Mirror Stage

Two political thoughts

One:

Could it be that with a campaign for the White House between McCain and Obama, for the first time in years we will vote, instead of for the lesser evil, for the lesser good? (I'm optimistic that way: given the "choice" to vote for the lesser evil, we picked the greater, given the choice to vote for the greater good, we should reliably choose the lesser.)

Two:

Some waves tonight on CNN regarding the fact that apparently McCain was not born in the United States, but on some military base, and as such, according to the Constitution he would be ineligible to be president. Oh, the irony of a country whose founders never thought it would get to the point of having military bases abroad…

Be Cause…

This turns out will become one of my pet peeves… The game of "be cause". The game we play (no, some people play) when inventing a cause for something. Not so much inventing, as stating, setting in stone, the ultimate cause of some effect. The way it works is this: the player of "be cause" starts thinking about a certain idea, reality and so on, and (very often, polemically, that is, trying to call others' games of "be cause" incomplete, or wrong) stumbles upon a so-called more primordial cause, more explanatory, wider, deeper, whatever. This game has been played to death, and I stumble upon it everywhere I turn, it seems. The particular event that prompted these lines is a re-encounter, after so many years, with the Marxist pseudo-scientific pseudo-philosophy, with its assumption that everything in the (human) world happens for a reason, and the reason is (drum rolls ….) to make the capitalists rich… As games of "be cause" go, this is one of the more short sighted ones out there, neglecting such basic notions as: who are these capitalists (extraterrestrial beings? Gods?) and what makes them want to get rich and from here on, again all the way down to brain chemical imbalances and properties of chemical and physical elements is such a long way that if I met someone who told me this is the ultimate cause (and I didn't read about it in books written by well-educated people) I would think that someone is working (not very hard either) at pulling my leg.

If I had more time, I would wax philosophic on the meaning of the insertion of a blank space between "be" and "cause", the sense of that vacuity, and what it is supposed to hide in a black hole kinda sorta way. Derrida writes pages upon pages about/starting from the letter "a", perhaps I can do the same about the " "? The emptiness that hides being, through whose emergence into the space of the écriture the ultimate ontology is postulated, the self-made ontology, the God-like "(let there) be light". "Be light" of course still some sort of "be cause" game, but, again, just a game.

And yet, is it justified, I always ask myself this, is it justified to jump boats from one discipline to another? Is it ok to say that the cause of the Chinese cultural revolution has ultimately to do with physical properties of the universe (oh, just watch physis return through the backdoor, no, through the window because it is through the window that you make the illicit entries or exits, Faulkner says) than with the wild-eyed, crazed dreams of some deluded individuals combined with the will for power of others? (Replace "Chinese cultural revolution" with any similar Marxist-induced state of body politic coma. Results will not vary.)

(And if it is through the windows that we make our illicit exits and entries, what does it mean that the world's computing population spends their time in front of virtual windows, ™ or not ™?)

I am on a roll. Daylight, Scheherazade.

Words

"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. (…) I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. (…) that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching (…) He had a word too, Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack" (172). (W. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

Words as mold, in, ironically, both senses of the word, mold as hollow shape mold as 'fungal growth' that parasitizes life. Words as "view from outside", as what sifts through the sieve of our skin through our all too porous self. And the Lord God said ...animals and plants... dominion ... name them... and he named them, for they were all not him so it was easy.

Desires

"Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They talked all at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words" (W. Faulkner The Sound and the Fury 117).

Formalisms

Wondering whether the rebellion of Russian formalism (and of all other formalisms to follow in its footsteps) is not indirectly a rebellion against the bitter pill of the ancient Platonic sentence against art as twice removed from reality, which even Aristotle's somewhat less damning view of art as cathartic mimesis did little to sweeten? To all those who thought form was just decoration, formalists of all denominations respond: wait a minute, content is nothing, what matters is form. But at the same time they indirectly respond to those (much older statements) that deprecate art's content merely because it isn't 'true'. In a world where art's main attributes are formal, the truthiness™* of art's content would cease to be reason for philosophical contempt.

*Truthiness is a Stephen Colbert trademark.

Lars and the Real Girl

So there's this Lars guy, who buys a "love-doll" online and when it arrives he starts pretending she is his girlfriend. Dresses her up, takes her out to meet friends, to dinner, to church to the lake. Fights with her. Sleeps with her literally, not sexually, or at least we're not told that: most we see, there is a passionate kiss, late in the relationship. (By the time this happens, everyone except the viewer seems to have accepted his premise, that Bianca is real, so no need for quote signs around 'relationship', above.)

Though it's hard not to find the whole premise inciting I felt it was undermined by the whole far-fetchedness of the thing, sort of like one of those less successful, more recent, Simpsons episodes where the whole Springfield embarks on some sort of farce only to fool Homer or Bart or Marge. At least, in the end, the Simpsons writers have the sense of humor to laugh at their own expense pointing out the absurd. If nothing else, they can always use the "it's a cartoon for God's sake" defense. Not much humor in Lars and the real girl, though the absurd of the situations does invite smiles and even a laughter or two. Stranger yet, this far-fetchyness undermines the premise both from outside and from within: from outside, because, when even the 911 and the ambulance people seem to agree to play their part in the delusion of Lars, well, it's like I am asked to find and suspend even the very last shred of disbelief, and I don't know about you, but those last shreds are Peskiness Incarnate, harder to find and get hold of than the watermelon seeds. The only help the movie provides with this is to suggest this all takes place in a small town, where everyone knows everyone… Ok, I might buy that, in the spirit of the holidays, I suppose.

But the real problem with the
whole damn town bending backwards to "play" with Lars is that it challenges the core idea of the movie; see, as I see it, this is that our going through life is a series of stories, of rituals, is the way Lars puts it, whose truth depends in a large measure of our say so. Yes, there are things no matter how many people believe, will not become true. But other things are less finicky. Gather enough believers, and you have yourself a bona fide "truth". Things having to do with feelings, are particularly prone to this, and relationships are merely a public (so even less "true", because "performed") version of those truths we can just conjure up by believing in them. So, if that's the premise, and if Lars's story is meant to show how someone's being in love/a relationship is ultimately a function of that someone's (and of many non-innocent bystanders') belief to the effect, then what is lacking from the whole ritual Lars is building up for himself and for his friends is the friction resulting when people do not approve of that relationship. There's little of that in the beginning, but not nearly enough. Someone should fall out with Lars for his chosen love, someone should tell him she's not good enough for him (the opposite might not work too well I suppose). Someone should not "play" with Lars for this ritual to be truly accurate. As it is, all we have is a relationship similar to what we have at the end of fairy tales, or Hollywood tales, when evil and obstacles have been conveniently disposed with. I don't like that as an ending, you can imagine how I feel about it as a premise.