• A Study of Love

    So I'm feeling very very good lately, in terms of my work.  I'm slowly reaching that coveted moment of professional criticism of being able to perform a close analysis on something, which means, to relate a particular historical event to the material forces in history.  I've been thinking a lot about love (because of the paper I have to write on Keats), and -- just to give an example of what I believe to be the aim of criticism.... ("If I were to write a paper on love--") -- Love should not be understood as some universal psychological thing involving psychological attraction, because that would be to ignore all that has been thought about love.  Well, this is science, but not psychology.  Nor, on the other hand, should we content ourselves with dividing up love into different forms based on different cultures.  But rather, the critic engages in the particular thinkings of love closely as thinkings, and not as results or necessities.  What does it mean, for instance, to say that love should exist even if the loved one could not bear any children?  What would it mean to assert that love should originate with dating (rather than with parental arrangement, status, etc.)?  The task of the critic will be to answer these questions without referring to universal, cultural principles (such as individualism, and determinism) but rather, by relating these thinkings of love to non-idealistic things.

    Well, it's hard to write a foward, so let me just start by talking about love.  Well, let me write just one more foward ("If I were to write a paper on love...") by courteously attempting to lay out the stakes beforehand, and to kind of give an abstract form of my argument.  ... I aknowledge the possibility that this foward will basically be the project... but, in any case, this project ... I don't claim it to be an original one ...  but this project involves the thinking of the relationship of love to technologies of writing, especially the alphabet.

    Of course there is attraction, but why does attraction think itself in that particular way?  Have you noticed how love insists on being (in our culture) something extremely light, completely irresponsible?  This is not at all a condemnation, it is because we expect love to complete us, to fulfill us, to make us happy, to motivate us.  Love is not fundamentally a relationship to another -- we expect love to do something for us.  And this is selfish but not really selfish -- because love makes us better people, socially.  Love is that which allows the inventor to invent, the athlete to perform, the soldier to fight, the artist to create, and so on.  Thus, love is that which allows us to be most ourselves, it gives us the will to live, and by doing so, allows us to be better, socially responsible, progressive people.  Thus, love should be weightless, or at least transparent -- it does not alter us, but gives us focus.

    2.
    Love, in this sense, resembles a technology -- would it be too much to say that love becomes a kind of energy?  Here is where I want to draw the connection between love and the alphabet.  Let's examine the history of the alphabet, independently, and perhaps occasionally jump back to love as the connections strike us.  The alphabet is a technology, it is used to facilitate the process of learning a language.  But there is no difference between the person who masters, say, Spanish, versus the person who has mastered Chinese.  Because we obviously don't make up new words, and furthermore, we don't even really think about how a word is spelled.  This is not even to say that we think in words, but rather, that we simply write, and things kind of flow out, and writing occurs just as efficiently no matter what the supposed connection is between meaning, sound, and writing, whether alphabetical or not.

    The argument here is that the alphabet it kind of extraneous, it is transparent.  As such, it is a thinking of something.  We are faced with conflicting characteristics of alphabetics: (1) That it is practical and (2) that it is expressive.  The former would seem to indicate some profound understanding of the mind, it tends to naturalize our thinking of spelling, ie, make it seems as though spelling were in fact a necessary development in the history of language.  At the same time, we can't deny pragmaticism altogether (for a sheer cultural-relativism), especially since alphabetics thinks itself as a development, which would seem to indicate that it's character is historical rather than practical, negative rather than positive.

    Here's what I mean: We ask, is the efficiency of alphabetic intrinsic or external?  In other words, is this efficiency or this development, an argument made by alphabetics itself, or is it merely justified by the results?  We can argue that children learn alphabetics faster, but one could counter that, in learning Chinese, for instance, one is simply learning some different way of thinking -- pointing to, for instance, the way in which in a culture and a philosophy seems latent within the langauge (and thus, the Chinese fascination with writing) -- and they would be somewhat correct.  And if were to argue, instead, that alphabetics facillitates technological or philosophical thought, then we fall into a kind of euro-centrism.  I'm obviously not at all concerned with political correctness, but ... etc. etc.

