Monday 6 March 2017

 philosophical thoughts  



There are those people we would be tempted to call cultural icons. Defining fashions, or at least reflecting tastes, these people embrace what we might decide to call, cool.

Like the blueness of that swimming pool that I see on Zoopla now, but originally on MTV cribs.

Celebrity is a word which not that long ago didn't mean anything; perhaps celebrity was once infamy, which is a totally different kettle of fish where swimming against the tide only results in pain. But this was the way it was, and in many, but different ways, still is. 

That’s another thing I guess, the 'way it was' or the 'way it's meant to be' or 'will be'. Being appears to have a quality of fallacy inherent to it, with the now of Being dependant on points that are fixed either in the reminisces of history or the, mainly conceited, often shallow, desires of futurity. This is however not a social-futurity for many, but a personal one: ambitious. These referential points we then aspire to reach, or get to, forgetting the wonderful delicacy of now-ness and the peculiarities of just being in a world of beings Being.  

Cultural icons look as if they reach these points, usually going back to something in history, drawing on this as inspiration to then go toward a new thing. They also seem to be pretty decent at Being, especially having to deal with being beings whose Being is both dependent on having to adhere to the desires of other beings and also on the construction of a certain type of Being, to this end.

There is a fallacy in this too, both in the very construction that supposedly defines us, and also how people view this construction, and we view them viewing our construction. This is because the Other's Being is a Being that one can never understand properly. This is because Being is only really comprehensively known in the sense of the self. The Other is ultimately just that: other, but the Self must, in the paradigm of Being, strive to garner a sense of Being outside of the Self in order the consolidate what it truly means to what is known as 'I'. Not just Me-I, but they-I too.

I went to the shops, I hate you, I really need to go to the toilet, I don't like the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, as I find them slightly heavy, and akin with Fascism. I do however like long walks on short beaches, and that slow shuffled walk that accompanies queues. I like it when people argue in the street as I only argue with myself, and watching two beings argue gives me a strange sense of faith in humanity: there is comfort between such people, despite possessing the appearance of discomfort at that moment. General beings around them also feel discomfort, which is kind of nice because that needs to happen sometimes. 

This is not to say that we mustn’t aspire to reach the Other, it is crucial that we must, and ground our Being in the architectures of other cultures, tastes or simple fancies. Being requires a vision outside of the self and this gives an insight into the textured roots of humanity, complex and intertwined like the mangrove forest. Franz Fanon says:

“Man [or woman] is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truth that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him”.

This truth, this supposed sense of Self requires a dissolution, and requires a double take. “Bound by crushing object-hood” it is all too easy, blind, and ignorant to evaporate the Other, Other meaning anyone outside of the Self, to simple appearance, to preconceptions and inherently flawed prejudices. Whether this be race, sexuality, or just personal-taste, the Self cannot and must not use this difference as the starting-point – but see it as one of many subjective differences that define a person’s sense of Being.

“Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain un-certainty”. We must, for Fanon, go toward ontology and not debase a subject by objectivity. We must turn rather toward to mind, away from the body and to the “corporeal” not "epidermal" schemas that define, un-holistically, those external to the Self. “The fact of blackness” details a move away from pre-conceived, reductionist facts, that one might also ascribe to femininity, or sexuality: we must not define a subjective Being with objective terms. Female, Male, Cis, Black, White, Gay, Straight or anywhere in-between any of these classifications. Classification negates a lot, it boils one down to a defining feature. This does not mean that we shouldn’t embrace cultures of each supposed ‘classification’: we should revel in these definitions, exalt them and allow them to contribute to our Self-hood, and at the base of this our shared humanism.

This brings us back somewhat to cultural icons, and another fallacy in this. Cultural doesn’t imply culture(s) which by nature is multifarious, rather the one culture that guides us all, like the currents unseen that control the air and the waters. And this is capitalism. The £ and ¢ have made it onto our keyboards: our mouths. The culture and language of economy has caused an economy of language: where perception is based on objects, materials. But hey, without it, I couldn't have written this.



 Let us move-toward-things
  not objects.
  which we can tuck away into boxes
  to reflect
  on something quite different.



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