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

[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...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I'd have to go and reference-comb/spend some time hunting stuff down. Some is quite old, some I only vaugely recall - a couple of bits I know are mentioned in a book that's under my bed, so that'll be easy.

Stuff like reading/hearing/watching sexist/racist material affecting results of intelligence tests, Association tests (you now is this word 'X or negative', Y or positive' where X and Y have sterotypical associations - now try it vice versa and watch the reaction times skyrocket, can be done with all sorts of categories) differences in perception of the same thing between people who speak different languages which vary in their descriptive range/power/variety. People walking slower down the corridor after a seemingly random word test that sprinkled terms associated with being old...

And I really wonder about deaf people in the days before and after widespread literacy/teaching of sign language...

Might be a mission for me. Not to sure I have the time, though...

[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.

[andrewducker]

I, of course, disagree.

There's the Zen Escape, by which we escape from language into the realm of pure experience.

The problem with pure experience, of course, is that you can't talk about it, think about it, or otherwise process it. It merely 'is' - any attempt to do more than that with it stops it being pure experience and brings it into the realm of abstractions, patterns, models and other things that are mere shadows and metaphors for reality.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

oooh, the boys are being clever kittens today :-)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

actually, after concentrating enough to read this properly, I think the only pre linguistic experience I've ever had was that first time on magic mushrooms. I've always assumed my I was what I said or thought now what I was. Did I even exist before i learnt to read? i have precious little subjective evidence of it. I think cos if I don't I am nothing.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

hear hear.

I'm all for pure experience, a very big fan of it in fact...

... but I can't help analysing or at least trying to distill down and record (mentally or otherwise) *something* that might remind at least me of at least a little bit of how it was.

not very Zen then, really :-)

But abstractions can, of course, be useful - in the right place for the right purpose. Witness that some people in this thread can effectively shortcut explanations to each other because they have read the same things, can put names to the philosophies/theories etc. which serve as pointers to a whole ream of background.

Whereas brute-force, ill-read boors like me just crash in without regard for the proper jargon, hammering general-purpose language to try to express the same concepts, and gleaning the overall sense :-)

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

now who's going in for pre-lapsarian fantasy? Pure experience indeed! You can no more have a pre-lingusitic pure experience than you can see with your eyeballs removed. The very opening of the world as experience is predicated on a subjectivity that is predicated on language. For sure you can clear your mind of extraneous clutter, but you can't (except a bullet to your skull) unpick the conditions that give rise to experience in the first place.

Experience is always mediated. I'm sorry but thats just philosophy/psychology 101. The notion of direct access to experience without the mediation of representation went out with Kant.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Which Dennett book is that?

I'll agree that the agreement between such 'camps' is unusual.

[I have my own opinions on any thinking about humans that doesn't take overwhelmingly strong account of us as an animal like any other. A lot of certain intellectual traditions come to what seem to me to be very implausible conclusions given even a smattering of biological knowledge, and jump through incredible hoops to explain things that are quite simple in their roots. And I think that has been very damaging in all sorts of ways. But I'm well aware that I'm not equipped to even get started on that, so I won't...]