Rob Ford Satire

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We lack words for all the small essential parts of sex: nibbling diagonally, mouthing earlobes, the way a moist tongue leaves a track across a soft expanse of flesh. We have only rude, coarse, short, ugly words, the language of Joyce, Hemingway, Mailer, Jong: !rick, cock, screw, balls, bust, bang, suck, lick . .. the list is endless, and endlessly uninteresting.

""a former football kid, ethiopian ... pass me more in#era $$ doug ford, slice of life as drug dealer, ry drifters or we %% the neo na&i's can come in too drug dealers #ust want to move to calgary to become dentists ... (((( )oug, like *ob, fre+uently promotes the ,ord family as a type of brand - one that started with their late father.s four(year tenure as an M!! in the government of former /ntario premier Mike Harris. )oug ,ord is fond of invoking his family.s contributions to the community. 0hrough his involvement with the *otary 1lub of 2tobicoke, he has helped to organi&e events like the 2tobicoke ,all ,air. He fre+uently mentions the many sports teams that the ,ord family business, )eco 3abels and 0ags, has sponsored over the years. He also cites the many football teams his younger brother has coached, and the hordes of people - he puts the figure at 45,666 - the ,ords have entertained at their annual backyard barbecue. 7n recent years, the ,ord family home has become known for the annual barbecue, attended by hundreds of neighbours and a Who.s Who of 1onservative luminaries - including !rime Minister 8tephen Harper and federal ,inance Minister Jim ,laherty. 9ut in the :;<6s, the finished basement at :5 Weston Wood *d. was one of the many places )oug ,ord did business, the sources said. =s a dealer, )oug ,ord was not highly visible. =nother source, >0om,? who also supplied street(level dealers and has a long criminal record, said his girlfriend at the time would complain, whenever he was arrested, that he needed to be more calculating >like )oug.? the helm heel of the family sailboat - 0he *aymoni -

8ince he arrived at 1ity Hall, the mayor.s office has said almost nothing about what Mr. !rice, called director of logistics and operations, is there to do. 1oncerning the hiring of Mr. !rice, )oug ,ord told @lobe and Mail city hall reporter 2li&abeth 1hurch that >you can.t teach loyalty.? Mr. !rice first appeared in the office mere days after 0he 0oronto 8tar revealed that the mayor had been asked to leave a military benefit gala by 1ouncillor !aul =inslie allegedly because he appeared intoxicated. = few months before Mr. !rice became a public official, he was approached by a 8tar reporter covering a football game being played by the high(school team coached by Mr. ,ord. 0he reporter +uoted Mr. !rice as saying that he had coached the mayor in high school, and ever since he has been described in media reports as *ob ,ord.s former football coach turned aide. However, four former dealers who spoke with 0he @lobe described Mr. !rice as a participant in )oug ,ord.s hash business in the :;<6s. His call appeared to have been prompted by a brief interview 0he @lobe had conducted that day, when a reporter asked a former associate about the *A )rifters - a group that he said never existed. >7t.s like a folk tale,? he said. ,olklore Bor loreC consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, #okes, popular beliefs, fairy tales, stories, tall tales, and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( His call appeared to have been prompted by a brief interview 0he @lobe had conducted that day, when a reporter asked a former associate about the *A )rifters - a group that he said never existed. >7t.s like a folk tale,? he said. (( globe and mail

7D the reign of Eing =rthur, there lived in the county of 1ornwall, near the 3and's 2nd of 2ngland, a wealthy farmer who had one only son called Jack. He was brisk and of a ready lively wit, so that whatever he could not perform by force and strength he completed by ingenious wit and policy. Dever was any person heard of that could worst him, and he very often even baffled the learned by his sharp and ready invention. he sold magic seeds.

round up the crew. *A )rifters evil government, evil taxes. """falstaff ian$$$ %% robin hood %%

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for fun this weekend, my computer and i will be doing a succession of downloaders and uploaders

(((((((((((((((( 8alvador Minuchin's family therapy or *.). 3aing's anti(psychiatry

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a screen is inherently less beautiful and calming and adaptive to a human compared to a tree. but a screen is a tool, it is full of human codes, it can give rise to our dreams, a place to make them, whereas a tree can only be a sign in our dreams, or, if &en, a beacon that speaks to the totality of our peace at a moment. """we adapted to look at trees$$$ everything i said above is stupid, because it treats a tree like a screen for events. a tree can have very interesting events. but it's not about that. it's cool though to use trees as screens everyone once in a while, a tree has a good movie : ants crawling, weird lines, etc

