miranda (w.h. auden)
My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely, As the poor and sad are real to the good king, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree, Turned a somersault and ran away waving; My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely. The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body Melted into light as water leaves a spring, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me, Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running: My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely. He kissed me awake, and no one was sorry; The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything, And the high green hill sits always by the sea. So to remember our changing garden, we Are linked as children in a circle dancing: My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely, And the high, green hill sits always by the sea. -- W. H. Auden
solaris.
wow. just emerged from solaris. that just ate me whole and it was amazing.
any more adventures of this kind? mind and matter issues and love and identity ones too? recommendations here.
wow.
abstraction.
rippled from here. i am not sure how ‘conceptuality’ is different from ‘abstraction’. in all fairness, i am trying to do something else here.
[from the OED]
1. The act of withdrawing; withdrawal, separation or removal; in modern usage euphem. secret or dishonest removal; pilfering, purloining.
an abstraction I never greatly cared about. 1848 MILL Pol. Econ. 5 (1876) A wrongful abstraction of wealth from certain members of the community.
2. ‘Abstraction, in chemistry, denotes the drawing off, or exhaling away, a menstruum from the subject it had been put to dissolve. Some also use the word as synonymous with distillation or even cohobation.’ Chambers Cyc. Suppl. 1753.
3. The act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations; or a substance independently of its attributes; or an attribute or quality independently of the substance to which it belongs.
it is merely a negation to one or more objects, in consequence of its concentration on another.4. The result of abstracting: the idea of something which has no independent existence; a thing which exists only in idea; something visionary.
5. A state of withdrawal or seclusion from worldly things or things of sense.
6. The state of mental withdrawal; inattention to things present; absence of mind.
7. In the fine arts, the practice or state of freedom from representational qualities; a work of art with these characteristics.
8. Comb. abstraction-monger, one who deals with visionary ideas.
ephemerality.
This moved me this morning.
From the point of view of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps its least important component. Indeed, if we waited long enough, if we could observe planetary dynamics at geological time scales, the rocks and mountains which define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would dissolve into the great underground lava flows of which they are but temporary hardenings. Indeed, given that it is just a matter of time for any one rock or mountain to be reabsorbed into the self-organized flows of lava driving the dynamics of the lithosphere, these geological structures represent a local slowing-down in this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow : very slow for rocks, faster for lava.
Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes and norms. Here too we would be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chaining into our organic bodies and cultural minds, as well as by the time scale of the binding operation. Given long enough time scales, it is the flow of biomass through food webs that matters, as well as the flow of genes through generations, and not the bodies and species that emerge in these flows. Given long enough time scales, our languages are also momentary slowing-downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that can give rise to a multitude of different structures.
[Manuel de Landa, entire text of 'The Geology of Morals' here]
To The Book
Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours
all the time
of course you are not finished
how can you be finished
when the morning begins again
or the moon rises
even the words are not finished
though they may claim to be
never mind
I will not be
listening when they say
how you should be
different in some way
you will be able to tell them
that the fault was all mine
whoever I was
when I made you up
—W. S. Merwin
areyouspeakingmy?
in a discussion (it felt more like i was refusing to have the discussion, actually) with greeeni i found myself saying something like ‘there is no language’ and had to laugh at my own utterance. geez, nutshell! what are you on about?
‘t was not actually what i meant.
what i wondered about is the following idea:
familiarity with various clusters of language that different groups of people use every day, i.e. the ’speech communities’ however temporary or contestable they may be of civil servants, anthropologists, dock workers, mothers, Fort McPherson Gwichin, Russian Israeli, people from one village…
+
the way in which the evocation of specific words trail a whole lot of others with them, both denoting and connotating. so the image this conjured up in my head was the following: word rings your door bell. as you answer you find not just that word has arrived, but with him/her/it an entire clan tucked in a caravan, with various objects dangling from either side, and drawn by a supersized penguin. this has all kinds of effects on different people.
+
i wonder then how it is possible bar in philosophy or linguistic seminars [which are highly specialised speech communities] to speak about something called ’semantics’ – and i still don’t buy the idea that context is considered here – that purports to be universal knowledge. and the thing is that it is circular: to understand it you have to submit to it, which makes you understand it, which in turn makes you part of the speech community, up to some degree. notwithstanding whether saussure and structural linguistics are pretty exceptional cases.
or am i just brainwashed by anthropology? which defeats the point in arguing with me anyways.
i think i need some sun to get these thoughts in boots to lighten up and dance naked.
i also need some convincing that it is entirely unnecessary for me to read up on the entire history of western philosophy since parmenides in order to be able to finish this chapter. no violence please.
autonomy.
Such oscillating systems [as ecological systems] are operated by thresholds – not by states, but by differences and changes and even differences between changes. There is information not only in our words but also in the processes we describe. It’s nice to have the explanation in step with the system of ideas within the process you are trying to explain… Now if you are going to face oscillating systems, you meet a very curious circumstance – that a certain degree of reality is imported to the ‘system’, the chunk of living matter. There is a justification of some sort in drawing a line around it, perhaps in giving it a name. That justification is based on the fact of autonomy, of literal ‘autonomy’ in that the [topology of the] system names itself. The injunctions which govern the [topology of the] system necessarily are message which stand for the name of the system. The system is auto-self-nomic, self-naming, or self-ruling. And that is the only autonomy there is, as far as I know. It’s recursivenss, and recursiveness is crucial to any system containing if-then links, where the ‘then’ is not logical but temporal ‘then’ (Bateson, A Sacred Unity, 1991: 181-2)
he’s the (dead) man of the week, definitely.
discipline-trapped (again).
no matter how many times I consider it, and however much I want to believe this is how it is, I think there is a definite problem with Ingold’s assertion of shared worlds, a continuous world of subject positions. I cannot imagine how much you can legitimately speak of shared worlds, if at the first round you try to speak outside of your discipline you are misunderstood and even an enormous amount of arguing cannot get you a lot further, possibly because other disciplines are not quite as open to the workings of disciplines that are not their own. Anthropologists (whatever else they do in terms of ridiculous closed argument-styles in a highly hermetic language) do open themselves up for difference when doing fieldwork. They learn, among other practical skills, how to learn to see how other people see, through dialogic engagement and everyday presence in other people’s environments/lifeworlds.
It made me quite sad to discover myself thinking that speaking outside my discipline was, to a significant degree, a waste of my time, if I am not willing to speak another’s language entirely and actually lose a lot of what I have to say about a certain social contexts and human lives. If I cast everything I know about people’s lifeworlds in utilitarian terms, am I not defeating the purpose of what made me look at those lifeworlds in the first place? The trouble with being in and of a subaltern discipline has hit me, again…
The consequence of this line of thinking frightens me, because it radically questions ideas of intervention, and makes me question the kinds of ideas I have been harbouring about the possible uses of anthropology outside of ‘academic argument’. If by adapting to power I change the content of my inquiry so much that it is unrecognisable and largely just like any other policy-speak (drawing also on those boxed conclusions), do I want to go ahead with it still? In an environment more and more hostile to alternative thinking do I really want to bail out from education and go into policy?
Ach, let’s finish this piece of academic argument aka thesis first… and if that doesn’t win me over to academia, nothing will... 
p.s. happy kleeserchersdag! bei mech war e jo dest joer scho mi frei komm…
must analytical writing disappoint?
here an excerpt of an email i wrote earlier… it rings with more than just the addressee luqman [who made a remark about something in an article i wrote sounding foucauldian] so i thought i’d extend it to more people in the hope to get answers to (one of) the most pressing questions of my life at the moment: how to write the bloody thing??! usually followed in rapid succession with *expletive starting with F deleted*…. quote here:
i was reminded, at several points today, of your remark about sounding post-structuralist or whatever in the article about saying how certain legal frameworks pose things in certain ways and how they produce subjects.
i think, deep down actually i am still a structuralist, and proud to be one.
the trouble with social science analysis [and any other analysis actually] is though that is takes this one step sideways [note i do not say away], and takes a stance [especially in writing it down then, because of conformity to certain rules].
but i guess my point is a different one. do you think we can ever get to the same understanding of the world because of our different life paths?
i also presume this is one of the central puzzles of my thesis.
one question that follows from it is: and if so, how do we then choose to write about it?
the idea that as soon as you write things down people are going to call you flippant, or foucauldian or levistraussian or bakhuninian or silly or unintelligible or whatever.
writing must disappoint i think, it doesn’t work in another way.
qualification: that is analytical writing, as opposed to fiction. fiction sustains the illusion if done properly.
do you think analytical writing can reach the kind of illusion that fiction works with? philosophy-as-fiction in the more common sense of fiction versus non-fiction, not crafted blabla.
no rhetorical exit strategies to the question please.
(one of) the consequences of writing.
“Phonetic writing generates cultural innovation by promoting two processes: economisation and scepticism. Economisation: because the form of communal memory is freed from its dependence on rhythm. Scepticism: because the content of communal memory is subjected to systematic criticism. With regards to economisation, we may note that in oral cultures most of the formal reflection of happenings takes the form of performances repeatedly recited by the custodians of memory to those who hear of it. These large-scale performative utterances have to be cast in a standardised form if there is to be any chance of their being repeated by successive generations; and the rhythms of oral verse are the privileged mechanisms of recall because rhythm enlists the co-operation of a whole series of bodily motor reflexes in the work of remembrance. But rhythm sets drastic limits to the verbal arrangement of what might be said and thought. Phonetic writing breaks down these limitations. By substituting a visual record for an acoustic one, the alphabet frees a society from the constraints of rhythmic mnemonics.”
(Paul Connerton 1989: 76)
It is not an entirely new idea he describes. But is it a point beautifully made….Of course, in the process things are lost too, and his argument does not hold all the water it should…
Need to learn more about memory and the way in which recent neuroscientific innovations shed new light on memory-as-social-process. Any ideas for readings?
Yesterday, I came across a new journal called ‘Neuroethics’ that is freely available to everyone, which in academic practice is still the exception, sadly.
Photo: taken only about a month and a half ago in what feels like an entirely different era/world. how do you remember the snow?
1 comment