Hope in Philosophy

I want to preface this entry by saying that we are not nearly explicit enough about the role that *hope* plays in philosophy. I wrote on facebook yesterday that ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ is one of the most underused phrases in philosophy.

Everything we write, everything that’s good I mean, has this air of ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ about it — thinking is a hope for a logical closure rather than some methodical activity. And we are not even talking about ‘subjectivism’, I mean, we are not saying that this hope arises from some deep rooted fear, prejudices, desires, and so on — or even from a perspective or school. We each hope in our own way regardless of declared allegiances… but rather, it is simply the hope for closure, an attempt to make a connection — ‘wouldn’t it be nice if these things were connected?’ — a hope for a good grade, if you want to think about it like that.

So I want to foward a few claims that would be nice — to me — if they were true, ie, it will mean that I would have verily accomplished something. I want to claim that we’ve been viewing the event in far too grandiose a way. Earlier on we formulated the ‘impossibility postulate’, which states that it is impossible to work descriptively, from the aftermath of an event, back to the source, since the eye that judges the event remains constant via this method.

This led to the assertion of the superiority of theory over analysis, which, as always, leads to the question of whether our effort, as theorists is *political* or *explanational*: whether we are drawing forth events from history, or whether we are explaining history

And let’s leave this question unanswered since the above was just a summary: that’s where we are in the conception of the historical event. I now want to propose that the *only moment of disruption* is this brief moment when the zero makes its appearance.

I hope this is true, I have several reasons:

(1) Naturalism and Reference — now we are correct in sensing the need for philosophy to attack nature, but we have not realized that nature is simply the stability of reference. Nature, is, if we think about the term, is associated with labor, with being able to work with the world, however abstract.

Now, reference is merely a kind of secondary activity, it is merely a kind of memory aid. Whatever turmoil we may be in — well, that’s sort of the point — that *memory*, tracking, is the very basic act of being in touch with the world. It is, once again, entirely secondary to the actual labor that would take place — it is merely a kind of pointing, a kind of indexicality.

I *hope* we can claim that we are always forgetting indexicality somehow. Well — I have an image in mind, a narrative in mind: that we are always confusing indexing with … reference. Indexing means to point at something, reference — or however we want to phrase this, the large set of concepts related to the idea of some more essential relationship between the mark and the world, eg, representation. For example, our basic argument regarding math the other day was that we always confuse working with the marks of things with working with the things themselves in some way, some labor of numbers.

We are fully aware, of course, of the secondary nature of the mark, that the mark is different from the thing. But our basic drive is towards the error — if we can even call it that — of conceiving of some more essential relationship than merely marking.

(Perhaps, this is basically the inevitable conclusion of our increasing bitterness towards the world, our increasing withdrawl and rejection, etc. — ie, when all our hopes have been let down, when we can no longer declare any allegiance to anything, not for a positive (ie, individualism) but rather a negative reason (bitterness)… the rejection of all proclaimed forms of disruption, freedom.)

Now, this seems to lead towards a transcendental moment but I want to suggest that this is not true — I mean, in the sense of, some transcendental moment when we suddenly have this vision of mark as mark. But rather I want to suggest a momentary vision, or maybe some path for action, some …hope, I guess, not meaning to be cute — but at the same time, sensing that this repetition of this word is not merely haphazard — which I hope is the zero.

The zero, as Rotman says, has a dual role: at once a reference to something, a number, and at the same time a reference to the mark: specifically, to the absence of the mark.

When speaking of the zero we were mostly thinking about algorithms; the zero was enormously practical for human arithmetic. But algorithms themselves are like riding on the back of a tiger (an interesting Nietzsche metaphor for danger) — the way that they work for this particular situation, painstakingly assured — does not at all guarantee a universal validity outside the tiny little region of stability — an algorithm can really be treated as a *claim* or even a *promise* of having understood something.

But nontheless, the algorithm is a brief moment, a flash, when the markness of the mark becomes visible — albeit, it immediately suggests another system. Not, once again, in some transcendental sense, but rather in the sense in which the zero refers to the mere act of marking and in doing so sets forth a kind of *hope*.

An algorithm, again, is not really a paradigm shift but a formalization of a hope, a transformation of a hope into a claim or a guarantee. The zero is the momentary disruption of some more intimate relationship between mark and world or event.

I’ve been thinking about the Gauss insight to, the gauss algorithm. I hope that the Gauss algorithm would give some reason to believe that a kind of ‘dereferencing’ is in fact an ongoing process and not merely a one-off thing, as it appears right now. There, I pointed out how the impasse was due to a kind of linear, causational, observational mental picture as opposed to a ‘detectivistic’ one, ie, one that would disjoin the linear flow of the marking or counting activity. Perhaps the zero would work here too, as the mark of some event, the mark of the origin as opposed to the mark in the midst of some procedure.

TBC, further questions:
1. Does this occur for animals?
2. Does this relate to the ‘epistemic weight’ of allegory, or the tightrope we have to walk when thinking of labor?

Literality in Epistemology

Literalism is a kind of an impossible demand — it is, I hypothesize, at the heart of our cultural understanding of knowledge. Well, literality and figurality are, it seems to me, almost the same thing, they refer to a kind of impossible angle we have to take, sort of like the tantalizing zen koan. It speaks of something at once of an obvious and unreachable, stupid (thus, something that we should have avoided) and yet and impossible to prevent — inescapable guilt. What I mean is, consider, for example, reading something that sticks with you — like a philosophical sort of book, or something, say, Heart of Darkness in this blog. I’m always recalling passages in that book, for example, whenever I realize something new I seem to talk to that book. However I arrived at my own insight, the discussion with the book always seems to focus on some passage that was taken, at some point, too figuratively: we approach a passage once again with a renewed, “literal” understanding and with the impression that we could have simply gone this route all along!