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We still teach !lato in schools and uni for christakes. 7t takes a long time for ideas to take hold of culture and set in. ... so it's interesting to think about how Marx, ,reud, Heidegger ... how their ideas are 80733 taking hold of us, still becoming real, still transforming society, and we cant see it yet """#ust like !lato would never have guessed his ideas are in practice today.$$$

1ontemporary 2uropean !hilosophy has revolutioni&ed the way in which we think about ourselves. /ver the last two hundred years, such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, 8igmund ,reud, Earl Marx, and Jean(!aul 8artre have challenged all of our most cherished and traditional views about what a person is and about what the world is. 0hey have introduced powerful and compelling alternatives that have for the Frst time allowed us to resolve some of our longest(standing philosophical debates and have given us rich resources for solving the personal and social problems that plague our daily lives. 0hese insights, however, are still only beginning to transform our ways of thinking and acting, are still only beginning to have a place in the shaping of our social institutions.

,rom Hegel 7 have taken the idea that forms of experience inherently involve standards for their own evaluation, and that experiences transform themselves in light of these values. 0hroughout the book, 7 have tried to be guided by this notion of the inherent tension and dynamism within the different forms of human experience, and 7 have especially tried to connect it with a central notion that 7 take from Merleau(!onty, namely, the way the body by its nature reaches beyond itself. 7 have tried to unite these two thoughts in my description of what

7 have called the >self(transcending? character of experience. ,rom Hegel 7 have also taken the focus on the forms of interpersonal and social life, and the diagnosis of the central tensions and demands of these forms in terms of the notion of interpersonal recognition B=nerkennungC. 7 have endeavored to link this with Heidegger.s notion of Mitsein, that is, the way in which we are inherently >with? others, rather than being fundamentally >by ourselves.? =lso from Heidegger 7 have drawn my focus on the inherent temporality within experience, and upon the irreducibility of the >moody? character of our experience. 7 have tried to integrate these themes with Merleau(!onty.s focus on the intentionality of the body, and especially his emphasis on the way in which we live out of the habitual patterns we have developed for engaging with the world. My work is also substantially informed by another side of 1ontemporary 2uropean !hilosophy that is most powerfully articulated in the works of Earl Marx, 8igmund ,reud, and @illes )eleu&e and ,elix @uattari. 2ach of these Fgures has produced intricate and compelling analyses of the primitive motors of experience, and each has emphasi&ed Bthough in different waysC the bodily foundations of the developed meanings in our lives. 7n many ways, it is the analyses of desire, politics, and knowledge that these thinkers have produced that have most shaped my understanding of the speciFcs of human reality. 7ndeed, my own emphasis on mental illness Band its social and political contextC is primarily inspired by these thinkers. 0hese thinkers, however, do not provide the primary philosophical matrix for this work because of an orientation that they share, and that differs from an orientation shared by Hegel, Heidegger, and Merleau(!onty. Marx, ,reud, and )eleu&e and @uattari all develop their analyses of the primitive motors of experience in such a fashion as to undermine the claims to autonomy made on behalf of the more developed

forms of human experience, whereas Hegel, Heidegger, and Merleau!onty, while acknowledging the originariness of these primitive motors, also acknowledge the integrity of the emergent, >higher? forms of meaning. 0here is a fundamental way, in other words, that the philosophies of Marx, ,reud, and )eleu&e and @uattari, despite their profound insights into the dynamic and developing character of experience, are ultimately reductive in their understandings of the most deFnitive spheres of human experience. 0herefore, while 7 have drawn substantially on the insights of these thinkers in this book, 7 also intend my argument to be a defense of the autonomy of the developed forms of human experienceGof the >self,? of >truth,? and so onGand thus, in part, a challenge to what 7 see as the reductive tendency within this side of 1ontemporary 2uropean !hilosophy. 7 have also written this book with an eye to possible resonances with a number of other prominent Fgures within the history of philosophy. 7n particular, 7 have structured this work in response to Johann @ottlieb ,ichte.s ,undamental !rinciples of the 2ntire 8cience of Enowledge and *enH )escartes.s Meditations on ,irst !hilosophy. My division of the work into three sectionsG>,orm,? >8ubstance,? and >!rocess?Gis intended as an allusion to ,ichte.s three fundamental principles Bthe ego positing itself, the ego opposing a not(self to itself, and the mutual limitation of Fnite self and Fnite otherC. 7n place of ,ichte.s self(positing ego, 7 propose the interpretive, temporal body as the Frst principle and absolute form of all meaning. My analysis of the way in which we exist as split into ourselves and our dealings with other people, and as split within ourselves in neurotic dissociation engages the domain of ,ichte.s second principle, the self .s opposing of a not(self to itself, and identiFes that with which we meaningfully contend in our lives, that is, the substance of human experience. ,inally 7 offer the self(transformative practice of

