Reducing the Input

version

Well-known member
If you get it from someone else, can it ever be sincere? You're always copying what they did first. It's not an original expression.
 

version

Well-known member
I always think of the way footballers all do the same clap above their head when they walk off the pitch and put their hands over their mouth when they miss or their face when they're carried off on a stretcher.
 

luka

Well-known member
I always think of the way footballers all do the same clap above their head when they walk off the pitch and put their hands over their mouth when they miss or their face when they're carried off on a stretcher.

I was thinking about exactly that the other day
 

luka

Well-known member
The way we become a collection of quotations. A disjunctive set of borrowed tics from multiple sources.
 

version

Well-known member
They do the same post-match interviews too. Something about it being a difficult game when you play whoever they played against, something about "the lads in the dressing room" and something about focusing on the games ahead.
 

luka

Well-known member
Part of that is a consequence of mimetic learning. How we learn to behave in a social group, but mass media and social media makes it very weird. Poses are funny like that too. The facial expressions and body postures you assume when it's time to have your photo taken
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If you get it from someone else, can it ever be sincere? You're always copying what they did first. It's not an original expression.
I think I could argue that it can be. If you are exposed to a genuine/sincere expression of some pathos, while you would still be copying it, I think it is a much deeper copy - one that qualifies, even, as sincere. As if their expression dug up your inner sincerity and brought it to the surface. I mean, we can experience genuine pathos as a reaction to someone else's experience, as in art, no?
 

luka

Well-known member
I always think of "see ya mate yeah see you mate" from a song by the fall in this context. We don't really write our own scripts. We just run standardised routines
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Part of that is a consequence of mimetic learning. How we learn to behave in a social group, but mass media and social media makes it very weird. Poses are funny like that too. The facial expressions and body postures you assume when it's time to have your photo taken
Yeah, because, in a sense, where else do you have to learn from? Maybe rigorous introspection - but how common is that?

edit: and even in the latter, you're still pulling from the same pile - just reaching deeper, or reaching period.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah, because, in a sense, where else do you have to learn from? Maybe rigorous introspection - but how common is that?

edit: and even in the latter, you're still pulling from the same pile - just reaching deeper, or reaching period.

I suppose the idea is that facial expressions and body language are unmediated and direct originally.
 

sufi

lala
this is all different from news though isn't it,
there's fuck all that directly affects me on the news, just loads of stuffed suits commenting, forcing their faces and careers upon us,
just one thing that was actually important - don't go out for three months - in my news feed this year
the rest is entertainment, special entertainment that makes us sick and miserable and deactivated
sory i made a mistake that wasnt even news - since the 15th century
 

version

Well-known member
Another point would be that if you were to communicate in an entirely original way then nobody would be able to understand you as communication only works by virtue of shared signs, symbols, language and so on.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Another point would be that if you were to communicate in an entirely original way then nobody would be able to understand you as communication only works by virtue of shared signs, symbols, language and so on.
Precisely - the impossibility of a closed/independent semiotic system/circuit.
 

version

Well-known member
I suppose you put sincerity behind whatever tools are to hand. You could sincerely send a generic greetings card because that was all they had in the shop and it wouldn't necessarily diminish the sentiment behind sending it, just the communication of that sentiment.
 

luka

Well-known member
All this stuff can make it incredibly hard or impossible to speak at all. I
M sure some of you have experienced that at some point in your lives. Paralysed by the impossibility of honest speech.
 

version

Well-known member
I suppose you put sincerity behind whatever tools are to hand. You could sincerely send a generic greetings card because that was all they had in the shop and it wouldn't necessarily diminish the sentiment behind sending it, just the communication of that sentiment.

"It's the thought that counts."
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
All this stuff can make it incredibly hard or impossible to speak at all. I
M sure some of you have experienced that at some point in your lives. Paralysed by the impossibility of honest speech.
For me, there is something almost paranoid or neurotic (?) about the paralysis - as if the sheer mass of learned insincerity precludes all sincerity.
 
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