I used to have a “music” section in my old college blog, a platform which catapulted and centred as a frontispiece my love for reading and writing, a hodgepodge of finds and discoveries that one must eventually ebb out of, being a juvenile coming-of-age ledger during the beginning of one’s intellectual journey, a measly-mouthed fledging composing monodies and monologues from a papoose. The prose itself was a hard sell, being on the cusp of that nescient time where one’s English tongue still flopped uselessly in the mouth.
There was, indeed, nothing like the unleavened cants and the harrowing consternations of youth — one felt most keenly, acted most cowardly, and quibbled most prosaically. Take, for instance, an inconsequential quippage referring to one Guardian article:
What’s that quotation by Matthew Arnold on this stupendous sort of foolish liberalism? A state of moral indifference without intellectual ardour?
Let’s not do anodyne politics here, people. You know, the stock argument, the dizzy look of profound ignorance and misguided unconscientious outrage, of course, or all would be amiss. Just… No. Hirsi Ali deserves better than this.
Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “This is the New Low”
Or even more culturally involved, in response to https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain:
[…]
The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.
[…]
Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”
Some interesting insights I almost made a concession or two. But some people do believe that feelings need not have the last words; that the way one’s mind spins it determines their person. The author seems fretfully indignant that some of these are female. Is the notion of “post-woundedness” then another ingenious, evolved form of modern sexism?
A legitimate question:
How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.
Especially that psychical projection a commonplace phenomenon, wherein this narrative (“female pain”) stands in as a readily available venue for the apprehension, realisation and assimilation of repressed inner experiences, as one of the ego’s integrative activities, or even a form of wish-fulfillment.
The possibility of an ideal solution perhaps lies here:
There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain—a self that grows larger than its scars without disowning them, that is neither wound-dwelling nor jaded, that is actually healing.
Although the post-wounded conditions seem almost necessary an aid and a context to get there (because the self isn’t merely the pain, the product of pain or the receptor for pain, it, as an agency, reacts and interacts with pain and one agency, if one is to accept such thing as individual differences, is different from another), and as a journey, if I may, more interesting, more dynamic, more faceted, more exploratory […]
We’ve got a Janus-faced relationship to female pain. We’re attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we’ve developed a post-wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon—melodrama, triviality, wallowing—and an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don’t valorize suffering women.
Though the author and I might diverge on value-systems and ideal modalities of fundamental human experience, this manifesto proves nonetheless a worthy and entertaining read […] However, let this universal ethical and aesthetic commandment be stated unequivocally, without censure or a chide: Don’t valorise suffering women; jolt them, with a scorching iron if need be.
Sylvia Plath needed not have a miscarried child, Tina Turner needed no bloodied nose, and no woman needed social affirmation to any form of emotional or physical jarrings to an extent which might override her vehicle for critical faculties—a cut or a clout, metaphorical or not, never brings much pain, only a sharp pang of disappointment or a stunning shock of disbeliefs; a continual hacking and a prolonged clobbering might.
Personal history does consist in cyclical repetitions and some measure of psychopathological predispositions, especially in a sphere where sentiments reign, self-identity mired, and self-worth hazarded. It is wise indeed to be wary of the unconscious and what in or of ourselves we can’t fully grasp or control. Quell the instinctually or habitually destructive; never endorse it, never fertilise its hotbed of cultural sympathies, in other words, don’t normalise. If women are the historically wounded, then the answer might just be that we rectify it.
Salisa, published in Nov 2017, “What is ‘Female Pain’?”
Or the most politically vogue, on the topic of ‘Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject‘:
My standard of judgement is this—insofar as the work of art expresses sympathy and acknowledges reality of the subject in question, then its aesthetic depiction should be allowed. The painting, Open Casket (2016), of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched in a horrific incident of hate crime fails the test on the ground that the illustration doesn’t retain the elements of cruelty, inhumanity and grotesque realism which affected the victim who was real and deserving of our commiseration as any victim who had their human person dismantled due to indiscriminate hatred against their race, ethnicity or gender. In other words, the problem of romanticisation stands parallel to the contrivance of art as recreation. Insensitivity is expressed when the subject’s personal calamity (especially one with historical significance) is taken as a subject of personal amusement, entertainment or leisure.
