A Thousand Plays

The mongoose and the snake

2020-10-06T02:24:16Z

Picking up from the Christopher Alexander bits of Keith's post. First of all, it got my attention out of my books and into my physical living space, so thanks for that. Second, Alexander mentions a back-and-forth between parts and whole (some refer to a 'dynamic whole' as opposed to a 'counterfeit whole'). Evolution too I guess is a kind of back-and-forth mutual determination of behaviour and niche, if that's the right way of putting it. Gadamer writes a lot about play, back-and-forth movements where games co-determine us more than individuals determine them:

I am indebted to [neurologist Victor von Weizacker] for his reference to the fact that the tension-filled situation in which the mongoose and the snake hold each other in check cannot be described as the reaction of one partner to the attempted attack of another, but represents a reciprocal behaviour of absolute contemporaneousness.

Part of what's behind this group is me starting to read Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation, and reconsidering where writing on the internet fits into my life. Today I read this bit about why people are afraid to talk on the phone.

In 2014, a group of junior and senior college women talk about the rigors of a phone call. One describes it as "the absolute worst...I instantly become this awkward person. On the phone - I have to have little scripts in front of me." For a second woman, a call is stressful because it needs "a reason...so I have to plan what I'm going to say so it doesn't sound awkward." A third also needs to prepare with notes: "It all goes too fast on the phone. I can't imagine the person's face. I can't keep up. You have to be listening and responding in real time...You have to be listening to the emotion in a person's voice." This is exhausting and, whenever possible, something to avoid.

This made me click to what I think Gadamer is saying. The college students typify a paradigm of what usually passes on the internet for 'conversation' - you're an individual, taking in information then preparing (and editing) a response. But this is not at all what conversation is, the kind of conversation that you fall into, that happens to you.

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The wheel still in spin

2020-10-01T07:01:21Z

This is a bit over my head, and will take me a while to digest.

I'm monist, in a sense - it's the cosmic background radiation of my practice, but while I'm here in this flesh bundle, there's really no reason to think much about it.

I'd go along with that. My general impression is that "non-dualism" can tend to make a fetish of dualism, rather than leaving it behind. The narrative identity stuff I quoted yesterday is not dualist, but I'm not sure that it's non-dualist either. Existential/hermeneutic approaches are post-Cartesian rather than anti-Cartesian, I think it's fair to say.

I like what Christopher Nolan said about the ending of Inception, where the lead character leaves the spinning top (which discerns dream from reality) while it's still in spin, to go engage with his life, play with his kids.

I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me — it always felt like the appropriate ‘kick’ to me….The real point of the scene — and this is what I tell people — is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing.

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Tales of creation and obligation

2020-09-30T06:27:47Z

Relevant Māori proverb: Kāore te kūmara e korero mō tōna ake reka - the kūmara (NZ sweet potato) doesn't speak of its sweetness.

It's almost impossible to avoid self-display as we let our worlds be massaged/pummeled by the medium of internet. I need to keep a portion of my reading/writing/thinking offline, lest the whole kit and caboodle fall into the clutches of the "I share therefore I am" mentality. Which is back to the garden, I guess.

I'm swinging back to thinking the whole "good girl/good boy" thing does more harm than good - totalising identity conclusions and all that. "Good" can easily have no content other than obedience in a clout-driven society. Then once you have clout you do what you want. As you say, a more principled approach can hopefully be brought to the matter

Speaking of identity conclusions, here's a quote from Richard Kearney distinguishing the "narrative identity" approach from our usual idea of identity as permanent substance:

Ethics, in other words, presupposes the existence of a certain narrative identity: a self which remembers its commitments to the other (both in its personal and collective history) and recalls that these commitments have not yet been fulfilled. This narrative self is not some permanently subsisting substance (idem). It is to be understood rather as a perpetually self-rectifying identity (ipse) which knows that its story, like that of the imagination which narrates it, is never complete. It is because it is inseparable from the activity of a poetical-critical imagination which sustains it, that the self’s commitment to the other—the other who addresses me at each moment and asks me who I am and where I stand — is never exhausted. The identity of the narrative self is, consequently, one that cannot be taken for granted. It must be ceaselessly reinterpreted by imagination. To reply to the question ‘who?’, is to tell one’s story to the other. And the story is always one which narrates a relation to the other, a tale of creation and obligation that never comes to an end. .... [The model of narrative identity] constitutes the self as the reader and the writer of his own life. But it also casts each one of us as a narrator who never ceases to revise, reinterpret and clarify his own story—by relating himself in turn to the cathartic effects of those larger narratives, both historical and fictional, transmitted by our cultural memory. The notion of personal identity is thus opened up by the narrative imagination to include that of a communal identity.

Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination

By the way, I really admired the way you made yourself available to let The Brothers Karamazov make a moral claim on you.

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The Playa

2020-09-29T01:14:47Z

But in dating, the term "Player" has negative meaning. Healthy dating involves mutual conversation and an assay of the other person. The kind of person who is called a Player is someone who is entertaining himself or herself in narcissistic, strictly manipulative play. For Players, there is no sense of attunement with the other. He or she is not really looking at the date's life and needs. Narcissistic lovers are intensely entitled, goal-driven, with orgasm, entrapment, guaranteed lifelong dependency, or domination as the goal. In real play, the activity is enjoyable in itself and done for its own sake. It overrides consciousness of any goal.When someone is deprived of true play, they are more likely to engage in narcissistic play.

-Stuart Brown, Play

True play is the opposite of narcissism. I want to get better at play - or is that too goal-oriented a way of putting it?

PS "assay", great word.

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Press play

2020-09-28T07:47:16Z

Touching story, and this jumped out:

Tracking someone's mental state is a very complex process, requiring predictions and picking up subtle real-time information to support or correct those predictions. It is much easier to know your preferences, and even absent many other capacities, it is possible to formulate manipulative moves to try to get what you want

Personal update from me: the stage-play has finished, which means a vacuum of meaning and social life for a while, but I think I got through the worst of it yesterday. This quote I found nailed me to the floor:

Avoidant individuals had to adapt to caregivers who were non-reciprocal, dismissive or derogatory...As children they learned to be both self-soothing and self-stimulating, a pattern which makes adult couple relationships difficult.

A couple of other things I wanted to share:

Here is a neat primer on paradigmatic causality written by a real live Platonist. Via this podcast.

A handy phrase: "Double H effect", or "double hermeneutic" which is about how "The findings of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they describe."(Giddens). Found via this excellent long interview with the author of:

We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power.

This is pretty much why I veer away from metaphors reinforcing the picture of humans as homunculi sitting at consoles.

I'm waiting for the book Homo Ludens to arrive - that seems like a better picture. I haven't settled on a blog title yet. I thought of "Play Plays", but maybe that doesn't quite scan. It would be a reference to Hopkins' "Christ plays in ten thousand places", but with play itself as the agent rather than Christ.

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