So it’s strange how much weight we give to literalism as this kind of “shortcut”, as if all we had to do was be more literal, more careful — as a kind of ruby slipper, a la “The Wizard of Oz”. What’s interesting to me is the enormous importance in which we hold literality, which is nonetheless something incredibly elusive.

I want to talk about a few things — math / coding. I do not have the role in which “literalism” (properly applied, to each case) firmly worked out in my mid but I do have a vague outline. And I really want to consider what may considered more unconventional subjects for the topic of “literality” in order to avoid running into some pitfalls that I sense will be there if we deal with literature.

What is mathematical literalism? In the last essay I spoke about the Gauss insight, and I spoke of a recent personal experience involving the Gauss insight (let’s just call it that), and the logic of that story was, indeed, that my poor roommates were caught in a kind of error or an impasse — as if there were a shortcut there. It seems to me now that the Gauss story seems to contain the elements for all mathematical insight in general, which is a kind of dematerialization and rematerializing … well, I mean, these terms used metaphorically. My roommates / Gauss’s classmates had, it seemed, a too representational understanding of the referent of the problem, they understood the problem too well in a sense. Again — here, even as I talk about this, I speak of a kind of obvious error or shortcut. Maybe Dorothy’s ruby slippers should simply be taken as a figure for epistemlogy as such — the study of shortcuts or (less misguided) the study of cultural understandings of shortcuts. I spoke of the distinction between “observational analysis” versus “detective work” there too (valorizing the latter), which seems to relate, indeed, to what basically amounts to the distinction between analysis and theory broached in the beginning — distinctions which may perhaps be misguided: “We have” — so I said (something to the effect of) — “for the longest time been attempting analysis, we have been asking how an ‘obviously eventful’ event takes place, but what we need instead is theory, which asks how, theoretically, given a set of circumstances, an event could unfold — and then seeking such an unfolding in history”.

But what is the “rematerialization” — the forming of a new model? Because for Gauss the case was not the abandoning of linear causation but the reestablishing of one. This seems to relate to the zero, which — and I find this refreshing — we hypothesized (following Rotman, I mean) to arise from pragmatic exigencies — the zero made arithmetic a lot easier, it was a translation of states on an abacus, which may have blank rows. But we also stated that an algorithm is always painstakingly constructed, so that those who use it afterwards believe it to be natural or entirely motivated, unaware of the danger of the path on which they travel.

Let me digress here momentarily — actually, I’m honestly not sure how relevant the following will be. I was reading, for some reason, a wikipedia article about man-eating lions when I was redirected to a British an attempt to build a railroad in Africa using Indian labor, the site of one of the worst cases of man eating lions in history… something like 100 lives or something … this is probably very insensitive me, or maybe not, for ignoring the horrifying plight of the exploited masses or something, but Churchill said something about the railroad, about how he admired the courage of those who “mucked through it” — he’s speaking of the white British colonists of course — of espousing a kind of stiff-upper lip British spirit. This is of course a good metaphor for what we’ve been discussing so far, but what I really like is this idea of mucking… the construction of the railroad required mucking.

The issue here, it seems to me, is the establishing of a new literalism — not merely a new route, but a new way of conceiving of that route. The establishing of the zero was the rejection of an older form of materialism in order to (re)establish an era of epistemic literalism, but one that has been painstakingly developed, pragmatically, by exploring every case, and by mucking through, and finally forgotten (and maybe the above metaphor is really applicable here, too) – in this notion of “merely literal”.

… TBC

 

Temporal Disjunctions and the Creation of Experience

I had the thought yesterday that I had been going about it all backwards: instead of attempting to characterize the experience of disjunction — even if we do declare that “we are talking in very definite ways about experiences that never happen” — we should simply be asking, in an abstract way, what is it that disjoins our experience?

There is an great scene in Faulkner’s Was about a poker game — well, the highlight of that short story is indeed a poker game, and poker itself is — even if this sounds cliche — an excellent metaphor for life. Because in poker games, you never know what is happening until the cards are finally turned — you never know whether someone is honest, bluffing, or faking the bluff, etc. In poker we experience everything all at once, in a sudden rush of holism at the end — which resembles, not the linear, reactive way in which normal life experienced but rather the way in which liminal states are experienced — such, as, for example, these moments of intensity, when man is pushed to his limits, that Conrad is fascinated in. So the task, I realized last night, was not the attempt to describe everyday life, or even its liminal states — there are some serious problems with asking about “liminal states”, since the word itself is almost an oxymoronic — problems that we are probably familiar with, ie, we with our bitterness towards society — the way in which all of society is about a crisis that is not really a crisi but an accepted “state” — but rather to start from scratch and ask how liminal states are even possible.

2 further comments or corrollaries — first, we wish here, I mean, we hope we can, finally take a very definite break from all the declared crises of society — we’ve been trapped here too long — it feels like an enormous impasse. We cannot even start with what society considers “events”, “disruptions” — that is already too late – but we need to make a fresh start as only theorizing and speculation can — perhaps — bring us. Second, and this is personal, I feel I have been stuck for too long on this notion of “darkness and labor” — it feeels like an enormous impasse to me. We cannot not (unwittingly) presuppose that labor will bring us any sort of insight or knowledge, we cannot look for disruptions with the very ‘eyes” that is meant to be disrupted — eyes in quotes here because we are talking about the linear eye… If my hunch is correct, then we are on the verge of overcoming an great problem, often stated but never clearly understood — the problem of dealing with genuine crisis and the way in which it is lost as soon as it is known.