    Anyways, the efficiency or "superiority" of the alphabetic system is actually built into the technology itself, and this is not even an opinion or a ethnocentric claim.  But rather, it seems to occur in the way in which alphabetics is aware of a (-what it defines as a-) "pre"-alphabetic stage.  Alphabeticism is either the elimination of everything except for sound from a language, or it is the fascination with some ghost of sound -- two ways of looking at the same thinking -- and a thinking which for all of us, even if we had not thought it consciously while learning the alphabet in school, seems to lie in waiting.  Because who is to say that the writer who wrote the book, or the speaker who spoke the thing, in real life, did not mean anything by their body gestures, or by the way in which they shaped their letters, or the way in which they arranged the words on the page?  So alphabeticism -- which was once a way of life, I feel, something that people could die for -- was either the elimination of everything except for the sound, or a hearing of a disembodied sound apart from all ... other elements.

    Well, in any case, alphabeticism was a thinking, a historical thinking, and as technology or as simplification, it seemed to mark a historical moment that exists only in relation to some earlier moment. We can imagine intelligent people theorizing about the significance of the alphabet, discussions over whether alphabeticism, with all it's relations to tradition, was a valid path, and so on.  What else may be interesting here is that this thinking lies latent within us -- we learn the alphabet without really thinking about it, and it may aid us -- who knows.  But it lies latent -- what does this mean?

    3.
    This is the moment in which our spelling will hopefully dovetail with love, this sense of latency.  It seems as though self-awareness occurs only in the very final moment ... 

    TBC: LATENCY

  • Young Love

    I feel as though youth mixed with love is a dangerous combination, obviously not in the sense that I have anything against it.  I don't think I have ever experienced young love... but the problem is, youth is precisely that which knows itself as young, it knows that it is a time to experiment, that it is allowed to make mistakes, that to learn is to make mistakes.  The youth is remarkably self-aware, it does not understand stupidity, because it thinks of everything as a 'learning experience'.  Love, on the other hand, always tends towards a heaviness.  Love is not light, whatever people pretend about it -- it always asks for nothing but takes everything.  The essence of love is an unbearable responsibility, even in the lightest things.  I feel as though people who haven't experienced this have merely been in a relationship.  In this sense, I feel as though love and youth are opposites.  What can be the result of this?  The end of one or the complete misunderstanding of the other?

  • Confidence

    Real confidence, I feel, doesn't derive from having accomplished some genuinely good thing -- it doesn't come from accomplishment, but rather, from something far more certain and easy to see, which is the realization that almost no one in the world knows what they are talking about.

  • The Reconstructed Literature

    I'm thinking, at the moment, of this idea of the reconstructed voice.  This follows my absolute break with aesthetics, and with the pursuit of good and bad.  ...That's right, I've decided that the pursuit of good and bad is an error, but perhaps a necessary one.  But, what's important is this idea of the absolute rejection of aesthetics, which means, indeed, that we want to dismiss from thinking the pursuit of good and bad.  But it is undeniable, still, that literature has an intention, or has a distinction (the two are the same).  Yet, to pursue this intention, or to pursue this distinction, would be to step into the realm of the good and bad, or it would be to hunt, and to think aesthetically.  Now, our argument here is not that we have found a new way of thinking that would avoid the problem of the hunt, but rather we must think about redemption or repression rather than of truth.  Well, this is all fairly difficult to formulate, but let me just remark that I think the role of reading to be the redemption of the reconstructed, retrospective voice.

    Here's what I mean.  We had insisted, earlier, that literature and thinking was a kind of hunt, or the following of the distinction between good and bad, or the attempt to isolate the good from the bad, as if out of a background.  So whichever way.  But literature is not, in fact, the hunt, but rather, always occurs after the hunt.  Literature speaks of a far more radical relationship to good and bad than the hunt, since, for the case of the hunt, the only possibility seems to be that the hunter becomes the hunted or the hunter draws close to the hunted, or becomes intimate with the hunted.

    The problem of thinking beyond the hunt is the attempt to deal with this problem.  On the one hand, literature becomes a performance that takes place after the hunt, but still resembles the hunt in all respects.  Literature, even in its melancholy (after the hunt) continues to think about this distinction, but this pursuit is now solitary, it is no longer linked to the distinction between good and bad.  It still looks like a pursuit.  But in rejecting the hunt, literature gains a new holisticity.  What I mean is, we reject hunt, and we reject presence, but we are still able to read and to understand literature.  But this reading would itself no longer be of the order of the hunt, but 1) something much weirder.

    We now remark, that literature is about a latent intention that is everywhere, and, significantly, possibly within the text itself, within the materiality of the text.  And in this materiality, every moment becomes a turning towards, a new intention -- in a kind of atomization of the text.  But at the same time, there is also a holistic aspect, which is the sense of the author writing for the future, despite the fact that he is no longer of the hunt, and cannot possibly, it seems, ever inject his subjectivity into his work.  We are thinking, then, of a kind of paradoxcial subjectivity -- the ghost.

