event mechanics

I was forwarded the below email. I am posting it here with comment below for anyone who was also sent the email and who finds it as abhorrent as I do. I make a simple argument below to indicate its fallacies:

An economics teacher at a local school made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Gillard/Brown socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The teacher then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on the Gillard/Brown plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the teacher told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on)
Remember, there IS a test coming up. The next election.
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

The high school economics teacher who carried out this little experiment should go on some kind of sabbatical to give the teacher time to head back to university and learn some basic political economy. What is wrong with the logic of the email? It equates marks received during education with money. Such an obvious error leads me to believe an actual teacher would never actually carry out such an experiment.
Money is a quantitative measure. The difference between $74 and $75 is only a difference of $1. The difference between a mark of 74 and a mark of 75 is also a difference of one mark, but it is also the difference (at my university, at least) between a distinction grade and a high distinction. Marks are a quantitative measure of a qualitative difference.
Why is this an important distinction to make? You do not take part in education to get marks. You take part in education to get an education. When employed, you work to exchange whatever work you carry out for money; money then allows you to go do things. You do not exchange anything while being educated; the point of education is to be transformed at a basic level from someone without skills or knowledge to someone who has achieved a certain level of competence. Competence is qualitative. There are good and bad students just as there are good and bad teachers.
The worst possible conclusion to draw from the email’s example is that students take part in education so as to ‘accumulate’ marks and not for the explicit purpose of becoming competent. This is actually a common phenomena. Students will try to minimise the amount of effort and work required to learn and expect to achieve the same marks. They follow the exceptionally poor advice and embody the ideology contained in the email. They try to ‘game’ the marking criteria and assessment details so as to ‘accumulate’ marks rather than acquiring competencies. If you have children or friends who are studying at whatever level encourage them to study so as to learn.
People who embody the faulty logic of the email may find it hard to adapt or even imagine some other way of ‘working’ that is not premised on a market model (you work to accumulate some ‘number’ of something, be it marks, money or whatever). Clearly, they have not thought too hard about the various other non-market based economies that operate in most developed countries. Here are a few:
1. Children. How do you measure the ‘success’ of your offspring? In terms of how many you have? Maybe that is good in non-industrial or non-developed agrarian or nomadic societies. In developed countries we invest a huge amount of resources into our children. What sort of return do we get? We hope children will have a high quality of life. One’s quality of life can be represented in quantitative ways, but like educational assessments, the number represents a quality.
2. Education. I don’t mean for students, I mean for the teachers. People don’t become teachers because of some quantitative measure of success. They believe that they can make a difference in the lives of their students, help their students (and others) live better lives. If the local high school teacher did believe what was contained in the above email, then why are they working as a teacher? Surely they would work where they would maximise the economic return for their work?
This leads me to my overall point. Most of our activity as human beings is not carried out to get a quantitative reward. The love of parents or the care and consideration of teachers is more important to the future of Australia. That is why I find the email so offensive. It was written by someone with an axe to grind, but has clearly never thought about the purpose of education.
I won’t even bother engaging with the explicit political point of the email regarding the redistribution of ‘marks’ as if they were a form of money. The abject stupidity of the analogy makes me sad.

Some photos from my first excursion around my old neighbourhood. I was feeling a bit diown being back in Perth. I basically didn’t want to be here and was feeling home sick for Sydney. A friend suggested I walk around to the various places that were important for my childhood. She was in Melbourne with her best friend and she was doing something similar.

There has been something slightly cathartic in touring these old sites and seeing all but traces of my own childhood. It at least kept my mind off thinking about missing my Sydney life for a while.

With my current regime of ultra-disciplined eating and daily exercise on a perfect day where I only eat what I am meant to and exercise on the bike for 35min I am actually burning up over 2000cal a day. I am sure this isn’t healthy. It means I am losing approximately over 300g of energy per day.

I don’t always do the perfect day however as this would be a shit life. Going out to dinner once or twice a week and a few nights on the booze balances it out. I am choosing my meals carefully to make sure they are healthy and contain very few calories. Plus I mix up my exercise and do sometimes more and sometimes less than 35min on bike (most of the time it is only 20min if I do less, then a walk). It will be interesting to see if it is accurate however, because it means that even including these ‘normal’ meals and a few nights on the booze with the odd slip up I am losing over 1kg a week.

