Ontology, what ontology?:

[1]

The question of being thus aims at an a priori condition of the possibility not only of the sciences which investigate beings of such and such a type - and are thereby already involved in an understanding of being; but it aims also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.

- Heidegger, Being and Time

[2]

We commit ourselves to an ontology containing number when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is. But we do not commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the round square cupola on Berkeley College when we say that Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the cupola in question is *not*. We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant…To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.

- Quine, On What There Is

[3]

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

- Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

So I decided to build an amp instead. Looked briefly at a few cheap tube kits, and decided I didn’t want the hassle or sheer bulk of something with a huge transformer — or the risk of the cats getting their paws somewhere high voltage!

After some research, I’ve ended up intrigued by the whole chipamp movement — the promise being ‘around 10W of high-end sound for under a couple of hundred dollars and some DIY’. Wanting a nice enclosure, I ended up ordering a Charlize Tripath module and one of Art Taylor’s custom cases. Put it all together one morning a couple of weeks ago, powered from an external power supply.

How does it sound? Well, it’s low power, so efficient speakers help. I’ve never really liked the Neutrons much anyway, and they sound boxy on the Charlize. The Dynaudios sound as good as they ever did (which is pretty good for their size) — and it’s them that have stayed hooked up to the Mac. But the real test for my little chipamp was the B1s, driven from either my homebuilt FLAC jukebox or by my Arcam FMJ DV27. And the truth is that it actually sounds quite amazing, for size and price! I need to spend more time going through my music, but — especially for recordings of vocals and acoustic strings and percussion — it does as well, to my ears, as my Bryston – and possibly better (!) when it comes to depth and positioning. The percussion on No Lonely Nights, from Keith Jarrett’s Rarum, in particular, sounds astonishing. Likewise Cat Power’s Metal Heart, off Moon Pix.

Big, dense, heavily studio-processed recordings don’t fare so well, muddying up a bit. But. This is from an amp the size of a CD case, that cost me maybe £150 to build. I could live with it, happily, as long as I had a great pair of speakers to hook it up to. Impressed.

I feel that his post, in its entirety, ends up diluting the most important thought — this one:

For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

I’ve written before about the generation who are of the Cloud, and the schism between them (us, I know which is my tribe) and the rest. I think it’s a genuine possibility — if that particular singularity hasn’t already happened — that there is some splitting of the Western psyche going on here… not quite what the transhumanists and techgnostics have proselytised, but something of equal scale.

Something of that — maybe one way into this is to frame it by saying that we are experiencing the effects of adoption of the first generation of post-communication technologies: tools that aren’t (endlessly-failing) attempts at meetings-of-souls (c.f. Durham Peters’ argument in Speaking Into the Air), but rather frameworks for something like Deleuze’s desiring machines: or as in Olson’s pronouncement: desire is a cluster which seeks to cluster (from whence the title of this site).

What if it’s that? That this is what we have post-communication. Because the Cloud isn’t about communication: it’s [not only but also] the cluster(s) where functions can be reallocated from the self. Mutually. We are a cloudscape, together. And that’s new.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

- Louis MacNeice