learning as the fundamental process of human experience, in place of ,ichte.s third principle of the mutual limitation of self and other as the dynamic ground of development and reconciliation within experience. 7n a similar fashion, 7 have written chapters : and 4 as a rough parallel to )escartes.s Frst two meditations, in which he pioneered something like a phenomenological method, albeit inade+uately. 0he substantial differences between my position and )escartes.s demand that this study follow a divergent path after chapter 4, but the subse+uent chapters are meant as a continuing re#oinder to )escartes, offering in comparison to his philosophy a new sense of the ego, a new sense of the body, and a new sense of rationality. 7n more subtle ways, 7 also intend the work to resonate with various works of ancient philosophy. /ne could think of my attempt to articulate the inherent dynamism within human life as a resurrection of something like =ristotle.s notion of phusis, put to play, however, not within the realm of ob#ective nature but within the realm of human experienceI further, the section headings >,orm,? >8ubstance,? and >!rocess? are intended to allude to progressively richer senses of =ristotle.s notion of ousia, here the human ousia. ,inally, my reference to the >elements? of everyday life is meant in loose parallel to !roclus. 8toiceiosis 0heologike, such that this work might be thought of as, perhaps, a 8toiceiosis =nthropologike. When we reJect on ourselves, we typically start by recogni&ing ourselves as discrete agents facing a world about which we must make choices. 0he world is made up, it seems, of things with discrete identities that are present to us, right here, right now. /n this familiar view, then, reality is a kind of aggregate, a bunch of distinct, separately existing things, one of whichGmeGfaces those others and must self(consciously orchestrate her dealings with those things. 0hese last few sentences, it

seems to me, sum up the very core of almost all of our thinking experience of ourselves. 0hough +uite simple, they nonetheless express the >theory? of reality with which we typically operate. 0he signiFcance of these familiar views for our lives is immense. >=nd why notK? one might ask, since, >after all, those sentences describe how things really are, so they should be the foundation for everything we think.? 7ndeed, this view seems so compelling as to be indubitable. 7t is, in fact, a standard way to mock philosophers to claim that they do doubt these ideas, wondering whether chairs exist, or whether they themselves really exist: these claims, in other words, seem so obvious that one would have to be a fool to entertain doubt about them. Whether or not the philosophers should be mocked, it remains true that this cartoon of philosophical activity does in an important way describe the real work of philosophy. 7ndeed, it seems to me that the history of philosophy in general, and twentieth(century thought in particular, has taught us to be wary of the vision of the world described in my Frst sentences. =s suggested above, the signiFcance of these views is indeed immense, but not because they are true. *ather, their signiFcance comes from the extent to which our lives are crippled by too readily accepting this >theory? of things and of ourselves. 7n the twentieth century, opposition to these views has come from many +uarters. 7n recent years, ecologists have done a great deal to show us that our identities cannot be easily severed from the natural environments in which we live. !sychologists, for one hundred years at least, have investigated a wide range of experiences in which people do not seem to be free agents with full possession of the power of choice. 8ociologists and anthropologists have shown how the way in which we see the world is largely reJective of cultural pre#udices, so the identities of the

ob#ects we encounter are not clearly separable from our own social identities. =ll of these insights challenge the easy separation of sub#ect and ob#ect upon which our familiar view is based. !robably the single most important aspect of the criti+ue of this familiar view is found in the recognition that our experience is always interpretive: whatever perception we have of the world is shaped by our efforts to organi&e and integrate all of the dimensions of our experience into a coherent whole. How we go about this will be dictated by the level of our education, by our expectations, and by our desires, and so the vision we have will always be as much a reJection of ourselves and our pre#udices as it is a discovery of >how things really are.? 7n other words, the very way that we see things reveals secrets about us: what we see reveals what we are looking for, what we are interested in. 0his is as true of our vision of things that we take to be outside us as it is of our vision of ourselves. ,ocusing on the interpretive dimension to all experience allows us to shift away from the typical perspective we have upon ourselves on one side and the world on the other. We can now turn to our experience of the world and ask, >What do we reveal about ourselves through the way we experienceK? or, >Who do we reveal ourselves to be by the way in which we see ourselves and our worldK? 8hifting our focus to the interpretive dimension of experience opens up for us a new Feld of in+uiry, a new ob#ect of study, namely, the Feld of our interpretive acts, the Feld of those acts through which we reveal the forms and limits of our powers of interpretation. 7nstead of accepting our immediate view of ourselves as obviously being discrete agents facing a world of present things about which we must make choices, we are now led to Fnd our own identities to be a problem, a +uestion. 0he same

