How to give concrete form to such a vague and ambiguous word as 'politics'? One way, is by reifying the social web. This is not an abstract entity, but a very concrete web of interests, interaction, directedness, etc. As such, it is very much like our ordinary road and transportation infrastructure. This is its form; its manifestation is the flow of politics, shared habitus, etc., just as infrastructure manifests the flow of good, people, and shared / connecting spaces, culture, etc.

As such, this web being a collective phenomenon, as well as free of being owned by any individual or group of individuals; it is expected to follow the tragedy of the commons. The only solution is provided if it happens to organize itself into a collective self-referential entity. In any disrespected political form of state, be it dictatorship, oligarchy, etc, one can point out the unfulfillment of this ideal arrangement. Collective self-referentiality is not unknown to us: it is life, it is being an organism. And it is true: a dictatorship is not an organism; rather, it is an internally disconnected environment, or space, wherein which a (dictatorial) organism has proliferated and feeds off of the rest of the environment.

---

Key questions:

• How is self-referentiality possible (the 'self' is an abstraction -- how is an abstraction referenced?)
  --> Maybe it can be turned around as well: possibly this state of 'being such an organism', in a structural sense, whatever it may encompass, can be taken as a definition of self-referentiality.

• To which degree can this 'organism-ness' indeed be taken to be a distinguishing feature of sociopolitical patterns (with their accepted status of value), and does it indeed cover the dynamics on would want to see? (I imagine not, there will be some key nuances.)

I myself feel as if I, from my youth and through my father--who is a scientist--, have taken my ungraspable starting point to be that of truth. That is to say, truth was the concept which presented itself most clearly and .. to me, and which I subsequently took to be the main value for all my thoughts and investigations. Because of this, I became stuck in logical paradox quite early on, finding myself trapped in all kinds of situations such as choosing between two hypothetically mutually exclusive belief systems, or logical regressions, etc, etc. My point of departure, as well as inescapable conceptual framework, was truth, logic, skepticism, and hypotheticalization.

The view that my "truth" is a value, of which there are many others, and from which one may, and people do, choose freely; is a view that indicates a different point of departure. It is one that scholars take, conventionally, and may in fact be the main distiguishing feature in fundamental belief systems between current scholars and current scientists.

Of course, a simple way to put this is that these two take different axioms in a, for the remaining part, similar system of thought. And this is definitely instructive, but one must not overlook the fact that there is a key difference between an "axiom" -- which refers to the fact that one "chooses" it, as in a game, and most notably with a certain impartial stance -- and a "basic belief" or "value"; even if for nothing else than the paradoxical reason that the impartial stance applied when choosing an axiom rests on the basic belief that this is a justified method of operation, i.e. the basic belief is just an axiom, but the first is the actual thing, and the second is it's hypotheticalization (and in fact only in a very specific belief system, where logic (despite it's extremely specific and ununderstood character) is acknowledged to have it's particular fundamental or instructive value).

The gap between what is actually the case, and our concept of it, will necessarily always remain, and remain quite large.

For me at least, mathematics and the study of logic has provided conceptual tools to grasp this situation. For one, the "axiom" as a conceptualization of this point of departure. But also a characterization and realization of the paradoxes I felt as a child; and more importantly, a feeling for the circumstances under which these hold (these being: a certain character of discreteness and linearity, and a certain pervasive assymetry, through which complex structure arises, though always reducible to, or established by, the former). For me, the key philosophical insights often flow from the framework of complexity, (in)definability, etc. Establishing in this view is my contact and discussion with Wolfgang -- though I cannot at all claim to exactly understand his approach -- at the heart of which is, in my take of it, the idea that mathematical indefinability is related to the inescapability of value, e.g. love and truth (particularly the former relies on a recursion in human connection, by nature connected, yet divided, thus only through communication). ...

• Format: [drawing & description]+

• Descriptive set theory, complexity, etc..

