edenism

Here is the “pop band of the future” (Purity Ring) making the pop music of the past (80's-tinged pop). Music of the past not only because of the retro-influences, but because the 80's revival of the 2010s is already passé, years after Emotion (2015) and Haken's Affinity (2016). And Purity Ring doubles down on the risky play: if Womb is set apart from these albums stylistically, that is because it is not concerned with the music of the 80's but with the cinematics. Often sounding like a movie soundtrack with lyrics like “riding your bicycle into the night”, Womb is more a spiritual successor to Stranger Things than to 1989.

Gone are the sparkling anthems of Another Eternity, replaced by pulsating, subdued, introspective dances. Tracks like Femia feel like the loneliness of tripping at a party, pressed among masses of bodies. With every insight, birth, and growth, comes a death and a loss, and this celebration/mourning is where Womb lingers; always pausing on the threshold. The effect is similar to Carly Rae Jepsen's Chekhovian vignettes, but turned much further inward and toward abstraction. If 80's revivalism is witnessed by musical Mary Magdalenes, then Womb follows Judas at the moment of betrayal. Always “a storm is coming. I can feel it in my scars,” but the moment of metempsychosis never comes.

(And this is true of the album itself: rather than being a vessel for the spirit of the 80's (maybe Songs from the Big Chair), Womb is content with letting the spirit haunt the grounds, like the chapter “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse.)

At every moment Womb is understated, always circling around the object of mourning, but never fully erupting into jouissance, so on a track-by-track basis the album may not be impressive, but as a whole there is a coherence and grandeur that shows an ambition far beyond Purity Ring's previous works.

Calisthenic strength sports, whether gymnastics, “street workouts,” or minimalistic training, are known for producing disproportionally aesthetic physiques. That is to say that a 160lb calisthenics athlete is very likely to have a better look than another athlete of the same size and bodyfat. At least, that is its reputation. Gymnasts, Youtube celebrities, and calisthenics popularizers are all commonly pointed to as evidence of this.

There are a couple of explanations I've seen repeated on the internet: 1. Calisthenics athletes are leaner because they have to work with their own bodyweight, and the population at large sees this “shredded” physique as more aesthetic. 2. Calisthenics athletes ignore their legs, and this allows them to achieve more with their upper body at a given weight.

Neither of these explanations addresses what I think is the most interesting part of whole debacle: calisthenics is very good at producing aesthetic physiques purely as a byproduct. The fact that there even is an argument over whether achieving calisthenics athletes have comparable or even better physiques than gym-goers is shocking, since the latter population is specifically trying to improve their physique. This all should indicate to us that in some way improving at calisthenics skills does mimic good bodybuilding practice, although it may be far from optimal, and even a local maximum.

In addition to this point, there are other reasons to dismiss the arguments above: 1. Calisthenics athletes are leaner than other strength athletes, but I don't think this is the whole explanation. Calisthenics athletes tend to look good for their size and bodyfat. Maybe not everyone agrees with this (it's certainly very subjective). 2. For every calisthenics athlete with chicken legs, there is a gym bro with chicken legs, and we both know which one looks better. Also, the idea that the upper body can be developed even further when the lower body is ignore isn't that clear. Men's physique athletes may be wearing board shorts to cover up their small legs, but this doesn't mean that they have hulking upper bodies that blow their bodybuilder peers' out of the water. In fact, if this logic holds, we would expect to not see bodybuilders switch to men's physique.

I think most people would agree that the real reason that calisthenics athletes' physiques are appealing is that they are (in the upper body at least) balanced. This is why, at a given weight and bodyfat, their physique tends to look better than you would expect. But how do they achieve a balanced physique by accident?

Skinning the Cat

Traditionally, strength movements are classified as either compound or isolation. Compound movements hit multiple muscles (giving a good “bang for your buck”) while isolation movements hit a specific muscle. While bodybuilding is famous for its isolation movements, and strength sports are famous for their compound movements, the reality is a little more subtle.

For strength athletes, compound movements are the bread and butter of training, because they allow for training heavy movements, coordinating multiple muscles, etc. Strength athletes also care about hypertrophy, and compound movements give a great return on investment by hitting many muscles.

