Phenomena of its Hours

Is not Lacan’s futur antérior his version of Marx’s Thesis 11?

‘What is realized in my hisotry is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming’ (Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 86)

The repressed past is never known ‘as such’, it can become known only in the very process of its transformation, since the interpretation itself intervenes in its object and changes it: for Marx, the truth about the past (class struggle, the antagonism which permeates the entire past history) can become visible only to a subject caught up in the process of its revolutionary transformation.

Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso, 2007, p. 114

It’s good to be traveling again – I’ve had amazing opportunity to just sleep in for the mornings then experience the City in the afternoons and at night.

Tuesday I got to hang out with Felicia and Morgan, who both went to NYU undergrad, and Tom Li, who is now attending NYU Law School. We met up at a divey bar near NYU. It was good to catch up with everyone – I’ve known Morgan and Felicia since my Sophomore year of High School. There’s no one who has a more realistic and humorous insights into Beijing than Tom, who spent years living there before immigrating to the United States. I look forward to the day he gets to visit me in Beijing.

Yesterday, I spent the evening with my cousin Chris at Spitzer’s in the Lower East Side. He talked about his book tour for his book, The Great America Ale Trail, his ideas for a craft brewery on Springbrook Hazelnut Farm (childhood adventure land, Aunt and Uncle’s orchard and home, Chris’ residence, along with another cousin), and his current project developing stainless steel growlers for breweries.

Here’s a better picture of Ham, who’s around as I wake up:

When I do get up, I’ve managed to set aside time to casually go through emails.

Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1961) – at the MoMA.

I started reading Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies on the plane, having brought it as a book to read in between The Sublime Object of Ideology. It’s definitely more approachable, but also makes me want to read some of Žižek’s influences, like Jacques Lacan. Somehow, reading the two different works makes both of them more understandable, which suggests to me that multiple readings of all of his works might be called for. I keep sitting on the metro or whatever, thinking about life in Berkeley and life generally, and different ideas pop into my head from Žižek’s books.

I’ll try to take some more pictures, but I’ve just been involved with just taking everything things in – and not just the visual. A lot of what I’ve seen reminds me in bits and pieces of San Francisco and Hong Kong. The transit system – especially around Downtown – feels kind of like a select couple stops in San Francisco, but instead of those few stops it spans all of Manhattan, then out to neighborhoods that make the Sunset and Richmond look like the Suburbs. In the energy of the place, New York reminds of Hong Kong, but in a rougher, more abrasive kind of way. All of its exciting – I love it.

Brooklyn is its own beast, but I realized heading out just a few blocks to the bank that even the area I’m in – heavily immigrant and African-American – is just one small enclave. Just East of here a block or two is a huge Hasidic Jewish enclave. If only Berkeley were so diverse.

I’m going to spend more time exploring and less time blogging, but I thought I’d post something here in case I don’t post anything tonight, as I’ve done for the last two nights. I’m still catching up on all the sleep I missed out on getting the BSC budget done. A Board member from one of our graduate student housing co-ops found some minor errors in our FICA tax budgeting, but it can definitely wait until I get back.

For the first time since Spring of 2010, I’ll be traveling somewhere other than the West Coast. Thanks to a graduation gift from my Mom – enough of an American Airlines ticket voucher to fly anywhere domestically – I’m going to spend Spring Break in New York. My flight leaves tomorrow at 12pm from SFO.

In preparation for the plane flight, I ended up identifying and fixing the issue that was causing excessive power consumption under Linux on my Lenovo X1. I had to completely refresh my understanding of the Linux kernel, how it handles modules, and how it handles hardware. Even with my external battery, I only had about three hours of life under Linux, compared to about six or seven under Windows 7. I installed tp_smapi (“The tp_smapi kernel module exposes some features of the ThinkPad hardware/firmware via a sysfs interface.”) to determine my baseline power consumption then started trying different potential solutions I found online.  I ended up enabling a feature (enabled in Windows 7 by default) on Sandy Bridge processors called rc6 by passing “i915.i915_enable_rc6=1″ to the kernel, which allows the computer to rest in a deeper power savings state. This dropped by power consumption by about 8w and significantly decreased the temperature of the processors (it used to get obscenely hot). Forcing “Active State Power Management” on my PCI Express driver by passing “pcie_aspm=force” to the kernel reduced the power consumption by another 2w. Disabling Bluetooth, another .5w.

I actual prefer traveling without a computer to relax and indulge in fiction, but I’ve been trying to get into contemporary Chinese authors like 王小波 (Wang Xiabo) and 余华 (Yuhua).

Before the software I use now existed, the process of reading and annotating text took me an incredible amount of time (imagine spending a few minutes a sentence just to find the words’ definitions in a dictionary). Doable, but time-consuming. Recently, I’ve started using software like Justin Kovalchuk’s Perapera, a Firefox plug-in that displays dictionary definitions instantly when you move your mouse over the character. It displays definitions from CC-CEDICT, a collaboratively edited Chinese dictionary (a Wikidictionary of sorts). In the same way that Wikipedia has contemporary information that older information sources don’t, CC-CEDICT has entries for words you’d find in a Newspaper that refer to issues from the last few years. And rather than sites like Zhongwen.com – an incredible project, but done by one person who no longer maintains nor updates the indexes – CC-CEDICT crowdsources this mammoth task. And when I want to take time and diligently study the words that I don’t know from something I read online, I can simply type “a” when Perapera displays a character’s definition to add it to a word list then export that into Anki, an open-source (and very configurable) flash card program.

Long story short, technology allows me to read contemporary fiction but also exponentially increases my exposure to the language.

Anyway, New York calls. I’ll be taking pictures and trying to write when I get the opportunity.