If I was super-ultra-disciplined it would mean I would be losing over 2kg a week, but the regularity and relatively boring diet would drive me (more) insane.

Just so you don’t think I am starving myself, this is my diet and energy consumption and burning/exercise according to my iKeepFit iPhone app that has a database of all foods (and allows me to input ffod and beverages like corn wraps and Mother energy drink).

8x cups of black coffee 8kcals
mother energy drink 208kcals
Celery 6x stalks 62cals
Apples large raw 116cals
tuna in lite oil x2 466kcals
corn, raw, small 62kcals
spinach raw 2x cups 14kcals
corn wraps x6 389kcals

Total consumption 1325kcals

Base metabolic rate -2521kcals
Activity level desk job -504kcals
Exercise -429kcals

Net kilocalories -2129kcals
Weight/gained lost -304g

This is per day remember.

With five weeks to go before the wedding at which I am doing one of the readings, I reckon I might aim to meet my next weight goal of 115kg.

Above meals consist of an apple for breakfast, celery and tuna for lunch, corn stalk for arvo tea, corn wraps, spinach and tuna for the evening meal. The celery and the wraps fill me up and give me a satisfied feeling of having eaten so I don’t feel like eating any sugary or fatty foods. The celery in particular is magic at this. It contains bugger all calories and would almost use up more energy digesting it than in what it contains. There is hardly any sugar in my diet except for the apple and the Mother energy drink. There is basically no fat except in the minuscule amounts in the low-fat oil used in the tuna.

I enjoy being disciplined again. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The title of this post from a poem I am working on. For me it expresses the way we form relations with the world around us both in terms of intimacy and estrangement. What follows is an improvised meditation on the way I am trying to grapple with a feeling of loneliness and relations of different intimacies and estrangements with the world, through Deleuze’s concept of the ‘fold’.
One of the most useful concepts in the complete Deleuzian armoury is the post-Kantian conception of the fold. The two main ways the concept has been understood is to think the fold as one way to grapple with the complexity of the event and the second is to rethink subjectivity as an extension of the cosmos. To combine them: We are each an event; that is, a fold of the cosmos that ‘develops’ (‘develop’ in the sense of an old analogue photograph would develop) complex intimacies and estrangements with the world as the lived duration of our existence. In different ways, we welcome and refuse, back and forth, over and over, various elements from our existential ecology on various levels that begin with the pre-personal all the way through to the most arcane and perverse fantasy.
A fold is not just a spatial gathering, each fold has a temporality. This is where it gets crazily complex. Derrida’s concept of hauntology captures some sense of the way we relate with folds that have endured long before we ever came into proximity to them. They have an existence that haunts the present with the duration of what has already been. Similarly the Derridean notion of the ‘to-come’ captures some sense of the way we sometimes come into proximity with events that have started happening but have not yet ‘developed’ into such a form that is definite. There is a sublime power of hope in the gap between the eventual and the event. The complexity arises once you realise that the temporality of events follows no discernable pre-established order, and certainly not some echo of socialised modernist, familial or ‘adult’ temporalities. The future of one event is already situated in the past of another of a different temporal scale and rhythm. Then you introduce the power of imagination motivated by the sublime hope of the eventual to embrace or discard various potentialities between events, and the distinctly human capacity to intuitively apprehend the patterns of potential and turn them into possibility…
Tonight I am thinking about the fold in terms of intimacy and estrangement, because as I have been writing a book review with all my tools of scholarly practice, my music, my apartment and my cigarettes to keep me company, I couldn’t help but feel the gnawing sense of loneliness encroach upon what is my relatively solitary existence. Solitariness has been discussed by various commentators as the withdrawal of communal efficacy in the day to day lives of most people; this has never much concerned me, community in and of itself is pleasant but often feels like a distraction. Instead of a simple dialectic of public-shared and private-restricted as being able to define the relation between solitariness and loneliness I have realised that I am very good at managing various configurations of intimacy and estrangment with the world around me. Recently there have been some disruptions to this, and I am trying to figure out what the implications are, of how much of the flow I should be going with.
For example, many of my friends and colleagues have noted that I share a lot about my life either on this blog, or my Facebook account, or now on Twitter. Some even imply that I overshare. But my sharing is a performative feint. What I share is view on some events of my life — what Deleuze in his book on Foucault would call the production of a visibility. (Very simplisitically, oversharing then is a kind of overexposure.) The composition of my sharing produces a kind of matrix of intimacy and estrangement in relation to and from me. On an affective level, I work to implicate readers in the event of my to-ings and fro-ings. I have often experimented, especially on Facebook, with different types of status update. All this may seem a little bit demented, even sociopathic, and maybe it is, but it developed almost as an accident of always being both remaindered as ‘other’ but included as ‘us’ at the same time. Lived experience is very different however, because it is not merely reportage on events, but the real engagement with future compositions of intimacy and estrangement with as-yet indiscernible folds of the world.
Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ‘slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

