Andrew's Posts

We all know who the band Oasis is. And we all know the generation of this name for this website, as though everyone apart of this watering hole must be a fan of the band Oasis. But I would like to take some time, not too much, and rewrite history. I don't want to substitute a lie for a the truth, the history of events was never the truth, and what I want to say isn't a lie as much it is a desire to open up a new the possibility of a new future through a rendering of the past.

Oasisband is then a frequency of an oasis. I will later address these two terms separately, but I want to create an image, an image of two almost contradictory ideas existing both at this specific url but also as a point that exists outside of technology a point that exists inside and within communities and individuals. A frequency, an electronic, technological point, position, or flux that brings together the various creatures of the desert into one community.

And yes, community is the word that I am looking for. An oasisband is nothing more, and at its best is a community. A community that is not simply based on geographic closeness or physical/mental necessity, it is a community that can cross a limitless number of boundaries—it can connect concentric and eccentric lines of flight, or it can be nothing more than a beautiful vista, amongst an unfathomable sea of sand.

An oasis is essentially a micro climate, a different climate, full of life and possibility amongst a desert which grows larger every moment. It is a climate that is not simply created by chance nor by design. It can be created by a roaming boar who creates an indent in the sand, a bird who comes to eat the life found in the feces of the boar, a seed brought on the foot or the feces of the bird, and the rain which accumulates in this indent. This can become an oasis, or it can stay the exact same. Whatever happens is always understandable in reverse, looking back at the action, but the possibilities are always open...there is limitlessness in every moment and in every being.

Much has been said about frequencies, about technologies, and much has been said to exclaim and much has been said to defame these frequencies. But in actuality a frequency is a medium, and yes it is a medium to transfer new thoughts, rapidly changing views of the world, create new communities and foster a fledgling oasis, but yes, it is also a medium to transfer images that increasingly lack connection to the soil, create mediocre relationships, and entertain and distract.

What we have then on this site is a possibility for individuals to come together and create images and personifications of themselves and their bodies of work. Through this site and this frequency individuals will be able to come to a common watering hole. A place/a frequency that supports individuals and through that support creates interdependent communities. To share a common resource, whether that be physical or electronic is the basis for community.

So here is the vision for a revitalized Oasis Band. Individuals would use the space to host their own content, i.e. my academic writing, jeff's comics and music, jesse's artwork (and anything else anyone of us wanted to post) on their own portion of the website. We would all share a common homepage, and would be able to find every one's own space through a page similar to the current about us page.

Why O Band? Oasis Band is a beautifully designed website that already has the functionality necessary to be converted into a watering hole. And in the era of social networking where everyone has a page on facebook, twitter, has their photos and so on, there is a complete lack of content and to a greater degree community.

Gaps, openings and possibilities are being opened and left opened in this modern world. Community, which builds on technology, provides a powerful voice in an unsettled, postmodern world, and an Oasis Band can provide that voice if it commands the proper tone, compels the proper audience, and chooses to speak beautifully and softly even in the context of former belches and the constant noise of the current age.

Moved from a comment to a post by Jesse Donat

Well I was looking to log onto the server because I wanted to update my Ipod as I forgot to do it before coming. But since I can´t find the ftp server I might as well make a comment on this dead website.

Currently we have no understanding what the media´s role is on the cognitive development of kids. The only studies that are done in this area are studies that attempt to get kids to consume more media and how to go about doing it. But what we don´t know is whether or not kids immersion into the media makes them more or less susceptible to subconsious control through the media.

Does completely omnipresent, unregulated, ever sophisticated, and incredibly addictive forms of media make children better consumers, less like to think creatively and develop resistance and revolutionary attitidues towards our current system of massive thought control...well I would have to think so.

The fear that you might be addressing Jesse is that the government would start playing a role in what kids and others are able to access. Sure, this seems like the common cold war fear that the federal government will be censoring us in order to believe that they are our masters and we should simply lie down and obey.

But on the other hand, what does a completely unregulated media system mean. It means the people that are controlling what we have access aren´t even people that we elected. They are people that are responsible to a system of capitalism that cares not for the individual, cares not for society, but only cares for an increase in the share value for the next quarter.

On one hand we have the federal government regulating, and on the other hand we have a bunch machine like capitalists regulating. It seems necessary that the two forces at least try and balance one another, at least there needs to be some conflict between these two forces. One tries to create new and ever more addictive media, and other tries to think about the consequences and if it believes those consequences are atrocitious they should try and do something.