[ AN EXPRESSION ]

Amidst the multitudes of understandings of the world, the possible intentions and interpretations of any act of language, or object conceived of for that matter, there is something very special to that, although forever indefinable, receiving aspect of an act of expression which renders it known, understood, or maybe just seen, by one individual, and even more so if by more. It is a positive informational polarity, a definitiveness. Although one may wonder whether a particular conception is justified, correct, etc. - what would almost be forgotten is the paramount quality of it being conceived of in definite form in the first place.
In political speech, one is sometimes told not only to listen to what is said, but rather what is not. This is what I'm talking of. A speech act is so incredibly definite, that (human intentions etc aside) it carries not only its informational content, but the very fact that it was chosen out of a vast set of alternative possibilities. This is its polarity.
The reason I speak of it as having a polarity, it the very fact that -- although mathematically speaking one might be inclined to think that the same could be said by saying "not" and its inverse, that is, all things not said -- there is no way in which we would ever be able to conprehend such an inverse. In fact, there is no indication at all as of yet that we would even be able to grasp the nature of such an inverse, and all attempts to would seem to lead to paradoxes of a known kind. For if we would have an understanding of the nature of such an inverse, then the questions begs itself what the inverse of this understanding would be, etc... leading to our current unfulfilling mathematical understanding of (in)definability, infinite regression, etc.
In short, I owe it to my understanding of (the current state of affairs in) logic that I assign a special value to the character of expression.
As I understand it, this state of affairs exemplifies that the primary concern in philosophy is not with truth, but with understanding, being, or being related to, exactly this nature of expression: having a positive polarity amidst all unknown/unconceived-ofs.

[ SOCIAL LIFE IS IMMANENT ]

...

[ POLITICS ]

Foucault talks of the politics of discourse, and I would generalize this. Social life is immanent, and deals with expression, at the heart of which is politics in the way Foucault has spoken of.

[ AESTHETICS -- ETHICS ]

Having a certain aesthetical or ethical value, is a property of an expression, or maybe rather an attiture towards an expression. The distinguishing feature between the two is conceptually smaller than what is something thought: it is just its shared state in society. If idiosyncratic, it is aesthetical, and if commonly held, ethical. If one devalues the "aesthetical" as a stage in life, then this is because one naturally walks the path of learning to assimilate to society, thereby replacing of transforming one's idiosyncratic aesthetical apprehensions for/into commonly held (hence ethical) apprehensions.
...
(dimensions in reasons for commonality: biology, rationality, culture, power, etc.)

[ THE HOLD OF NATURE ]

There seems to be such a thing as a grounded, unchanging, understanding of the world, which is nature. It is what people debate about when they question whether our understanding of mathematics, most notably, or other things, are "universal". This universality, which in terms of the previous, may be nothing more than a stubborn play of power in the immanent political field of expression, is what I'm referring to. For the moment being, it matters not to resolve the (in)definite character of such universal quests, or the matter of our preoccupation with the "universal" -- I merely want to bind my concept of "nature" to this concept of a discourse of expression of which we cannot detach ourselves, no matter what we do. That which lies outside of social constructability. (Who knows, maybe there is no such thing!)

[ LOVE ]

Love is the will to reconcile empathy (by whose path one is led to the social/common life-world) with one's origin -- aesthetics. Hope also has something to do with this, either believing in the possibility of love, or accepting some intermediate form, or something else.

..?

Als ik luister naar een liedje uit mijn jeugd, herleef ik opeens, zij het na wat aandacht, weer het gevoel dat het bij mij teweegbracht. Ik ben jong, zeg 9 of 10, en lig in mijn kamer, in mijn bed, in de Gruttoweide. Mijn bed was van hout, mijn vader had het voor me gemaakt, op school is er gym, wat ik ongemakkelijk vind, en knutselen, wat ik leuk vind en waar ik goed in ben. De muziek die de knutseljuf speelt is jaren something radiomuziek. Maar nu lig ik in mijn bed, en het is avond. En ik luister de muziek niet, zoals ik dat nu gemakszuchtig maar doe (en hoe breng je het anders nog teweeg?), het speelt zich eeuwig af in mijn hoofd, en ik ontwikkel mijn eerste romantische gevoelens. Ik luister niet naar de volledige lyrics, die zal ik ook niet kennen, maar uit fragmenten tekst, en instrumentele fragmenten, neem ik veel waar, en bouw ik een wereld op aan gevoelens.

Mijn god wat waren mijn belevingen en voorstellingen toen toch groot. Mijn verbeeldingsvermogen. So vivid were those images of the plantsoen, the flats around, the nooks and crannies between the hedges. The recurring nightmare of the limousine with the unknown and scary man leaving from one of the garages behind the plantsoen, and the frightening thought of not knowing who and where he is, what his intentions are.

I lie in bed, comtemplating these budding romantic feelings. My first explorations into that notion of love that I have so intensely invigorated and romaticized, and made into an unattainable thing, pivotal in my conception of human connection and vitality.

It makes me feel weird to think about that smaller, younger and less shaped version of myself, lying alone at night, in his bed in that house that is, all considered, quite alien, contemplating love and human connection. All these elements, the way of music, the way of physical objects, the way of family, so immanent and unimaginably non-present. How do we just accept all this? Why do we put up with such an absurdly specific set of things?

