people construct languages to give themselves over to, to lose themselves in
for instance, when one person tells another person “i missed the bus this morning!” & they’ve both unconsciously agreed not just that is frustrating but on an exact flavor with which it is frustrating, then they get to pantomime a commiseration about it, while eliding the deep horror of the actual fact that neither of them actually really knows how the other experiences “missing the bus in the morning.” the actual qualities of each person are completely absent from this idea of “missing the bus” that they’ve agreed on, but the idea is perfectly distributed between them, they both know it
when you try to use a language to describe yourself, you have to confront the fact that the language is a separate thing from you, a thing you’re hiring to try to represent you. what this means is that you have to make a certain degree of compromise with it, & the degree of that compromise is a decision you have to make before you start. the more compromise you agree to, the more you lose yourself to the language. here’s what i mean:
if you pick the minimum degree of compromise, you can convey your experience in a kind of poetic word salad that feels perfect to you, but no one else will understand it
if you pick the maximum degree of compromise, you give yourself over to a way of talking about experience that absolutely everyone understands, but that “you” are absent from. that’s where we find these stereotyped models of everyday experiences, “ugh, i missed the bus,” “ugh, my friend flaked on me.” we decide in advance what these things feel like so that we can have responses prepared instead of responding with blank stares, nihilistic confusion about how to feel
(hopefully it’s clear by this point that when i use the word “language” i’m referring to an idea that could refer to “English,” “Swahili,” or what-have-you, but also to the smaller languages we build inside those languages. we may both speak English but we may also have completely different styles of relating our experiences)
no matter what you do, you are equally faced with the horrific fact that your actual interior experience will always be noncommunicable. by adjusting this degree of compromise, you are trying to find the approach that hurts the least. what is most important to you? fiercely retaining your sense of self, or being able to relate at any cost? the priority you give to one will always correspond to how much you deprive yourself of the other. there is no escape
many people, by default, choose the way of commonality. they construct languages to completely give themselves over to. they’re putting the cart before the horse in a way: they want to become a particular language, they want to start & end exactly where it does, because that language is wholly expressible, & by reducing themselves to its scope they can produce a sense that they too are wholly expressible, that they are not alone. you can see this in the way internet memes tend to circulate, the way they define certain overall styles of responding to the events in life, & these styles collectively make up a sort of closed system, a generalized style of personality that is distributed to the people who identify with the memes & circulate them
there is nothing wrong with doing this. it’s uncomfortable to witness, yes, but that discomfort is just a reflection of the fact that they are employing one extreme of the potential responses to the fact that we are all alone. the discomfort is innate in that fact, it’s not in them or what they’re doing
although, one could maybe say it’s unfair that it becomes the default for people so incessantly, without them having it carefully explained to them that there is a compromise to be made & they don’t have to default to one side or the other
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- in the same way alvin lucier’s i am sitting in a room indeed became the acoustics of the room he was sitting in,
- in the same way you can’t just apply the same effect in an image editor over & over for continuously interesting results because eventually the image you’re editing completely gives way to the underlying pattern of the effect you’re applying, which was inherent from the beginning in the way it was coded,
the internet can have an underlying pattern - or at the very least, the particular websites hosted on it can have underlying patterns determined by the ways they are structured - & if suitable efforts are not made in each moment to counteract the effect of that pattern, then people’s social relations, which on the surface appear so much to be products of their own agency & choosing, can be (on a mass scale) merely giving away to the underlying pattern of the platform on which they are communicating. are you being you or are you just facilitating the underlying pattern of the medium you’re communicating through? i’ve been saying this for like eight years since i first had a mental breakdown about it when i was seventeen. i’m saying it again right now because i like this particular formulation of the statement
& in the same way, the structure of our society is an underlying pattern of daily life, this is why dead processes on one level of abstraction beget dead processes on other levels of abstraction, why a dead process at the heart of society begets death in oneself, why constant vigilance is needed to not collapse into becoming the constantly lurking background qualities of one’s society, why the “cosmic microwave background” is so bleak & threatening
also check out this picture its cool
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conjecture: the necessity of interacting with dropdown boxes while e.g. creating an account on a bank website could be called supplementary to the seemingly unrelated process of being induced by a social media website to conceive of oneself as an assembly of discretized labels. because a dropdown box is directly analogous to the nameless mental architecture by which one conceives of themselves as a sort of arrangement of slots separated by rigid boundaries, into each of which one concept may be placed
there is a sort of… nameless broader category, which contains both the idea of “a dropdown box” & the idea of “this nameless mental architecture.” & by exposing a person to dropdown boxes, the notion of this broader nameless category is sort of piqued in the mind, so that it’s a relatively small step to familiarize with that mental architecture, since it’s just one other expression of a broader category of thing that they’re now familiar with
i more or less believe this to be true, albeit unintentional, not reflective of any sort of conspiracy. it’s arguably also reinforced by about a trillion other things, a sort of death spiral of constant reinforcement. if we’re talking the general idea of “rigid boundaries separating anything” then can any list we encounter be called an example? you do a google search, there’s a list of websites, each one has an entirely existentially separate place in one’s corresponding mental architecture of the results page. there you have it
you could apply the same general kind of reasoning to the mental construct a person builds & refers to as “their own immortal soul,” an intangible cupboard into which various sins are placed. you could also apply it to some people’s idea of the eternal immutable binary separation of humanity into sexes. trust me, people who argue about biology & stuff probably may not care that much about it, they care about a little wooden cabinet in their mind that is infinitely, infinitely more real to them than any textbook or study they could ever feel obliged to supplement it with
the same wooden cabinet they identify with & defend, i also have in myself & disidentify with. i have tried to dismantle it, saw away at it, burn it, demolish it, because it has caused me so much pain. it is not “facts” to me but an arbitrary architecture seared into myself, telling me from within myself that i cannot live, it is futile, what’s done is done, the bone is fused, it is sealed, the plate is broken. it has caused me so much pain. i never feel like i have really rid myself of it
this provokes a quite disturbing consideration: for all my efforts, for all my confrontation, it still feels this intrusively real inside me. i can hardly imagine it being more tenacious. & yet. i think of the people who do not go through any of this, do not even think about this stuff, & i can only imagine it being infinitely more tenaciously real to them in ways i cannot even dream of. in this light, their eyes are absolutely scalding to me
curiously, on the flip side, i suppose we find a humane application of this sort of logic when part of a person’s pain is quite assuaged through modifying their birth certificate or a little field on an identification card. i cannot relate to this - what’s all these worldly bureaucratic endeavors when i feel like some deep intangible destruction has already befallen me - but i feel i at least understand it
anyway, go out & start a political conversation & try to bring up the matter of intangible mental architectures that would seem to be so utterly crucial to the conversation & informing everything about it. see how long it takes someone to ask you what the fuck you’re talking about. what is to be done
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