philosophical thoughts  

There are those people we would be tempted to call cultural icons. Defining fashions, or at least reflecting tastes, these people embrace what we might decide to call, cool.

Like the blueness of that swimming pool that I see on Zoopla now, but originally on MTV cribs.

Celebrity is a word which not that long ago didn't mean anything; perhaps celebrity was once infamy, which is a totally different kettle of fish where swimming against the tide only results in pain. But this was the way it was, and in many, but different ways, still is. 

That’s another thing I guess, the 'way it was' or the 'way it's meant to be' or 'will be'. Being appears to have a quality of fallacy inherent to it, with the now of Being dependant on points that are fixed either in the reminisces of history or the, mainly conceited, often shallow, desires of futurity. This is however not a social-futurity for many, but a personal one: ambitious. These referential points we then aspire to reach, or get to, forgetting the wonderful delicacy of now-ness and the peculiarities of just being in a world of beings Being.  

Cultural icons look as if they reach these points, usually going back to something in history, drawing on this as inspiration to then go toward a new thing. They also seem to be pretty decent at Being, especially having to deal with being beings whose Being is both dependent on having to adhere to the desires of other beings and also on the construction of a certain type of Being, to this end.

There is a fallacy in this too, both in the very construction that supposedly defines us, and also how people view this construction, and we view them viewing our construction. This is because the Other's Being is a Being that one can never understand properly. This is because Being is only really comprehensively known in the sense of the self. The Other is ultimately just that: other, but the Self must, in the paradigm of Being, strive to garner a sense of Being outside of the Self in order the consolidate what it truly means to what is known as 'I'. Not just Me-I, but they-I too.

I went to the shops, I hate you, I really need to go to the toilet, I don't like the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, as I find them slightly heavy, and akin with Fascism. I do however like long walks on short beaches, and that slow shuffled walk that accompanies queues. I like it when people argue in the street as I only argue with myself, and watching two beings argue gives me a strange sense of faith in humanity: there is comfort between such people, despite possessing the appearance of discomfort at that moment. General beings around them also feel discomfort, which is kind of nice because that needs to happen sometimes. 

This is not to say that we mustn’t aspire to reach the Other, it is crucial that we must, and ground our Being in the architectures of other cultures, tastes or simple fancies. Being requires a vision outside of the self and this gives an insight into the textured roots of humanity, complex and intertwined like the mangrove forest. Franz Fanon says:

“Man [or woman] is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truth that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him”.

This truth, this supposed sense of Self requires a dissolution, and requires a double take. “Bound by crushing object-hood” it is all too easy, blind, and ignorant to evaporate the Other, Other meaning anyone outside of the Self, to simple appearance, to preconceptions and inherently flawed prejudices. Whether this be race, sexuality, or just personal-taste, the Self cannot and must not use this difference as the starting-point – but see it as one of many subjective differences that define a person’s sense of Being.

“Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain un-certainty”. We must, for Fanon, go toward ontology and not debase a subject by objectivity. We must turn rather toward to mind, away from the body and to the “corporeal” not "epidermal" schemas that define, un-holistically, those external to the Self. “The fact of blackness” details a move away from pre-conceived, reductionist facts, that one might also ascribe to femininity, or sexuality: we must not define a subjective Being with objective terms. Female, Male, Cis, Black, White, Gay, Straight or anywhere in-between any of these classifications. Classification negates a lot, it boils one down to a defining feature. This does not mean that we shouldn’t embrace cultures of each supposed ‘classification’: we should revel in these definitions, exalt them and allow them to contribute to our Self-hood, and at the base of this our shared humanism.

This brings us back somewhat to cultural icons, and another fallacy in this. Cultural doesn’t imply culture(s) which by nature is multifarious, rather the one culture that guides us all, like the currents unseen that control the air and the waters. And this is capitalism. The £ and ¢ have made it onto our keyboards: our mouths. The culture and language of economy has caused an economy of language: where perception is based on objects, materials. But hey, without it, I couldn't have written this.

 Let us move-toward-things

  not objects.

  which we can tuck away into boxes

  to reflect

  on something quite different.

an aside to the 'book'

an aside to the blog-proper in the name of intellectual discussion.

-written in response to Sarah Perry's fantastic article 'In Praise of Readability' < http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/in-praise-of-readability/ > for The TLS.

