Rabble Rabble Rabble, and My Next Project?

So today was a pretty good day. I bought three pairs of pants. That is nice. Need some new pants so I can hopefully look good for my interview with the Elliott Bay Book Company. What a delightful job that would be. What a nice place it would be to work. Then I could get an apartment in Capitol Hill and live totally close to work and feel good about all that stuff.

But I am also in a sort of interesting frame of mind from having finished my 'Society's Implicit War' essays. In sum total all six essays total 143 pages. I am glad that I ended up publishing them serially. I think it helped me segment the work on them.

The whole project took about 2-3 months from reading Discipline & Punish to the writing of the essays. I read D&P from May to June. Then finished the outline on June 13th or so. Then finished the writing a few days ago. So it was about a month total of writing in fits and bursts. It was fascinating because it coincided with my move to Seattle. I'm not reeling from them as hard as I've reeled from some of my other large writing, like 4/30 and 6/13. But it is still something that I'll have to figure out how it sits in my mind exactly.

I am pleased to have reconnected my thinking with military history. Pleased that Foucault had such a strong interest in war at one point. I also finished reading the Society Must Be Defended lectures that he gave from 75-76, just before D&P was published. Gives me even more understanding of how it is that Foucault thought about war. Good stuff. War and politics. Politics and war. What the heck is up with those things? Hopefully I will continue to think about them.

I think so. I recently bought John Gray's Enlightenment's Wake. John Gray is an exciting thinker to me. I look forward to reading more stuff by him. Interesting to be exploring some political philosophy that is anti-liberal. Not that I believe it, but I def need to explore it.

But my next writing project, I think, is going to be an essay called 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In these SIW essays I was able to explore some interesting connections between Foucault's work and simulation theory of mind. Also, the element of neuroplasticity that I explored has some interesting bearing on this new essay. The general idea is to pick up with Foucault and Nietzsche and try to use history to expose precisely what is going on with us. But for me I see philosophy of mind as such a central thing. I also see history as a fundamental part of philosophy of mind. And based on all that I have read about neuroplasticity it seems like history would have to be a fundamental part of philosophy of mind. If brains are plastic then our brains are totally different from brains that existed in the past. So, it seems like philosophy of mind has to be an incomplete and practical project, just like Foucault's genealogy of the modern subject. Because the brain is plastic a philosophy or theory of mind has to be an open and continuous project that can never be predictive or prescriptive. Theory of mind, just like Foucault and Clausewitz's 'theories', must be considered a tool kit of sorts that can enable mindfulness. Yikes. This essay could be super potent. I need to note this stuff now in that in the works blog. ONWARDS.