holds true for the things of the world. We are led to ask what the principles are behind the interpretive acts that give to us an integrated vision of ourselves and our world, who or what the agency is that enacts those interpretive principles, whether those principles are right, what conse+uences this structure of interpretation has, and so on. We are left, in short, with a task of discerning and evaluating the acts of interpretation that make our experience appear the way it does.

((((((((((((((((( 7t is as though the sound of a hunting horn reverberating everywhere through its echo, made the tiniest leaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and transformed the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating, sonorous world ( 2ugene Minkowski, prominent phenomenologist, 'Lers une 1osmo logie', :;MN. ((((((((((((((((((( 0he experience of listening to music is well(described by Jean(!aul 8artre in his novel 3e DausHe: =t the moment, #a&& is playingI there is no melody, #ust notes, a myriad of little +uiverings. 0hey don.t know any rest, an inJexible order gives birth to them and destroys them, without even giving them the chance to recover, to exist for themselves. 0hey run, they rush, they strike me in passing with a sharp blow, and they annihilate themselves. 7.d really like to hold onto them, but 7

know that if 7 managed to stop one of them, there would be nothing left between my Fngers but a roguish, languid sound. 7 must accept their death, indeed 7 must will it. Bp. MN, my translationC =s this example makes clear, listening to music is an experience built out of the relations between and among the notes, and it is an active experience in the sense that it re+uires a well(prepared and engaged listener. =s this example makes clear, listening to music is an experience built out of the relations between and among the notes, and it is an active experience in the sense that it re+uires a well(prepared and engaged listener. 0he notes of a #a&& tune Jy past, and in so doing they carve out a space that one can inhabit with one.s imagination in concentrated attention or with one.s swinging body in dance. 9ut this musical reality cannot be fro&en and graspedGit only exists in its temporal passing. = particular note, so exciting or moving when heard at the climax of some passage in the song, has none if its force if separated out and heard in isolation. 0he other notes that contextuali&e the note we are now hearing are both past and future, and these temporal determinations are not contingent features, but are deFnitive formal features of the music, that is, the temporal order is essential: to play the same notes in a different order would be to play a different piece of music. Music, then, only exists for a being that can >tell time,? so to speak. 0he music can only be heard by one who attends to the music in the integrity of its Jow, who hears the sense of the music passed on from one note to the next. 0he listener must come to inhabit the music, #oin with it in anticipating its further development, and hear the notes that present themselves in the context of what has already sounded. 8ometimes we cannot hear this integration and sense within the sounds, when we hear styles of music with which we are not familiar, and it can take a great deal of time and effort on our part. 0his power to comprehend an inherently temporal, varied, single experience

we can call Bfollowing the practice of 7mmanuel Eant in his 1riti+ue of !ure *easonC, >synthesis,? meaning the ability to recogni&e things in their togetherness. 0he particular synthetic power of maintaining as deFnitive of the present that which is not in itself present Bi.e., in our example, the past and future musicC, has traditionally been called >imagination,? that is, the ability to entertain in consciousness that which is not currently present. 8uch imaginative synthesis is the precondition, the conditio sine +ua non, of our experience of temporally meaningful, intrinsically varied unities. 0his means, in fact, that such imaginative synthesis is the condition of our experience simpliciter, for all experiences are temporal and intrinsically varied: all our experiences carry on something like this melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic Jow whereby one moment seems to grow out of the last and to melt into the next in a way that >keeps the tune going,? so to speak, while developing it into a new richness. 0ypically, when we think of imagination we think of fantasi&ing or engaging in some kind of fanciful and self(conscious extrapolation beyond what is real. 7n referring to imagination here, however, we must not think simply of what we explicitly do when we daydream. *ather, the imagining under consideration here is an activity we never do without. 0o feel in some situation that we have >arrived? is to experience that moment in light of the context set up by what preceded it: the present is here experienced in light of the no(longer(present. =gain, a sudden feeling of fear or comfort in some setting is the experience of that present in light of what is not(yet(present, what threatens. We can also imagine countless examples of richer ways in which our daily experience evinces a harmonic and rhythmic Jow that allows the experience of a certain melodic unity, a certain sense. = conversation with a colleague over dinner, the passing of the workday, the recognition of my friend.s familiar

