Synkaironisation (1)

Synchronisation can be understood as the happening of 2 events, processes that are indexed by the same (or sufficiently similar) points along an abstract chronometric scale. Chronos is an otherwise undifferentiated scale we model using clocks. Synkaironisation is similar, but with respect not to chronos, but to the reciprocal relations we are embedded in, the recurrences, mutualities, entanglements, that make the notion of time meaningful as something other than the losing battle against entropy.

A simple example is the “synchronous” appearance of blackberries at this time of year. They emerge in approximate alignment, not because of chronos, but because of the seasons.

We might look at any apparent synchronisation among the living and find it is similarly synkaironisation. Look at the fireflies. Their synchronisation is driven by the common embedding in the fading light of dusk, and the common phylogenesis that has equipped them with bodies of similar sensitivities and capacities.

Now consider what kind of synchronisation we might be seeing in speech? It is not the seasons. It is our embedding in … in us? in a common world? In what?

 

Nature *yawn* Nurture

A kid grows up and has a life, L, that bears a strong historico-cultural stamp. Was it nature or nurture the foolish ask.

Not that the question is poorly motivated, and the problem is not that the social-cultural forces that had such demonstrative effects are, or are not, real. The problem is that there is no nature-only version of L to be found. There is no way to construct nature that is not from a contingent, fully enculturated, position.

A person does not remain a seed.

 

Being inside out

Assume: experience does not divide into subject and object, though we may talk about it that way, as we seem to have few other options.

Assume: the notion of the individual mind, reified by cognitive psychology, is built upon just such a split. This provides a background assumption most of us have, and it licences discussion of perception, attention, and memory, each conceived of as something “I” do.

We can drop the problematic pre-theoretical split. Then we are no longer in our heads, but we are the world we meet. Perception, attention and memory can all be inverted.

 

The mirror of nature

Our job is not to construct a description that captures some natural model/Vorbild. Our job is to relax until our objective picture and the processes of law and control settle into an equilibrium. Until they become the surface of a mirror.

 

The heart of being

There is a paradox at the heart of being. It is a negation. That which is asserted defines itself as the complement of that which asserts.

You stand outside a moshpit, and you can characterise it; you describe it, from a safe distance. Now you are in the moshpit. Now you participate, and you cannot describe. And these two positions, these occupations, dance each other into being.

There is nothing to explicate there. Everything summoned from the void by naming must disappear back where it never came from. The call is a summons, bringing this and that into being and the discourse rages, grows, transforms, abates, and is extinguished. Until nothing is left.

It appears as if we continually confuse representation with reality. But that is our fate. We fall through to meaning, always. We see through the image, the text, and sense is made, and enacted. Tat tvam asi, or self-reference.

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The structures and distinctions of language drive a fat wedge between subject and object, between actor and patient.

• Language
• Nervous systems
• Immune systems

Each of these three makes distinctions. Those distinctions bring into being self-other dualities.

A distinction is drawn. In H. The distinction can be indicated. A dualism arises, for with the distinction, there must be one who distinguishes. But that one is not an enduring essence. It is enacted.

To describe is paradoxical.

 

Coincidences of non-self

In the previous post I referred to a discussion about Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite. The first speaker, Charles Stang, gives a precis of his recent book on the topic, in which he makes a case that the author of that work used the pseudonym in order to deny his self, so that by speaking from a displaced locus, he might better approach the divinity (or the fusion of atman and brahman).

There is a remarkable resonance between this account of a split self, neither one nor the other, but both and neither (paging Nagarjuna!), and my previous ruminations about the dislocated self that seems to underlie first person accounts of activity in Grand Theft Auto. I also wrote about that here.

Seeing that all our talking is “in game” (what I have referred to as “specific conversations”) might be a means to recognize our inverted being, continuous with all.

 

P- the single point

Watching this fascinating discussion on pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, there is a remarkable section around the 37 minute mark.  The first respondant, David Brakke, has articulated a notion of self that seems familiar to him, illustrated with Bruce Springsteen, St Augustine, and Hedwig of Brabant, that has an interiority. He finds the kind of no-self suggested by the apophatic approach of Dionysius to be hard to understand.  When he tries to describe that non-interiorized self (from 39 minutes) he describes it as a single point in 3-D space.  He is dead on the money.  He furthermore suggests that this way of conceiving of the self might be aligned with post-structuralists account of social construction of a relational self.  The single point is, of course, Victors “single point that cannot be grasped”, and it is my minimal P-point in a representational framework. Importantly, for that to work, we require isometry of space and time, which came about at the time Descartes suggested the Pineal as a privileged center of of the body/mind.

Pursuing this thought, what does the further isometry of value through the medium of money allow? If the represented domain (P) is that warped view we find money supporting, what is a single, content-less, point therein?

 

Of stories

When I play Grand Theft Auto, I project myself onto the avatar who seems to be running around in a vast fictional world. If I were to describe my understanding of my activity as I appear to simply sit on the couch twiddling my thumbs, I would say things like “I’m stealing a car, climbing a hill, jumping, cycling, falling, oh damn, I died.” The terms used do not make it clear that this is a fictional universe, and in some sense, I am telling nothing but the truth.

When I use similar terms to describe my activity at any other time, similar concerns arise. The words used do not distinguish between a projection and anything real. The indubitable reality of my lived experience is not approached, described, or contacted by my words, which simply draw pictures, tell stories.

Add to this realization, the non-singularity of my experience, such that your experience and my experience are continuous, reciprocal, mutually entwined, and we have a right pickle. Words can only tell stories (in P). We are here (H).

 

Autobiographical note

I have notes everywhere. I leave very many trails in my pmwiki pages, in this blog, in thousands of whiteboards, and in many other locations (including publications). If one were to trawl them forensically (Lord forbid!) I doubt a coherent picture would emerge. But in re-reading many bits myself, I find I have to understand them in the context of a specific progression of ideas.

About 2005, I became fixated on the concept of the P-world, which was that which was present to an individual at any given moment. My attempts to articulate this ran foul of obviousness and unoriginality, and it must have seemed that I was trying to describe the contents of consciousness, or the like. I suppose I was, but I was trying to tie it to the notion of the present. However I was trapped in an individualistic framework.

 

Thought on Brexit and Van Eyck

Perhaps we could democratise not the jobs of authority (let them be done by competent people), but the selection of the sacred texts and objects.  I want to vote for the the Ghent Altar.  Media and screens as channels of engagement with the objects of veneration could become the sacred objects.  People might develop variants of potter’s nod, which would look remarkably like the bobbing found in prayer.  Let everyone’s world be real, might be our slogan.

On the outer panels of the altar, there are four figures in one row: the flanks are the patrons, all fleshy, very very real and present.  The middle two are saints and they are paintings of statues.  Representations of representations.  Because they are above mere humans in the neo-Platonic hierarchy, you cannot see them, which would be to be in their presence.  You must content yourself thus with a representation.