- The Zero -

The time is shattered, experience is shatterd, because of representation, because of the trace. In other words, the world is shattered because we have before us the puzzle peices to represent the puzzle of experience, and not because experience has, via some kind of intensity, been shattered beforehand. Poker shatters experience and disrupts the flow of time, it is not merely the representation of an experience that was shatterd a priori.

I’ve been reading — well, I mean, I tend to skim things nowadays — I’ve figured out long ago that you can understand what you read only if you already understand it — I’ve been reading a lot of Brian Rotman lately, I’ve been reading his book on the history of the zero, the mathematical zero. His major argument, I believe, is that plays a special role in the holisticizing of experience, at the moment when the cards are laid out, the traces brought together.

His account of numbers, arithmetic,etc. is highly pragmatic — related closely to accounting, trade, bookkeeping, and so forth, and not to anything like pure mathematics. In retrospect, I seem in myself a vicious religious streak (cf, “labor”, “darkness”, etc) that I really need to address. Mathematics is basically a set of techniques used for the manipulation of numbers, specifically, for adding and counting numbers. The zero greatly simplifies arithmetic but there is definitely a kind of blindness to it as well. I mean, working without the zero is conceptually easier but pragmatically difficult — think about, for example, adding Roman numerals — it can be done. The shfit, I believe, towards the zero can be considered a trace from a linear sort of experience to a holisticized one, I mean, a reassembled one.

Algorithms itself are a kind of gathering together of traces — an algorithm is put together from shattered peices.

Let me digress momentarily and tell you about an experience I had recently, and the lessons I drew from that, upon reflection. I don’t mean to self-aggrandize or anything, even if it may sound like that.

Anyways, the basic story is that I was able to rather quickly solve a problem that some of my roommates had been working on for hours. This is not because I’m a genius or anything, but mostly because of all those years of high school math competitions. Yet I want to also make some cliams about a sort of “insight” or perspectival shift that “cracks” such a problem. It is a very interesting problem in elementary combinatorics: how does one enumerate the set of n-element combinations selected from a set of m elements? So, for example, if you had the set of lowercase letters, {a,b,…z}, and you considered all the 4 element combinations (ie, unordered, so that  {e,j,z,a} would be the same as {a,e,j,z}) then what would be a technique for enumerating the set of all 4-element subsets, that is, assign a unique natural number to a given subset?

So this problem is hard if you try to do this… “directly” in some way. One must not have faith in work, in a sense. You have to sort of step away from the imagination of a person “counting” and incrementing each set. Since we are considering unordered sets then we might as well consider them in alphabetical order — so the problem becomes enumerating all the alphabetical 4-tuples, or whatever the technical term is. It’s a problem of counting — we obviously know how to count to 100, it’s very easy, but how does one count if one can only count increasing, non-repeating 2-digit numbers? Like:

12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, … etc. — and how would one (easily) map this to the series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? How would we know, quickly, what the 27th element of this series would be?

So this is the obvious but also the wrong way to approach the problem. It is very computationally intensive, especially as one considers, say, 3-digits, or 4 digits. Yet there is also the mistaken belief — and this is why they were at an impasse — that there is some underlying reference to this problem. One gets caught in a kind of mathematical impasse of translation — that is, doesn’t this number necessarily refer to that moment of counting? Isn’t this problem asking about that procedure, that linear procedure, and nothing else? Isn’t our only mode of progress the mental observation of that procedure?

This reminds me of a famous story about Gauss — which is in fact, now that I think about it, pretty much the very same story. The story goes, that Gauss was told, along with some classmates, by a bored teacher — who wanted a break apparently — to add all the numbers from 1 to 100 and produce an answer. Of course Gauss, via a leap of insight, was able to produce the number within seconds: (1+100)*100/2 = 5050. So the other students are similarly faced with a kind of referential, linear imapsse.

But here we consider that working with the trace has a way of shattering or exploding this scene. We do not observe, like a scientist, but arrive afterwards, like a detective to the scene of the crime, and make deductions about what must have happened. (Maybe this is why proof by contradiction, too, can leave one with an uneasy feeling — since there is never the moment of direct observation.) With the construction of addition around the zero — well, there is nothing natural about this.

You know, I’ve had for a long time this incorrect imagination of the zero as a sort of “foolhardy leap” over the problem. Like, although the zero is this strange, almost unthinkable number, let’s just treat it as any number and carry on, and if it works, then we are home free. … this actually reminds me of that story about Schuvalkin if you are familiar with it. But anyways any algorithm involving the zero must have been painstakingly constructed — an algorithm makes operations faster but does not itself come fast or easily. Once we have an algorithm, then we have the tendency to float along blissfully unaware of the enormous dangers we may be facing — since we usually end up in the right place anyways, which we find comforting.

Numbers themselves are traces, they are representations of an earlier act of counting — so they say. So that the natural numbers are an abbreviation of what Rotman called, I think, “ur-marks”, which are the actual marks of counting: 1, 11, 111, 1111, 11111 … corresponding to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But they are also, on the other hand, traces, marks, themselves. Even when abstracted and abbreviated from the ur-marks, it seems as though our imagination persists in seeing numbers as the trace of some given, prior experience of counting. And so this is what addition, without the zero, becomes, merely a kind of abbreviation – and thus, still representations — of the process of counting.

