The characteristic of rambliness
"The characteristic of meaning is that not everything has it."
-Jean Baudrillard, The Lucidity Pact
I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and I'm still not sure whether it's true. There are three possibilities: everything is meaningful, nothing is meaningful, or some things are meaningful. Baudrillard dismisses the first two. My worldview dismisses the second (disciples of Richard Dawkins can stop reading here). It's not a question of whether meaning is intrinsic or constructed (or both). The question is, when interpreting the basic events of our daily lives, which is more burdensome: a knowledge that Everything is meaningful, or the task of determining what is and isn't?
Take, for example, our obsession with self-knowledge:
This is the Wordle visualization of the content of this site for the last year. Is there meaning in the fact that the largest word is "people," seemingly incongruous because of my extreme introversion? If I knew that it was meaningful, but could have no grasp of that meaning, would that be worse? And that's only considering one word in the hierarchy...
This is where you call me a loser for thinking about this.
Ideal living is often summed up in trite phrases, like "live every day like it was your last," or, "look for the diamond in the rough," but these don't work in practice because they amount to veiled propositions about meaning. The propositions themselves usually remained obscured and unexamined, so we can never really accept or definitively reject the aphorisms. Of course, now that I've criticized the conventional wisdom, I'm supposed to offer a different spin on the same "truth." But I don't have one.
The reality is that everyone has a set of presuppositions about whether events and things are meaningful, and 90% of the time these presuppositions are not examined --- because to do so nearly guarantees unresolvable internal dissonance and paranoia.
I think this emergent self-examination is what happens to many academics somewhere between their 2nd and 4th years of graduate school. Like groundhogs, most of them see their shadow and run back into the hole (the hole is called "the tenure track"). It usually arises because of a question about whether their epic thesis on a clay pot from a 2nd century Welsh town is truly significant labor.
Yet we can't dismiss significance and meaning out of hand, because we all crave transcendence on some level. Everyone has reached momentary heights of blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany --- maybe while listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing genuine intimacy with another person for the first time --- which tell us that either there is or ought to be Meaning beyond survival. Whatever it is, we want it.
-Jean Baudrillard, The Lucidity Pact
I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and I'm still not sure whether it's true. There are three possibilities: everything is meaningful, nothing is meaningful, or some things are meaningful. Baudrillard dismisses the first two. My worldview dismisses the second (disciples of Richard Dawkins can stop reading here). It's not a question of whether meaning is intrinsic or constructed (or both). The question is, when interpreting the basic events of our daily lives, which is more burdensome: a knowledge that Everything is meaningful, or the task of determining what is and isn't?
Take, for example, our obsession with self-knowledge:
This is the Wordle visualization of the content of this site for the last year. Is there meaning in the fact that the largest word is "people," seemingly incongruous because of my extreme introversion? If I knew that it was meaningful, but could have no grasp of that meaning, would that be worse? And that's only considering one word in the hierarchy...
This is where you call me a loser for thinking about this.
Ideal living is often summed up in trite phrases, like "live every day like it was your last," or, "look for the diamond in the rough," but these don't work in practice because they amount to veiled propositions about meaning. The propositions themselves usually remained obscured and unexamined, so we can never really accept or definitively reject the aphorisms. Of course, now that I've criticized the conventional wisdom, I'm supposed to offer a different spin on the same "truth." But I don't have one.
The reality is that everyone has a set of presuppositions about whether events and things are meaningful, and 90% of the time these presuppositions are not examined --- because to do so nearly guarantees unresolvable internal dissonance and paranoia.
I think this emergent self-examination is what happens to many academics somewhere between their 2nd and 4th years of graduate school. Like groundhogs, most of them see their shadow and run back into the hole (the hole is called "the tenure track"). It usually arises because of a question about whether their epic thesis on a clay pot from a 2nd century Welsh town is truly significant labor.
Yet we can't dismiss significance and meaning out of hand, because we all crave transcendence on some level. Everyone has reached momentary heights of blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany --- maybe while listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing genuine intimacy with another person for the first time --- which tell us that either there is or ought to be Meaning beyond survival. Whatever it is, we want it.
posted by M. Weed at
11:55 AM
8 Comments:
When you mention the moments of "blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany," I think of the first time I saw The Incredibles.
