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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Pointer Finger
In which several examples direct the reader towards an unstated conclusion.
Tuesday, 2009-12-15 | The Limbs of Osiris
| The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. |
| Albert Einstein |
- "Fear of commitment" is an accusatory gloss that generally describes the feelings of the accuser with much more accuracy than the accused; the accused invariably would prefer something like, "uncertainty" or "pragmatism".
Both parties are, of course, engaging in rank dishonesty. - There are two sorts of eunuch in the Western imagination and both are traditionally antagonistic figures, if not out-and-out villains. The first is the Byzantine eunuch--that metro-sexual conniver, schemer, king-maker and string-puller who sews discord from behind the muslin veil of his master's harem--and the second is the philosopher eunuch, exemplified in the fable of Origen, the church father who castrated himself, or in the anti-breeding tirades of One, the deranged Templar in I nuovi barbari (who contends that since it was the race of man that destroyed the Earth with nuclear weapons, so it becomes the sacred duty of all men to prevent the creation of additional men).
The first eunuch is at war with society and the very concept of order and progress because of his desire to externalize his own infertility (think Richard III) and thus share his pain; the second eunuch is at war with the idea that a species so corrupt should be permitted to perpetuate itself (with mirrors, coitus, whatever) in defiance of some imagined "natural order" to which he is fanatically devoted.
Basically, the first one is angry about his balls; the second is angry about your balls. - Dogs are famously simple creatures. An idea frequently encountered in the written and anecdotal lore concerning obedience training is that dogs are, in fact, so simple that they cannot tell a dog from a man (and vice versa) and that this can be exploited when training them: by aping dog behaviors, a human trainer can cause a dog to perform certain instinctual response behaviors in response (and thus expedite the process of obedience training).
What's important to keep in mind here is how this concept was almost certainly struck upon by someone who was too un-self-conscious to realize that, whatever actually does or does not go on behind a dogs eyes, he himself was certainly doing exactly the thing that he was accusing dogs of doing: by imputing a thought process or cognitive mechanism to an animal by which that animal makes or does not make human-like distinctions and classifications about other organisms, the guy who came up with the whole "dogs see men as dogs" idea was anthropomorphizing dogs in exactly the same naive, simplistic way that he childishly and fancifully imagined and hoped that dogs were cynopomorphizing him. - Historically speaking, it has frequently been argued by intelligent, sensitive people that the difference between rhetoric and demagoguery is easy to see. Rhetoric is a sane and sober man, speaking lucidly to a crowd that hangs on his his every word, enraptured by the clarity of his speech and the force of his delivery: demagoguery is a delusional malcontent working the rabble into a lather with the kind of salacious, incendiary talk that deliberately forsakes things like "lucidity" and "appeals to reason" in favor of their opposites (i.e. "obscurity" and "appeals to sentiment") in order to hold the attention of the basest and rottenest men.
And, for as long as sensitive, intelligent, sensitive rhetoricians have been pointing this out, demagogues have been sticking intelligent heads on pikes and nailing their sensitive palms to wagon wheels. - Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently had occasion to begin one of his inane "blog post"-style advertisements with a time-honored "hook" that anyone who has spent any time working with criticism, philosophy or theory will recognize instantly. Adams thus:
Your regular brain uses your exobrain to outsource part of its memory, and perform other functions, such as GPS navigation, or searching the Internet. If you're anything like me, your exobrain is with you 24-hours a day. It's my only telephone device, and I even sleep next to it because it's my alarm clock.
Adams concludes, as do untold junior-grade literary theorists and Busch-league futurists before him, that "man is a cyborg" on account of the fact that man depends utterly on his tools and environmental adaptations for his survival.
Adams' (and others) willful ignorance of the fact that this characteristic of man (i.e. his dependence on tools) is, in fact, the literal sine qua non of man--the characteristic that separated man from beast once and for all during that exultant, watershed moment when proto-man first dashed out the brains of his fellow proto-man with a sun-baked bleach-white bison femur--leads precisely nowhere (by rhetorical necessity: a premise as sexy and vacuous as "all men are cyborgs" must necessarily lead to a hum-drum conclusion). When people begin essays with premises such as these--i.e. when they announce that they will be ignoring the unavoidable facts of the matter they intend to discuss before even discussing them--the productive thing to do is to "read between the lines", so to speak, and look beyond the text, back at the writer and attempt to ascertain what he has to gain from intentionally overlooking the obvious in order to make whatever point.
And so those who point away from themselves, ostensibly refraining from talking about themselves and their feelings by making impossible or illogical arguments about something else, frequently point back at themselves and, as Sahlins instructs, their arguments "become pure values, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing...but the speaker."