But numbers, in the very act of marking, as mark, becomes also divorced from representation. It becomes possible, does it not, to ask about traces directly, like a detective: for example, to ask about what sort of process produced this trace:

1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1

The zero is the absence of the mark, it seems like a reprentation but it can be represented only when the mark gains an independent status, ie, becomes freed from representation. There is no prior experience assocated with the zero — well, it is precisely the absence of an experience — the experience of not counting, or of the origin, of just starting to count — which itself comes, afterwards, to be considered an experience.

TBC

The Politics of Style

There is a kind of contradiction in the last essay. It claims that there is a retrospective moment, an originating moment, that is able to look back on an earlier moment and reconceptualize that moment as an encounter with the darkness. The key idea there is ‘overlap’, where this reconceptualizing occurs not merely as a 3rd person perceiving of the past, a transcending of one’s previous condition towards a broader perspective, but rather ‘overlaps’ with the past, so that what one sees is a kind of reexperiencing of that moment, albeit with a sense of loss. But the advantage that this loss carries is that it is able to isolate this moment out of the progressive flow of history, and to see this as a moment of insight.

It is indeed true that we are speaking in very definite terms about experiences that never actually happen. But this is something that characterizes our entire project. We have always been talking about the construction of experience, whereas actual living and decisionmaking is mostly automatic. The error here, however, I believe, is that we focused too much on ‘the darkness’. We acted on the assumption that the darkness would not be visible to ourselves in the past, and only to a retrospective vision, but the retrospective vision itself seems then to have an encounter with the darkness anyways, thus begging the question. I think had a suspicion of this when I pondered on the ‘amazing *experience*’ of this retrospective vision.

The problem here is that the darkness has always been kind of a placeholder. We can sense the darkness there but there is no way, even via the method above, to actually *see* the darkness. Perhaps we should have known this since we’re have long known that experience itself is … ‘out there’, constructed, yet to come, no matter how definitely we seem to speak of things — our past always open to reinterpretation — and thus, we can never really have the definite experience that we seek. Darkness is merely a placeholder for that towards which our ‘experience’ turns, it is kind of a tautological element.

In response to this difficulty I want to propose ‘The Politics of Style’. The idea is that we are *always* caught up in politics, we can never refer to the darkness directly, no matter how aware we are of it. In short, we are talking about a kind of existential condition. But we do have recourse to a kind of interpretive historiography where we suddenly realize that the stakes are not as moral as we once thought they were, and that the concern, in fact, a particular mode of accessing the darkness.

Let me talk a bit more about ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’ — I actually took the time to skim through maybe a third of it last night. That essay is incredibly *scholarly* — in the bad sense — and all but incomprehensible, at least in the introductory passages, to anyone not familiar with the discourse of romanticism at the time — which includes me. But we can nonetheless understand the effort there: the romantic time was a heavily *moral* time, it was a time of hope, disillusion, etc., and all these grand things — but this characterizes all eras of history. De Man’s effort was to recast these politics which dealt with all these grand affairs of the human condition as a politics of style.

This is actually not that far off from my own experience. There was a time when we were, you know, moral, liberal, concerned with the grand things. I positively believe the old cliche that liberalism subsists solely on the deceiving the naive. Eventually I decided that people to exaggerate and whine too much, and that the world is a sum of personality (and not systemic) problems. I became more intolerant and spiteful — attitudes weren’t simply ‘harmless’ — people shouldn’t be allowed to have their own vacuous little ‘opinions’. Although I still extrapolated from personality problems outwards, towards the more general problems of the world, the problems that I dealt with could definitely be said to be ‘stylistic’.

For De Man, rhetoric wasn’t at all a ‘method’ for expressing things, but rather, an almost invisible element around which a self-assertive politics condensed. It was not a guarantee but a possibility or chance. In a sense, yes, we still progress too fast. There is indeed the chance that all we want is for the world to slow down and be a bit more critical, to simply ask more questions. But the very possibility of asking questions, which we extrapolate to all good things, to confront the darkness, hinges on these elements — rhetoric, in this case — around which experiences can condense.

Light and Darkness of the Retrospective Vision

I don’t know at this moment if this will remain a draft, or I will post it to the blog, since it involves an amazing kind of feeling, well, that is founded upon a logic of course.

I have a kind of pipeline established when it comes to what we are thinking about. I think this latest development may, after some reflection, be a further kink in the pipeline rather than an overturning, which is definitely a good thing.

I have been feeling around, and accustomizing myself to this development for the past few days, but today I’ve found maybe something to write about. Basically, the idea here is that events are originated retrospectively.

So that, as we look back, even upon ‘a moment of negation’, a voice, there is also a kind of subtle absence, a subtle melancholy to this experience. We look back to the voice that speaks to us or looks at us, about the lowly, about a work or substantiality without substance, but we also look back in the mode of loss, since we are separated from this moment. This serves to reinforce, for me, the idea of a retrospective origin — specifically, involving the very gaze of mnemonic mediums.

For rhetoric of temporality, this means that rhetoric originates and seems to fill in that moment of darkness, beforehand. We called it a categorization but it is one that seems more fundamental than actual experience.

Conrad has this line in Heart of Darkness that really sticks out: he said, ‘perhaps all truth is condensed into that single moment when we cross the threshold of the invisible’. This is quite interesting: it speaks of a threshold that, because it is invisible, we are unaware of at the very moment of crossing. (This is what I believe he is saying, rather than that it is invisible in the sense of ‘intuitional’.) And this is because this threshold is something that we ‘see’ retrospectively. This vision of the threshold is very interesting — it is not purely logical or structural, but it is itself a vision that (we said above, ‘touched by melancholy’) seems to *reexperience* that vision, but now in full view of the *darkness* that was not visible at the moment.

