I've been thinking about acting lately, and about music and lyrics. Lyrics are interesting probably because the sound of the human voice is so dense and meaningful. I really like that song, "You're so Vain", it's very good even though it's played so often. The line, "Well you're where you should be all the time..." is particularly touching, it's one of those moments when I can imagine a pretty female singer with her hand behind her back and her eyes closed, swaying... This image of the eyes closed brings up a quick to answer to song -- it's not about you, it's about me. But who is, me?

The whole song sort of takes on a nagging sort of tone, doesn't it? It's basically one huge nag -- you do this, you do that. But that's the beauty of it, in the way that it takes the very mundane, the pointless, microscopic nagging of the female, and says: it's about me! There is this man -- it doesn't matter who -- who goes out and travels to Nova Scotia and Saratoga, and does all these great, manly things. And here I am, and I have had no such experiences, but I see all that you are, and all the stupid little things you do. You can sense how microscopic this nagging is in the first line: the way you walk, the way you wear your hat, the way you glance -- I see everything. But the song does not counter this via explanation or an exposition (like a psychoanalytic thing or something), since it does a sort of microscopic dance of it's own, where it elevates these stupid little feminine moments to some kind of sublime level. A sort of "you don't see the things that I do!"

This is the density of the lyric, in pop music ... the line incredible density of that line, "Well you're where you should be all the time". It's not a particularly well written -- there are too many pronouns and to many occurrences of the verb 'to be', all introduced by the trite banality, 'Well', but that's kind of the point. It's at the same time, of course, the most classically philosophical line, being a generalization of all that has been said, an attempt to distill a kind of general truth. But the suggestion here is that what is said here, at the conclusion, this philosophical summing up, doesn't really matter as much as the elements that are much harder to hear but ever so touching: The emphasis on the "all", in "all the time", so that if you can imagine that, if Mozart wrote this, there would be a decorative turn here. You can imagine each monosyllabic being sounded out -- Where | You | Should | Be | All | The | Time -- now that the words -- being some of the most worn out words in the English language -- have lost all meaning. This is sort of similar to the finale of the Andantino movement in the 14th piano concerto, where it all breaks down into a set of very banal arpeggios.

These 20c concepts like the "ego" or the "unconscious" actually arise from a cutting up of everyday action, a placing under the microscope, much akin to what happens in the first verse, where the man is placed under the microscope, so that his gestures are cut up. Of course, there gestures are not subconscious, but designed to perform or to mislead. But this doesn't change the fact that the "man" is no longer there. Traditionally, this transformation is thought of as taking place from one to three, ie, from the man to the ego, superego, and id. But we tend to forget that the very possibility of this transformation begins with a cutting up, from the one into the infinite. What is recovered is either technics (the technics of womanizing, of controlling authenticity) as is the case in the song, or the return of several (three -- really, an uncountable number, there's always at least one more, always x+1) spirits.

TBC: Cutting and Opening

Dignity is actually an important component of thinking, it's that difficult to describe concern of thinking for purity or for the non-material. There is actually a simple explanation for all of this. The persistence of thinking is based on its failure to understand. Obviously, in every discipline, we have to take breaks and come back. But thinking avoids thinking of itself as gradual accumulation. Instead, the situation tends to flower, in the sense of open up and take on a kind of richness. But this flowering doesn't solve the problem, but rather seems to push it back. So the problem then takes on a kind of dignity. This is reflected in the denial of those who harbor such a problem: "You don't understand". This denial is, in fact, the essence of teaching, which is not "guidance somewhere" but merely "guidance" -- or in fact, merely refusal. The encouragement of teaching is always encouragement towards further thinking, like an encouragement of a clever way of failing.

A good example of this is heartbreak. In the case of heartbreak, an artificial focus is maintained on the past, because of emotional intensity or other psychological factors. If one persists in being heartbroken, then the experience is that the situation starts getting more and more severe, there is a greater difficulty ameliorating the situation with concrete aids.

This is because this denial is, like in the case of the teacher above, is related to my own dignity or my own mastery. It is related, for example, to the slave who refuses both the masters's opinion of him and the solace of the slave community. A community oftentimes seems abhorrent to this sense of dignity, with its hypocrisy and it's insistence on performance. The community, of course, has it's own way of pushing back, of thinking, so that, for instance, people take sad films very seriously. To understand a sad film does not necessarily mean merely the "re-experiencing" of that moment in my own life. But rather, the tragic truth that it speaks about the human condition has to do with the way that it enriches everyday social life, so that there seems to be a great deal of thought behind the most banal social occurrences -- a sigh, a glance, a witticism, and so on. So this is the sense of "denial", hypocrisy, or depth in everyday social situations.