I have no scruples with the question of ‘appropriation’—the artist’s identity should in no way affect the judgement of his or her work. It doesn’t matter whether the artist is black or white or hispanic; what is problematic is that the work lacks social and cultural awareness as to transmute a heinous and gruesome act into an object of aesthetic indulgence—for your viewing pleasure. If the painting, say, tones down its artistic embellishment or distortion—not necessarily that such creation is always plausible—but if it is rendered possible, then the defilement via an act of painting is to be judged on the same basis as an act of photographing. Romanticisation—almost contextually synonymous with trivialisation—does, indeed, limit the range of subjects of depiction for an artist. And let us not forget that a claim to collective—or “objective”—reality through self-expression (or under the guise of), not only engenders psychological harm to the families and communities of the victim—a matter of past atrocities—it expresses a certain set of judgements and sentiments which has further implications on individual realities through future atrocities which may be committed—in whichever form or scale, however subtle or slight—a matter of future repercussions.
An interesting point is then raised, onto the problem of realism as realistic as its actual subject—The Minneapolis Scaffold of Sam Durant. Does the erection of this sculpture express insensitivity towards the Native American community? “Who am I to judge what is or is not sensitive?” if I may pre-empt the question sure to be put forward. The greater purpose for platform of discussions is to sway, incite and alter. It is not reductive to recast the question in the form of “Who am I to have an opinion on the topic of which my status renders me an ineffective judge?” It perhaps is not far from the truth that even the totality of my experiences affords no sufficient understanding and empathy towards the issue at hand and the individuals affected by it. While an interpretation of realities is highly fluid, and in this particular context, historical and cultural—of which this acknowledgement conveys my grievous attitude towards publicising one—it is weighted enough, in comparison to the concern raised, as to warrant my speaking of it; not to mention that it is thought-provoking by itself. Sensitivity is a slant and ought to be judged according to its contextual position—with its historical, cultural, social and individual components considered altogether.
A question is posed, “Is realistic depiction of a victim, an event, or other invocation of past injustice—which no reasonable individual would equate it with condonation—an affirmation in a way resulting in the continuity and propagation of pernicious attitudes or is it contrariwise a denouncement?” The answer seems to be neither. A neutral observance—neutral in the case of this actual scaffold and cannot be exemplified with a better example—merely states a past happening uncoloured by any sentiments or prejudices. This observance, it can be said, embodies the prejudices, the hatred, and the inhumanity as to inflict openly a symbolic violence upon the living and future generations of those suffered. Perhaps this is true, but without a solid confirmation by the consensus of the community, by individuals of whom the issue directly concerned, the reaction appears a mere moral masturbation—a touchstone applicable equally well for non-neutral observance, in whatever sense of the term. It is impossible to gauge how a perspective may be taken towards the recount of past experience—however damnable it may be—especially with the passage of time altering its cultural bearing. But it must be argued that the creation of impartial art—if such a term may be permitted for use—should never suffer an aspersion the same way a history book is exempted from it. Realism is good. Realism is unfettered in its elements of realness and the entrusting of naked realism to mankind is a consecration of the individualism of moral judgement and conscience.
Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “On Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject (Art As Artistic Narration Only)”
Of all the hammy nonsense I have arrogated, this one trounces most victoriously. I redact some of the content of the post, a long laborious sustenuto that started off as a footnote to an unrelated item of feuilleton which began:
The one-hour presentation I delivered on Quantum Gravity, and its necessary preparation, as a requisite for my Astronomy course was undertaken via self-directed personal-cramming […]
But to give a sample flavour:
[On Quantum Field Theory]… But if I were to have to naively outline two main approaches to understanding the lack of successful contemporary resolution to the problem (and I’ll take this opportunity to entertain both interpretations with equal respect), one would be to understand gravity as an emergent phenomenon and the other, to understand classical gravitation under General Relativity as an effective field theory (which doesn’t necessarily dismiss the possible inspection of gravity and its effect approaching the Planck scale). Gravity as emergent can be interpreted in the following way:
After all, the description of an ideal gas in terms of a large number of molecules moving at random, by Boltzmann, cannot be pursued further to actually reveal the atomic physics of the molecule. The fact that the thermodynamic description is independent of the microscopic details cuts both ways. It allows you to formulate the theory without worrying about the detailed microstructure but at the same time, refuses to reveal anything about the microscopic structure.
