A hypoactive thyroid may be partly responsible for my feeling old and worn out, as well as for a certain slowness of thought and depression that has been at least once rather too close to being in a coma. How fitting then that I've been reading Jean Améry's On Aging, which reads something like a prelude to a suicide note. I want to reach out to the person who left this text so much that I can feel it in my arms. This is where I am reading, in half of an embrace, one of the simpler dimensions that never quite vanishes. The withdrawal of the author from the text—is this something I am aware of acutely and suddenly, or could I possibly be misdiagnosing what it's been like to read Améry? I feel his person there amidst the text through his absence? Has he finally withdrawn from his absence? No, I fear I am misplacing agency. Whose image is projected there amidst the text? Are they his words or mine? Is my withdrawal from the words that have been given to me necessary if I am to feel connected to the person who gave them to me? Agency may mislead us into thinking that in any given instance of reading only one person can be responsible, that only one person acts (at a time—it's hard to think synkairotically). I should like to take full responsibility for what I read, and how I read, but am I really alone in all of this? Why should we think that the withdrawal of the author from the text is also a withdrawal of the person? Oh, I imagine a person detached from these words, undeniably, and yet I encounter another imagination, I have been given to encounter a person, a who who speaks through words, relinquishing them, continuing to relinquish them even after death. Is relinquishment a silent partner to my reading? To my imagination? Has responsibility itself been relinquished, a sacrifice one makes for the sake of relinquishment, for the sake of reading?
(It'll take a few weeks for the meds to kick in, after which point I'll have to find another excuse for not blogging so much.)
7 Comments:
"Agency may mislead us into thinking that in any given instance of reading only one person can be responsible, that only one person acts"
Great insight, and I'm glad you're back. I hope you feel better soon.
--Yusef
Thanks, Yusef. The treatment for the thyroid condition is said to be quite effective.
I think something like relinquishment is not merely a contingency of the act of reading because reading doesn't happen all at once, in one gesture. On the other hand I feel in my muscles my enactment of reading of Jean Améry, so I think it's reasonable to think of reading as a way of acting. "Interaction" doesn't adequately say what I am thinking. I'm thinking of acting with, of doing with. I engage in an act of reading with Améry. It's wrong to believe that the essence of acting must be to have some object, to be directed at some thing, while the proposition can only express something ancillary or merely contingent. There are, after all, transitional objects, a field of play, language and culture, and we can use prepositions to speak of such a field. So if I'm living with the contingent that is what is essential to me. It sounds kind of trite and unoriginal, but this is the path I am on for now.
"It's wrong to believe that the essence of acting must be to have some object, to be directed at some thing, while the proposition can only express something ancillary or merely contingent. There are, after all, transitional objects, a field of play, language and culture, and we can use prepositions to speak of such a field. So if I'm living with the contingent that is what is essential to me."
Does this mean you think to act is as contingent as anything else; that intention is also contingent?
What is the significance of saying we use prepositions to speak of such a field? We use prepositions to speak of a great number of things--why is their use when speaking of contingency, agency, intention, essence,etc. important to note? What did you mean by that?
Does this mean you think to act is as contingent as anything else; that intention is also contingent?
Yes and yes, now that you've brought it up. Perhaps I don't pay enough heed to questions of necessity and causality. (I'm inclined to regard straight up causality as both an inferior mode of description and hasty thinking.) When I say "contingent" I basically mean that things touch upon other things, and I don't feel there's anything mere about such a contingent existence. Existence is gloriously contingent. It almost as if existence were disposed to be exuberant about its contingency because it has no other choice.
