parents are guilty of something.
We respect people's right to believe in God however they choose up until that belief conflicts with something functional, like applied biology, medicine. Beneath the functionality of the medical field lies the theoretical chaos of Science made into something objective by institutions and by the performative value of its application.
This is the Simulacrum of Objectivity at work. Traditional faith has nothing to do with functionality or the empiricism that it descends from. The validity of the parents' belief cannot be determined from any position of knowledge available to living human beings. Their right to make decisions based on their faith is limited by the functional consequences of their actions, and to compromise one's faith for such reasons is to deny it. This case says it is illegal to be a true believer.
True faith in a traditional religious sense is illegal because only faith in objectivity can allow for a unified and functioning world. Thankfully, objectivity provides its own miracles (from the heart transplant to the iPad) to make this neo-faith easier to accept as it is far less comforting than its traditional antecedent.
May 24, 2013
May 22, 2013
Introduction to The Simulacrum of Objectivity
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1
A survey of the work of Jean Baudrillard results in an inevitable sense that the world is facing a catastrophe. His work suggests this problem lies with reality itself. If he is not wrong, where is this catastrophe? One answer is that it is a silent disaster which Baudrillard's words have failed to draw attention to. This answer is easily refuted. Baudrillard's cry was picked up by the Wachkowski siblings in the 1999 film, The Matrix, and that film's impact has spread through popular culture to the point where bullet-time is now a visual cliche.
However well or badly the film represents Baudrillard's work, the pill scene from the first installment in the trilogy nicely illustrates the way reality is always in question in a contemporary world which has sped along spiraling further and further from the real gaining speed by feeding on the consequences of the catastrophe. These consequences have been muffled and translated and reordered through the emergence of the Simulacrum of Objectivity.
Reality remains in question, but the ways in which it may be questioned are limited, and these limitations suggest the shape of the Simulacrum of Objectivity. If one replaces "the matrix" with "a catastrophe for reality" during Neo and Morpheus' dialogue, the Pill Scene demonstrates the limitations of questioning reality in the contemporary world.
Firstly, the protagonist, Neo, must desperately search for one to ask this question, and the person he finds to answer it is a criminal, Morpheus. Morpheus is the most-wanted criminal of the institutional authorities. The importance of this is not that questioning reality is a criminal act, but rather that there is no legitimate authority for one to turn with questions of reality without compromising one's position as an upstanding citizen.
Secondly, Morpheus offers Neo a choice. He may accept that there is a catastrophe or he may deny it. When asking questions of reality, the answers are always structured as a binary. Things are either real or they are not. The binary structure of the response to questioning reality limits the range of the consequences of the act of questioning. It places the question within safe bounds. Binary answers are calculable, measurable, performative.
Thirdly, Neo must make his decision by taking a pill. Anti-psychotics alone bring in 14.6 billion dollars a year. The only legitimate institution which deals with those who question reality actively profits by medicating those with questions into answering the questions correctly.
Reality can be questioned but not in a way that threatens anyone or anything. The catastrophe that Baudrillard's work points to has become the absence against which the Simulacrum of Objectivity defines itself.
Functionality is for the Simulacrum of Objectivity what Faith was for God. Functionality meets man's needs for evidence of things not seen by replacing the unseen with an objective universe in which everything is either observable or unreal. While functionality meets man's need for explanation in the way that faith used to, it fails to address human emotional needs in the way that faith does. This failure manifests in the contemporary state of religion, Dawkins-esque atheism, and certain kinds of mental illness.
Religion persists because functionality cannot fully replace faith. It is not the substance of things hoped for, and yet it more than meets the need for evidence of things not seen by removing from the category of "real" things anything which is not potentially measurable. This category of "real" things is guaranteed by the Simulacrum of Objectivity which displaces God by exerting His comforting authority without all the bother of a beard to be tugged or mocked.
In precisely the ways that theologians seed believers with miracles and harvest faith, technology fills users with the certainty of its functionality which seems to be evidence of an objective guarantor, but is after a close analysis proof of nothing but functionality itself.
The Simulacrum of Objectivity can best be understood through an analysis of the photograph. Every photographic image is always also a simulacrum of objectivity. After developing the Simulacrum of Objectivity with the photograph, the Simulacrum of Objectivity's role in the American Education and Mental Health Systems will be explored.
I. The Simulacrum of Objectivity
A. Simulacrum Defined
B. Simulacrum and Reality
C. The Photographic Image as a Simulacrum of Objectivity
D. A Photograph Analysed as a simulacrum of objectivity
II. Objectivity and Education
A. Learning as a Human Endeavor
1. Deleuze and Freire on Learning
B. Education as Learning Made Objective
2. Description of the Leaning Focused Approach
C. The Simulacrum of Objectivity in Teaching Writing
3. Writing Practices - The Rubric as an instance of the Simulacrum of Objectivity
III. Objectivity and Madness
A. The Clinic as a Producer of Mental Illness
B. Clinical Practices as Instances of the Simulacrum of Objectivity
May 20, 2013
The Novel is Done
A draft is complete. It's been sent to someone for editing/artwork.
I wrote a number of short stories to help me flesh out the novel. If anyone's interested in a printed compilation of those stories as well as the novella, send me an email. I'll put something together on Amazon.
I wrote a number of short stories to help me flesh out the novel. If anyone's interested in a printed compilation of those stories as well as the novella, send me an email. I'll put something together on Amazon.