Compound movements only go so far though. Imagine you take a beginner and only have them do the bench press. Eventually they will max out so that not even more volume will progress them. Now unless they've hit their genetic limit (they haven't), we have to find another way to progress. This is pretty easy. A compound movement like the bench press is a chain of small movements incorporating different muscles in different proportions. When your trainee fails to hit a new maximum, it is because a specific link in that chain is breaking. So let's say that your trainee can bench 140lb but is failing with 145lb, and no amount of practicing the bench press is fixing that. Now let's say they are failing at the top of the lift. The conclusion we can draw is that no amount of benching 140 is making them strong enough at the top of the lift to do 145.

What conclusion can we draw? The reality is probably something like this: the bench press is fatiguing both the chest and the triceps, but the triceps are no longer being hit enough during bench press to continue to grow. If you try to add more bench press, then your trainee will eventually accumulate too much total fatigue before getting sufficient triceps stimulus.

As an extreme example, imaging doing pullups to grow your biceps; you will be very, very fatigued before you get much stimulus. It may work for a month, but you will not be able to overload your biceps this way for a year because the total fatigue will be too high as you increase volume. And even worse, your lats will be the failing point, which means your biceps training will be limited by when your lats give up. We have the same situation in the previous example; the chest is limiting the triceps training.

So what is our solution? Give the trainee isolation exercises for the triceps to continue to grow them so that they can bench 145.

It is well known that muscles grow much more when they are close to fatigue than when they are far from fatigue. This gives us the golden rule of compound exercises; if you do a compound exercise for long enough, one muscle will grow from it much more than the others.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have bodybuilders, who use a large number of isolation exercises. While there are a few reasons for this, the biggest one is that developing a balanced physique requires hitting the muscles of the upper body from different angles.

For example, the triceps has three heads and is involved, albeit in slightly different ways, in virtually any compound upper body movement. Even pullups involve the triceps. From this we can gather that developing the triceps will require hitting it from multiple angles.

But if this is what is required for a balanced upper body, how do calisthenics athletes achieve it, seemingly by accident, while doing virtually no isolation movements?

The secret is that calisthenics athletes perform hyper-compound movements, and many of them. In order to perform an iron cross, front lever raise, handstand pushup, skin-the-cat, etc., a calisthenics athlete needs to develop strength through nearly the entire range of motion of the shoulder, both for pushing and pulling. This means that, as a consequence, they hit huge swaths of upper body musculature, although most of it is hit submaximally.

The result is that calisthenics have stumbled upon an easy rule of thumb for developing a balanced upper body: become strong in every articulation of the shoulder.

Now to be clear, I don't think that becoming a calisthenics athlete is anywhere near an optimal way to develop a balanced physique. But there is a lesson to be learned in the way they succeed unintentionally at what so many others fail at despite their great effort.

So how would a physique athlete use this information? One way might be to use hyper-compound movements such as front lever raises to identify weaknesses in the upper body, rather than relying on visual judgement alone. Another way might be to use hyper-compound movements in the same way that they currently use compound movements; as a good-bang-for-your-buck way to hit a lot of muscles from a large range of motion before moving to isolation exercises as a means of overloading the muscles.

Current approaches fall roughly into two categories: limit the volume of compound movements in order to allow for a larger set of isolation movements performed from different angles; or, perform more compound movements, and switch out the isolation movements for variants every mesocycle. We could possibly improve upon these by instead performing a larger volume of hyper-compound movements in lieu of traditional compound movements and then overloading each muscle with a single isolation movement. Then we can rotate out the isolation movements every mesocycle.

This approach might be especially useful for the average gym-goer. Their dilemma is something like this; either strive for a balanced physique now at the expense of total mass, or build as much mass as possible now and sculpt it later. By hitting upper body musculature through a wide range of shoulder articulations, we can almost guarantee that anything severely underdeveloped will be brought up.

I will start using this approach, so I will probably post more about the nitty gritty details of programming with it.

