Things so horrible you never want to be in the situation to find them out #167

[andrewducker]

Collecting your own stool sample is _exactly_ as unpleasant as you'd imagine.

Comments

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

oh i completely get it. i was once in a club where two people were publically getting a lot of pleasure out of dealing with each others...i really don't get that one. Takes all sorts of course, this thread might be providing minutes of auto-erotic pleasure for some of your audience.

[andrewducker]

Oh, if I can give a helping hand to the coprophiliacs in the audience then that's fine by me :->

I'm interested to notice that I've now given up completely on trying to persuade people of emotional things. That's definitely a step forward - and seems to be new to the last 6 months or so.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

now a Kleinian therapist would make a really big deal about you mentioning this emotional growth in a post about shit. ask your analyst.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

*chokes with laughter*

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

actually not primarily intended as a joke, the envious and destructive child, in Kleinian stuff, projects its shit into the bad breast of the one who refuses to nurture us. Klein is really visceral and primal in her psychic imagery, breasts dripping milk covered in angry shit (I think we might just have turned on more masturbators).

So looking after your own shit, not projecting your emotions onto others, and not expecting them to "get" yours is actually a very classic sign of growth.

[andrewducker]

Is it wrong of me to find that kind of psychoanalysis ludicrously funny? Or, indeed, funnily ludicrous?

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Actually I do think the imagery of "dealing with your own shit" does have something going for it.

Just like when I got told that I ws grinding my teeth so much because I was "gritting my teeth and bearing it".

metaphors matter.

[andrewducker]

That's possible because people _do_ grit their teeth and bear it?

And I have nothing against metaphors - just against people who take them too seriously. It's the age old mistake of building a metaphor that works in and of itself, but then trying to build on it/extend it as if it were literally true.

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

And then finding out you haven't got planning permission and the council comes along and makes you tear it down again.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

depends, i think our reaction to it says something about our own psychic ecomomy. I look at Klein and think, yep, sounds about right, but thats because i know that part of me is all about the body and the fluids and the envy and the filth. If you fancy yourself a bit more rarified and narrative then go for Jung, if you fancy yourself as a creature eterenally alientated from itself by the monstrous imposition of language, go to Lacan (or Zizek) etc.

It's like different people reaction to their own shit.

[andrewducker]

I mostly fancy myself a monkey that tells stories. Who do I get?

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

me

[andrewducker]

Well that's handy - at least you live in the same city, and aren't dead. Makes things a lot easier.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett?

(and a few popular science authors whose names escape me right now Damiaso?)

You are REALLY quite attached to this concept, aren't you? :-)

[andrewducker]

Ian Stewart/Jack Cohen.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

that's the chaps. Ian Stewart is the quite numerical one, IIRC

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

but after a bracing session of CBT, I'd send you back to a Lacanian (or get you to read Zizek) because I think you are a little blithe about the story telling and the metaphors, about quite how irredeemably perverted by language we are.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

quite how irredeemably perverted by language we are.

Something I am thinking about again at the moment actually (in my own, brute-force kind of way).

You can end up right up your own arse (he heh) with considering language though. That's a philosopher's job :-) I'm a scientist, gimme repeatable results :-) (which I am aware there are, and have read up on a few more really fascinating effects recently...)

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

(which I am aware there are, and have read up on a few more really fascinating effects recently...)

go on, share, or at least point...

[andrewducker]

There ya go, using language to pervert things. You could have said "how irrecovably changed by language" - which would have been more value neutral, but instead you're treating language as the bad guy, perverting us from our pre-Fall goodness, turning our natural Noble Savage into a corrupted Industrial Monster.

Which, I thought, was an interesting choice of words.

Oh, and I agree that Lacan should be read, because we should understand our environment, and a vast amount of our modern environment is language and other constructed signals. But I think the best response is to refuse to take these signals too seriously. I generally think that pure rebellion is an infantile response, treating the world in a black/white manner, and allowing the thing rebelled against control over your actions (albeit in an oppositional way).

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

"generally think that pure rebellion is an infantile response, treating the world in a black/white manner, and allowing the thing rebelled against control over your actions (albeit in an oppositional way)."

I agree, rebellion is actually not possible. the fundamental insight of Lacan, Zizek et al is that "the thing" (in your sentence above) is acutally inscribed at the heart of subjectivity, that the "language and constucted signals" far from being mere contingent externals are also the constitutive bases of our "I". As such, language is a kind uncanny possession, It speaks us.

Or, as the deconstuctionists would have it, there is nothing outside the text. There is no external place from which to rebel, no escaping the prison house of language.

Interestingly you find almost the same argument in cognitive science, very well articulated by Dennett and Andy Clarke, and Dennett takes the metaphor even further and happily talks about our being forcibly parastised by language. And of course you have the real piss poor lego version of it in Richard "memes" Dawkins.

rarely do you get such convergence of opinion from such disparate intellectual traditions. They all point to the fact that language is not an add on, we are not just Monkeys+. Language founds subjectivity and forms the site of Being.

[tisme.livejournal.com]

I always find it amusing that he will often call me from the bathroom, mid pee, and happily continue talking to me should I ever pee (although I'm far more discreet, and don't do it unless I *have* to, and he's refusing to get off the bloody phone), but should I realise I need to take a shit too, (and it's always amazing how he can *tell*. He has shit radar. Scatdar), I have a disconnected signal faster than you can say 'Oedipus complex'. Andy thinks I've been shitting a lot recently :D

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Don't go TOO far with it :-)

You know what I mean...

IMO, emotions still benefit from explanation and examination. You can neither just run with them or ignore/run counter to them. You can neither just accept other people's (and the resultant actions) or ignore/reject/disregard them.

Some things can be explained and shared, some can't. It's interesting to try, usually...

[andrewducker]

You can neither just accept other people's (and the resultant actions) or ignore/reject/disregard them.

You can certainly ignore or accept other people's emotions. It's their actions you have to pay attention to (or at least learn when to duck).

I'm happy to discuss theories as to why people have an aversion to touching their own waste products, but I suspect we're both already au fait with the instinctual ones and I didn't think there'd be much else to say...

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

It's nice to realise that you're tolerant of others intolerance :).

And, having had to once do a thyroid test that required everything I peed for a week, I know your noses' pain.....