Stuff

Haha, I wrote my MC15 final paper about Jameson vs. Lyotard on the concept of totality (Lyotard doesn't like it, he's even more freaked out than Baudrillard I think) and I've forgotten pretty much all of what I referenced there. I do recall though that one or both of them make use of spatial metaphors--the real, or the absolute, has been lost, so that there are no longer any stable reference points to guide yourself by. Jameson criticizes some forms of totality but seems to have his own preferred one, and I'm not really sure what he's trying to get at, but I'm not bothered by the idea--say, sort of an ideological "gray goo," if you're up on your end-of-the-world scenarios.

I'm quite fond of theory but I prefer more theatrical, even mythological ideas to explain the sort of things life and theory concern (the Kantian sublime is pretty cool, for example, and Campbell/Eliade's ideas of the sacred are even better). So I particularly enjoyed Snow Crash's ridiculous stories about Enki the original linguistic hacker. It's true that most (perhaps all) world-creation stories begin with the separation of things--God separated light from darkness, the waters from the heavens, etc. Of course that separation had to have been real in some sense--in truth there is no difference between the sky, the sea and the earth, or at least not as far as we're concerned: they're all part of what is observable in one way or another. The separation between them is not intrinsic except in science, which is (in the context of postmodernism) an art which lacks the kind of truth that we so fruitlessly seek. It's fascinating to wonder what it was like--if there was a moment when the world of instinct and raw sensation split into the world of words. Probably there wasn't, and it happened over millions of years, but that's what we have myths for, isn't it? Anyway, that primitive world is still there--we're still in it, we've just convinced ourselves (but only halfheartedly) that it's gone. Eliade says that when the Aztecs and Mayans removed the hearts of their victims, the gods were supposed to be there, present, as real as anything else--and that they really were, as far as anyone was concerned. Maybe it's just my naive wish to be a spiritual guy, but I think the gods are all still there, just buried under mountains of words, though I'm sure that's been said better many times in the last few thousand years.

At this point my blog post is a horrible mess of what amounts to incoherent pop philosophy, but to get to my original trite point, I think Snow Crash functions as a light held to the act of describing the experience of living that is the fundamental concern of all human projects, once we get past the business of staying alive and reproducing. I suppose the question is are we actually getting anywhere? Sure, anybody in this class who enjoys thinking about this stuff might get a thrill of "enlightenment" once in a while, a sort of "Oh, so that's what it was" feeling of understanding, but I'm sure any number of kids studying existentialism in the early 1900s or priests studying whatever priests studied during the middle ages came to similar conclusions, (I think thinking about thinking tends to repeat itself a whole lot) just phrased differently. Jameson (among others) believes we're approaching a nexus where things are going to get really wild, maybe because of computers, maybe because of politics (I'm personally holding out for ascension to a higher state of being through philosophical meditation, but that seems unlikely), probably a combination of things. But it's kind of easy to find similar beliefs throughout history--aren't we always headed towards a crisis or a paradise of some sort? I guess I've just been reading way too much about postmodernism + computers lately (I'm also in Code, Software and Serious Games), and at times the essentially ridiculous (the texts strut around like roosters) nature of a lot of this stuff chafes a bit. Still, didn't someone once describe the entirety of human civilization as a protracted bout of mass schizophrenia? I guess we all settle into our own madnesses.