Hallowed flesh of the copper tomb, burned of all its earthly wires: saraband of silicon vapor.

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fallacantastopian faedream: pileious repositioning somaticortical conditioning

mossy palm upturned purple iodine lips vertebrae a schizo-phreno-formalda-fantasia

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in Her Sinfinite Blissdom's seersucker carriage: rotten is the wood and wooden are the wheels, zephyr of night lays its finger on satin and rosemary for this is the minute 22:02 of burning invocation, metemerosis, and the everending passion of the superblime, when

every flower is a wheel and every wheel a carriage. For this, the hour circumcised, the pious man belabors.

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Leave your blue boots in the corner. Jaundiced moon, watch Autumn's shades while we dip and gallowbirds ask where we have gone while we dip and when the lake freezes won't find us here behind the trees but your blue boots and will know to remember you.

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Knifepoint in elbow: Principle of pith: The only command minted in copper breath:

Shudderandfall of fruit for juniper palates.

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If ever I'll seek But if I'm after after out starlight I'm searching maple your embrace, on a lake, for your soul, leaves of gold.

Across disciplines, the 21st century has brought a gust of optimism. This is meant in the sense of the term “poptimism”: apologia for that which is sincere, quaint, traditional, naive, and easy-to-disparage. Philosophy is among those disciplines invigorated by this spirit, with the very structure of the term “Speculative Realism” revealing the this spirit's coy, subtly dangerous attitude. What I owe to this spirit I redouble here: double the naivete, double the stakes. Besides that, the primary creditor of this work's spirit is Alain Badiou, for the refreshing clarity, insight, and restraint of his Second Manifesto for Philosophy.

Ontology

The revival of ontology has not rid the tradition of a bias towards the atemporal – Being comes before Event. If I am to uncover a path forward, I would like to do it in the opposite way such that the dynamic qualities of an object have primacy. This allows us to answer questions about the structure of reality necessary for describing Being-There (Dasein), by a simple trick: reality must have exactly enough structure to allow for the dynamics of that which is within it.

From this we can derive an axiom of local evolution: let reality at time t, R(t), be a topological space such that the time-evolution of reality is continuous. What this means is, roughly, that we consider the geometry of reality to be a geometry that makes time-evolution local. In other words, if one object can affect another (even entangled particles), then these objects are said to be close in some sense.

The interaction between reality and a subject we call an appearance. This takes the form of a continuous function f from R(t) to a new space, X. We have no reason to assume, for now at least, that this space X is common across subjects – for all we know, each subject could have a unique X. We can then visualize the interactions between reality and subjects as a hub-and-spoke diagram – each subject producing its own model of reality.

The “materialist” hypothesis itself lies in the assumption that everything which can effect the visible universe can be included in the topology, R(t), that we have constructed (even if this R(t) is contrary to our usual notions, including those of materiality).

Social Objects

The most rich and elusive objects are social: art, symbols, myths, etc. are much more dangerous than tables, chairs, and their ilk. Without tiresomely repeating the whole of Social Geometry, we can recapitulate the basic ideas here.

The hub-and-spoke diagram risks misleading us into forgetting that subjects are part of Reality itself. The result of this is that we must consider the effect each subject has on the others. An easy way to do this, across media, is to observe patterns in the content produced and consumed by these subjects. We call this content Text. Text can be a painting, song, mannerism, etc.

To analyze these phenomena without encountering a number of pitfalls, we take the following approach: first, identify patterns in the Text between actors. One might consider this to be a social equivalent to psychoanalysis – first recognize a pattern of behavior or speech, and then ascertain its meaning. Similarly, problems of transference and countertransference apply here as well; we must recognize above all that our identification of these patterns is in itself subjective, that is, it relies on our own appearance of reality, not the reality itself. A more general way of seeing what this means is, in Lacanian terms, that the symbolic order can appear differently to all.

These patterns in Text we call the Viral.

Autonomy

To focus on the Viral for too long might lead us to a deterministic perspective. This is not the intent, but in order to unravel autonomy, we must first understand the nature of subjectivity.