• Ik ben niet autistisch.

• Ik ben heel jaloers, en angstig/nerveus.

• Ik heb een slecht geheugen / gebruik het geconditioneerd slecht.

• Dit tezamen met analytisch denken maakt voor de situatie waar ik in zit: ik probeer de wereld te begrijpen, op een analytische manier, maar verlies telkens mijn houvast, en sta erg angstig in dit geheel, waardoor ik mezelf heb geconditioneerd minder na te denken, terwijl het me juist meer stress oplevert.

• Het levert me veel stress op om intellectueel + gevoelsmatig de wereld te integreren, vanwege deze redenen.

Ik vind de wereld inderdaad gewoon een vrij onredelijke plek.

En zoals dat gaat, kan het ouder het kind, aan het eind van de dag, niks anders bieden dan zijn daadwerkelijke leven. Levenslust moet het kind zelf niet zien te verliezen, en een begrip van de wereld zelf maar zien te vinden.

Why the paradigm of object oriented programming is so effective, is because the object is a very potent conceptuality, in being the locus and encapsulation of control, logic, and/or just data.

Why apps have become the main guiding architectural principle of modern user tech? Because this architecture is the (simple) unification of two needs:

• The possibility for a multitude of "entry points", or loci, of things structured. A daily task (browsing, note taking), but also an organizational need (planning driving lessons, ...), or an entity (NS, DUO, ..)
• A flattening structure, that places all things in the same arena.

Think of language in the same manner, in which words are the loci of a variety of things. They do not even form a conceptual whole. A word can stand for an object, or a thought, an emotion, a reified social structure, an organization, a friend, a verb, a logical entity, etc. But they compete, as it were, on equal footing. They are all words, and no conceptual distinction restricts one from stringing them together in new, novel forms, which have the power of changing our conceptions in the first place.

As words, so do objects, and apps, display this power of being the basic units of thought, on which one can project many entirely different kinds of things. Most interestingly indeed, they can hold notions of computation, logic, data, location, etc.

... ?

The most natural principle by which humans reason, is analogy. This is exemplified at all levels of human cognition, and most apparent through linguistic study.

BOIDS !

• Analogy is (alignment+cohesion); but separation ...? Applying rationality? Experimentation? (A variety of less abstractly theoretical mechanisms of social differentiation.)

"The way in which reality naturally proceeds." -- which can be (and is logically) contrasted with the way in which human endeavors and institutions sometimes proceed, but only to a certain level of grounding, as ultimately, the ways in which human actions proceed are also very well understood to be natural in this beforementioned sense. (And science has brought us greats leaps in understanding this phenomenon.)

Seems to me to be a key point, at one and the same moment:

• The only reasonable way by which socially constructed things can flourish, whether by this I mean that (a) it is in the long-run uneffective to design something; (b) it is a more ethical way of proceeding; (c) or that it is actually the only real way in things ever grow. Think: (i) democracy as a greenhouse, or stimulating environment, for natural moral policy-making growth; (ii) music, art and technology since the inception of the internet; (iii) postmodern reflections on urban flourishment; etc.
• The only effective way in which also bad things can, and have, flourished. When I think of unrestrained natural growth, I cannot help but directly think of the ... (capitalism in it's ugly faces, colonialism, effective resource depletion, etc.) ...

Just taking "natural growth" as a value is ridiculous. Where in Habermas' three value spheres would it belong? ...

Why this musing on natural growth? Hasn't it long ago been abandoned by philosophers as a source of ethical insight? Why take an apparent "systems-designing" stance, trying to apply "natural growth" to create a good system instead of appealing to individual human morality/agency?
=> Because I have a low esteem of both individual human agency, as something that is very voratile, very typically naturally distributed (in clear statistical terms), and very susceptible to their surrounding contexts; as well as a low esteem of institutions and other emergent systems, as things that, by their nature, are not guided towards societal or human well-being, in principle, at all. Either one of the two can make up for the other's fallacies, and in fact this is the best case scenario that we depend on in everyday reality, but there is no clear safe-guard as to that this should happen. Hence, I think of these two together mostly in pragmatic terms, and try to understand why and which affordances they have. To have hope, then, is to have the imaginatory power to figure out in which way these affordances can be set in motion in such a way as that it benefits society and humankind, and be able to reason why this should indeed happen, possibly (probably) given neccessary human action to achieve this goal. ...