General Hello

I've been updating more frequently due to an influx of visitors which has caused me to go back and reread my Much Ado paper and consider its shortcomings and its strengths.

Shortcomings first:

It's hyper-dense. I think most people are bothered by that, the Chaucer commentary needs to be elaborated with extra emphasis on the Confession Generating Mechanism that follows the Manciple's tale, no longer a story about not telling stories, but a tool for making your own story, and seeing it in the vein of a confession. Really interesting stuff to branch out on has been left out and a defense of density in writing isn't going to help that any. I wanted a lot of what I was doing to be implicit and I think maybe it was too implicit. It has a poem-like sense of reference to it, but, if you consider the breadth of its implications and how short it is, then it's forgivable (for me). Anyway, I need to write this book.

Strengths:

As far as I can tell, the general structure of the first chapter, which would be Much Ado About Nothing, is really great. The feedback I've gotten is: you jump around a lot, there's no transition between blah and blah, blah. Whatever. Get used to it. The point is to make connections that are not obvious, obvious, the motif repetition that accesses a different center of the brain in learning, is actually better suited to the task of remembering, since you are remembering without having to remember, or necessarily even being aware that you are remembering anything. You will simply notice that certain things seem to "pop out" at you.

The big thing is this: It all comes back to the motif of the circle, circularity, encircling, and eventually circle-ness.

Deleuze's and Guatarri's work, though forgivably problematic is going to be indispensable to mine, and in fact, really helps me to prove this critique on the humanities in general that the dehumanized subject is commensurate to a personified language and that the two appear to be in sort sort of ratio to one another. S/s maybe?

Anyway, to me it's a little goofy to talk about it like this. I prefer to say that people invest in languages, ideologies, politics, religion, and ideas at large with their own agency and act on their behalf.

There is also a problem of inversion in Deleuze, where he wants to say the opposite of this or that thing, to say difference is the ontological given and sameness is derivative is largely to reify a paradigm which subordinates a negative to a positive.

My understanding does not subordinate anything to anything. Sameness and difference come into being simultaneously being themselves two sides of one coin, ends of a spectrum. The spectrum exists because more than one state is being linked in a continuum. Light and Dark, don't turn on an off, but rather gradually change via interstitial periods, Dusk, and Dawn. You cannot have sameness without difference. If it were always light outside, there would be no reason to say, "It's light outside."

The other problem here is that the Derivative being derived is not vulgarized or shittier than the thing it was derived from. Often what happens is we start at one point and we move in a certain path, and that path will lead to other points which could have also been starting points and lead to derivatives, and all this origin-derivative stuff really says is that you followed such and such path along a chain.

For whatever reason, I find people bemoaning constructs they themselves investing in. I perhaps am guilty of this too. When criticizing Anti-Oedipus for "analyzing" schizophrenics, I think I opened up a can of worms. I have also written about schizophrenics here: http://basenothing.blogspot.com/2009/05/lazarus-murdering.html .

The idea then would be to empathize and express this schizophrenia, and then go analyze it.

Again, as our will to analyze increases our capacity to empathize decreases. There is an intrinsic subject/object division that cuts itself off from human-embodied methods of knowing like feeling and empathy. Far from being useless vestiges of our animal past, they are cues to our internal states and provide us with the sort of awareness that pure mathematics will forever fail to give us. While they often lead us into ruts that only reason can free us from, they also prevent us from becoming satisfied with sameness and hopefully compel us to improve ourselves on a daily basis.

This also gets into different methods of using language to convey ideas, namely explanatory vs. descriptive.

The general argument is not that descriptive methods are better, but rather, that explanatory methods are descriptive methods which describe their own methodology rather than what it is that they are referring to.

That is, we general don't accept the possibility of an explanation that has as its object some truth, (any truth). Part of what the continuation of this thesis will entail is proving this, and by so doing, hopefully with the end goal of setting it aside like Freud in the place where quaint yet influential theories go to be mused upon by historians.

So, if there's anyone out there who's on board with this, send me an e-mail, I love to talk about it.

A lot of what I've working on recently involves geometry and temporal objects, information theory, and dimension-theory.

It works because you don't have to prove what you can demonstrate.

Thanks for your interest,

Dave