Briefly, the subject is defined by a temporal loop. Consider the case of identity, where one (as Zizek loves to say), becomes what they always were. At each moment, the subject is searching for an identity that will explain the past (hopefully in a flattering way), while providing a basis for future action. Autonomy is characterized by the same temporal loop. Think phenomenologically for a second: how do you recognize whether an action was taken of your own volition? It can only be after the fact.

A common error in exercising autonomy is to, instead of actually performing an action, merely telling oneself to perform the action, as if saying “I should get out of bed” will cause oneself to get out of bed. But this clearly will not work, because it violates the temporal rule we set out: you will know when you have succeeded in making the decision, because the action will already be done.

There is still the strange matter of having autonomy, but not autonomy over our own autonomy. In other words, our autonomy is finite, not always present, present at different magnitudes when it is present, etc. Strangely, if there is anything that is not done in volition, it is thinking, which is, as Badious calls it, “violence done to us.” The only sure thing is that our autonomy is incomplete. We can consider this analogous to original sin, an analogy which leads us a step further: the autonomy we do have is analogous to grace.

Divinity

Through our presentation of the world so far, we can immediately identify two “divine” gifts.

a. Grace (as described above). b. Efficacy of communication.

Failures of communication are widely understood (at least among the potential audience for this piece), so I will not devote time to it here. Successes of communication receive less attention, and are really something spectacular. To those who doubt that communication is successful at all, I suggest looking at R. M. Hare's “Missionaries and Cannibals” thought experiment. Without belaboring the point, it is truly a spectacular thing that we can be so confident our debates about morality, spirituality, etc. are truly debates about the same things, when the extensions of our terms are so different. Is it not spectacular that a pantheist and a Christian can be referring to the same “God,” when by any rational assessment they are referring to different things?

It just so happens that we can also construct a biblical schema for this divine gift. Failure of communication is the reality for those scattered from the Tower of Babel, and the successes of communication are a gift given during the miracles of the Pentecost.

Interpretation

We now have elucidated the process of identifying patterns of Text, and have asserted, without real justification, that there is some possibility for real success in communication. What remains is to stitch these two components together to provide a formula for interpretation. Again, this section will overlap greatly with Social Geometry, so it will be kept concise.

The primary claim we can make about a Viral pattern of Text, transmitted across a network of subjects, is that it must have a “form” which allows its propagation. Consider the conservative reaction to transgressive art, which is to say “now absolutely anything can be art, from a urinal to a paper ball! I could become an artist right now!” This account is exactly backwards, when anything could be art, it is even more confounding than ever to attempt to explain what is art. What better place to begin than with the realization that this definition of art, with its transgressive motifs, must be succeeding in propagating across social networks?

A second realization is that Text that accounts for its own failure in advance tends to have an advantage. This can be (and often is) in subtle, symbolic ways, but it can also be in blatant ways. For example, advocates of extreme diets will warn you about a “detox” period, after which you will surely be healthy.

A key error here is to make an interpretation without the realization that it is subjective, i.e. filtered through one's own symbolic lens.

Rejected Hypotheses

If our (eventual) goal is to fulfill the promise of this new wave of philosophical optimism, we must briefly explain where our proposition differs from its competitors, or risk getting caught in the undertow. Here are the following rejected hypotheses:

a. Disillusionment Hypotheses

These come in various flavors, but our position rejects all variants. Theology did not die at the hands of modern disillusionment, and modernity did not die at the hands of postmodern disillusionment. This includes the rejection of promises to “revive” either theology or modernity, since they are still alive and well.

b. Complexity Hypotheses

This (sometimes called a source of disillusionment) is the claim that 20th- and 21st-century life is inherently more complex, and that this complexity either invalidates “old ways of thinking” or is qualitatively different from prior problems.

The short explanation for both of these rejections is that many find it necessary, when proposing philosophical optimism, to first insert it into a historical narrative of philosophical pessimism. While it may make for good rhetoric, I see no evidence for the existence of such pessimism.

Lithe Adam descends from the olive tree with a fist of fruit.