    ---

    Why is literature so melancholy?  

    Now, you may be wondering, whether it is necessarily the case that this reconstruction is somehow "less real", since it is not, it seems, localized in time and space.  But it is real in the sense of it being a responsibility, and furthermore, we must remember that the intention or the distinction familiar to us is not localized in time and space either, whatever it's claims...

  • When is the best time to work?

    A lot of people think that the best time to work is when one is inspired, when one is positively seized by something.  But perhaps it's the opposite -- and this is in fact what I believe -- that the best time to work is when one has sufficiently forgotten what one has been working on so that one's mind is cleared (like, after an hour or so is usually enough to clear the mind).  There is a lot more I can say about this, but it has a lot to do with what one believes the nature of work to be.  Is it a positive expression of a time or place, or is it -- as I claim -- a repeated effort to come to terms with the weirdness that is everyday life?  Does a work of art originate out of a moment of exitement out of boredem, or is it that which estranges us from our familiar world?

  • Art and Morality

    The concern of art is essentially morality, it's one and only effort is to distinguish goodness from badness.  But art is not therefore knowledge, since knowledge is the attempt to make a distinction between two types of things (such as goodness and badness) in the world.  Art recognizes the difficulty of such a distinction, it recognizes that all oppositions can be deconstructed, in the very precise sense: "the practice whereby one demonstrates that the two elements of an opposition are not flat but hierarchical, and that the lower one is in fact present essentially in the higher one".  But this is precisely why art continues, art is moral yet not deconstructible -- in other words, it forms an opposition yet this opposition cannot be deconstructed -- because art always continues to think.  Art therefore never finishes elaborating this opposition, it never claims that its opposition has a concrete reference in the world.  In other words, the incompleteness of art is not a half-assed effort (and what I derisively term "half-assed effort" is otherwise known as as "provocation", "inspiration", "groundwork") but rather ends up being about it's own difficulty in elaboration, what it's fighting against in attempting to make this effort, what aids it, and so on.  In other words, art is not an attempt to insist on this opposition by piling up information (as is the tendency of bad scholars and bad artists) but rather, it is rather much more focused, it is constantly thinking of itself, the difficulty of forming or maintaining this opposition, and so forth.  In other words, the reflexivity of art is the essence of art, it is the attempt to think about why one cannot even make the smallest baby step towards real work, to define the problem so that one can even attempt to begin to work, one cannot even begin to rise up against badness because the problem is not merely a matter of willpower or discipline, but rather of the inability to even define this issue.

    Art is therefore always two components: the attempt to define good and bad, and the performance of the inability to define this, which then reflects back on what good or bad is.  For instance, if we argue that badness is pretentiousness, we are arguing that badness is precisely the thinking that one has succeeded in distinguishing goodness from badness.  But there are more interesting arguments out there -- and this will be our effort in the next few days, regarding Keats.

    (Basically, it's possible to substitute the word "thinking" and "art" in the passage above, I make no distinction between art and thinking at the present.)

  • The Importance of Reading

    Our thoughts on memory remind us that there is no possibility of transcendance, by which I mean, that everything we do, feel, or say, everything we experience (everything, and not merely the intellectual) or even perceive (all historical events, all natural events) is not immediate, we are never able to come into contact with the source.  There is no possibility of ever breaking through into science, to the extent that science attempts to explain the unknown by means of the knowable, to bridge the gap between reality (the unknown) and perception (the knowable). Not even as a hypothesis -- we can't even make a hypothesis that can then be tested.  It's certainly an admirable effort to attempt to reduce everything to the bare, material, minimum, but it's also a faulty effort.  We can never make the leap from things as they really are, to perception, perception bears no knowable relationship to things as they are.

    A relationship with objects we can call reading.  Reading is an activity that takes place without transcendance but, on the other hand, without understanding either.  Reading takes place on the edge of comprehension, it is just before us or just outside of our reach.  In other words, reading is that which we can think, since thinking is precisely the attempt to deal with the just before.  Now, we must not understand this too literally, thinking is not a journey or a transport, thinking does not actually follow a thought.  But rather, all thinking deals with an abstract space...

    What is the 'just before', if not transport?

  • Getting Up to Go to Work

    I sometimes have these days when I cannot make myself lift a finger, because I imagine the rest of my life as merely an expertise and the slow familiarization of myself with concepts.  But whatever the validity of this realization is, on some level, I couldn't imagine dragging myself out of bed every day if there weren't some other reason for working.

