The Milesians suggest that things are they way that they are because of the way that they are. Thus a nature is a property or set of properties, procedures, behaviors, functions that engenders the things that are in the way(s) they are. Paradoxically, things are thus both what they are and what they make possible, which must be both identical to and distinct from the way in which they are/that on the basis of which they are. Parmenides then suggests that things appear one way and yet are another; essentially that there is a nature to perception and also a nature to reality, and humans tend to mistake the former for the latter – thus doubling human reality into two natures existing in some paradoxical relationship (things are what they are how they are and yet may also appear as what they are not – which after all must also in some sense be what they are).

Christianity picks up this paradox, principally in the Eucharist but also in a number of other mysteries, such as the human-divine nature of Christ, immaculate conception (being without basis), and the triune God. The messianic prophecies of the OT also, perhaps, function in this fashion: Christ is both fulfillment and negation of those prophecies (or at least the tradition of Mosaic Law in which they appear). Christ overwhelms the paradox by emancipating himself as man from nature: “Christ, in other words, passed from the corruptible to the changeless . . . ‘What I have done through my power,’ said Christ, “you do through my authority, I by example, you by imitation.’ To do what? To fashion (conficere) his body and his blood through his words, not only to preserve his memory but to seem him spiritual, to sense his presence. Ritual, then, is vitalized by the Word, and Durand’s central problem is how to move from word to text,” (291-292). Christ is unmediated being, pure fiat, and by imitating him, human being gains subject-hood and agency, based as they must be on a kind of radical independence – human being is not of the world and thus is not subject in a fundamental sense to the vicissitudes of nature or history.

This is exactly the theory of Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser enunciates: society is an embodied logic that makes humans in its own image so that it can be perpetuated. The form of this logic is subjectification, where individuals enact the central metaphor or action of that logic (communion, for example) in order to become individuals/subjects. People are offered an escape from history, nature, and death, ultimately, in order to get them to reenact the logic that their society is. Societies are kinds of logic-viruses that use humans to reproduce themselves, as when Christ says “without me you can do nothing” – and there are plenty of other statements in the NT to that effect (285).

What’s this winding tradition mean? What is the nature of my perception of it, the nature of its reality, and the nature of the relationship between the two?

Obviously this is the question Nietzsche and Heidegger solve when they say (to the pre-socratics, primarily) that the nature of reality (what is) is perception itself, and that the appearance of a thing governs its myriad manifestations in an ontologically-prior way. But that’s a much larger issue.

More rough notes.

what seems really striking to me about latin (medieval catholic) thought is its dedication to paradox: the way it strove to continually develop and intensify paradoxes (the eucharist and transubstantiation, the triune god, virgin birth, Jesus as both human and divine). i suspect that this dedication is at the root of a lot of the great intellectual advances of the middle ages, which are humongously larger than most people believe. i've read a convincing argument that latin philosophy (beginning with Augustine) and lasting for 1200 years is characterized by inventing semiotics as a branch of inquiry or thought. i've read a convincing argument that the triune nature of god played an important role in separating the notion of personal identity from the notion of (physical) presence. now i'm reading one to the effect of the eucharist - where bread and wine transformed into flesh and blood while still appearing to the senses to be bread and wine - was a major spur to the development of nature as a category of experience/reality/inquiry distinct from god/theology. there were those who argued that Jesus' words to the effect of bread and wine as his body and blood were largely or entirely allegorical - that is, not "the case." that probably seems like the most logical way to square the bible with experience without ditching either to us (and, of course, that's what our civilization, protestant civilization, ultimately decided). but i wonder if that view had won out in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, would the natural world, the sign, cognition, and so on, have been so rigorously investigated for hundreds and hundreds of years? if there appeared to be nothing mysterious about lived experience? would people have studied in the absence of mystery, confusion, and insecurity?

and text is below all of this; all of these questions are being pursued in a historical setting in which texts are coming to make more and more powerful and varied demands on life and lived experience, in which they're becoming the core of worship and inquiry and authority (and thus humanity, rationality, subject-hood, historical perspective, natural law, semiotics, politics).

at the core of this question i'm working on is the idea that society can be understood in terms of different groups' (classes) relationships to the means of reproduction. by reproduction i mean to capture a few different phenomena: 1) the althusserian notion, which pursues an understanding of how productive relations are replicated and continued across time/through human generations; 2) the creation of representations of the world (mimesis), i.e., media in the broadest sense (writing, pictures, statues, plays, rituals etc.); 3) sexual reproduction and the domestic institutions of productivity, such as households, factories, and so on. so obviously this idea can be understood as a modification or translation of marxism. in a way i see it as a more equitable synthesis of Marx and Hegel: rationalism or idealism develops itself through human history, but that development is simultaneously, entirely material because it is literally comprised of physical (and often industrial) production. it doesn't make sense to argue that either material causes precede ideal ones or vice-versa (even Marx had a sense of this later in life); rather ideal is always material and material is always ideal. it can be productive to abstract either of those categories into distinct units of study, but i think the most ambitious project has to pursue the ways that experience is materially developed and arranged and to treat that development and arrangement as primordial. material, historically-organized experience is probably the most primordial approximation of specifically-human reality that's possible.