What do I mean by the unity of man? What is the disunity of man? The split subject, the dividual, the Freudian discovery, the Fall. And what is the project here? To show that the split subject is not just what Freud discovered, but what Freud discovered, not for the first time, but for the last. To show the missing ingredient, the je ne sais quois, but more specifically the joie sans jouissance, that separates pseudo-dialectics from their real counterparts. To be at once without the myth and within, but without paradox, and in doing so to collapse the structure of infinite reflection into a unit. And if we unify man, then what is man? Fecund in thirst, wordly rebirth.

The Disunity of Man

A great transformation took place: Saturn, the bounty of the earth, became time. Ba'al became Beelzebub.

Time, not other men, is what splits man from himself. The 0th action that comes to mind is the locus of unity. Every hesitation, contemplation, reconsideration is both the knife and the scar of division. This unity in 0 means that the task is one of elimination: the complete elimination of the temporal element. But this is not a matter of not thinking. Thought must be in instantaneous accordance with action, like the boxer, the quick chess player, the agile predator.

The great myth of modernity is that the thirst of man is for his own destruction: through opiates, recklessness, plastic foods, theft. But this is not true. Unity is found not in the repression of desire, but in its realization. In short: there never was a happy thief. Even the dumbest animal quickly learns what it truly wants (not to steal from the bigger beast). So why is it so hard for man? If nothing from bacteria to rats has a desire to eat Twizzlers, then should we believe that any human truly wants to?

This is the greatest lie you've never been told: that you want the things that poison you, fracture you. You've been (never) told this because this is the only way to make you want it. Without the guilt, where's the pleasure?

This logic is the logic of a perverse world, and this perversion has been the most important aspect of your education.

The other aspect of the disunity of man is a non-problem that disappears under scrutiny; that man is not self-transparent. For one, it could never be otherwise: a conscious and verbalized understanding of yourself won't be achieved both because of the limitations of language and the limitations of introspection. But even if you could achieve full introspection, it would be at the cost of action. The system always lags behind the skill. A corporation's organization is not a description of how it should solve future problems, but a description of how it solved past problems. Criminology is not the study of how to catch criminals, but the study of how criminals were caught.

For this reason, the Freudian discovery should not bother us.

The Western Mind

Notice the acceptable, commercial solutions to the disunity of man; Buddhism, New Age, etc. Not only are these not solutions, they are but further perversions. The annihilation of the body, of the self, of pride: these are the religions of death drive.

Not every religion is a religion of death. Not every spiritual truth is rooted in paradox. This is the heart of the Western spirit.

The strong, capable body, not the withered monk.

Architecture, not shelter.

Avoiding the secular to nurture the spiritual is like a diet without nutrition.

Those who fear the pursuit of Beauty, sword-in-hand, are still footsoldiers in its war. They should be thankful they have been placed in the back, to see its destructive force.