Thanu Padmanabhan, Quantum Themes
That is, in simplification, to view gravity as an elasticity of space-time, the same way elasticity arises out of tangible physicality of material. The elastic behaviour of an iron rod or the thermal property of an ideal gas is independent of their internal structure at the infinitesimal scale, or in the understanding of physics, the equations describing their microscopic compositions (the ideal gas law PV = nRT or PV = NKbT applies to both Helium and Argon, though their atomic arrangements are nothing alike). It is a large-scale phenomenon, so to say, and while gravity does bend light (which, under the Newtonian model, was a striking anomaly given that gravity is understood to act exclusively on particles or objects with a non-zero mass while light consists of massless photons), it is interesting to ask whether gravity acts on “individual photons” (though allow me to tag a question mark on this doubly-quoted entity). However, if one were to evoke Einstein’s model of gravitation—gravity as a distortion of space-time—we perhaps would do away with this notion of “acting on” entirely; light travels in a straight line but our new concept of space-time postulates that this straight line be the world-line, rendering the question of direct action of gravity upon matter as obsolete and possibly ill-conceived (matter, energy or any component associated with the stress-energy tensor distorts space-time, which in turn, imposes on matter and its nearby).
I’d like to make a different conclusion from Padmanabhan though, that this premise, if one were to accept as principal, not “refuses to reveal” but has nothing to reveal. It is not meaningful to imply that there exists such interconnectedness when there is none just as it is not meaningful to speak of an entity (“entity” in physics seems to me an equivocation) of which no direct or indirect consequence of it having existed can be observed […]
[…]
This emergence approach would preserve the classicality of gravitation. The approach which sees General Relativity as an effective theory would overturn the authority of Einstein’s formulations (effective means it is not fundamental, works within certain limits or scales, or describes an effect without attributing to a direct cause) and posit a new set of tools, perhaps a revised unit of basic building blocks or a new way of constructing and understanding relations, interactions and effects which are considered more underlying. General Relativity, if one were to disregard the quantum world as more primary or fundamental, held contradictory assumptions with Quantum Mechanics from the outset, in that the measurements of physical quantities—momentum, pressure, energy—are not probabilistic in nature (the components of the stress-energy tensor in Einstein’s field equation, which determine the curvature of space-time, have definite numerical values); it is a classical theory and as such, creates a conceptual problem when one tries to incorporate it with quantum formulations. However, the failure to integrate gravitation with Quantum Field Theory to produce another canonised perturbative theory is of a technical and mathematical nature, not a conceptual or philosophical one, that is, it produces nonsensical value—infinity for physical quantities—under the procedure of renormalisation; a process required in a quantisation of field.
[…]
The failure to re-normalise, if one is acquainted to a degree with the history or development concerning QFT, also beset weak force when it first underwent the conventional field quantisation. Fermi’s theory of beta decay, an early formulation of weak interaction, was non-renormalisable. The higher order of approximation in perturbative calculation led to the same foundering that gravity has encountered, the divergences at high energies. Its successor, a gauge theory of electro-weak interaction (a quantum mediator of W boson was inserted in between the point of exchange, followed by some appropriate structural modifications to preserve gauge invariance and conservation of electric charge), which modelled after QED and subsequently incorporated it, provided a quantum picture of weak dynamics which then became re-normalisable. An analogy could be made between Fermi’s model of beta decay and Einstein’s model of gravitation; they are not considered rudimentary, and a more complete and rudimentary formulation is needed to bring about this successful transformation under QFT. How much is preserved of Einstein’s formulation is left to the arbitration of different approaches which seek to quantise gravitational field. I know not much of these approaches (while my presentation was titled Theories of Quantum Gravity, forty minutes were spent elucidating contexts and backgrounds starting from Relativity, and only some few last slides touched on major candidate theories—String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity—which, due to time constraints of my research and reading, ended up mere general descriptions of their methodology; as procured hastily from journalistic layman’s articles).
[…]
This AdS/CFT correspondence seems to be an emerging new concept in high energy physics which I consider, as of the present, to be too advanced for my taste (assumptions are not axioms; axioms, especially in a theoretically rigorous field like this, are not accepted facts). Einstein wrote, quite reasonably:
Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
It ends with:
Modern theoretical science has benefitted greatly from intellectual pedagogy of German Rationalism—exemplified in Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein himself. But he perhaps did not foresee the rise of such unenlightening tangle that is the contemporary speculation of impetuous nature, invoking though meekly, what philosophy called, the demarcation problem. Are there any other empirical tests for Grand Unified Theory, aside from proton decay and fermion masses? How is one to interpret the proliferation of variants of String Theories? Quantum Gravity itself lacks an expedient model used to test its validity, owing perhaps to the lack of workable invention specifying its constituents (With these practical limitations, what are we to look for? Or equally, without these practical limitations, what are we to look for?..). How much of modern particle physics falls into the domain of falsifiability? How shall we appraise this over reliance of the use of mathematics in a sphere highly specialised, highly rarefied, highly assumptive, even if their corresponding contexts are invoked in the manoeuvring of symbols and the establishing of relations? Such metaphysics in the realm of science seems to be embodied in String Theory, or perhaps any attempt to force into mould a unifying principle indiscriminate of contexts, scales, or limits.