Something else from HoD may be relevant here: near the end of the book, Marlow says something like – ‘and I saw them both [Kurtz and the Intended] together, I mean, I saw them at the same time…’ – along with this notion of the simultaneous presence of both darkness and light. This is the retrospective vision that I have in mind – touched by melancholy, but not entirely gone, able to see the darkness and the light at once.

There’s a big uncertain claim (B.U.C) I want to make, which may be wrong. But it concerns an amazing moment of experience, the experience of the origin, which makes the claim tantalizing but also vulnerable (which is a good thing — being able to make vulnerable claims). To look at a painting, or a poem — well, I have in my mind’s eye, for various random reasons, a scene of fireworks from a Hitchcock movie. But to look at a moment, and to see there both ‘light and darkness’ in the above metaphorical sense, that is, to a moment when that image, wild, alone, and independent, looking upon me, whose accusing gaze once fell upon me, and also to see the darkness there, to see the leap into darkness, the utter darkness (as Kurtz did, obliged, leapt) — that is, of a voice in the dark, a substantialism without substance — isn’t that retrospective moment the origin of all things?

Well, the other BUC I want to make is that I want to relate some *logic* of how the medium of memory seems to abscond or displace with the logic of the event. This is much like the ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’ claim, we will want to think over that claim too.

Some thoughts on Rhetoric of Temporality

The biggest realization I’ve had in recent days has been this understanding of universal failure — this is not really as grim as it sounds — one of those situations where, in this developmental blog, we sometimes aim for mnemonic resonance, or maybe we don’t want to spend too much time developing technically accurate names. It’s basically the idea that we always tend to forget the initial shock, we tend to pursue solutions. The advantage of this is that we can speak of a development over time, via repetition I mean, rather than limit ourselves to the mechanism of a single moment.

(1st example) Paul De Man’s Rhetoric of Temporality is infamous “most photocopied essay in all of comparative literature”. It has certainly always been in the back of my mind. But only recently did I realize that it is more of an act than a discovery, the bulk of the essay is spent declaring that rhetoric doesn’t really matter.

Here’s what I mean. We must speak, as we have been speaking, about a moment of “shock” a moment of negativity. This is the shock that accompanies literature, and that literature seems to veil, and which the essay is about. A shock always brings about a pragmatic moment — but one that is always a departure from that shock, a forgetting about it, yet even still, nonetheless, about it, and remembering it — this is what we mean by “universal failure”. What Paul De Man does is give a kind of metaphysical characterization of the way in which the shock of literature is understood, the shock of the surprsing lowness of literature or poetry, the shock that, as we said, at once validates and negates us — validates us in giving us a new sense of direction, in preserving or reigniting our purpose, and negates us in that it tells us we are not “low enough”, we were not as wild as free as we think.

I had this motivation poster about 30 or so entries ago:

OK, fine, but this forgets to mention this moment of shock is also a validation, that I’m not a free spirit only in relation to someone or something that is.

Everything is dark… so dark. This recurring theme of Heart of Darkness is quite literally that — not the  darkness of the human psyche but rather a kind of visual blindness. This darkness is related to the perpetual failure principle, where our need to carry on, to find a solution that matches the shock we experience is also an attempt to avoid, or simply a failure to aknowledge, the incredible darkness of what is actually being done. If we are not wild and free, and yet the wild and free exists, if ther is some more material, lower way of life — whose gaze falls upon us (“as trenchant as an axe”) — then this being is also veiled in incredible darkness — a paradoxical lowliness without materiality, lowliness without ground.

And so Rhetoric of Temporality, though it goes to great lenghts to give a metaphysical, temporal description of the aftermath of the moment of shock, is fundamentally, of course, a description of an error. It doesn’t matter — that was, as I said, my big realization. The argument is not that rhetorical structures are linked to our experience of time, but rather, that humanity constructs various erroneous understandings of their experience in order make up for this blindness. The essay is fundamentally about this blindness, or rather, about the way in which history and literature, in a moment of error and clarity, comes to be about this darkness, veers towards it.

… I guess I’m also saying that Paul de Man is kind of asshole. Maybe in a sense he was so far ahead of his time that he had to be… I mean, I’m pretty sure he wrote those essays in order to be incomprehensible — though not technically I guess. I mean, there were always these paragraphs of rapid theoretical development that he could refer to, in courtt, in his defense, as reaching the same kind of conclusions that we are here (I’m guessing). But I don’t think he ever made this explicit, but this is something I can understand — since to outline clearly the performance would simply lead to people dismissing what he’s doing as a kind of elaborate intellectual act, so that the alternative, of coming across as a declaration of psychological face, is perhaps inevitable. I mean, if he wrote for someone like me (and my current understanding is correct), then I would have to say, you know, “well played, man, well played” — since there is really no other way that essay would have remained with me.

 

Kurtz, Pain, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia

This almost sounds too easy or too trivial a matter for me to put here, but one of the main draws of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is extremism. It’s about a kind of pure logicality, of following things to their inevitable conclusion. It’s also about a form of obliging that is, however, not entirely thoughtless, oddly enough, not a kind of thoughtless generosity, but rather a kind of noblesse oblige, which is itself an odd expression. Since to oblige to something, in this sense, doesn’t mean, actually, to become someone else (even though this becomes sort of Dennis’s experimental character in the later seasons), but rather, to reach for a kind of purity. The idea of noblesse oblige doesn’t actually mean peer pressure, it’s not even, “doing as a noble should do”, since the very definition of nobility is one who is self-justifying – a noble is one who sets his own standards. As I said, it is a paradox or an oxymoron, since one can only oblige oneself in a sense. This is how we should actually understand Dennis’s character, or actually all the characters, not so much self-centered as self-obliging. A weird expression… let me just include something I wrote on Facebook the other day:

OK, I get it — the entire premise of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is this, that one day, 5 grown men and women suddenly decide, a la Don Quixote, to become teenagers again, but, armed with a greater self-awareness and confidence in their reasoning, can now follow through those proclaimed logics to their conclusion — producing something that is an impossibility in the real world: a *self-consistent* teenager (just as Don Quixote is the only possibility of pure knighthood). The moments when they interact, always contemptuously and destructively, with actual teenagers (as well as actual adults) are some of the highlights, or maybe simply the show as such.

