mixed_biscuits

_________________________
There is a big insoluble problem when it comes to working out exactly what happened for any event of any reasonable magnitude. For instance, what exactly happened during the scumdemic in the UK? To get to the facts of the matter you would need experts in practically every field who would then output interpretations that would not be fully comprehensible to any living person as they would need expertise in every field to understand the interpretation.

As far as reality goes Kant said you can't know things in themselves because the perceptual apparatus which seemingly gives us access also distorts the data. McGilchrist brings another problem to the table: he claims that there are no such things as things in themselves, no "reality out there" (acronym ROT) and that, as apparently independent reality is in actual fact wholly dependent on consciousness. Perhaps reality is a multiverse in that each person co-creates an at least partly different universe. Where this leaves war reporting is anyone's guess.
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
His comparison between post-truth and post-reality is skewed as he restricts the description of the former to a single event. The confusion in the latter stems from selective use of a restricted subset of those events and their interpretation. That's why people should give criteria for their interpretations. If this is done one is much more likely to agree on a common interpretation regardless of the Kantian caveat. In other words nothing unusual or new is going on in either case.

The newness is clearly just the quantity of information and the size of the audience. The problem itself is very old.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
The newness is clearly just the quantity of information and the size of the audience. The problem itself is very old.
Yes, and also it seems like it was less of a problem in the past because conflicting accounts have been lost over time. To us the past may seem deceptively solid for this reason.
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
Another one for @sus and @Murphy. Bit cutesy, but worth a look. Could go in Book of Gardens and Environment is an Agent too.

"The complex spatial thinking of Henri Lefebvre and its implications for folkloristics are explored in the context of a fictitious conversation between him and the author as they walk around a small farm in southeastern British Columbia. Aspects of Lefebvre’s position are explored and illustrated using examples from this setting, such as fences and campfire pits. Lefebvre’s tripartite schema for conceptualizing space is articulated during this conversation, foregrounding the importance of the oft-occluded espace vécu (lived space). Viewing this as a dialogic, embodied, open-ended domain of space is shown to be a highly generative and potentially transformative approach to understanding space — an approach which has numerous implications for the study of cultural tradition."​
 
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vershy versh

Well-known member
“... the sign has the power of destruction because it has the power of abstraction”

“ ... all signs are bad signs, threats and weapons. ...They are doubles of things. When they assume the properties of things, when they pass for things, they have the power to move us emotionally, to cause frustrations, to engender neuroses. As replicas capable of disassembling the ‘beings’ they replicate, they make possible the breaking and destruction of those beings”
 
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sus

Moderator
I don't believe that people were more honest in the past

That people were less rhetorical, that they never chose their words (consciously, unconsciously) to better reach their goals

I don't believe that linguistic treadmilling—the way words like "awe-some" come to describe the nearly ordinary—is new, even if examples like awe-some have been devalued relatively recently.

And if this everyday fraudulence is what inflicts the semiotic wound, or drives us into simulacra, then what are we left with?
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
re: Bretton Woods, Prynne's Note on Metal's partly about this too -

I think what he's talking about in A Note on Metal is value ceasing to be based on the inherent qualities of a given material. A coin's value doesn't come from its properties as a piece of metal and you don't fashion a coin into anything else. That's why he goes from stone (history) to metal (theory). It's a process of abstraction. History deals with the material, theory breaks from it. Quality is no longer essential.

I think he's also saying magical properties are bound up in substance, so if you're dealing with something based on its quality, e.g. alchemy, those properties survive the process because the process is reliant on that quality. Once you're dealing with something based on a non-material value you're effectively splitting it in two.
 

sus

Moderator
Kotodama (word, spirit) the Shinto believe in the mystical power of words and names. Word and thing, inseparable. A word does not call to a thing, it is the thing itself.


If sign and signifier are not a relationship but a single thing, then to use a word is to actually conjure and activate what it refers to. To write poetry is to cast a spell.

from "Text of Bliss," collected in Poetry as Spellcasting (2023)
 

luka

Well-known member
Prynne’s emphasis on primes might remind us of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the primordial” and “the primacy of perception.”
Both writers advocate a perceptual relationship with others and the world as
free as possible of habits, of genres of reference, of rational imperatives, or
of subject-centered points of view. Prynne, at this point, hopes that “maybe
we can listen to the rain / without always thinking about rain” as rain, i.e. as
the images and associations already on file, so to speak. And when Prynne
connects landscape with history and human desires, or when he claims that
“twigs are inside / us,” he is close to Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the coexistence
of an embodied subject and the world.
Nevertheless, Prynne has something else in mind when he invokes pri-
maries and first states. Often he means something less like primordial and
more like initiatory. In “Bolt,” a poem from the mid-70s, he writes that “first
levels are free ones, / only the end is fixed….” And he goes on to say: “for me
/ all levels are held but the last.” As early as The White Stones (1969), Prynne’s
poems adamantly acknowledge the inescapable mediations of language. This
is one of their paradoxes, for it means that any projection of “prime” as a
recuperative re-orientation of intersubjectivy or as a reconstructed originary
whole is understood to be corrupt from the start. With the publication in
1971 of Brass, Prynne’s work begins to examine this corruption—linguistic,
social, political—in more radically skeptical ways.
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
Prynne’s emphasis on primes might remind us of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the primordial” and “the primacy of perception.”
Both writers advocate a perceptual relationship with others and the world as
free as possible of habits, of genres of reference, of rational imperatives, or
of subject-centered points of view. Prynne, at this point, hopes that “maybe
we can listen to the rain / without always thinking about rain” as rain, i.e. as
the images and associations already on file, so to speak.

D&G-as-trip-guide territory. The plane of immanence where everything's flattened and connections are loosened. Synesthesia extended beyond the five senses.
 
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