Numb

NYC - Raining 2024.12.11

 

ba1149c2985231e0c646029ec7e2825a5d75b69b906322283d1e5c1005e07563

春不晚

姑娘 一句春不晚

痴儿 留在真江南

江南曲落孤城

化作烟雨与我对弹

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

simulacrum

me 

how much information will it take to recover us? To reconstruct us from the artifacts we leave behind?
 

V

I don't think that is possible.

me

if not to an exact representation then to an approximation?
 

V

Ok, so what does it mean to be recovered, and what would be the approximation?

Let's say that when given an ordered set of preferences, return a simulacrum that makes all the decisions that you would make.

me

"Was it I who escaped? Or, the other?"

V

What if our simulacrum makes all the same minor choices that we would make, but diverges when making a major choice, such as whom we marry?

And how many divergences in the major choices are within bounds? To the point that we say - that is no longer "us"?

A lot of the decisions we make are simply due to the rigidity of the world.

Do you wake up in the morning and choose to go to work? Without knowing anything about you I can have a very good model that predicts whether you do that or not.

Do you like Prince or Michael Jackson? Well there are only two choices presented. And there are countless examples of these limited choices. If there are an infinite number choices then perhaps we can get a much more clear signal.

Think about what is the highest cardinality of the choices you have made? A billion? A million? Certainly much much lower. 

Any recovery would be from the background of a sea of noisy, rigid choices, with very limited signal particular to you.

me

a lot of choices are connected. There must be some manifold that can be recovered.

V

I guess one argument for the possibility of recovery is that the human body is, after all, finite.

赤伶 执素兮

台下人走过 不见旧颜色
People below the stage walk by, no longer seeing the old colors
台上人唱着 心碎离别歌  
The person on the stage is singing, a heart-breaking parting song
情字难落墨 她唱须以血来和
Feelings are difficult to put down in ink, so she sings them until she coughed blood
戏幕起 戏幕落 终是客
The curtain rises, the curtain falls, are we all not merely guests to this performance?
你方唱罢我登场
Finish your singing and let me come up on the stage
莫嘲风月戏 莫笑人荒唐
I bid that you don't so hastily laugh at plays about love, nor laugh at plays of people's absurdity
也曾问青黄也曾铿锵唱兴亡
道无情 道有情 怎思量

 

 

The Excitement of the Stuff

"If some theory had revolutionary implications, it was because it pressed that soulless logic through to the humanities themselves. They were no longer to be seen as a preserve of personal value and spiritual insight in a crassly utilitarian world. On the contrary, you could take a work of art and show how it was governed by certain underlying codes and systems, deep narrative structures, ideological interests or the play of unconscious forces, of which the work itself was innocently unaware. The elusive spirit of the human could be reduced to the product of impersonal forces. What an otherwise diverse body of theories had in common was their anti-empiricism – the conviction that the truth of a literary work was not the way it spontaneously appeared. What you saw was not what you got."

"For the liberal humanists who presided over literary studies, literature was the home of the intimate and irreducible, the stray gesture and sensuous particular, of everything that held out against a world of bureaucratic states and transnational corporations. The phrase ‘literary theory’ seemed a contradiction in terms: how could one deal abstractly with the tone or mood or texture of a poem? Literature was the last refuge of personal experience and the individual spirit, as well as a form of creative transcendence that had long since stood in for a failed religion. If all this were to be unmasked as an effect of the signifier or the ruses of desire, there really was nowhere else to turn."

"Theory represented a new configuration of knowledge, appropriate to an age in which the boundaries between traditional academic subjects were crumbling and most of the exciting work was being done in the borderlands between them. Literary criticism had been tightly focused on the isolated text, in a defence of high culture against a barbarian world, but was now flung open to a much wider field of inquiry. Jameson’s academic field was literature, but there is little about poets and novelists in The Years of Theory compared with philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis and so on. The book is thus likely to confirm the prejudice that theory supplants the literary work rather than enriches it. In fact, it confirms the view that criticism can flourish only by reaching beyond its traditional confines, losing one kind of identity in order to discover another." 

The Excitement of the Stuff

R.I.P., Fredric Jameson 1934-2024

Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

On the Imperium:

"The Imperium is one of many cathartic dark fantasy statements about the hideousness of contemporary reality: it channels a conviction that our world, this neoliberal and imperial capitalist dog's dinner, is not in fact the height of progress, but fundamentally awful and only getting worse."

On the appeal of the Space Marine fantasy:

'The appeal of the Space Marine fantasy is that it takes the alienation, misogyny and misery of being "man-made" and flips it into a rigid gasmask of pride and belonging, of indestructible and unquestioning purpose. In return for all the mutilations it deals and expects, it promises calm and some degree of togetherness - and this is why it doesn't really operate, in the bulk of Warhammer 40,000 art I've encountered, as parody or satire.'

On what Sontag says about fascism:

'It's dangerous, Sontag says, to reduce fascism to "brutishness and terror". Fascism survives because it offers things to aspire to - in Sontag's summary, "the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community". These are relatively innocuous values and emotions that may also appear in, say, rock music, in superhero stories, at wargaming tournaments and sports events, and in earnest game developer paeans to "absolute brotherhood and sacrifice".' 

On masculinity :

"I'm not immune to this hellish daydream. It's a carnival mirrorshow for all the tackly little aggressions and humiliations of my own upbringing. I understand my own masculinity as a wound that is slowly healing, and which is reopened periodically by the experience of art that cultivates the old patriarchal frenzy. I find Warhammer 40,000's Imperium freeing, as a magnification of the grinding stupidity of patriarchy, but I also feel the pull of these warty stereotypes. I look at the thunderously daft trailer for Relic's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War 3 and, silly as it sounds, I tear up a little, because I see in the smiling face of the doomed Marine the sheer absence of fear my older male conditioning has always demanded, and never permitted..."