Learning

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Blake, Jerusalem, plate 10

Blake isn’t boasting there, and he isn’t being difficult for its own sake. He’s describing a choice that gets made either way. Everybody is inside some system of thought — one that decides what counts as an argument, what counts as evidence, which questions are serious and which are silly. You either build that yourself or you inherit it from somebody who did, and inheriting it quietly is still a choice. It’s just one you don’t get to inspect.

So I build. That’s what this part of the site is.

If Start Here was the first door, these are the second ones. There are two, they came from different years, and they are asking the same question at different scales.

What the Work Actually Is

It would be easy to make this sound like a hobby, so let me be plain about the labour in it. This is cultural criticism in a particular line of descent, and the line matters because it’s where the tools come from.

Vico, who saw that the human world is intelligible in a way nature isn’t, because we made it. Kant, for the discovery that the conditions of experience are themselves a subject. Hegel, for whom those conditions have a history and that history has a shape. Marx, who put the shape back on the ground and demanded to know who was eating. Deleuze, for what happens when you stop assuming that difference is a failure of identity. Foucault, for the reminder that an apparatus which produces knowledge is also producing the kind of person who can have it.

That isn’t a reading list I’m waving at you. It’s a set of instruments, and using them properly takes years. Most of what’s here is me learning to.

Why It’s Called Learning

I’ve called this Learning rather than Writing or Theory, and I want to be straight about why, because the word is doing something.

Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, "thus it shall be!" They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is — will to power.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §211, Kaufmann's translation

He’s splitting philosophers in two. On one side the labourers, who take what has already been valued and press it into formulas — and he names Kant and Hegel, which should tell you it isn’t meant as an insult. On the other, the ones who legislate, who say thus it shall be and turn everything behind them into a means.

I’m not going to pretend I’m on the second side of that. Nobody gets to award themselves it. But I’d rather admit which side I’m reaching for than dress the reaching up as neutral scholarship, because you can feel the difference in the prose either way and it’s more honest to say so.

Which is what makes Learning the right word and an uncomfortable one. Reading this isn’t neutral. It’s an initiation into a system somebody built on purpose, with ends in view, and the invitation is to work inside it long enough to find out whether it holds. I’d rather say that now than have you discover it four documents in.

And if you’d rather not be initiated into anything — fair enough, but Blake’s point is that you already have been, somewhere else, without the paperwork.

The Second Doors

Both are unfinished. That isn't an apology, it's the method — see Corrections. If you only wanted the videos, they are over here and ask nothing of you.