Somehow, in spite of the much-maligned homogenization of Hollywood, horror films alone have managed to maintain significant thematic density. If mainstream commentary on contentious topics was once solely in the purview of comedy, today it is solely in the purview of horror. Without attempting to explain this shift, we can take a second to admire the scenery at our new destination. The most striking feature of contemporary horror films is that they are thematically haunted by the ghost of psychoanalysis (an obituary of which might appear on this blog). Jordan Peele's “Us,” despite trading primarily in cultural symbols (ballet, masks, and shamanistic trickery), is above all a story of ego formation. Anyone familiar with the mirror stage should guess the twist: it is the subject who finds in the mirror her own fragmented body. While discussion of this film could easily fill the space allotted here, I would like to turn instead to “Scary Stories to tell in the Dark.” By far the less assuming two, with a familiar premise (kids in a haunted house on Halloween), difficult source material, and empty, half-hearted tropes (a blind, elderly black seer), I would question the sanity of anyone who voluntarily watches “Scary Stories.” However, I would also recommend it. For one, it is much better than any reasonable person would expect. For two... it's just really pretty interesting. “Scary Stories” unites the themes of its various stories with an eye toward the relationships of its characters with their mothers. This is done subtly enough to not be distracting, heavy-handed, or shoehorned while being overt enough to lend some structural integrity the anthology film. If the psychoanalytic subject matter of “Us” is the mirror stage, then for “Scary Stories” it is symbolic castration. Perhaps because of the rating, audience, or source material, “Scary Stories” has a sexual ethos that inverts the horror cliche. The castration of the characters lends the subject matter an entirely new meaning; there is no transgression, no perversion, and no jouissance besides the (very literal in this case) return to the womb. “Scary Stories” truly has its finger on the pulse its time; when the anxiety of children and adults alike to their cloying, oppressive environments is not a reaction to patriarchal power, but to the omnipotence and omniscience of the techno-AllMother, found in guidance counselor offices, HR departments, 24/7 hotlines for parents of university-attending adults, and in the emasculation and maternalization of the father (Dean Norris is an excellent casting decision). It is only fitting that Dean Norris's character and the sheriff both spend their days watching Nixon and Vietnam on the television with a nostalgia that betrays the ahistoricity of the film. The phallus is absent here as one character comments: “Tricky Dicky” is certainly no name for a president. The malaise of artificially-extended youth is felt throughout the film: sexual exploits end so soon as to question the use of the term at all (an interrupted date, a pen with a picture of a busty woman) and, above all, the juvenile (symbolically infantile) game of fishing feces out of the toilet. The Evil Tome of the film “reads” each victim and delivers the appropriate punishment. For each of its victims save for one (whose fate is precisely the opposite), this fear is of a return to the womb. While “Us” revisits the ego-formation and interpellation of an adult, we are left with a sense that in “Scary Stories”, despite the characters being adolescents, they are still largely unformed. Where the typical film of this breed lends its adolescent characters unrealistic freedom and power (e.g. Stranger Things), “Scary Stories” gives its victims only passivity and powerlessness. The resolution to the conflict is nothing more than a plea, a concession.

My book Social Geometry is now available here: https://docdro.id/MYvTyQv.

If bisecting messages into “the literal meaning” and “the rest” is a poor way to understand language, then how do we preserve the notions of form and content (preferably in a way that is blind to the medium)? To answer this question, we need only to look at the memes which use text to label different elements of a picture. What is obviously the defining characteristic of these memes is that the content is not the viral element: the content can be almost anything, as long as it fits the structure. Rather it is the structure itself of each meme, which, in its way of organizing a thought, structures the thought of its readers and imparts itself into their communicative repertoire. Generalizing this property gives us a new model for separating Form from Content for social artifacts in general; the Form is exactly that which is epidemic (adds itself to the vocabulary of the recipient), and the Content is that which affects the recipient's speech only indirectly. When analyzing Cubism, for instance, it is the whatness of Cubism that makes up the form of Cubist paintings. This already gives us an explanation of why James Joyce claimed that good writing has the property that the reader can remember exactly which words were used (a property that Shakespeare's works undeniably embody); a good writer's works have good poetics. In this way the Content becomes memorable because of the structure it is attached to, like the old trick of remembering text by putting it to song. These terms, Form and Content, may give the impression that the “meaningful” or “privileged” term is Content. Rather, the situation is the opposite: under this analysis, one is lead to consider that Cubism itself (the Form) was that which lead to the success of Cubist paintings, and only some resonance between Cubism and its surrounding society could have led to this. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek draws a parallel between (1) Karl Marx's recognition that the content of a commodity is banal, but that the form that the commodity must take to succeed speaks to a deep truth and (2) Sigmund Freud's recognition that the seemingly deep content (dream-thought) of a dream is banal, but that the seemingly shallow form of a dream is where true discoveries are made. This phenomenon is echoed here in a more general way as a property of social artifacts. We can also use this model to analyze the claim that sincerity is returning to art in the “New Sincerity” of metamodern art. The fact that this “New Sincerity” and its associated techniques are structurally similar enough should give us reason to doubt whether there is any change in sincerity at all: just as a meme can be appropriated for any Content, the “language of sincerity” can be similarly appropriated. There is no reason, then, to assume that the development of a new language of sincerity implies that (authentic) sincerity is truly in vogue, and in fact even gives us a reason to doubt it.