But we aren't really interested in this social depth. But rather, we are interested in the sense of dignity that every living thing seems to understand. Sociality is one aspect of this, but it comes with a lot of baggage. For one thing, such an investigation is too caught up in concerns of social justice and so on, since what's important, for the case of social philosophy, may not be the intrinsic interest of some activity but merely it's prevalence.

2.

There is not a great deal of difference between the withdrawing tendencies of sociality and the dignity of loneliness. This is sufficiently obvious from the fact that people find communities of intimacy, even if this community is a state or nation. Sociality itself tends to form pockets, as the denial of the rest of the world. Vonnegut made the distinction between the granfalloon and the karass, between false and true forms of sociality.

In a preliminary analysis, the difference between the two seems to be a matter of degree rather than kind. Ie, it's a matter of how long one persists in negation. All societies are formed based on negation and withdraw. Deconstruction characterizes this process of formation (and not, as is commonly believed, dissolution). For instance, to be a conservative does not mean, to have conservative views, but precisely to deconstruct the opposition of liberal and conservative. So the result is not that liberals and conservatives are two opposing beliefs, but that conservatives are more liberal than liberals -- ie, it's a matter of consistency versus contradiction. A persistence in thinking about the the values of liberalism confers upon them a dignity that is then detached from the practical implementations of those views.

This is the same relationship as that between the slave and the master. The master is content in his own world, the slave is a deconstructive position, so that the slave is more masterly than the master. However, this is an aspect of slave culture in general, and not of the individual who denies even the slave sociality, through a persistence. Even in slave culture there are moments of victory. The thinking that persists beyond deconstruction, that which cannot be appeased, is the undeconstructible.

3.

In the second analysis, the distinction of the undeconstructible cannot merely be a matter of degree, but necessarily also that of kind. The concept of humor interests us here. The undeconstructible necessarily rejects the tragic, romantic interpretation. Romanticism is a way of reintegrating the undeconstructible back into society, since it views the individual as merely a rebel, or merely after human causes. This is why it's so important for the romantic to be humorous, and to avoid at all costs the concepts of romanticism (hope, beauty, humanity). The idea of humor alerts us to the fact that ... yes, materiality, writing


TBC ... humor

One of the pervasive naiveties of our culture, and probably most cultures in the world (cf, Japan), is the idea of fantasy. It is related to hope and to pity. We pity the fantasizer -- children, women, etc.. -- the one who hopes. At the same time, we participate in that hope, somewhat hypocritically.

This is related to two other ideas: (1) the relationship between truth and beauty, and (2) the idea of the monument. First -- beauty is something that is not yet here, but fills us with a kind of wonder. However, beauty is different from improvisation (such as in Jazz) because of it's relationship to truth -- to the truth that is about to arrive, just over the horizon. The idea is that beauty dulls the harshness of improvisation with knowledge of it's own weakness. (Beauty is therefore feminine while Jazz, related to the word "jism", is emphatically masculine.) Beauty always asks for our aide -- it is something that should be true and bears the form of truth -- peace, order, justice, and so on. The improvisation of jazz, on the other hand, is seen as inferior because it lacks this temporal component.

Second -- the idea of the monument. The monument is something left by the dead -- it is something secret or incomprehensible, like final words. However, time can be once again introduced even into the thinking of the monument. Consider, for example, the story Bartleby, which is monumental in several senses -- starting with the repeated phrase: "I would prefer not to." There is a denseness to this phrase that cannot be understood. But time is reintroduced via a kind of "romanticization", where one understands Bartleby as merely "wanting his own space". Thus, this once again links up Bartleby with the future (via hope and pity -- two of the central concepts of romanticism). Of course, this reading is seriously flawed, since Melville's point is that Bartleby is actually from the future (like a time traveler) -- his "previous" job, he tells us, was a position in the office of dead letters -- that place where mail is sent whose owners are dead.

(This premature reading of Bartleby may raise some problems because of the concepts we use above require a non-temporal explication. Death, for Melville -- the death of the dead letters office -- is not a temporal concept. Similarly, "futurity" of the dead letters' office is not the futurity of defeat -- as hope looks forward to the future of fulfillment. Actually, death is already present, in the here and now -- it is the difficult to fathom death of that everything we do, around letters. Death is kind of controlling concept rather than some point that we can reach -- it precisely counters the open-ended-ness of beauty.)

2.

The idea of a writing that is emphatically atemporal (or rather, the correct, atemporal understanding of writing) is one of the most rewarding concepts I've come across. A consequence of this is the break with the romantic concepts of hope and pity. (I also, eventually, want to get to a critique of science, which is also atemporal.)

TBC