Resistance is Futile.

[shiels]

But there is always a felt connection to guide you. Some things resonate and some don't. You read something and it just connects with something deep inside you, an unmistakeble authentic vibration inside you, it tells you yes, this is me. That is the authentic you.

Yes but have you ever welled up at an awful Celine Dion song in a supermarket, heartbroken? Cried at TV ads? Felt odd feelings of relief and pleasure that seem to betray you, that you’d prefer not to acknowledge? Which one is you in these conflicted states? The one in the most pain? The most logical one? The one you’re proud of, tell people about after?

 

[entertainment]

Yes but have you ever welled up at an awful Celine Dion song in a supermarket, heartbroken? Cried at TV ads? Felt odd feelings of relief and pleasure that seem to betray you, that you’d prefer not to acknowledge? Which one is you in these conflicted states? The one in the most pain? The most logical one? The one you’re proud of, tell people about after?

i don't think that everything about you is fixed, just that they come from something that isn't just cobbled together by the socio-cultural-historical-economical circumstances of your existence

 

[luka]

cant beleive we are on the verge is cracking the mysteries of the self but also everyone is on the verge of falling asleep. drink euphoria lapsing into sleepiness

 

[luka]

smoking an ill-advised fag. contemplating twisting the cap of the methylated spirits or the Joop.

 

[luka]

ive drunk half a bottle of jif

 

[entertainment]

this whole conversation has been a sunday league tango with semantic blindfolds, nobody knows what anyone really is talking about

 

[entertainment]

is jif not peanut butter?

 

[shiels]

It’s just a load of stuff all interacting together and shit

 

[entertainment]

It’s just a load of stuff all interacting together and shit

that's the definition of cybernetics aint it

 

[pattycakes_]

Does inauthentic pathos amount to the same thing as a heavily doubted/audited pathos? Perhaps genuine pathos, at least some of it, can't withstand the sheer degree of doubt we subject ourselves to, and is eviscerated and hollowed by skepticism, thus left mistakable for hollow and inauthentic pathos? Surely, we can conceive of genuine pathos short of saint-like pathos.

When an actor taps into sense memory to convey an emotion, to tell us a story, we're relating with something totally different to what's happening inside of them. They're flexing a muscle. Should that matter to us? Or should we just enjoy the show?

And I see your point about the human needing the human - I, for one, am constantly overlooking that.

If you mostly live in your intellect, and it seems you do! (not a diss) That's what tends to happen. But that's fine if it works for you.

Part of this was a response to the calls for speculative/creative futures of culture and aesthetics, but a lot of it comes from the core of how I currently see things.

Yeah, I suggested that and then didn't do anything. Half distracted with other things right now. But it's something really worth getting into. Need to re read padraig (u.s.)'s thread first though.

 

[shiels]

Computers?

 

[luka]

is jif not peanut butter?

yes, but in this case its lemon juice.

 

[luka]

patty, as your analyst, (im trained) i would like to probe your antagonistic feelings towards 'intellectuals'. i have it too actually. i would say everyone here does. which is why we went out of our way to banish any intellectuals and why they aren't any here.

 

[pattycakes_]

Probe away

 

[constant escape]

When an actor taps into sense memory to convey an emotion, to tell us a story, we're relating with something totally different to what's happening inside of them. They're flexing a muscle. Should that matter to us? Or should we just enjoy the show?

I guess I was more confounded by the concept of inauthentic pathos - I thought of it as someone trying to feel something, but suspecting that it wasn't genuine, and letting that suspicion eat away at them. But your point about acting, about willing yourself into certain emotional currents, sheds another light on pathos and whether it can be called authentic, and whether or not such a distinction is of any importance. I think I'm a bit clearer on your points now.

If you mostly live in your intellect, and it seems you do! (not a diss) That's what tends to happen. But that's fine if it works for you.

Especially lately.

@shiels
just read through that thread, and yeah, I would totally recommend looking further into metamodernism if you haven't already. Personally it served a huge purpose for me. It has to do with being able to move toward a goal that you know cannot be reached - really, I think it can help one pave their way out of a nihilism. Seriously. Or even let someone begin climbing a seemingly insurmountable barricade. But maybe I just give more merit to theory than others.

The process:

1 - moving toward some ambitious because you don't have reason to doubt its attainability
2 - gradually, or suddenly, acquiring more and more reason to doubt its attainability, and giving up
3 - coming to believe that the completion of the goal itself might not have the meaning it has cracked up to have, and that the movement/progress it enables/occasions is really the meaningful stuff - but this progress is only meaningful so long as you believe in the goal? How can that work then?

This is where the metamodernism discourse helped me out. A gradual, but real, divestment from the goal and investment in the progress - and now all of a sudden the goal is dispensable, not just in theory but deep down you can live without getting there, and yet you are still willing to move toward it. In fact, you might as well push it way the hell back, so as to give yourself more ground to cover. The return of enlightenment-scale potential in projects.

 

[luka]

i think what we have tried to do, tried to create the space for, is to allow for an exploration of ideas, stuff we might think, without any consideration for what has already been thought. to go through the sequence of moves without too much anxiety about what other people have already done.

which might seem redundant to people who are well educated. but no one here is well educated. which is what i like about dissensus. i like the naievete of it. that we can think something which has already been thought as if we were thinking it for the first time.

 

[luka]

i think that's whats liberating about this forum. you can articulate your ideas without people telling you who did it first. i really treasure that.

 

[luka]

that's why i characterise it as a militantly anti-intellectual forum. ferociously committed to anti-intellectualism.

 

[luka]

i will always fight to keep this as a safe space for anti-intellectuals. i think it's character is bound up in that. that's what keeps it fun for us. it allows for a sense of discovery and exploration.

 

[luka]

inventing fire and not even caring that it was invented a million years ago already