footsteps on the stairs, the ability to drive a carGsteer, accelerate, shift gears, turn off the windshield wipers, watch the road, read the signs, listen to the radio, smoke, talk with my passenger, stop and go with the trafFc lightGthese are so many synthetic experiences, experiences dependent on our power of imagination, integrated experiences of a uniFed sense being manifested through a complex and temporally varied diversity. 0hat power we are familiar with in our self(conscious daydreaming is rather a luxurious use of this most basic power we have to hold togetherGto synthesi&eGwhat is present with what is not present, the power that underlies all of our experience. =s experiencers, then, we simply are synthetic processes of imaginative interpretation. Just as we can be misled by the term imagination, so can we be similarly misled by the description of our experience as interpretive or synthetic. 0ypically, we think of interpretation as an activity we perform upon an already ac+uired ob#ect, and synthesis, similarly might typically suggest binding together two pieces that are already present. 0his typical model of an action performed upon an already ac+uired material is not, however, the proper model for understanding the interpretive character of experience. 2xperience is not a two(stage process in which we Frst get data and then construct an interpretation. /n the contrary, it is only as already shaped by our interpretive orientation that our experience ever begins. 7n other words, the way we immediately notice the new moments of our experience is always in terms of the meaningful contexts we have already been developing.

/b#ects are not indifferent and alien, and they do not passively receive our explicit choices. 0hey draw us forward like magnets, without our self(conscious control.

1ontrary to our traditional assumptions, then, this is the form that experience typically takes: we are imaginative, interpretive, synthetic sub#ects for whom ob#ects are meaningful calls to action that direct our life without our self(conscious intervention. /b#ects as they Fgure within our experience are not discrete and alien, but, like notes in a melody, they are embedded in contexts with other ob#ects with which they mutually interpenetrate, and they already penetrate and impinge upon us. We, in turn, Fnd ourselves already committed to various situations such that we Fnd our choices made for us, rather than being self(contained choosers who stand aloof from things.

Dotice that this description, by showing that we are not the alienated, autonomous choosers we typically take ourselves to be, also shows that our familiar assumption that we can easily know ourselves through simple introspection is mistaken. We cannot immediately know ourselves through simple introspection, because the view that introspection gives is the very view we have #ust critici&ed. 8elf(knowledge, that is, does not come through the easy reJection upon ourselves that we typically rely upon, but, on the contrary, will only come through a study of the determinate forms of interpretive synthesis that can be discerned within the character of ob#ective calls to action B>ob#ective? in the sense of, >pertaining to the nature of the ob#ect?C: the terms in which we experience the ob#ect as calling upon us reJect the values and pro#ects through which we experience the world. /ur preliminary results have shown that such a study of the implicit signiFcance of the forms of our ob#ects, by revealing the temporal, synthetic character of experience, will be a criti+ue of the familiar view of the self as immediately present to itself as a chooser amid present, discrete ob#ects. """Warhol, going to choose underwear reveals more$$$$

/ur talk of interpretation could be recast to say that it is our pre#udices that are reJected in the way we experience the world. /ur study so far was itself already designed to challenge some of our most basic pre#udices. !erhaps the general pre#udice that most informs our experience, and of which the various pre#udices we studied are species, could be called the pre#udice of >presence.? We typically treat reality as if the truth of things is in their immediate presence, and as if it is by being 7nterpretation :Oimmediately present to something that we get its truth. 0hus we take ourselves to be able to be immediately present to ourselves through introspection, we take things to be present to us as ob#ects confronting our perception, we trust the >reporter? who was >present? at the event over the >interpreter? who appraises the event by evidence collected by others, we treat things as if their reality is present in them and in them alone, and so on. /ur study of the synthetic, temporal, interpretive form of experience has already shown us how this privileging of presence is a signiFcant misrepresentation, inasmuch as the sub#ect is not immediately present to introspection, neither the ob#ect nor the sub#ect holds its identity simply present within itself alone, and all experience is inherently mediated by interpretation and time. /ur description of the basic form that experience takes has begun to show us the inade+uacies of the pre#udice in favor of presence, and this criti+ue can be developed further. *ather than recogni&ing presence as the ultimate ground of reality, the full(Jedged description of experienceG the philosophical approach called >phenomenology?Gwould show negativity, difference, deferral, absence, distance, ambiguity, duplicity, and concealment to be the primary terms in which the motor and substance of our world is to be articulated rather than simply the positivity, self(sameness, immediacy, presence, proximity,clarity, univocity, and obviousness that our pre#udice insists on. *ather than looking to some supposedly independent ob#ect in

order to Fnd out its intrinsic sense, phenomenology will consider how it is that the ob#ects of our experience are meaningful only in light of their contextuali&ation within the structures of memory and expectation that deFne a particular perspective. We can begin to see this inversion of traditional values if we look once more at the experience of listening to a melody. """chopped and screwed music$$$

