of shape

[entertainment]

Seeing a movie last night, I thought about the 'thingness' of being a private investigator in 70s L.A. The localization of character within, not what we'd call identity, but something more material, like the webbed matter of constitutive culture. Being a private investigator in 70s L.A. was a thing. It had a texture of movement and behavior distinct from being, for example. a cop in 70's L.A. And so, when a private investigator met a cop, the encounter had a friction of a particular profile, the product of a distinct, esoteric, materially localized cultural grammar.

I think that what I clung to was this institutionalized heterogeneity, this organizing around hard shape. This was the way you were in the world in the 70s, a thing (at least if you are to trust the films, which I do), and I thought, did that make you more or less of a person that what we are now?

 

[luka]

think you might need to elaborate on this a bit

 

[entertainment]

i wanted to post this under 'thought' but i can't seem to move it

 

[luka]

ive got a sense of what your saying but i want you to define shape and exaplain exactly wht you mean by it

 

[entertainment]

ive got a sense of what your saying but i want you to define shape and exaplain exactly wht you mean by it

i tried some different formulations but i'm afraid i'm just not up for it right now

 

[entertainment]

for the purpose of this thought, maybe the best way to describe it is 'something to interact with'

something to preserve, oppose, agitate. some gravitational field against which to measure the weight of the self along recognized axes.

i think about it as something organic in essence, some crystalized residue of human activity, and I think the essence of my thought was about it being resistant to central mediation.

 

[entertainment]

another instance which made me think of it was reading the story in the news over here about this primary school that had chosen to ban crop tops, a big teenage fashion right now, to big outrage in the media. and of course you had to concede that the school was very silly to ban a piece of clothing, and weren't they almost comparable in principle to the taliban?

even though it is a pathetic show, isn't there is still something in us that wants the school to be a bit repressive and conservative simply for the sake of having shape? simply for having something to interact with, to measure ourselves against?

 

[entertainment]

but then you could also easily tip this line of thinking into some invariable defence of constructs, however hierarchical or repressive, which of course it's not.

 

[sus]

Alfred Schutz has this idea that we understand the world through types. I think you see this "cognitive legibilizing" process, whereby the unknown is made known (categorized, filed away as a known-factor) in the social world, via "types of guy" discourse.

This reminds me a bit of that. The point of having a set of types is you know what to do depending on what type someone is. The diagnosis the doctor gives you tells him what medications to put you on, etc.

Having a type also gives you an "object"—a pseudo-object, a representation or signifier—around which people can coordinate. Once you can refer to "that" kind of person, people can all share their disparate opinions, experiences about that type. And that type starts developing a reputation within different sets of people, a reputational or connotational "baggage" that emerges in the discourse around their shared history of interaction. (That is, the history of individuals from those groups interacting individually and reporting out to their peers.)

So in theory, when there are sets of established types interacting with each other (like private detective and LAPD), there will be a set of emergent interactive patterns, from the shared protocols of how they handle each other. And you have a set of beliefs each group shares about the others, prejudices or predictive patterns and cultural baggages.

 

[Clinamenic]

Maybe shape can be considered the boundary of a thing's distinction, spatially or figuratively. Beyond this boundary is no longer that thing, but a different thing.

My working understanding is that we visually process spatial shapes via lines and continuities, striations, what have you, and then attribute ideas to discerned shapes that persist over time long enough to attach ideas to. Objects in our world would seem to be first territorialized perceptually, pre-consciously, before being territorialized conceptually, consciously.

But the language of shape carries over from being literal to being figurative, when we talk about lines dividing categories, rather than lines dividing spaces.