Aim
A perpetual work in progress…
My Aim
To work towards ways of mediating the tension between poetic origination and technical formation in service of a communalistic emancipation.
Elaboration
Terminology
- poetic origination
- The process of originating forms of expression, conceptual spaces, expressive paradigms, ways of thinking, feeling, and inhabiting. Cf. Scott Buchanan, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger,
- technical formation
- The techniques through which we form, process, order, sequence, mechanize, and automate everything from our ways of understanding and processing the world to our production of new technologies themselves. Cf. Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian technocriticism, first generation Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason, and critiques and analyses of formalism and mechanization advanced by Gòˆdel, Turing, Girard and the like.
- communalistic
- With a nod towards Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism”, this invokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing of community as “a whole of articulated singularities” (by Peter Connor 2001): it means to be in communication with others and to find the end and origin of being together in that articulate sharing.
- emancipation
- The liberation of children from the dominating imposition of their parent’s programming and conditioning. This is a special case of the liberation of the oppressed and exploited from the grip of the extractors who feed off them, but it is the most special case, since the perpetuation of extractive domination is strictly dependant upon the reproduction of successive, vulnerable generations.
What is an “Aim”?1
aim (v.)
- 1300, “to estimate (number or size), calculate, count” (senses now obsolete),
from Old French aesmer, esmer (Old North French amer) “to value, rate; count, estimate,” ultimately from Latin aestimare “appraise, determine the value of” (see esteem (v.)).
Meaning in English apparently developed from “calculate,” to “calculate with a view to action, plan,” then to “direct a missile, a blow, etc.”
In our current, common sense, aiming is concerned with focusing intention on a specific, significant region of what is within our field of view. I mean it in this sense. But let the older senses sound through too: when I speak of my (always only provisional) aim, let the target in view also be considered in terms of estimation, calculation, valuation. My aim is an estimation of what I can meaningfully contribute to in an essential capacity. It is a way of guiding the calculations that determine my resource expenditure, and a means of calibrating my values.
Footnotes:
I considered naming this theme ’mission’, but am wary of the religious connotations of that word and of its debasement by extractive organizations marketing themselves as “mission driven” on the job market.