Rampant government and, or rampant industry provide no hope for a future where the individual is able to think and act freely. Government regulation is a small pebble amongst a massive culture of thought manipulation.

Here is an excerpt from my Junior Thesis, I submitted this with my resume for an intership in the spring. If you are interested in reading the rest of the 70 pages, I am more than willing to email you the rest of it, when it is done (2 weeks from now). It is sorta political, I guess . . . figured I haven't posted in a LOOONGGG time, so here goes:

The Eternal Recurrence

“Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths: they offend each other face to face: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.”
“All that is straight lies,” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “All truth is crooked time itself is a circle.”

This excerpt from Zarathustra is Zarathustra’s first encounter with what he and Nietzsche will later to refer to as the eternal recurrence. What is incredibly interesting about this section is that not even Zarathustra, the one who is great heights from the rest of humanity, is able to understand the message behind what the dwarf, the proclaimer of the recurrence, is trying to say. Zarathustra is unable to hear the eternal recurrence and he tries to dismiss it, he feels that this dwarf is a bad omen, preaching to him something terrible that must be rejected. The Dwarf explains to Zarathustra, that time is not a linear pattern, a history with a beginning and end. But rather time itself, is like the Overhuman, in that it is a process, in which we must both engage in this process as well as accept it. But at the outset, though, we can see that Nietzsche realizes how difficult the eternal recurrence is, and is probably admitting that he himself, although presented with the notion many times, was not at first able to understand it. Thus, the readers must be very careful when trying to understand this philosophy—it is one so delicate, yet intricate, that we can not afford to mishear Nietzsche when he speaks of the eternal recurrence.
The eternal recurrence effectively serves as the opposition to hedonism and nihilism in a world without repressive, dogmatic morality and the absence of God. Richard Avramenko argues that once Nietzsche created the eternal recurrence as an opposition to repressive notions of truth (specifically, Christian notions of truth), there becomes a large void. In Avramenko’s essay he is specifically referring to a void of friendship in that Nietzsche effectively denied any sort of ground in which friendship can form. As Avramenko says, “The whole of Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be understood as Zarathustra’s quest for a type of friendship that can grow out of this groundless ground.” I agree with Avramenko here that Nietzsche both created a void with the eternal recurrence and also tried to fill that void with the recurrence. So, when Nietzsche chooses to deny the conceptual truth of good and evil, it leaves a huge vacancy for what humans should do. Nietzsche fills this void with the eternal recurrence. The idea is that every action, or every way that we live our lives will occur over and over again, eternally. This serves as Nietzsche’s beyond-morality moral system—if we are truly able to joyously say ‘yes’ to every action we take, then we are headed towards the overhuman. Essentially then, the eternal recurrence serves to give a path for humans to try to become the overhuman—to understand the process of subversion and creation, which is the overhuman, without falling into nihilistic despair.
As Avramenko points out in his essay, the eternal recurrence is not exactly something that westerners are easily able, or even willing to accept:
“With the declaration of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche is introducing uncertainty and unpredictability. It would thus be better to refer to the eternal recurrence as a flavor. It is a flavor for which we must develop a taste. The eternal recurrence, as Nietzsche well knows, is a tough pill to swallow and this is precisely why he calls it ‘the greatest weight.’”