0his is the ama&ing fact of experience, of >being(there? B>)asein?C, as Martin Heidegger says: we are aware of, we are affected by, others, and we retain our identity by being absorbed in the identities of our surroundings. =s we have seen, then, awareness, cognition, or knowledge is of the essence of embodiment, for knowledge #ust is this recogni&ingGthis measuring up toGthe determinacyGthe demandsGof what is other

=s we have seen, then, awareness, cognition, or knowledge is of the essence of embodiment, for knowledge #ust is this recogni&ingGthis measuring up toGthe determinacyGthe demandsGof what is other. We will see later that the values of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual life are #ust the more sophisticated developments of this fundamental capacity, this fundamental >7 can?: >7 can care about what others care about.? 0o interpret is to see something assomething, to bodily engage with something in terms of some accessible determinacy, and to see something not #ust idiosyncratically but in its universal signiFcanceGthe issue behind truthGis to see it as it is open to another perspective that 7, or

another body like me, can adopt. 0he demands for ob#ectivity and universality that are the core of our moral, artistic, and scientiFc values are #ust the demands to respond to things as they can matter to others and not #ust as they happen to matter to me according to my singular whims. 0he ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness are the ideals to which we can aspire because of our fundamental bodily capacity to care. 0hese ideals are implicit in the very notion of care, and our artistic, moral, and intellectual life is #ust the explicit taking up of these values to which we can respond by virtue of being sensitive. 9y virtue of being the activity of making contact, the body is the activity of sub#ecting itself to an other to which it must answer, and the speciFc ob#ects we encounter in our engagement with the >absolute? values of truth, beauty, and goodness are simply the revelation of way in which we as sophisticated, habituated bodies have come to develop our capacity to encounter the inherent richness of the determinateness >other.?

=ll of these signiFcances that populate my consciousness are +uite speciFc, which means that at any time there are only certain particular determinations with which 7 am explicitly engaged. 0his is precisely what it means to say that 7 am located, namely, that 7 am here and not there, that this and not that is what 7 am experiencing. 0o be an experiencer, to be a bodyGa bodily sub#ect(ob#ectGis always to be determinate, speciFc, particular. 0his inherent speciFcity, this locatedness, is well(articulated in such novels as Plysses by James Joyce or 0he 8ound and the ,ury by William ,aulkner, which build their narrative from a description of the determinate Jow of experience as it is lived by the experiencing sub#ect. 7n these novels, the narrative is not told from the perspective of some all(seeing observer, but is articulated as the multiplicity of local, personally meaningful engagements that constitute the

ongoing development of experience. 7ndeed, 7 can never be a >consciousness in general,? as if 7 were an omniscient narrator of my own world, but 7 am always a speciFc assemblage of determinate engagements that are presently underway. =nd, while it is true, as we saw at the end of chapter :, that 7 can be engaged with my world in terms of its universal signiF( cance Bi.e., its signiFcance for the other points of view that a person could adopt but that 7 am not in fact adoptingC, 7 can never vacate the particularity of my location. 7n other words, the very body that lets me be with others also demands that 7 always be this uni+ue and speciFc one, this one from whom other possible stances are actually excluded.

"""facebook is our Pllysses$$$"""facebook is my Pllysses$$$.

1hapter 5, >Deurosis,? brings together the different materials from the earlier chaptersGinterpretation, embodiment, memory, mood, and other peopleGto show how the tensions, demands, powers, and needs of the bodily sub#ect are lived as a personality. 7n particular, this chapter focuses on the disparity between the ideal of >normalcy? that our social relations pro#ect, and the dissociative, compulsive, neurotic character into which a personality naturally develops. 1hapter 5 ends with what is in many ways the >point? or the climax of the book, in a discussion of the bodily roots of the developed forms of human meaningful experience, and why these are naturally neurotic situations. """and his comment about the fundamentally moody character of all life$$$ Mood