We could start ticking off the contingencies of any action: a field of action, a heterogeneous field of masses and energies. Does such a field include a subjective "I can" or would such a power reside outside a field of action? Well, they are contingent, the various forces. When we step "outside" the biosphere we take the biosphere with us. We inescapably live in a sphere of membranes, of touches, but these membranes are never absolutely impermeable (touch teaches us that much). Mostly they are passed through. We experience them this way, as always in some way partial barriers. Inside and outside depend for their existence on knowing how to pass through; neither a purely interior world nor a purely exterior world could possibly be known. So in acting we find ourselves participating in so many passages, so many breakthroughs, some of which we may have some consciousness of directing, but all of which are contingent upon masses and forces in a field of actions—and by saying this I don't mean to limit contingencies to the what the natural attitude would take to be the physical world in its geometric dimensions. There is of course a temporal dimension. When I act with my knife on the cutting board an accumulation of training and experience go toward making a single cut. And there is culture, ideation, memory. Why cut this zucchini on the bias, the French cut which one sometimes also finds in East Asian kitchens? There is a physical reason for it, achieving a high surface area to volume ratio; but really medallions saute easily enough; the French cut is also a question of presentation, how this dish tonight will be presented. When was that decided? Right there on the cutting board? When buying the zucchini? Sizing it up? What about the mushrooms? Does the salmon, Coho salmon, suggest a way the zucchini should look? The wild rice? The color of the plates? The choice of napkins? Whose cooking is being emulated? Did this act take place the other night or did it begin more than twenty years ago when I worked for Mrs. Okada? Did it begin with the cultivation of zucchini? Italian immigration to America? In lieu of providing definitive answers I say the act of cutting the zucchini is contingent.
Perhaps you are asking whether it is possible not to act, or not to be intentional? Does one escape karma? Does one escape meaning? Karma is subject to karma. Meaning is subject to meaning. Are these statements necessarily true? They could be read uncharitably. I know that. There's a context, something like a personality and a world, an intertextuality, contingencies. A moment of expression. Karma is subject to meaning? That might be its limitation, or it might not. Is karma a done deal? I couldn't say.
What is the significance of saying we use prepositions to speak of such a field? We use prepositions to speak of a great number of things--why is their use when speaking of contingency, agency, intention, essence,etc. important to note? What did you mean by that?
You are right we use prepositions to speak of a great number of things. I thought it important to note because one could imagine the deep structure of a language in such a way as to obliterate the meaning of prepositions or in other languages morphemes that perform similar functions with respect to verbs, or, indeed, one could imagine Language itself with a deep structure like SOV (Subject, Object, Verb), and say, "this is how thinking takes place," and, yes, to an extent there might be a tendency to think of action as SOV or SVO, and this tendency must be resisted until we have a better understanding of what we mean when we talk about action. Possibly the isolation of action is a distortion of analysis, and I would be concerned that the positing of such a universal grammar would destroy the poetry of languages and misrepresent what it really means to speak and therefore also to think about action. Well, in my mind it's not simply a matter of reference or representation; it's a matter of reflexivity, yes metalanguage, and pragmatics; talk about action is highly contingent, meaning it touches on many heterogeneous things in many different ways. Does that point to a metareprentation? An iconic relation between action and talk about action? This is still an open book for me. I emphasize prepositions in order to explore what seem to me to be modalities of action. Touching with seems notably different than touching on, though there is some overlap. If I wanted to explore action directly why not look at just touching, touching itself? Why accept the impoverished or the denuded as the essential or even the necessary? To the exclusion of the preposition? What lesson is there in stripping language away? Not a very good one I'm afraid if one forgets that language has been stripped away. What I am against is the misjudgment of contingency as superfluousness. I try to think and I express opinions. Are these two endeavors at odds? Now I am curious about noncontingent acts and intentions, and pure noncontingency and what would be an example of that, and what you may have in mind with regard to propositions, so I'll turn it back over to you.
What great, rich explanations. After your "selfless self" post, I found I couldn't keep up with you--that was one advantage to your slow down! You are touching here on themes which concern me, and I find your more phenomenological approach is an enrichment of them.
-Y
Have you seen the Galton's quincunx simulation at EU? I feel the phenomenon of the quincunx offers an insight into problems of conceptualizing both normativity( I think the "self" is a normativity) AND contingency, which I hope to explore in the future (though in my lackadaisical way.)
It is insightful. Let's say that self is a distributive phenomenon. Why would it be normative? What is the distribution of distributions? Is there any natural reason for thinking that self would be phenomenon of normative distribution?
p.s. and yes it's fascinating to watch the quincunx demo with the thought of contingency in mind. Same questions about various kinds of distributions.
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