To begin with the notion that time is anything but linear is problematic for the Western ear. Avramenko places Nietzsche in a debate with Augustine who argues, referring to cyclical theories of time, “even when it [the soul] has attained wisdom; it must proceed on an unremitting alternation between false bliss and genuine misery. How can there be true bliss, without any certainty of its eternal continuance?” Augustine’s reaction to cyclic notions of time demonstrates a very Christian and western understanding of how time functions, and furthermore, a reality that is dependent upon having God and a heaven to obtain when time has ended for a specific human being. Yet obviously, Nietzsche rejects the Christian morality and God himself. Not only is Nietzsche creating a philosophy to fill his ‘moral hole’, he is also directly responding to and refuting typical Christian understandings of time, existence, and ‘right’ action. The eternal recurrence seeks to dislodge the authority that Christians have assumed and display a direct contradiction of it, both to fulfill his own philosophy and to engage in irony. To argue that Nietzsche believes we need to authoritatively accept his eternal recurrence and abandon the ‘inferior’ Christian notion, is completely outside of Nietzsche’s project. Instead of choosing one over the other, Nietzsche asks us to develop a taste for the eternal recurrence. Whether or not the eternal recurrence is ‘true’ or ‘better’ is of no real consequence, but by developing this taste, or ability to hear the recurrence, we are able to see the ironic nature in all human things and head up the mountain towards the overhuman.
The eternal recurrence serves not only to disrupt a Christian notion of time, but it also serves to disrupt any sort of linear, rational, or higher truth. The eternal recurrence renders it impossible for there to be definitive truth or a values system that transcends time, space, geography or even relativity because the eternal recurrence exemplifies a system with no actual truth, but rather truth as a process, something that must be constantly created and destroyed in order for the elimination of repressive notions of truth, and leave the Dionysian, or the positive, liberated aspects of mankind in their wake. Truth, value, and morals can not be habitual or long-lasting under this system; as the Earth itself does, they must be always changing, engaged in a process of creation and destruction—plate tectonics. In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche warns us of any words that do not take part in this process of creation and destruction because they will try to lead us to single goals, aims or meanings. “The whole surface of consciousness must be kept clear of all imperatives. Beware even of every great word, ever great prose! The organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down . . . it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as means toward a whole.”
After looking closely at these words and trying to understand what they mean, we now must ask the same question that Nietzsche asked himself towards the end of his second essay in the Genealogy of Morals, “What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?” And Nietzsche responds to this question:
Have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on Earth has cost? How much reality had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much “God” sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!

With this we can now look at the rhetoric of Zarathustra and Ecce Homo and look for the subversive and ironic process in which Nietzsche tries to both create and destroy systems of values, truth, rhetoric, and inquiry. But we must listen closely, and dissect with delicate fingers as to not try to find the new idols and ideals that Nietzsche is creating, but to look to see how he moves outside of the truth-game altogether. Nietzsche’s divergent rhetoric is arguably the most difficult part of Nietzsche’s works to truly understand, but by not understanding this essential quality of Nietzsche, it is not possible to hear Nietzsche.
Before we move away from the fundamentals of Nietzsche’s words and concepts, and move into his rhetoric in general, we must take into account the Overhuman and the Eternal Recurrence and their affects on language in general. For Nietzsche, language can have no transcendent truth, but truth in language is similar to the Overhuman and the Eternal Recurrence in that it is able to obtain some form of human truth through a process of creating and destroying. Essentially then, language is not transcendent, and as Tuska Benes argues, it is only adequate if we forget that we created language and that we created truth. “Accepting the illusion that words referred to things allowed early humans to live in mutual trust. The invention of truth thus had ‘pleasant, life-preserving consequences’ Society, however, had thereby exchanged a set of lies for the truth.” So with a language that humans have created they were able to become social creatures, they could move away from, repress, basic primordial desires. But for Nietzsche, this conversion from the base creature to the social creature brought with it inherently negative, inherently repressive, and inherently forgetful forces. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche allegorically compared this social change of human-creatures “well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure,” who had to repress those instincts to effectively live socially to sea animals coming out of the water who had to “walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves upright’” —the skills that the sea creatures had developed for marine life became unnecessary. This shift from primordial language to a socially ‘meaningful’ language helped humans to adapt to their new surroundings, but it also meant that humans forgot that there was no truth, and instead believed that the truth and language that they had created was somehow transcendent. “Faith in truth depended for Nietzsche on a process of forgetting. People had to deny and repress the actual origins of language in order to believe in the accuracy of its representations.” Society, today as we see it, is fundamentally established on the fact that we have forgotten that we have created truth, language, and god, because “acknowledging the rhetorical foundation of words would have automatically destabilized the edifice of truth built upon them.”

Works Cited

Avramenko, Richard. “Zarathustra and his Asinine Friends: Nietzsche on Post-modern, Post-liberal Friendship.” American Political Science Association. Chicago, Annual Meeting: np., 2004. 1-30.

Benes Tuska. "Language and the Cognitive Subject: Heymann Stienthal and Friedrich Nietzsche." Language & Communication Vol. 26 Issue 3/4 (Jul 2006): 218-230.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All. Trans. Kaufmann. London: Penguin Books, 1978.