But, as I said, these observations seem almost too trivial too include on here, because it seems to relate to a kind of naturalness or unquetioning extremism that we have always tried to distance ourselves from. What makes Sunny tolerable is certainly that it there is a great deal of thinking involved on the show, by all the characters — they don’t simply put on hats, or become or pretend to be other people, but they are sort of selective in what they oblige. We are returning to that mysterious sense of self-obliging, which should really be thought of as almost as a kind of ascetic practice, I believe.

We still haven’t spoken about pain yet, but let’s talk about Kurtz first. None of these people seem to feel pain. In Kafka’s famous one-paragraph summary of Don Quixote, the knight is associated with the demonic because it is able to carry on this self-obliging without pain, with a kind of purity, while Sancho, the human, follows him along. We’ve talked about demons before, it’s a very apt concept here. This is what I want to emphasize with Kurtz too, the demonic Kurts, he was one who gave in, who obliged, who was satisified — abominable satisfactions. And Kurtz felt no pain because his death, “the horror, the horror”, should most definitely not be understood as a kind of deathbed renunciation of his ways or something. Even on his deathbed he felt like he was being robbed of something, that he deserved more — and however deluded Marlow felt this to be, he never treated it with anything more than a kind of mild annoyance — he seemed to respect the man.

This is what Heart of Darkness means, or means to me: a focused, demonic kind of asceticsm, a self-obliging that is, oddly enough, that is some paradoxical combination of asceticism and gluttony at the very same time, asceiticism and satisifaction.

~

Pain — let’s talk about pain… I hear in this word that line form Boy of Winander –

Actually, this is very odd… there is no mention of pain in that poem. I must be remembering some other poem? In any case, pain is our response to the demonic, it is the moment when we realize that we cannot be demonic. Pain is the experience of the encounter with the demonic source. Since we can never be demonic (though we try to be) we experience this demonic intentionality as pain.

Rejection is actually not our main concern here — I mean, rejection of society.

Let’s talk about Boy of Winander for a bit, even though for some reason I misremembered this poem.

Now, this boy has not explicitly rejected society as the later Wordsworth had. Yet nonetheless, his communion with the owls is a kind of rejection, it is a way in which he can, it seems, reach out and touch at a distance, conjure, the magnificence of the natural scene about him. Nothing is explicit here, which is why this is so interesting, even though it seems to follow the motions of a mature asceticism. (Which means that the poem itself is not ascetic.)

The moment of pain — let’s just call it that — is the moment of self-recognition, the pain or the shock of self-recognition that I spoke about in the previous essay. There, I spoke about how naive and teleologic my self-awareess was — and I also spoke of the possibility of a kind of genuine engagement. I spoke about how my self-awareness had already become too seeped in grandiose concepts. All these recognitions, I believe, takes place without language in that poem, so that what’s so remarkable about that poem is how it is able to think pain without rejection, without asceiticism — it merely hints at asceticism.

The pain felt by the boy is … the pain of exclusion from something, the sense in which he no longer interacts, not because of the sublime immensity of nature but rather because of something much lower. The rocks, the trees, etc. – are barely alive.

 

TBC

The duality of redemption

There is a connection I want to make before I pose the pose the question of how exactly Kurtz can redeem us, and how he can be redeemed — the mutuality of all redemption.

More than racist, I think, I think a much more fair charge to Heart of Darkness is that it is misogynist. Honestly, accusing HoD of racism is one of those things that immediately makes me bristle — being indicative of far greater problems than political incorrectness. But misogyny is definitely there, all the women just seem incredibly spacey or something. Yet his precise words are “another world” — they live in another world — rather than a direct derision, which I actually believe we should take as more than mere politeness. That is, I want to truely consider the other world of the women.

… basically, we have to remember that women are not young and full of hope. Women contain that paradoxical combination of maturity and innocence. They somehow seem to know, just through mere living or something, all those scary facts or attitudes that I didn’t find out until much later, and, at the same time, to have these fairly ridiculous notions of practical possibility — that’s the argument being made (which I agree with). This is the survivor hypothesis — that they are survivors, that we are survivors.

To be a survivor means, at the same time, to seek something else and our own redemption. We are after in both senses: after something, and after — after desolation, or after boyhood, I mean, when we are independent, we know that certain things just won’t work, we have found our own self-sustaining way of living in the world. This might resemble being addicted to drugs — that we find happiness in something and that we are content with it — that’s what being “after” means, being after naivete, or rather, being after a yearning for knowledge, a yearning for change.

That’s who I am right now, for example, I obviously have many questions, many things I want to accomplish, but I am content with what I do, I no longer want to become someone else. And yet I am at the same time far from even knowing myself. This confusing state where I am somehow, at the same time, content, static, and yet wildly uncertain, when my identity is pparadoxically at the same time uncertain and yet immobile.