The difficulty in assessing art, and especially in giving criteria for assessing art in general, is that it is impossible to separate the art from the discourse. That is to say, the mere fact of assessing an artwork is already discourse. In fact, this essay is discourse relevant to the assessment of art: as people read this document, the state of the discourse surrounding the assessment, appreciation, and interpretation of art could change, and this essay should be able to account for that fact. Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) already provides some useful techniques for trying to discern what the true nature of an object is. For instance, OOO rejects the notion (undermining) that you can reduce an object to all of its pieces (a novel cannot be explained just by all of the words in it). It also rejects the notion (overmining) that an object can be explained solely in terms of some larger structure (a novel cannot be explained just as its effects on the world right now). The key insight of OOO, then, is that it takes a common issue that people involved in art deal with on a regular basis and inverts it: instead of asking why we can never fully explain an artwork, we realize that it is precisely what we cannot explain that is the “essence” of the artwork. We can make a generalization from these two techniques of OOO, and realize that what makes an object “more” of an object is precisely its ability to be discursively inexhaustible. This seems like a position that is shallow and easy to refute: if the goal is to make art that does not yield to discourse, then the best art should be meaningless, right? Ironically, this is not true, because meaningless art is the art that is the most easily destroyed in discourse: we simply say “it is meaningless.” In this way, it is not possible to create art that is inexhaustible by attempting to create art that is inexhaustible. There must be the intermediate step of trying to create art with meaning and that thereby should yield to discourse. Another easy way to refute this stance is by calling it overmining: as claiming that the art is determined entirely by its effects. This still is not true, though, because part of what makes the artistic object is its possible future effects in new contexts / discourses, which implies the relevance of some potentiality inherent in the object. There is a common assertion that something is not old enough to be considered “classic” yet, for precisely this reason. The efficacy of an artwork in one particular discourse does not imply it will be similarly inexhaustible in future (or another culture's) discourse. The ideal artwork, then, will resist yielding fully to any human discourse.

Much of the (academic and popular) contention with postmodern theory centers around what Quention Meillassoux calls correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” That is, the idea that we can describe what happens in the interaction between a person's experience and the external world, but there is no way to describe what happens when, say, two stars collide, outside of our ability to observe it, at least, since, in the end, everything we can describe is limited to our experience. Imagine that you are attending a play with your correlationist friend Carl, and after the first act the curtain comes down and the stagehands begin to change out the props. Carl tells you “there is no way you can know what happens behind the curtain. All you can talk about is what happens on stage, because that is something you can observe.” Of course, Carl is wrong, because you can make pretty good predictions about what happens behind the stage. For instance, you can throw a stick of dynamite behind the curtain and be certain that there will be no second act. What we have, then, is a realization that your ability to make beliefs about what goes on behind the curtain may rely on a deferral until you can observe the consequences (e.g. there is no second act), but so long as your predictions are true, you have no reason to doubt your beliefs. The question is why we are able to describe what happens behind the curtain without being able to directly observe it? The answer to this question is that we describe what happens behind the curtain as something like a monadic type from languages such as Haskell. What happens inside of an IO monad is not determined by the way you write the code: as long as the computation is the same, the result may differ, since you can only access the result of the computation, not its intermediate steps. Similarly, it could be that the play was cancelled for reasons unrelated to the dynamite, since you can only view the result. Experimentation, then, provides a way to describe the interactions of objects outside of your ability to perceive them, with the stipulation that “check” can only be “cashed” by perceiving the consequences of the interaction. (It is worth noting that this idea resembles scientific instrumentalism.) Magic tricks rely on this mechanism: a magic trick does not function by deceiving the eye, but by leading the spectator to construct false mental narratives about the thing they cannot see. The real art of a magic trick, then, is in giving a spectator room to misinterpret and deferring the revelation of the spectator's misconception until the appropriate moment. In other words, the magician is in control of when the correlationist check is cashed. The result of this perspective, then, is that one can accept the correlationist perspective but still have a useful ontology, such as an Object Oriented Ontology, wrapped inside.