The Laudability of Literary Loquacity, “Unreadability” as (un)consciousness

Luke Connolly

“But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions — colour, odour, texture — in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.”

from, Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’ in Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Walter Pater, known for his ebbing Latinate sentences, with clauses unfurled effortlessly one-atop-the-other, is dense, lacks brevity, but has a certain complicated charm. His prose feels “unreadable” at times, but this is because it requires a different vision. How often a reader traces a page, overlooking its content and rather automatically following the shapes of letter, not the intent of these letters’ meaning. There is often the inclination to become lost in a page, processing it in immediate ignorance, following another train of thought outside the world of the book. “Readability” works to eschew this effect, it keeps things moving and feels efficient – something civilisation has strived for, for many years. Impermeable literature will frequently mean a reader will stray back into their own narrative: conscious of what will be cooked for dinner rather than focussing on the verbosities that so beautifully flicker on the page. Its resistance is its strength, however confined to the elite this may feel. It is however, ultimately human and realistic in its rambling.

Mark Twain once said:

“Stick to [simple prose]; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

But Mr Twain is missing something. The flowers that adorn simple prose, at times masking what lies literally underneath, but that which can also elucidate complex meaning, or paint images as readily as the mimetic artist, works against the steadfast sterility of plain prose. This approach to prose, despite its simplicity, is not condemned to be basic, or artistically weedy: it often rather works to the opposite effect. Hemingway, Orwell, write with a terse minimalism, pithy and precise and alluringly readable. It flows, it reads and it is inviting. What often goes unsaid is strangely expressive, and Hemingway does this with intellectual acuity, but ‘fluff and flowers’ is how one is to truly experience the subject. One can become joyfully shrouded in its sublimity, left confused but committed to finding the central kernel that lies behind the dexterity of the obtuse.

The human consciousness, the ‘con – science’ of subjective experience, revels in resistance. The rational, reasoned self: simplistic and honest and defined in readable, readily concise prose is hugely reductionist in terms of the subjective. A narrator with remove, objective and without the flowers of authorial interjection, does not represent the real. One does not think from a-to-b in laterality, but rather segways, serendipitously, swaying from literalism to a more abstracted arena. Joyce might take this too far in Finnegan’s Wake, and erects a wall to meaning similar to the wall that one puts around their personal subjectivity. It is so resistant it can leave one rueing purchase. It does however, demonstrate the absolute unreason, unreadable textures of thought. It shows a writer working against what has preceded him, discovering an artistic innovation which questions the meaning of everything: of the language that is central is life, interaction and communication.  

Arduous by nature and conceited by design, the sustained stylistic textures of “unreadable” prose often has no narrative, or juiciness of determined plot. It hangs, as Pater says, as a collection of impressions, ‘the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind’ and leaves at its base the questioning subject.

Huysmans goes Against the Grain of brevity, instead triumphantly traversing the delicate delicacy of the aesthetic eye, descriptive to such a level that one must become lost in his words to enjoy them. Taste is one of the few shared characteristics in all, differing though it may be. We might be tempted to resist a 300-word description of a jewelled tortoise, finding it essentially verbose, skim-reading it in the search for a big plot finish, or a succinct wrapping-up of plot, but this would negate the journey of consciousness and the individual discovery of meaning, or interpretation of beauty.

Unreadable, complex prose, can too change the world. It can change the world of lateral signification, from the stark strictures of definition to a world of aloof, if slightly lofty, re-presentation. This is not to say that simplistic, readable prose cannot change things: it simply does it in a way to educate, easily. Reading must err into self-teaching; where a truly complex writer does not simply impose meaning but exposes the frailties of the such literalism, rather revealing the beauty of the subjective, highly-individual mind. The ideal life, for the Aesthete like Huysmans, mimics art and art has to in some way mimic perspective. Perspectives differ and this is where the beauty lies in resistant prose, or indeed overly-meta poetry. Post-modernism comes from an abstraction of meaning and its referential form loosens the signified, which we base our external realities around: the perceived real.

Terry Eagleton says:

“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. 

Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.”

Let us exalt the symbol, and try to resist rationality and definition. Let us keep some secrets. Art thrives not with cursory glances, but detailed study which leads a reader back to themselves. There is a magic in re-interpretation, and resistant ‘unreadability’ gives us this.