Yesterday I had an interesting sort of mental experience, it consists of two parts. At first, as I was sitting there, writing in my notebook, it dawned on me, “suddenly”, with a shock, just how bad and sloppy my models of thinking, intellectual development, etc., were. I put “suddenly” in quotes here because this was not a kind of insight at the beginning of things but rather something that occured in the midst of a few days of lethargy … I mean, sort of like a particular implication or instantiation that is the analogue the a more general shift in attitude. Namely, I feel, the shift from being before a discovery to being after, in the sense above: perhaps it was simply the realization that I tended to still organize my models of the mind around some sort of “acheivement”, some ends — it was still a fundamentally teleologic model, which contributed to what I perceived, in that vision, as a shocking bit of naivete.

… because we are survivors, in the mind, too, I mean, our thinking is a combination of self-assurance and uncertainty. I want to find the truth but I want to find it in my own way. We seek our goals and solutions at the very same time that we seek a validation or redemption of our mental methods. So, it was not really that my mental models were too “metpahorical”, but rather that they were too teleologic — so that, upon reflection, what I was really seeking was merely a way to conceive of this sort of wandering or this sense of … groping about, mentally. I feel this to be related to what we called the “time bubble” in the previous entry, and also, it reminds me of that Keatsian line, from Ode to a Nightingale — “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet….”

I am still not quite sure if this is exactly a right connection… but, continuing on with the story, hours later, when trying to flesh out some ideas, I found myself going back to the terms that I had rejected earlier as naive, perhaps, again, because the problem wasn’t metaphor but rather teleology. I wish I had some good examples, but those concepts seemed to make a lot of sense, understood not as something focused around a discovery yet to arrive but rather as a way of living on. I will have examples shortly, when I’m less tired, but the point is that the reverse side of those naive concepts is the awareness of one’s own life, as related to the two senses of the word “after”.

Anyways, to tie the ends together, the point of all this is that redemption is perhaps precisely the process of dealing with this duality, the duality of being “after”: and this is something that Conrad recognized in women as well.

TBC:
1) How does Kurtz redeem / the mutuality of redemption
2) The duality of the Intended’s reaching out after the river, as a seeking and a “pose”, a moment of self-expression

The Temporal Bubble

I want to revisit an old idea, which is this idea of human a kind of human creativity underlying our sense of reality — I think I called it a “tautology”. But here, I want to subject that idea of development to the condition, basically the condition of “sustained labor”: I want to think about, not the overturning of a niave “work-centric” view of the world, but rather the way in which work, and all that it entails, can be sustained. What I envision here is a kind of “temporal bubble”.

I mean, it’s not all that elaborate an idea. Basically, it derives from the notion of how work must overcome certain moments of disturbance and desolation, and yet remain work. I have a nuanced understanding of “work”, I have in mind, something that is “immediate” in some sense, that is “tangible”, metaphorically, that is not structural or cultural, that does not ask us to wait in order to find out. It is something that requires us to do something, some activity that we may have to follow or oblige. The opposite of work is not laziness or inactivity, but rather, a kind of non-immediacy, a showmanship maybe, nihilism, and so forth. So it’s defined in a very general sense. We are always drifting back and forth between engagement and non-engagement, and the temporal bubble is the way in which we can remain engaged while taking into account this non-engagement.

As an example, let’s reconsider relativity. The story we told last time, last entry, is incomplete, because it does not adequately explain the “recovery” that relativity makes. That is, it is indeed true that relativity, I believe, includes a moment of terrible doubt, a kind of sublime moment when causality is entirely thrown into question. I mean, it feels as though, for example, light can anticipate the measurer, that light has a mind of its own, and reacts differently according to how it’s measured. Measurement, or physical activity in general, ceases to take place in a “straightfoward” world, straightfoward in some relative sense. But it also recovers, in particular by introducing the idea of a “frame of reference”. I think that the frame of reference is sort of like a “bubble”. It is a momentary lapse in time, a bubble when causality is suspended. Physical activities still take place, within this bubble, but one has to consider the totality of the bubble, and adjust accordingly. It is a kind of “limited holism”, rather than an absolute one, that allows work to mostly carry on.

… now, all this could be relative, I mean, not in the sense of “relativistic” but rather in the sense that we do not have any absolute things in mind when using words like, “straightfoward”, “causality”, “suspension”, “bubble”, “holism”, and so on. That is, it is indeed true that nothing is immediate, and that all work requires, presumes, a holstic picture of the world, and that we never experience time linearly. But despite aknowledging this, we still want to make use of the above words because we are talking about a bubble relative to some established view of the world.

I want to give a few other examples… examples I feel are of the utmost importance here. Because I feel there to be a kind of blur of logic here, when dealing with this issue. Speaking personally, I have wrestled with this idea for quite some hours now, and I feel it to be more resistant, in some way — a cause of ENORMOUS DIFFICULTY. I look back and consider, as naive, any possibility of straightfowardly “applying” this idea. I find it hard to develop because the things that we end up with, the stability of the finality of our reality — we are not dealing with that. But rather, we’re dealing with a kind of obliging — a kind of effort to sustain. I have in mind, when I say “obliging”, the way in which Conrad says that Kurtz obliges — gives in, surrenders, etc., to the forces of darkness. And this, to me, is the story of Kurtz — one who wanted to keep on working no matter what, one who refused to ive into the desolation of the jungle and the disarray of the colony — all the pretense. It makes sense that his final words, on his deathbed, were not — you know, a renunciation, a plattitude — so that death was not really even an “event” for Kurtz, ie, there was no renunciation, no deathbed conversion — but rather, a continued, willful “rebellion”, Conrad called it — a final utterance of negation, tautology, and creation — “he had something to say, he said it” — and also, I would like to add, work. There is kind of a blur that surrounds this situation, as it is held suspended between work and … holism, or desolation.

