Thoughts Thought Digest
N.B.: This is a chronological compilation of thoughts shared elsewhere, with the least recent first.
One of the more significant forms today of enantiodromia — the tendency of things to become their opposites — is how, as the monstrous is made normative (orcs are hot, Medusa was for feminine solidarity, Lucifer is cool and my boyfriend, etc.), the normative is made monstrous. We cannot escape these symbols. Notions of the vile, grotesque, and horrific will always exist, because they are are more real than us. It just depends on what they are culturally assigned to. Showing monsters in love or slapping big titties on a one-eyed demon doesn’t actually ideologically deconstruct; it simply inverts a value system.
When I used Twitter, etc. more heavily, I’d often have the experience of going: “That’s a good thought. I’ll post it on Twitter.” Social media as telos turned my intellectual activity into a kind of manufacturing process for the production of bite-sized goods. There may be a parallel to explore here in how the way that phones and social media “legitimize” reality makes, for example, the event of a sunset most meaningful once it has been neatly captured and shared. Nature here enlivens because one predicts, and then supplies, its digitization.
If I intend to work on a project, absolutely the worst thing I can do — the thing which is guaranteed to obstruct my discipline — is eat or have sex. Creativity is about managing your “hunger.” If you can understand this — the way that libido underlies drive — , the value of asceticism is pretty comprehensible. As such, the identification of voluminously productive historical persons who eschewed sex as asexual misunderstands. Isaac Newton, for example, was not asexual; rather, he redirected his libido into his work. Sexuality is not solely the act of fucking; it is the interpenetration of compulsion and will.
The public shaming of Rebecca Tuvel for her paper on transethnicity and, by association, Rachel Dolezal simultaneously exposes hypocritical thinking and conceptual extents. Look: either “identity” is infinitely mutable and solely subjectively validated; or it isn’t. What is interesting is that the relevant responses treated transgenderism as if it were self-evident, requiring little explanation and no validating; as if anyone confused by it were willfully ignorant or a bigot. But identistic transmigration is not obvious. In fact, the comprehension of it is a sociocultural privilege, requiring the navigation of complex ideas and terminology. Yet even then it’s unclear what the parameters for legitimacy/illegitimacy are. People will be dogmatic about “personal choice” — “LOVE IS LOVE”, etc. — , but there are taboos. What happened with Dolezal and Tuvel is representative of one of those taboos. It demonstrates how the politicizing of identity delimits transmigration. Dolezal “can’t” be Black because she is White. The characterization of Whiteness as a fixed, or permanent, problematic demands a respectful immobility.
Music criticism’s utter inability to write about music in a way which doesn’t treat it as essentially a biographical statement is a failure on both the part of critics and the musicians themselves. If any music can be reduced to portraiture, I’m sorry, but — well, it’s dead. During the 1980s, music and music criticism near-totally became about cults of (graphic) personality. This was, I think, largely an effect of MTV. Past a point, few people cared to examine music per se anymore; they just figured out clever ways to discern personae. Now, if an album is by a super-popular singer or band, you already know the critical discourse will center on the act’s navigation of celebrity and which characteristic aspects are more or less “intimate”, “raw”, or “honest.” Throw in something about “production.” This has created a strange situation for people whose critical capacities and preferences stand outside such modes of production. When we decide that the interest in, say, a chord or rhythm is “neurodivergent” or “hyper-technical”, music per se is cast as a nerdy domain.
SCIENCE IS REAL is just about one of the most meaningless phrases you could devise, and it responds to an imaginary contingent. It is, in fact, surpassingly rare to find a person who thinks of science as wholly “unreal.” The people who believe that the Earth is flat, or that the moon landing was faked, regularly deploy cross-referenced data in attempts to prove their points. That this data might not, or does not, withstand further scrutinizing rigor is beside the point. These people are, in their own way, attempting to deduce something by utilizing a form of data-based, empirical, comparative analysis. Rather, then, it is that such people see science as limited, manipulated, or overtly ideological. These latter descriptions aren’t off the mark, either. The question is: how far does one want to take this critique? and how much does it influence one’s thoughts overall? The issue isn’t about reality/unreality; it’s about the science’s presumed “right” to moral and intellectual reach.
“lmao im so GAY” is a communal phraseological meme utilized by younger (Online?) homosexual demographics, and implicit within it, seemingly, is the idea that gayness, in its full intensity, has inherent aspects of camp and subversion. It also functions as a sort of reclamation, I think. A gay person describing something as “really gay” twists a usually prejudicial statement into a kind of delightful form of self-recognition, yet still relies upon this sense that gayness is just, well, funny, in itself! I wonder how present this sensibility would be if bigoted attitudes towards homosexuality were next to nonexistent. On some level, I think that the delight stems from the notion that someone, somewhere, is annoyed or disgusted by the “really gay” cultural item or person. In other words, gayness has a provocative power which, in a sense, is dependent upon its very sociocultural marginalization — an irony which conceptually complicates efforts made at “normalizing” homosexuality.
Our linguistic connection between insight and illumination is now so cliché as to avoid review, but a closer look will reveal a thread within esoteric thought and religious experience where epiphany and revelation is integrally tied to a metaphysical light of numinosity. We speak of ignorant persons as “dim”, while we speak of learned persons as “brilliant” or “en-lightened.” I don’t think that troped expressions like these are metaphors which stand apart from experience; rather, they point to how gnosis and genius occur in unexpected flashes, and how light itself seems to have a metaphysically epistemological aspect. Recall that Jakob Böhme, for example, was sent into a mystical state which purportedly revealed to him “the innermost ground or centre of the recondite or hidden nature” from a glint of sunlight on a pewter dish; or that the Apostle Paul was blinded by the light of truth. Darkness, too, would appear to contain its own truths, but to perceive these truths requires, it would seem, a long and slow immersion into the depths of being.
One of our most interesting philosophical problems, to me, continues to be that humanity’s human-ness is both the (apparently) only ontological mode through which we can know ourselves, yet also the metric by which we distinguish the “natural” from the “unnatural.” Put another way: we have the power to measure Nature, but the position of our consciousness self-alienates. One of the benefits of contact with other worlds could be an increased awareness and understanding of what invention/technology is teleologically. As it is, it’s anomalous.
