Dclcq - Dclcq

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky (via naranzarian)

In the period between the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the American response, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called to ask me if the events of the past weeks meant 'the end of relativism.' (I had an immediate vision of a headline - RELATIVISM ENDS: MILLIONS CHEER - and a photograph with the caption, 'At last, I can say what I believe and mean it.')

Stanley Fish

Let me introduce a pair of rather less admirable siblings in the relativist family. The first of these is the familiar "freshman relativist," who urges that all opinions and actions are equally good and should be equally tolerated. He has two mantras: "Who's to say?" and "That's just your opinion." The other sibling is less amiable. Instead of a grin, he wears a sneer. He takes himself to have seen through or debunked the claims of others. So when we use words like truth, reason, objectivity, justice, fairness, or progress, we may think we are putting on robes of state, dignities that with luck we have earned and come to deserve, by doing our thinking properly. But to this sibling we are doing nothing but putting on tawdry theatrical props, disguises, and masks - and what is disguised is a Pandora's box of ugly things like persuasion, rhetoric, self-deception, and ultimately power and force. So where the previous sibling was tolerant and vacant, this sibling is destructive and bitter. Standing on the shoulders of modern thinkers, he tries to crush them under the weight of contempt. But this sibling is equally obnoxious. He is oblivious to his own intellectual limitations and laziness. He could not describe a transistor, let alone make one, but he will use computers and faxes and mobile phones full of them to spread the message that "transistor" is just a construct of Western bourgeois culture. Where the freshman relativist was promiscuously vacant, this relativist is promiscuously suspicious. - We still have to make judgments and act in the light of them. We just have to make sure that we do so as well as we can. Once we have to make up our minds about something, the issue is the issue. The other siblings duck issues, either retreating to an ironic, playful, aesthetic detachment from the business of life, or substituting allegiance to a realpolitik of naked force. ...They shy away from convictions and causes altogether. They suppose they have seen through the whole business of taking issues at face value. They say that we should not and cannot judge whether Tolstoy is a more interesting writer than Stephen King, or whether there was ever a Holocaust, or whether a religion that enjoins slaughtering the infidel is worse than one which does not. Expressions of opinion on such matters would be bad form: politically incorrect, disguises for colonialism, liberal hegemony, dominations of gender, and so on. It is this paralysis of judgment that the commentators lament. You cannot drive down the freeway with a mind vacant of opinion on where the traffic is and how fast it is going.

Simon Blackburn Relativism's Ugly Siblings

I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.

Josh Cohen

jensenacklesmishacollins:

Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.

...

The majority speaks Sense.

http://jensenacklesmishacollins.tumblr.com/post/99414721364/as-i-said-there-was-a-protest-against-union

Blink by Johnny Lucus on Flickr.

by Ron Terner

look, it’s 01:32, and the notebooks in the pits of my drawers are not enough for the horror that is tropical disease biology studies…

I wonder, when you decide to voice your questions, when you send off your impressions, when you speak or write or type, out of the blue, to your unsuspecting peers, is it done with an obstinate hope that you will receive at the very least any kind of response? A measured reply, despite the overwhelming standard of there seeming to be so few who would not only appreciate the question, but would consider an answer at all. 

In a manner that is self-deprecating, I think, I have been hunting for forms of connection that are more opportune for people who would rather not engage in anything so "aggressive" if "cute" without first throwing their daily habits into disarray. For whom such randomly expressed vexations of admittedly pretentious proportions pose as minor amusements, surprising puzzles, forms of performance art, and above all, a craving for approval–the latter, undoubtedly, many of my hurriedly scribbled down remarks are, but more, I suppose, a form of reassurance to myself that it is fine if I cannot help myself. Rather that than a kind of validation that is supposed to instill in me, over and over again, my sense of self-identity and worth. That would be very silly, don't you think? But it is to be expected that more often than not we will seem silly regardless, and are loved despite of it, than seem as we want to be, and are loved because of it. So herein then, ought we not to give free reign to the expectations of others, and to our own, and tailor our contentment accordingly? 

From there has emerged, I reckon, the infamous, “Nevermind that,” for which I am chastised here and there alike. Yet it occurs to me that I do not dismiss so much myself, but what I see as the toil and burden for you to bear if I did not do so.

I have never thought of it like this before, or thought of any of it for the longest time, if only in passing sneer in relation to my own expectations of people. Suppose I have dismissed thinking about it entirely, but wouldn't that truly be considered as “settling”, after all?

Why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field? The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

David Graeber What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun