Annihilation of "being" through reason

I'm getting deeper into my prepatory background reading on Theodor Adorno's body of thought. I just finished reading the first of five chapters in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book he co-wrote with Max Horkheimer. I've filled a dozen index cards with quotes and notations and I'm puzzling over the contempt he seems to hold for Enlightenment thought and approach, considering his own marked snobbery in The Culture Industry.

The quantification of nature through science and its major handmaiden, mathematics, have led to a need for individuals to understand their selves in reasonable and quantifiable terms, they argue. Certainly I see this tendency openly in all kinds of sociological research. The self-conscious apologetic striving for sociology to become a "science" has led to the preference in the field for quantitative over qualitative research. Numbers are more important than stories. As A&H point out, stories make up myth and myth is suspect because it is seen as uncontainable, as something that transgresses boundaries and blurs categories.

But what really struck me today in my reading is the way in which he and Horkheimer clearly point out the role rationalism (as entrenched in positivist determination) has had on being. Here I see their clearly outlined argument for how positivism, mathematics and the death of myth have led to the commoditization of humans and their transformation from beings to things. This transformation has also contributed to individuals' increased feelings of powerlessness and inability to control self, in a rational way, as dictated by modern collectivities. Reason and action are put paramount in power, over feeling and even over thought, they argue.

As I worked to extend this train of thinking out to digital space, I started to see ways in which digital self-presentation is the ultimate extension of this rationalization of being. Online self-presentation is inherently and absolutely rationalized. It is a conscious choosing of ways to self- present, stripped of the possibly defining clues that Goffman speaks of as being ways we can inadvertently discredit ourselves. It is absolutely reasoned, yet more deliberately presented than in non-digital social space. The digital world is made of words. Even those areas where one can self-present using the physicality stand-ins of avatars is still rationalized and commoditized. And the opaqueness of the digital world, the way its inner workings and happenings are seen as inscrutably opaque to the average netizen, this leads to another paradox of feeling empowered while being disempowered. The empowerment feeling comes from the apparent ability to freely choose one's self-presentation. But at the same time, given how little control or understanding of the environment one has in digital space (more so even than in traditional non-digitized space, I'd argue). There is an increased sense of powerlessness and impotence.

I find much of A&H's argument compelling, gloomy that it is. When they say, "human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless", it seems to express this paradox. It seems to express an idea of annihilation of the power to be through the pre-eminence of the need to reason.

I'm not sure where I should go with this initial train of thought, though, as it applies in digital space.

Emotions influence physicality

According to work done in the labs at Queens, our overall emotional and intellectual state influences the way we hold ourselves and the way we walk. Researchers at the Biomotion Lab there have taken this seeming truism to the next level, by mapping out the walking gait of various individuals in various internal states.

They provide many demonstrations of how their work in cognitive psychology and kinetics influences the physical stance and motion of individuals. One that I like: an online modeling program where you can manipulate and test for yourself what happens to a person's body language as they feel stressed or relaxed, happy or sad.

I am paying attention to this type of thing these days, as I attempt to figure out how to create a research method that would allow me to map people's digitized physical cues (e.g. emoticons, avatar expressions, etc. ) to their unwired corporeal expressivity, as shown in their body language. I'm hoping to present a paper on this at the upcoming Trials & Tribulations symposium of digital research methods, co-managed by Kelly.

Bachelor of Arts

I'm still in shock. I'm sitting here staring down at my piece of parchment paper declaring that I'm a graduate of Concordia University, Arts and Sciences, Major in Sociology. I graduated "With Great Distinction", which is the same as "Summa Cum Laude", or straight A average.

So many years of dreaming of this day, of wanting it, of working towards it, sacrificing social life, material needs, free time. So much reading and thinking, researching and writing.

... and now here it is. In my hands. The day. The paper. The achievement.

Wow.