I dunno. I'm just wondering. Can one "hail" oneself? Can I call forth the valences in "me" that I choose, rather than those that are called forth from others? Of course, I'm pondering the whole parent- and partnerhood thang. The more distance I have (and I don't think I'm talking about the aesthetic kind!), the more able I become to disengage from the less appealing valences and personalized history that has fed them and perceive "where things went wrong" and hypothesize about why/how. And....this makes me a bit more capable of recognizing when those same valences are being triggered (silence just flips me out; it can be so aggressive and diminishing) and - while being pulled into "old" (repetitive, familiar) emotional patterns - I can imagine that maybe this silence isn't a disciplinary silence (one designed to let me know that I have transgressed some communicative/relational code) but a "silence" of another kind, for instance, of gathering one's own resources, of "dealing", of coming to terms with one's own subjective tendencies and "choices". Then again (see here comes the drift!), maybe it's just an opportunity to solidify the suppression of any residue of affection...no no no, here is the moment....I call to the better parts of my own nature and banish suspicion.
phenomenology: October 2004 Archives
I've been getting clearer about some of the academic impulses (indoctrination?) that I've been resisting. This, from Paul Claudel on Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance, sums it up:
"This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by education."
Benjamin sucked me right into that trick question at his presentation today! Of course I *assumed* that if he was showing us a certain example it had to mean something. :-)
A couple of the new cohorters got right in there - but what was up with all y'all marching in late and disrupting the whole show, eh?! And did anyone besides me notice the faculty member dozing off and on throughout?
This was a bad movie about really fascinating stuff! Too evangelistic for my taste, but a useful compendium of cutting edge theory in quantum mechanics, human biology and chemistry, and consciousness studies. I was fascinated by the whole neural net/nerve connection scenario in the brain - where repeated emotional experiences sortof install routine pathways that lead to a kind of "addiction" in which experiences that will stimulate those same pathways are sought....over time the biochemical pathways for other emotional experiences are impaired and eventually cut off. Its reparable - one can shift one's neural nets - but requires concentration, deliberation, time, and repetition.
Heard a story on NPR's All Things Considered two days ago about the speed of sound and the speed of light, which concludes that the human brain processes sound a teensy tiny bit quicker than it processes vision. I think this is evidence in support of my recent "revelation" :-) that Deaf people experience the passage of time differently than non-deaf people.
Extended coverage on Protein Key to Human Hearing. I might have to get the transcript.