so the basic questions for this kind of analysis are: 1) how is the interpretive function assigned and distributed in a society and 2) how is the communicative function assigned and distributed in a society. just as the roughest example, take 11th century Latin Europe. this is already a highly particular society, especially in terms of these questions, and because all this thinking is based on medieval europe extreme care has to be taken when applying this methodology to non-Abrahamic contexts. one of the most important particularities, it seems to me, is how explicitly Catholicism, and to a slightly-lesser extent, the other Abrahamic sects, had articulated just this understanding of society. it considered that the right and authority to interpret (anything, the world in the broadest sense) and then to publicize those interpretations had to be distributed socially in a certain way not only for moral and personal reasons, but for the very sake of good social order/cohesion. that's not to say everyone agreed in latin christendom who should interpret (and according to what principles) and who should preach, but most groups involved in power struggles of every kind recognized that this was basically what they were fighting about. another very important and distinctive practice of this civilization was the extent to which the interpretive/communicative functions had been isolated into a particular set of classes and institutions. probably no civilization had imagined that it might separate its "religious" (religion itself being basically an 18th century christian invention) functions as strictly and completely from all its other functions as had latin christendom by this point.

but, perhaps unexpectedly, it really seems like for all the talk of separation and the obviously-religious domination of interpretation/communication as basic practices going on in latin europe, christendom resolutely maintained that the right to interpret ultimately did not stem from erudition, or correct reasoning, or ecstatic/ritual experience. that right derived from institutions which were, in effect, arbitrary: the church, being the obvious one, which was granted it literally by divine fiat and not necessarily because of any of its own merits, and the dynastic lines just beginning to establish themselves among the long-romanized goths and germans that had moved into the western empire centuries ago; there too, clearly, the right to interpret was the result of arbitrary fiat, that of birth (probably this latter institution is an example of one which was able to gather to and invoke for itself the ruling/legitimating ideology of the church because of a power based originally in a very different social logic).

that might be the fundamental difference between that civilization and the one which has followed it: one of the Reformation's most radical moves was to attack these arbitrary-yet-easily-identifiable bases for the interpretive right. in theory anyone could interpret the bible, and the identity elect was fundamentally unknowable. the french revolution is a high-profile example of the further political/secularizing development of this revolution, where the old authorities of church and king were overturned in favor of whoever could mobilize reason. to my mind, this characterization shows the deep basis for mass chaos in modern society: now, everyone interprets, and there is ultimately no concrete standard for evaluating sound reason/interpretation. coalitions rise and fall, and anyone could be right. probably capital is developing now as a new core principle . . . dunno about that.

anyway, just some incredibly rough thoughts.

by "goth" i really mean a certain thing. as a concept, its very thorny to really engage with. how we actually know which bones go with which uses of the word in extant sources (basically they don't match up at all) or whether or not any goths called themselves goths, and then you have to worry about latin or romance speaking goths, and roman diplomatic practice as a state-forming institution. it is a mythical concept, but it's one we need because it's really in the cultural bedrock, so we have to make fun of and scorn it at the same time we also need it to understand the world.

there has already been a lot. a lot of shit already ended. i've been thinking alot about early modern european warfare recently. immensely wealthy nobles who had been nobles for two or three hundred years, not like medieval nobles, raised from birth, literally, to command. french and spanish children raised in palaces, taught latin and to command and to dance and wear fancy clothes. they led their armies basically by elaborate semaphore and hollering and costumery. the basic way of fighting was organizing groups of pikemen and musketeers to march in various mutually-supporting close-knit squares: forming little fortresses of men marching around in time to one another. systematically moving into position and shooting one another to pieces. that's what made the spanish a major military force. this way of fighting ruled for more than a hundred years before its myth was ended in 1643 by a 21-year old french dude.

That's a whole era of culture and war and striving and significance and it's so unlike our own (though of course you can see the obsession with spectacle and alienation, so it wasn't THAT different) that's gone forever and can never return. of course it's always with us too in a paradoxical way. spent a while thinking about benjamin's theses on history (marxism really can be incredible), and i concluded that nothing ever really stops happening. the mongols are still invading russia today, americans are still small farmers. our understanding of the world and everything we do is so immensely christian. no matter how cliche or faux deep it sounds, it's just true. secularism is just the most recent protestantism, the most recent catholicism, the most recent abrahamic-greek soup.

it's scary to imagine i'll be thinking this hard about this for longer than i've been alive so far, at least ideally. i feel . . . pregnant.