We have talked about the distinction between our implicit, pervasive memory and our explicit, occasional memory. 0he latter is experienced as reJective thought. How is the former experiencedK What is the form of experience of the immediacy of the embodiment of our commitments as ob#ects, the form of our fundamental route to self(consciousnessK 0his experience is what we call >mood.? 7t is how we feel that offers our fundamental take on the basic reality of things, which means the basic commitments we have made in our pro#ect of contact. 7t is another typical pre#udice of ours that our moods are of secondary signiFcance, and that, for example, we should learn to think without them. We sometimes mark out speciFc individuals as emotional and others as unemotional. We urge people to >be rational,? and not to respond >emotionally.? We typically treat our emotions as a separate sector of our experience, one that misleads us when it comes to apprehending the truth. /nce again, our pre#udices mislead us. *ather than being of secondary signiFcance, our moods are our primary way of knowing realityI they provide the foundation for our more developed and reJective acts of knowing. 7ndeed, as Martin Heidegger says in 9eing and 0ime, >"0$he possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods in which )asein is brought before its being as the there,? that is, it is our moods that initially open us into the world, and rational, reJective life is itself one of the developments of our moods, rather than a separate access to reality Bp. :4OC. 7n a mood, how we are is certainly manifest, but it is not manifest as a self(perception. 0o be in a mood is to have ob#ects appear in a certain way. When 7 am bored, 7 experience things in the world as dull and uninvitingGas boring. 7t is the things that fail to engage me and offer me exciting routes of action. When 7 am angry, things are invasive and challenging to my rights and to my personal space. When 7 am excited, things

seem electric, and charged with possibility. When 7 feel amorous, the world seems enchanted, precious, and welcoming. 7n each case, to experience the moodGto be >in? the moodGis to have ob#ects in a certain way. 0he mood is how the world gathers itself up and shows itself to me. 0o experience the world as having a certain Javor Band 7 think it is noteworthy that vocabularies of taste and touch tend to be among our richest resources when we want to describe how things feel to us in different moodsC, is to have certain paths of action more or less ready. Moods open certain paths and close others, or, better, they clear certain paths and obscure others. 7n anger, it is hard to see how the world can be trusted, or how it can be something with which one can cooperate, or even that one can tolerate. 7n sadness, it is hard to see how various tasks can be worth doing. 7n love, it is hard to see how this other person could ever be someone of whom to be critical. 7n tran+uillity, it is hard to see how the world could ever warrant an unbalanced response. Moods are the way in which whole paths of action are closer or farther from us, not in a geometrically measurable sense, but in a >felt? sense, that is, in the sense of being real possibilities for our existence. 7n moods it is not impossible to go down the obscure routes, #ust as it is not impossible to be a musician with only three Fngers, to make a Fst in a pink room, or to keep writing even when one needs to sleep, but the general tone of things directs us elsewhere. 7t is not impossible to take the obscure routes, but everything in the world speaks against it, and it re+uires work, and perhaps practice, to be able to follow these paths. 7ndeed, actually following these difFcult paths may result in a change of mood, when opening the unexpected dimensions of the situation results in the situation feeling different. Moods open up the situation as a wholeGgive a Javor to the worldGand offer paths for uncoveringGadvancing intoGthe more precise determinations and articulations that are the things within this

world.

We often try also to overpower other people. We order them around. We yell at them. We try to manipulate them by playing on their sympathy or fear. We humiliate them. 7t is interesting that we typically do not take up these latter strategies in our efforts to overpower nonhuman things. 7n our different moods, we are, in a basic way, like different selves. 8uch dissociation is our original mode of being in a world, and is not a falling away from a prior state of self(unity. 7t is original, in that it is the condition from which we start, and it is >originary,? in that this condition is what makes available to us a determinate contact with the world: it is our creative >reach,? our initial capacity for self(transcendence. 7t is as thus dissociated, as >moody,? that we enact any embodied contact, any disporting with signiFcance. /ur moods are our ways into meaning, into developing a meaningful situation 0he child.s situation is characteri&ed by Fnding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. 7n his eyes, human inventions, words, customs and values are given facts, as inevitable as the sky and the trees. . . . 0he real world is that of the adults where one is allowed only to respect and obey. Bp. M5C

