Noise definitely one of those words that sounds ridiculous upon close inspection/repetition.
This post isn't actually about noise. We're not sure what it's about yet. In the title we refer to the burgeoning self-awareness of our dependence on little tokens of success, including Rightness and Male Attention, to make us happy.
Having, over the course of the past ten days, written an article, a response paper, a five page paper, a ten page paper, and discussion notes, as well as editing someone else's article, reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, some Kristeva, most of Ways of Seeing, and four pages of Simmel, I have granted myself permission to still be in my pajamas at 3:30 in the afternoon. Soon I shall shave and go to a li'l magazine launch, and then mebbe hear Seigneur Pepper Grinder talk about how to read fiction, and then return to the life of the tippety-tappety, in which we extol the virtues of up and coming music presenters in the greater Philadelphia region.
Repetition is definitely worth thinking about. On a mundane level, we notice how temporarily repetitious circumstances guide our responses: having busted two hair ties in the past week, I conclude that I need a hair cut. Squirming around with the laptop on my lap keeps pulling the powercord, which wouldn't be a problem, except the battery is bad. Two Wednesday evenings in a row waiting under a canopy with someone for the rain to slacken leads the mind, not necessarily to any conclusion, but to the expectation of one. It sets us in motion.
They say the profundity in Warhol's films, such as Haircut, consists in his resensitization to experience in time of the viewer. The films are long and boring; nothing much happens; but in that boringness the smallest action is rescaled as interesting. Minds make their conversation out of events of any size; all that's required is an emergence from a background. In quiet periods of meditation, a cough or sneeze tends to ripple small actions through other people in the room: a shift, a rustle, a sniff.
And perhaps what I really want to know is whether there is any kind of human causality *other* than this minor scatter of affect. Each person absorbs even the most major event through the senses and their mental equivalent (mind is the sixth sense organ in Buddhism), in the form of an intrusion or insistence that he or she can appropriate. Negative emotion seems often (always) to take the form of a sort of friction caused the process of appropriation; the churn and flake of what hasn't yet yielded to transparency. Positive emotion, that which sings with ease of knowledge, use. The deep metaphor of consonance and dissonance.
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5 comments:
are you coming to philly this weekend? did you come last weekend? why haven't you called me about it?
querulous north.
i'm coming to philly this weekend. my plan is arriving sometime saturday and departing sometime sunday. i haven't called you about it because i've been busy and i hate the telephone.
pw doesn't seem to do the pepper-grinder anymore - he's almost always holding a pen when he lectures now, so maybe that's the problem. did you see it?
if positive emotional reactions come from ease of assimilation, does that mean we're less likely to respond positively to foreign or unknown or unanticipated causes. and can't negative emotion be caused (or reiterated) by things we've already in a sense "appropriated"?
yay fireboss. keep posting.
and hurry home. we're jonesing for you.
how might one identify a little token of success of the Rightness variety (as opposed to the Male Attention variety)? is that something to do with academic grading or just acknowledgement from people you think are smaaaht or [...]?
i really like this entry. :-)
ross: i'd say yes and yes. i don't think that they *only* cause of negative emotion is foreignness. actually, i was writing about the quality of negative emotion, rather than its cause. i think that's a sensible difference? hm.
am: sure, both/and. Rightness is interesting, because it's not a random goal to pursue. truth/accuracy has merit. but the social status that can accrue to making a point, or presenting good work -- not to mention the burn of being wrong -- is extranneous to that merit, yes?
dependence on such 'tokens,' i think, manifests itself in unconscious or semiconscious behaviors in pursuit of that token. sudden feelings, swelling desires, catty comments, escapes -- that sort of thing.
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