(psychoanalysis was a bit drunk at the time. i like to think the unfathomable depths of my subjectivity made her anxious. psychoanalysis is a she, right? at least for overly self-conscious but politically immature men?)
1.
i know some people who can only be described as that which is trying to be that which it is they are trying to be. (the worst part about people like this is that they never apologize for being so recursive). philip roth’s characters, on the other hand, always seem to be made of something else: they are always trying not to become that which they are trying to become. roth’s tyranny of the problem, unless misremembered, is about trying to get rid of that which you are trying to become. is this double-recursivity?! it is most certainly not ambiguity, though double recursivity could well be the structuring formal principle behind ambiguity... who knows
what we seem to have here is a classical case of 3 crazy-ass theories of the subject fighting for the throne. let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that structure determines meaning, and that identity has much less substance than it forces itself to seem to have. let’s also assume we’ve read enough or marx and freud to produce enough (circumstantial) evidence to convince a resistant third party that such is the case (or not convince him, as we’ll see).
[insert unequivocal demonstration here - qwantz fashion, the rules of for determine social thought. also, a point]
.
.. this could imply that ideas are, first, a means of strengthening social bonds and, on a somewhat distant second, an exploration into the nature and workings of reality
(which makes things like this cracked article, while exceedingly funny, ineffective
((it might be fun to try to figure out what ‘funny’ does, under these assumptions)
.also, comedy before thought..
…maybe horror before thought?! or maybe even motivating it
of course, though, resistance is only a resting stop before total subjective rearrangement. form here is also structure - it is structuring (of meaning).
if, as tolstoi claims, all happy families converge - then happiness is specular in nature. so is TED-stress, especially when specularity is halted by - inequality.
(no one can not quote tolstoi given the chance? well converged)
2.
autism x dissociation: can there be only one?
i still think autism is to analytic philosophy as derealization disorder is to continental. and even though reducing things to their substanceless functional-formal properties makes me want to cry, it’s probably a decent approach
autism, as in an easily findable TED talk, is in a way an extreme form of (marxist) reification. the subject (in the other) is removed. all people (and relations?) become things.
it’s also the very opposite of reification: thingifying all people (and their relations) is the only way (cit. needed) to make visible, and understandable, their structures. it’s the very de-reifying (analytical) act.
the discussion can be shifted one subject to the left if we consider dissociative disorders. in depersonalization/derealization, it is not the other subjects that vanish: it is the observing subject itself. the effect here, paradoxically, is similar to the one produced by continental-style theoretical criticism: a disavowal of reality (and even the reality of perception) as such.
semiegoless reading and meandering: i think personally this distance from the ego becomes the dark, featureless terror of the future. it feels as if what is demanded is not this or that determined content, but the formal composition of the ego... it’s a tough pickle (if you’ll excuse the travested freudian nod - and let it be recorded that contradiction and ambiguity, not literality, is as much the meaning of sexuality as it is of class relations).
what about the fear of death? can the autistic mind not only conceptualize, but be affected by, a notion of death?
paradoxes abound here... if norwegian wood could send certain people into a 3 day long fit of depersonalized bewilderment, while remaining a straightforward descriptive work, synecdoche ny (together with the other murakamis), while more pretentious, is infinitely less effective (at inducing autistic removal, merely hinting at it). can it be that formal madness is actually therapeutic? interestingly, the most emotionally detached indie film director, wes anderson, managed to be touching while blatantly replacing people by things.
if communication relies on a certain invisibility of language, how can the gaps in the text be the site of meaning or interpretation? are they accents?
something similar seems to be at work in fashion (and perhaps in expression in general): leaving just a little too much of your t-shirt show from under your sweater, this sort of differential deviation, could also end up as a mechanism of change.
this is, at last, the very discussion of form. changes in content, or particular contents, can be taken to express particular identified subjectivity,
a change in form expresses the subject as such, the very presence of a subject!
and is in turn subject to imitation, convergence, spreading, and eventually collapsing into content.
3.
some concerns over the transitory character of thought:
there’s a scene in the first season of game of thrones where it is claimed that one must keep reading to keep their minds sharp, same as one must continually sharpen a sword. the scene bothers me, but what it claims makes perfect sense considering my personal plight of forgetting (all but distant structural impressions) faster than i learn anything new. now this might be either a personal cognitive shortcoming or a fundamental property of human thought.
the latter would be a little unsettling, considering that someone would have to write in a day what you read on the the next and then forget, unless you also write it away etc.
the thing with things is that we know them for what they are, but not for what they aren’t.
i know, i know... that’s ontologically inevitable, it’s the very form of perception, the condition for a cognitive reality etc etc. still annoying as shit.
this is what is wrong with technological breakthroughs... or breakthroughs in general. the very possibility of something new having a huge impact on the world is actually testimony to the limitations of our consciousness as a race. it is also one of the reasons why academic work can be so infuriating... you can end up spending most of you time mining the unknown - the realm of what things are still not - for news on what things aren’t. 10 years later you know as much of what things are as a layman - the only difference is that you’ve collected tons of reasons why they are not what they are not. (this might be a bit like the fact that you can only notice bad special effects once you've seen better ones - they are either made of negativity or we really like to be fooled). the peer-reviewed journal institution can be little more than a forum for people to collectively figure out what things are not - and very occasionally also what they are.
4.
and this, in short, is why i don’t always floss
5.
qed
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