RIFF
One of the things that makes life these days what it is, is the tortured vocabulary – yesterday the firm fired a bunch of people to reduce costs. This used to be called a layoff but is now a RIFF (a Reduction In Force – don’t know where the extra F comes from – just so you can pronounce it I guess) whatever they call it, it means you no longer have a job motherf##ker – welcome to hard times.
It’s the same world that refers to civilians getting blown up as collateral damage and torture as ‘aggressive interrogation”. It’s the language of the bloodless.
Few things are less fun than working at a place where they laying folks off – there is the tension, then the kind of survivor feeling after the layoffs (talk like “anybody in your area get it?” abounds) and then oddly enough for a few days things are less tense cause well the worst just happened but after that comes the decision to update your résumé or try and hold out like grim death.
There is no promise that more will not be coming either.
It’s a bloody odd world when the band looks like the most stable and secure part of my life.
Speaking of tortured and words I have been trying to read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation – and I have to say I’m having a real rough go here.
The only reason I picked it up was cause it’s shown in the Matrix (very early on – it’s the title of the fake book Neo stores his disks in). And he does say the desert of the real.
My problem stems form not knowing what the hell is talking about when he talks about the desert of the real. Or that the “real” doesn’t exist. He seems to have some very very specific definition of “real” in mind but he doesn’t share that with us, at least in the early going.
Side note: I have found when people are trying to put forth an argument for some position, be it political, philosophical, scientific, or legal, they tort out their least defensible postulate as if it were established fact first, in the first few pages and go from there. I get the sense of that here.
In one section, talking about simulation (on page 3), he talks about some who is not sick is simulating the symptoms. I am not sure here but he seems to arguing that is someone is say producing a fever but does not have say a cold that that blurs the difference between the imaginary and the real. I don’t see that. Let’s take two people – both have a fever, on has a cold, the other has manifested the symptom due to a virus the other due to a mental condition. The fever is ‘real’ in each case, just the cause is different. That patient B is the cause and not a virus is immaterial (and that he could be doing this sub-consciously makes no difference here despite what Baudrillard says in a very weak comment) to the reality of the cause and symptoms. Really.
What he could be saying, and this is a translation, is that how we think about reality has changed. All I know is the book’s giving me a headache. I need to go watch a bad film and go to bed. Maybe even Mesa of Lost Women.
Blogger is hating pictures again.
It’s the same world that refers to civilians getting blown up as collateral damage and torture as ‘aggressive interrogation”. It’s the language of the bloodless.
Few things are less fun than working at a place where they laying folks off – there is the tension, then the kind of survivor feeling after the layoffs (talk like “anybody in your area get it?” abounds) and then oddly enough for a few days things are less tense cause well the worst just happened but after that comes the decision to update your résumé or try and hold out like grim death.
There is no promise that more will not be coming either.
It’s a bloody odd world when the band looks like the most stable and secure part of my life.
Speaking of tortured and words I have been trying to read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation – and I have to say I’m having a real rough go here.
The only reason I picked it up was cause it’s shown in the Matrix (very early on – it’s the title of the fake book Neo stores his disks in). And he does say the desert of the real.
My problem stems form not knowing what the hell is talking about when he talks about the desert of the real. Or that the “real” doesn’t exist. He seems to have some very very specific definition of “real” in mind but he doesn’t share that with us, at least in the early going.
Side note: I have found when people are trying to put forth an argument for some position, be it political, philosophical, scientific, or legal, they tort out their least defensible postulate as if it were established fact first, in the first few pages and go from there. I get the sense of that here.
In one section, talking about simulation (on page 3), he talks about some who is not sick is simulating the symptoms. I am not sure here but he seems to arguing that is someone is say producing a fever but does not have say a cold that that blurs the difference between the imaginary and the real. I don’t see that. Let’s take two people – both have a fever, on has a cold, the other has manifested the symptom due to a virus the other due to a mental condition. The fever is ‘real’ in each case, just the cause is different. That patient B is the cause and not a virus is immaterial (and that he could be doing this sub-consciously makes no difference here despite what Baudrillard says in a very weak comment) to the reality of the cause and symptoms. Really.
What he could be saying, and this is a translation, is that how we think about reality has changed. All I know is the book’s giving me a headache. I need to go watch a bad film and go to bed. Maybe even Mesa of Lost Women.
Blogger is hating pictures again.
posted by Unknown at 11:13 AM
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