0he child.s contact with the world is fundamentally a demand to conform

to the authority of its already established ways, its independent reality. 0his original familial situation of being challenged to establish >proper? identities for ourselves and others is described by @illes )eleu&e and ,Hlix @uattari in =nti(/edipus: 0he inscription performed by the family follows the pattern of its triangle, by distinguishing what belongs to the family from what O< Human 2xperiencedoes not. 7t also cuts inwardly, along the lines of differentiation that form global persons: there.s daddy, there.s mommy, there you are, and then there.s your sister. 1ut into the Jow of milk here, it.s your brother.s turn, don.t take a crap there, cut into the stream of shit over there. *etention is the primary function of the family: it is a matter of learning what elements of desiring(production the family is going to re#ect, what it is going to retain. . . . 0he child feels the task re+uired of him. 9ut what is to be put into the triangle, how are the selections to be madeK 0he father.s nose or the mother.s earGwill that do, can that be retained, will that constitute a good /edipal incisionK =nd the bicycle hornK What is part of the familyK Bp. :45C

0he stoic is the person who has made a virtue out of renouncing the immediacy of contact, of vulnerability, and has come to deFne herself as a locus of self(control and choice that holds itself in reserve from embodiment and living engagement. 0he stoic has sealed herself off from others with a defensive wall of silence and refusal. 0his defensive sealing up of oneselfGthis withdrawal from others, from emotion, and from embodimentGis #ust the extreme end of the ideal of normalcy, for the values of stoicism and the values of normalcy are at root the same.

Walking is one of our most basic ways of expressing or enacting our posture as independent agents. We are not born walking, but must learn how to control and coordinate our bodies in separation from, but in cooperation with, the larger environment. """"u forget that, in the city, out all day ... whitman crawling around on the floor ... and in a few years, running to the shipyards ... or the supermarket to meet ginsberg or me $$$

3ike sleeping, eating draws attention to the body.s inherent vulnerability, its dependency upon its environment for its continued existence. 2ating is a more active practice than sleeping, inasmuch as in eating the successful response to this >weakness? of the body is not reali&ed involuntarily, but re+uires the agency of foraging, chewing, swallowing, and so on: eating does not #ust >come over us? as does sleep. 2ating re+uires a greater effort, and also a more determinate interaction with the surrounding environment than does sleep. !sychoanalysis has drawn attention to the complicated issues of dependency and trust that are associated with the child.s early experiences of breast(feeding, and we can see how such issues are elaborated in many of the typical patterns of continuing family life. Meals are often charged sites for speciFcally familial interactions, whether at the breakfast table or at the 0hanksgiving dinner. 7n human cultures generally, and especially in modern Western family life, eating is a heavily organi&ed and rituali&ed process.

"""eating as vulnerablility$$$

0he dinner table can thus be a primary site for the production or reproduction of family order. =s a ritual of family membership, eating dinner becomes the space in which one is deFned as doing well or poorly as a family member, and, inasmuch as our familial involvements are our primary initiation into the human, intersub#ective sphere, eating can become the privileged space for determining whether one is doing well or poorly as a person. 2ating, thus, can take on the meaning of being the, or at least a, primary mode of intersub#ective action. 3et us consider what eating can mean, that is, how it can be an interpretation, a memorial gesture, and a transformative human action, and how, therefore, it can assume a neurotic shape. """ D/ M/*2 0LQQ 7nventive talkingQQQ 7 need to learn to be challenged and engaged with your presence$$$

0hese neurotic compulsions cannot be removed. 0hey are the very schemata for meaning, the developed forms by which we sense. 9ut, though they cannot be removed, these schemata, like all bodily phenomena, are self(transcending. /ur neuroses Fgure our contact, but they Fgure it in a way that always invites transformation and development. 0he >cure? for neurosis is not the removal of these Fgurings, but the development of the potentials implied within the contact these bodily comportments offer us. 7t is this development that we should understand by the term therapy. 9ecause >being neurotic? does not mark out the character of a speciFc set of people, but characteri&es, rather, the essential human condition, we cannot think of >therapy? as a special practice that is geared only to the abnormal demands of select individuals.

((((((((((((((((((((((((

((((

modulate me "music$

(((((((((((((((((( there's simply less social capital in words, esp philosophy .... i look at my art school friends' walls: visual images .... an economy of expression (((((((((((((((((( a crippled sense of reality (((((((((((((((( those pictures of me in the backyard by the pool, wearing tommy hilfiger. hate knowing i was there, emmeshed in that blandness but in those same pictures also a microscope nearby... ((((((((((((((((((((( for me, part of the 'dirtyness' or 'uncouthness' of sex (( the bareness of your desires ((( holding someone else down with your body and making them feel you, leting them feel you, wanting them to feel you, they feel you. u feel them, all these same steps too. (((((((((((((((((( unmoney

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