My current reading material leads me to believe that most of academic philosophy is careerist shit. There are a few worthy exceptions to this wide-ranging criticism, but not many. The mistake that all these authors make is that they assume their readers are in the same position as them.

So instead of simply getting onto my blog and having a whinge about it I decided a while ago to take other steps. One of the two books I am working on was meant to be a book of applied philosophy with the working title of ‘Event Mechanics’. However, instead of me writing the book on my own I want to write it with other critically-minded young-ish intellectual types. So I am recruiting co-authors for each of the chapters. After dinner with a friend on Thursday who has undergone a transformation from someone who was not really happy about the world to someone who has embraced this uneasy dimension and has reconstructed her life around this affirmation of uneasiness, I realised that there are others in the world like me and any sort of book on the subject should be a collective work that includes others. I don’t know if this will work or not! Could end in tears! So be it! Anyway, I have called this group of people the Uneasy.

So far I should have co-authors for one chapter and I am after more. Here is a list of chapter ideas from my original book with a brief description of what I imagined each of the chapters was going to be about. All of them already have content largely derived from my blog posts on the respective subjects, so long time readers will probably be familiar with the basic themes and ideas. I am open to modifying the chapters to better work with the co-author’s perspective and ideas, and certainly encourage anyone interested .

Let’s Get Down and Dirty
The introductory chapter that outlines what is forthcoming in the rest of the book and the rationale behind a book of applied philosophy.

1) War on Stupidity — need co-author(s), would love someone who works in government
This chapter is fun The conservatives have their wars on everything, so why not have a progressive war? Stupidity is defined in terms of the structural constraints that transform very intelligent people into infantalised idiots. Case study here was going to be economics and governance. The chapter answers the question of how smart people do incredibly stupid shit on a grand scale.

2) Pedagogy as Practice –- should have co-authors for this already (my medical doctor friends!)
Current management practice has two focuses. 1) Extracting surplus value from workers by inciting workers to be enthusiastic about their jobs. This has a number of ramifications including the disolution of work time from other times and meaningless competition. 2) A punitive appreciation of error. Thinking of error as bad is stupid (see above). From a management perspective error should be a resource for improvement. The case study here is medical error. Gross negligence should be dealt with, but error is part of a learning process that should lead to better ‘outcomes’.

3) Uncolonise the Future — need co-author(s), someone from marketing would be fantastic
Our respective futures are colonised in two ways. Debt has long been a focus of critical philosophers and on a large scale debt is the model by which we suffer from a compulsion for a certain future. On a much smaller scale our attention is colonised by external expectations. We look because we expect to see. These expectations are acquired and are best understood as a form of affective programming produced by selling us a ‘world’ within which we desire to inhabit. There are two philosophical tools to be learnt here: How to slow down our perception to see and experience the world anew and how to depotentialise the false excitement of capitalist imperatives.

4) Fight for the Write — need co-author(s), not sure who would be best here
Language is a vehicle of oppression when used in the service of stupidity. How to free language and reclaim it. Kind of self-explanatory.

5) Romance as Truce — need co-author(s), maybe I should write this with an ex. That would be epic lols.
I have already written about this extensively (unsurprisingly, considering my abject failures!!). Fuck true love. Love is certainly a durable connection whereby individuals reconcile their individual perspectives of the world in which they live. For the Uneasy it is about becoming Uneasy together and facing the world, including the ‘world’ of each respective partner. Although I am a hetero kind of guy, I have been in too many weird relationship scenarios to restrict this to the classical hetronormative coupling.

6) Generations of Care — need co-authors, maybe I should write this with my parents? Not sure.
How to engage with older generations when they seem to own everything, be in all the positions of power, and have lived lives when aspirations were relatively innocent. This chapter is about the ethics of being worthy of the aging population.