Wednesday, January 07, 2009
If the open domain is logically possible it must be possible in a paradoxical though intelligible sense in which making a home (domum), a mode of enclosure, also means making an opening. Perhaps that what's intended in the expression, an oxymoron with just a soupçon of impossibility. The truth is though I don't know what possibility means, especially as its distinguished from potentiality, as Whitehead does, for example. None of my suspicions about possibility seem to match what others say about it. I put the concept on hold. As I like to say to myself, I'm open to what it could mean. At the moment possibility appears to me as something that would have to be imagined, like the open domain, perhaps. It is a fantasy idea, one of many fantasy ideas that wanders through the open domain wherein I read Casey's Imagining. Or possibility is a gesture. Perhaps I should allow it that much, that it could be offered in the interests of dialogue.
What is the milieu of the imagination, the polyskoppic power, the "organ of metamorphosis," Marie Antoinette of the faculties, winged prophet of the iconoclasm, mother of all possibilities? I'm being playful but take the question as seriously as you will. Like Casey to some extent I recognize that the imagination variegates and divagates. There's something multilocular about the whole affair. Surely Casey is right in that respect. However, I am in no rush to equate the many places of the imagination with pure possibility or any such idea. Please, allow me to loiter. What are the milieux of the imagination's vagrancies?
I am not convinced that the autonomy of the imagination is in evidence. I cannot so easily isolate my imaginings from thought, dream, fantasy, memory, culture, myth, symbol, archetype, much less assert its dominion or its rule, its something-archy. Is this not animated by a mythos, this "finding" of mine that the divagations of the imagination are not completely contained within any autonomous region? Does mythopoesis need to be obliterative in order to function, to open a domain, to push other animations aside? Does it need to obliterate the traces of its own mythos? Whether or not in practice the mythopoets call for obliterations, implicitly or otherwise, I am not persuaded of their necessity. Obliterations could be owned. This is a possibility.
Labels: Casey, imagination, myth, possibility, wandering
Thursday, November 20, 2008
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about" (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, No. 203).
"The way up and the way down is one and the same" (Heraclitus, DK 60).
When we follow a path do we follow an image of the path or do we feel the path directly without any mediation of the imagination? I mean our everyday experience of following a path. Although we are able to immediately feel something that could be called a path, provisionally, awareness of such immediate feelings tends to be extraordinary. We can cultivate divergence from the image of the path, just as we, in most cases without clear awareness, cultivate a convergence upon the image of the path. In either case perhaps we walk a path our imagination has laid out for us. (Yes, we can speak of not walking a path as irrealization of a(nother) path, as well as as an irrealization of walking a path, i.e. the path allows itself to be not-walked, or irreally walked, in multiple ways. Walking is a labyrinth of paths....) In a real and vibrant sense we walk in our imagination. Is this walking in our imagination a parallel walking, a walking that walks alongside actual walking? (Does such a parallelism–representation as such–only appear as an artefact of philosophical reflection, whereas in the raw walking and walking in our imagination are one?) Is this walking in our imagination what should be meant by saying "walking"? Or is it something else entirely? You tell me.
I'm of the opinion that mostly our abilities, the bulk of our abilities, are dormant. We don't feel the need to break paths, so we don't. Is sleep an ability? Should we be able to sleep our way into the breaking of a path? How else? What would lack of preparation have to do with breaking paths? Quick. Extemporize extemporization.
When we're following a path are we making good use of our imagination? Do we imagine in accordance with an image of the imagination? We should feel exhilarated by our imagination. Could it really be imagination itself that would keep us from feeling exhilarated by our imaginative exercises? Sometimes I realize that all my images are dull. That sucks.
"The way up and the way down is one and the same."
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about."
Labels: habit, Heraclitus, imagination, improvisation, labyrinths, spontaneity, wandering, Wittgenstein
Monday, December 04, 2006
I am abidingly the yak who thus and so yakked. There's no getting around it. But in what way am I the yak who wandered here and there? Abidingly? I used to imagine that the interesting thing about the nomadic way of life was transhumance. Now I'm not so sure. Still, I should not be surprised if, ultimately, there is no place for nomadism in any worldly egology. And yet what would life be like without wandering? I shudder to think.
Can newborn infants experience non-organization, a lack of relatedness between experiences? Stern replies emphatically in the negative (The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 46). The state of relative undifferentiation should not be hypostatized. When diverse experiences are in some way yoked, the infant can experience the emergence of organization. What then becomes of wandering? Is wandering the perpetual emergence of organization, or is it something more radically at a distance from the self?
Stern presents a four dimensional model of the infant self: emergent self, core self, subjective self, and verbal self. The model has two plain virtues: (1) it appears to be empirically warranted, and (2) the development of one sense of self does not obliterate the previously attained senses of self; all are available to experience throughout the course of life. In theory one should be able to introspectively identify one's emergent sense of self. So what about non-self? Is this available to introspection? Search me.
Labels: egology, introspection, Stern, wandering