Ugh, modern history. Is there anything more self-indulgent? Book after book after book in which the same genres that exist today are gathered into heaping piles and lazily investigated. We all know what they say. Society has not changed all that much in two hundred years, at least not in terms of its semantics. It's no struggle to figure out what French middle class people thought in 1870-whatever; lots of people still think those things today.

Compare that to this:

‎"through analogous principles a new type of discourse evolved for communicating between individuals. like the economy, it was governed by a set of abstract rules, which, like prices, were largely independent of human control. literacy, like the market, insured that an entity external to the parties in a given interchange - the text - would ultimately provide the criteria for an agreed meaning. just as the market created a level of 'abstract entities' and 'model relations' between producer and consumer, literacy created a set of lexical and syntactical structures which made the persona of the speaker largely irrelevant."

mass media - which has been developing for at least twelve centuries and has clear antecedents much further back - is pretty much the invention of a non-human, mindless, perception-behavior-generating structure comprised solely of a reflexively twitching, positive-feedback loop pursuit of the increase of its own power. literacy is an industrial technology designed to extricate and gather human being's creative powers of meaning-making from their location in concrete masses of human tissue, and then to deploy that dehumanized power to the end of extracting ever more protean human significance-goop ever more intensively and extensively from human matter-goop.

the human race created Mechanism, a self-intensifying process-institution without direction or understanding that appears only through embodiment in humans but nevertheless is humanity's absolute and inescapable master.

In the middle of a chapter, the whole book just flashed into clarity. In retrospect it is amazing to see my understanding of what at first seemed to be only tangentially-related ideas slowly assemble itself, like life arising from protein-rich primordial sludge. A twitch, a shadow's passage, a discordant noise suddenly revealing its identity as a leitmotif . . . and then I thought this is it, the next six pages are going to summarize the whole book, but really it did more. I haven't even read them yet but I just filled all four margins of the open pages with my understanding. The bloom which Hegel knew was anything but a refutation the seed it had once been, a rising sun, a messy explosion of semen after a lot of grunting and wrenching that might've been pointless nonsense at the time; and then I realized that this moment was totally singular, that I'd never understand this text the same way again. Already my understanding was cooling and dying. We only have words for what is dead in our hearts. The little space I'd carved out of experience for me and the work and this book was crumbling to grave-dust. That's all right - it's the way it has to be.

I really, really love thinking.

What is formalization?

I do feel embarrassed, even ashamed, to be as enthralled to a taste-maker like Pitchfork as I am. Of course I should be determining my own preferences, of course I should be independent, indulging in the free use of reason, blah blah. And of course it's even worse in many peoples' eyes to be under the sway of such a cliquish, hipster-y institution.

It's gotten to the point now where I don't even read reviews; I check the reviews of the day, and then I go download almost anything which they've given at least an eight. I literally just listen to anything they like; I don't even need to read why they like it.

But as bad as all this sounds - and I'm mostly talking about how bad it sounds to me, myself - I've come to accept such behavior with fewer and fewer reservations. I mean, what it boils down to is that I want to constantly find new shit to listen to and I can't, or don't want, to spend the amount of time it would take to really dig this stuff up on my own. I've found that the music Pitchfork likes represents a fairly ideal blend of stuff I like right away and stuff I want to grow into liking. I think that's a pretty good calculus, to be honest.

I also liked a line from today's Penny Arcade news post: "I didn’t vote, which is to say I didn’t 'Like' my 'favorite,' because I don’t book face." I don't know if the author meant to indict democracy through a comparison to Facebook, but doing so succinctly expresses my complex, interconnected feelings about both.

Also, I like the way Tolstoy spends much more time telling in frightfully-insightful detial how something is said, rather than telling what is actually said:

"She met Prince Vassily in that jocular mode often made use of by garrulously merry people, which consists in the fact that, between the person thus addressed and oneself, there are supposed to exist some long-established jokes and merry, amusing reminiscences, not know to everyone, when in fact there are no such reminiscences, as there were none between the little princess and Prince Vassily. Prince Vassily readily yielded to this tone; the little princess also involved Anatole, whom she barely knew, in this reminiscence of never-existing funny incidents. Mlle Bourienne also shared in these common reminiscences, and even Princes Marya enjoyed feeling herself drawn into this merry reminiscence."

and just before, a careful description of unspoken behavior:

"Anatole was not resourceful, not quick and eloquent in conversation, but he had instead a capacity, precious in society, for composure and unalterable assurance. When an insecure man is silent at first acquaintance and shows an awareness of the impropriety of this silence and a wish to find something to say, it comes out badly; but Anatole was silent, swung his leg, and cheerfully observed the princesses's hairstyle. It was clear that he could calmly remain silent like that for a very long time. 'If anyone feels awkward because of this silence, speak up, but I don't care to,' his look seemed to say."

I don't know, something about the immense precision and creativity of these descriptions make me feel like I'm observing new emotions and habits being made up right in front of me. They've always existed, but no one's noticed them before. Now they're named (or at least articulated) and so they come to exist.