Lastly, a general reminder, from Godel’s Proof:
… it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates. In fact, it came to be acknowledged that the validity of a mathematical inference in no sense depends upon any special meaning that may be associated with the terms or expressions contained in the postulates. Mathematics was thus recognised to be much more abstract and formal than had been traditionally supposed: more abstract, because mathematical statements can be construed in principle to be about anything whatsoever rather than about some inherently circumscribed set of objects or traits of objects; and more formal, because the validity of mathematical demonstrations is grounded in the structure of statements, rather than in the nature of a particular subject matter. The postulates of any branch of demonstrative mathematics are not inherently about space, quantity, apples, angles, or budgets; and any special meaning that may be associated with the terms (or “descriptive predicates”) in the postulates plays no essential role in the process of deriving theorems. We repeat that the sole question confronting the pure mathematician (as distinct from the scientist who employs mathematics in investigating a special subject matter) is not whether the postulates assumed or the conclusions deduced from them are true, but whether the alleged conclusions are in fact the necessary logical consequences of the initial assumptions.
Is the subset of theoretical physics in predominance scientists employing mathematics or mathematicians employing science? The difference seems to lie in the degree to which empirical verification takes precedence in justifying a postulate or in surmising a hypothesis, in discerning a set of assumptions from a set of scientific facts, in taking caution incorporating foreign axioms or mathematical formulations, in investigating the nature and the integrity of assumptions, statements, relations, integrations, inferences, directly or indirectly, employed. And as a scientist-non-scientist distinction in general, in sustaining sufficient reservation towards analogous reasoning as a means of knowledge-production, in understanding the actual nature of pictorial representation of concepts, in exercising critical judgement towards any set of formulations one might encounter or any set of evidence purported to corroborate them, in acquiring an understanding utilising a top-down approach rather than bottom-up, in keeping in mind the big picture, in building a conceptual edifice, in being able to reason and justify a hoard of steps one has taken in their accumulation of knowledge, in philosophising, in being exhaustive and exhausting, that is, sapere aude!
[1] Being conversant with a history or philosophy of science, or at the very least of their own field, rescues one from being a votary of science or what Schiller called, in his phenomenal inaugural lecture, “a bread-fed scholar.” Although academe is largely an economic apparatus with a clear established hierarchy and authority governing appointments, nominations and publications, what shall be expected of “truth” in such place? “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat” has not only held good in all times, but in all places it seems.
[…]
[2] On second thought, no mathematics or logic should have a final say on what we are or are not capable of excelling (computational system and nature are markedly different; we can’t fully grasp the latter, and the laws we ascribe to them are always a post hoc description of observational occurrences). The limitation of any aspect of nature is what we ought to verify not reckon by means of human reasoning. For instance, Special Relativity posits that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but our universe does, for one, expand faster than the speed of light (another thing to note of this commonly misinterpreted deduction: simply that human can’t will it, in no way, suggests that nature can’t). So take my suggestion above as a mere parallelism drawn to illuminate the meaning of my assertion.
[…]
Salisa, published in Dec 2017, “What Is This Turning Into?”
In fact, I have worked up, back in the days, quite a roster of scientific ideas in de rigueur garbs against which I would wager: quantum computer and its whole charade, Higgs boson, black hole, some or most of astrology including but not limited to the big bang theory and the expansion of the universe, any non-probabilistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Pardon my blasé naiveté; I profess my alliance with Popper as laid out in his obscure paper edited by Mario Bunge, “Quantum Mechanics Without the Observer,” one of the most brilliant of its kind). It is difficult indeed when one deals with a dunghill of experimental artifacts. But these are the shiny trinkets of youth — trifles with which one disports and dallies oneself during the deadening bouts of boredom or ennui.
Salisa lohavittayavikant 