Have you seen Wall-E?
I (not surprisingly) mostly think about musical moments, like the Rouse Flute Concerto debut at the Kimmel Center in 2006, and a couple of shows I've played over the years. And Stars of the Lid live... duh.
I think music is one of the biggest arguments for transcendence and the soul --- science has never come up with a compelling [evolutionary] explanation for why this or that pattern of pitches and sounds can inspire such enormously strong emotion.
Yeah, I saw Wall-E. I was a bit disappointed - I thought they sacrificed strength of story for strength of message. But it should get plenty of kids to follow the green leaf.
You're right. I've mused that the very existence of music is proof for God. Even before asking why it stirs us so, why should mathematical principles to guide tonality at all?
No one invented the major scale. It was discovered. Who made the major scale then?
I'm also amazed at how such a large amount of people find such a large part of their identity simply in what music to which they choose to listen.
I loved Wall-E. Mainstream movies usually disappoint me, but I was a sucker for that one and the Dark Knight. Wall-E I thought was unique because while it satirizes our culture and [de facto] values, it is also incredibly compassionate toward those responsible (the fat lazy humans). It seemed like a message that was at odds with the money-making machine that produced it, and that the movie makers were actually aware of this. That level of candor is unheard-of in kids movies. So is 30 minutes of footage with no dialog.
I recently came to the same realization, that the most important , or most exhilarating, moments in life are the ones that don't remind us of being the civilized individuals we all are. I''m sure it really only comes down to physiology and a specific neurotransmitter being released in a high enough amount to cause elation, but I find it odd that we've gotten to the point that those are the moments we love in life most: when we don't have to worry about getting a good education, finding a partner, stabilizing our income, nor any other activity we so communally perpetuate as a 'need'. A bit sad as well, to me at least.
Luckily I've had this reevaluation of being human before I've even gotten to graduate school. Hopefully that does me some good once I get there.
But furthermore, I think what means the most is what we do. Sure these objects that we create and that are natural elements of the Earth serve a purpose in our lives, but we don't find them symbolic enough to directly help us feel protected or loved like we do when we consider another human being.
A thought-provoking post. Today a friend of mine read me a poem by Pablo Neruda called ODE TO MY SOCKS. I told him that usually, being "romantic" in my literary tastes, I avoided this kind of poetry of the mundane. But this one worked---it used those socks as a springboard for talking about love and life and the fact that to use something is to lose it.
But these meanings were not implicit in the socks as such. They were created, with the socks as raw material. The poet creates meaning. A human is a meaning-creating being. In one sense, when we create meaning we play God. In another sense, we can no more help it than we can breathing.
Or perhaps that's not true. We can actually unmake meaning, like the backward-pronounced tetragrammaton that unmakes creation. Things like adultery, murder, or even the hatred that denies any worth to its object, all unmake meaning.
Anyway congratulations on your marriage, hope to see more of you two in the future....
Hi,
1) can i have the lyrics for the song "wake" ?
2) As a musician, i wanted your opinion on this : i think literature has been degenerating for many decades now, and that creativeness resides today in song lyrics that seem to me much more abstract and mind-challenging than any novels or classic poetry. what do u think ?
1. I'd give you the lyrics if I had them, but I don't!
2. It's hard to say where creativity resides, or what is the "most creative" of the humanities at any given time. I think song lyrics qualify as poetry. They might have an unfair advantage in rousing our emotions because they're "activated" by musical program material, with which they're in constant interaction. That being said, I've personally felt a lot of disillusionment with text in general --- I'm not much for poetry, and more and more of the music I listen to is instrumental. I really believe that music doesn't need words to communicate, or if there are words, that they can be an accompaniment to the music instead of vice versa.
As for literature itself --- I wonder if maybe it's just that our literary criticism has degenerated. Maybe our narratives are just as vital as they once were, but we've thrown away and forgotten the tools for understanding them.
Post a Comment
<< Home