on parting from the party

Sometimes an atheist can be holier than thou...

AN AFFECTATION IN PARTING. He who wishes to sever his connection with a party or a creed thinks it necessary for him to refute it. This is a most arrogant notion. The only thing necessary is that he should clearly see what tentacles hitherto held him to this party or creed and no longer hold him, what views impelled him to it and now impel him in some other directions. We have not joined the party or creed on strict grounds of knowledge. We should not affect this attitude on parting from it either.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All-Too-Human

Disengage becomes a work of in/difference.

And so for day 2138
20.10.2012

Praising the Damned

Tying freedom and privacy is an exhilaration that masks a fear.

If, as Freud remarks, the child's first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence — the moment when he proves to himself that his parents cannot read his mind, and so are not omniscient deities — then it is also the first moment in which he recognizes his abandonment. The privacy of possibility has opened up for him. If you get away with something — though, as we shall also see, it rather depends on what it is — you have done well and you have done badly. You are released but you are also unprotected. You have, at least provisionally, freed yourself from something, but then you have to deal with your new-found freedom. The ambiguity of the phrase is partly to do with the odd picture of freedom it contains. An exhilaration masks a fear.

Adam Phillips. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

This for me serves as a comforting (though daunting) backdrop to a story by Michael Harris (author of Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World and The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in an Age of Constant Connection) in the Globe and Mail. The story is headlined: "Damning with praise" and subheaded: "A radical uptick in social-media use has produced an economy of accolades into which all users are drawn. Today, we are all performers and we all have to decide: Will I read the reviews?"

[Y]ou're letting those people control what you think about yourself. That's dangerous for a bunch of obvious reasons. But the harshest — the really toxic reason — is that, once you've been pumped up by the praise of others, you can be squashed by their criticism. If you were buoyed by the kudos, you'll be sunk by boos.

I am convinced that the negative valence is underwritten by the fear of exposure as outlined above by Phillips. Even if not a single critical statement is made, there is a certain anxiety. Consider the definition of social anxiety given by Ellen Hendrikson in an interview in The Guardian:

Social anxiety is often thought of as a fear of judgment or a fear of people, but that’s not accurate. Social anxiety is a perception that there is something embarrassing or deficient about us and that unless we work hard to conceal or hide it, it will be revealed and then we’ll be judged or rejected as a result.

For instance, we might have the perception that we are boring, awkward or have nothing to say, or any one of a million perceived flaws. We might avoid parties for these reasons, but we might also avoid them covertly by going to the party and only talking to the friend we arrived with, by scrolling through our smartphones or standing on the edge of groups.

So the root of social anxiety is fear of this reveal, and it is grown and maintained by avoidance.

Can we rally to a call for an economy of intrinsics? Cultivate an indifference without being indifferent?

And so for day 2137
19.10.2012

Time Matters

There is a marvellous gem of elucidation in To Tell a Story: Narrative Theory and Practice. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar. February 4, 1972. It is Stanley Fish's reading of a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes. It is difficult to do the piece justice by selective quoting. But we try:

Ten is an arbitrary number signaling the end of an arbitrary sequence; any number would have done, any order would have served; it is a matter of indifference, an indifference Andrewes displays openly when he closes or rather stops by remarking: "I see, I shall not be able to goe further than this verse." Here we see exactly how time is at once everything and nothing; presumably the bell has rung and he must giver over, but while time has run out, the sermon is nevertheless complete, for the meaning it offers is found not at the end of it, in the fullness of time, but at every point in its temporal succession. Am I then arguing that the parts of the sermon could be rearranged with no loss of coherence or power? Not at all, for, paradoxically, it is the sequence of the sermon as it stands that leads us to affirm the irrelevance of sequence. The experiential point is realized only through the agency of the structure it subverts, which becomes, in effect, the vehicle of its own abandonment.

At some point the essay will fall into the public domain and some enterprising soul will upload it. Or before then some donor will underwrite the expense of bringing all the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Seminar Papers to open digital access. I am indifferent to the order of the options but desirous of the essay getting a wide reading.

And so for day 848
09.04.2009