    This other reason is the relationship to ... objects and people.  People and objects are the same thing, but this refusal to draw a distinction between life and non-life is not to say that people are predictable or anything, but to say that all things speak to us, and all things ask some responsibility out of us.  The aescetic, or the one who avoids people, is not cold-hearted, but rather feels just as much responsibility as the next person.  Perhaps asceticism is not at all the dodging of responsibility, but a rather a desire for focus, I sometimes feel like a live in a world of like a thousand voices.  Everything begs responsibility from me, everything and everyone.  I'm obviously not talking about pity, or about being able to help things, but everything seems to speak of itself -- not only people and art, but the objects all around us -- the table, the book, the house, the silverware, etc., everything.  One needs some kind of focus in order to get up and go to work, and that focus requires one to be "alone" (to in fact, be with very few things) so that one can form a unique or an intimate relationship to some object or some spirit.

  • The Mark

    Forward: 1) There is one thing that I have become convinced of, and that is the relationship between thinking and politics.
    2) Why should we differentiate between the rare and the invisible?  And why shouldn't thinkig be concerned not with describing the rare, but of thinking about the invisible?

    We have been thinking of intelligence, lately, where we should be thinking of comfort.  Comfort i that which we are used to, and therefore, not something associated intelligence, which we have come to associate with these rarer moments (evil, dust, insight).  Comfort is the invisible, it is that which conforms, that which seems to do our bidding, that which is unremarkable.  For instance, we possess a remarkable comfort with language and thinking.  And, when we work, we feel at home in something, we feel comfortable with the land.

    We hypothesize that the task of thinking is in fact to think about that which is invisible, in the sense of comfort.

    1) First possibility: speech... tbc

  • Intelligence

    1. Robots and Dolls

    Intelligence is not know-how, I'm not talking about that which can be determined by a competency test.  But rather, intelligence is that inexplicable human or creative component, liveliness, insight, and so forth.  My basic argument, or assumption perhaps, is that intelligence is never communicable, by which I mean, that one can never verify that intelligence exists at a particular place.  We are never sure, really, the nature of intelligence: does have a coherent moment, like insight, or like problem solving?  Is it an elaborate plan, like evil?  Or does it take the form of dusty glimmers, like the liveliness of conversation?  From the tremendous difficulties that artificial intelligence is having with even the most basic aspects of behavior, we realize that intelligence seems to be scattered throughout the most minor aspects of our lives.  But a further point should be made -- even if we could fairly easily detect whether we are speaking to or chatting with a human or a machine, that does not diminish the feelings of creepiness that we can get from talking to a machine.  That is, even in talking to a machine, we get the feeling of an intelligence like dust, or like a brooding evil, or various other forms -- what did it mean by that?  Was that programmed into it, or was it an accident?  Even if a computer may be unable at present to model human behavior, it can certainly frighten us and unsettle us, it seems to have an uncanny life, evil, disrespectful, and so on.  This is the same way in which the face of a doll may strike us with terror, because we can easily sense these glimmers of intelligence.

    What we call intelligence in humans (besides having a large memory, besides memory association) most likely has more to do with recognition than with competence -- in conversation, that which differentiates a human from a machine is the ability to recognize (and perhaps even to capitalize on) these little things like intentions, puns, inflections, and so on -- these things less than meaning and grammar.  It is a kind of sensitivity.  But this intelligence is always entirely disconnected, it is never communication, which explains the creepiness we experience around robots or dolls.  We can assert that someone is brilliant even if we have no real understanding of what he's saying.  We can pick up on intentions, and introduce them into the conversation, even if one never intended to go there.  In fact, we are foreign to our "own" intentions, so that when we embarrass ourselves, it's not at all the case that we had unwittingly made a "slip of honesty", but rather that we had, after the fact, picked up on the intention of our own gesture and thus become embarrassed.

    In other words, there are no Freudian slips, only rhetoric, or only the play of the signifier at the level below meaning.

    2. Men and Women

    I mean, let me start off by saying that I'm opposed to the notion of manliness, I think it's idiotic, or I make the argument that manliness is precisely a kind of spiteful hatred, negation, or destruction rather than competence or skillfulness.  It's fine to be competent, but can't be who you are.  In any case, the traditional gender distinction goes, that men are primarily competent while women are expressive.  This all has to do with one's relationship to the 'play of the signifier'.

    3. Art

    In art, we are thinking about a holistic thing, which is weird