—

Ex 2: My humility: I think that the key thing we realize with Kurtz is that he does not ever learn anything in the course of the story, that whatever he learned happend beforehand in the way in which he obliges, gives into, these “abominable satsifactions” or something that Marlow keeps on talking about. The same thing happens with the Intended, and with Marlow’s aunt — he emphasizes how the latter always seemed to have a ready answer for everything ‘– ”But the worker is worth his hire!’ she chirped back.” So we are talking about a case where everything is already set, where the relativistic insight already happened……

—

How is the temporal bubble HELD UP?????

TBC

So/aLu/vaTION (Theory of Relativity)

I want to offer a provocation for the theory of relativity here, I imagine it will almost sound too contrived, as we basically play a mapping game with the concepts we have been using, and also I want to ask the question of what knowledge could be if we are declaring a circular model.

This is how the mapping will take place: basically, phyisics is the ability to focus on the world, it is the rejection of all that isn’t physics for the ability to “work” with the world. The “shoulders of giants” metaphor, I think, may therefore be quite bad, since it, well, suggests a social journey rather than an inidividualistic one, and it furthermore suggests that the field of human knowledge is too vast or complex. Rather, we here emphasize the active, individualistic role of phyiscs, which we “map” onto Marlow’s pragmatism in the desolation of the jungle.

The theory of relativity is the moment of inversion in our “spiral” metaphor. If physics provides for the possibility of a definite, ordered experience, where measuring is this “simple” act that seems to produce results — we associate it with Marlow’s pragmatism — then the theory of relativity is a kind of undeniable aftermath to the world of pragmatic measuring. One can no longer declare a simple causal chain of observation, measurement, result. And let’s also remark on salvation here — I have here in my notes, “Sa/oLva/uTION” — just because it’s a kind of cool observation that “solution” and “salvation” are such similar words. I remarked last time that Marlow’s pragmatism was a salvation rather than a solution — meaning, that it was not intended to solve the complex problems of the colonies, but rather, to provide a sense of self, to save oneself, to provide the possibility of committing to something definite. This is the case for physics, too, and the scientific model of the world, which is basically salvational — which is why having engineers as political leaders is not necessarily a good idea. A salvation can be a solution only if one insists that everyone thinks the same way I do, that the commitment to science as a practice or discipline can help society, which is definitely not a given — I mean, it’s very wrong. In any case, the claim here is that physics provides a way to work, a salvation via work, and not a solution to all our questions.

So the idea is that the theory of relativity, with its emphasis on the act of measuring, really seems to question man’s location in these salvational, linear, causational processes. Of course this is not explicit, it is definitely a part of phyisics, which is why the figure of the spiral (rather than the “circle”) comes up: suggesting a return to another point with a difference. The theory of relativity is not, in fact, a return to the state of desolation before physics, nor is it regressive move that destroys the “misconceptions” of physics. Thus, the question of knowledge comes up: what do we come to know, with relativity?

Perhaps we come to know something about … “ourselves” … well, about what it means to be “human” in a sense. All this time, indeed, we have been focusing on the … “non-lazy”, on activities that are “human powered” — we emphasized, for example, the concrete social factors (eg, “slave”) that drove these interactions. The suggestion is that knowledge can only knowledge of the search for knowledge, but that this doesn’t make it any less useful.

Well — that is the preliminary proposal. The theory of relativity is “not given”, I mean, we are not simply saying that all those who try are doomed to fail. Like Marlow on the river, it is about more than the human — it is about a kind of “encounter”. It is indeed a radical revisiting of classical physics, it is — if one looks at it at a certain angle — an “inversion”, but this inversion does not itself flow along a definite path (as we misleadingly suggest with the spiral metaphor, actually) rather — I have in my mind, a mental picture, the movement towards relativity as a kind of “reordering”, a “flocking”, in the way that a school of fish will scatter when disturbed but then realign themselves, somewhat randomly, when the threat disappears.

Let’s return briefly to Heart of Darkness… Marlow finds salvation in work, on the river, but becomes disturbed at many points when he comes face to face with a possibility, an otherness, and perhaps one’s own injustice, in Kurtz and the Intended. Ie, (1) possibility — the possibility that there is sitting in the jungle some halfway reasonable human being, or some fellow devoted to work, progress, and pragmatism, in the middle of the jungle. (2) Otherness — the recognition of an alternative arrangement. For Marlow, there is no longer the effort of a precise remapping of the self to the other, from one school of fish to another, but he acknowledges the possibility that they “were human, like you or me” (actually, in this phrase, speaking of the Africans) — “human” here in the sense of “human-powered”, hopeful, intentional, non-lazy, etc.. Regarding women, he always states that they “live in another world”, regarding Kurtz, he says that he has “blasted free from this earth” (or something to that effect). (3) My own injustice — this is simply the recognition that there is a holism to my pragmaticism, my salvation, which is basically insight or maybe the driving conviction of the theory of relativity — that I am of another world, too, perhaps. This is the sort of self-knowledge that Marlow comes to recognize.

With relativity, the otherness becomes the act of “measuring”, to whatever ends. Physics, then, is not fundamentally some set of methods, ideas, principles, etc., but rather — the set of activities that take place about measuring. This is not quite “experimentation” nor even objectivity, since measuring is always towards some ends, for some purpose — as with salvation, it is a necessary error, the first necessary and incorrect step in the spiral. With the recognition of measuring, relativity can then make claims about the holism of measuring that severely disrupts the causational chains both in the world being measured and in the very process of measuring.