Blog Archive

Wednesday, 21 December 2016



When you think about the mind at this historical moment it is hard not to imagine it as a general purpose computer which builds internal representations of its environment and of itself, and which thus generates its own semantics by way of certain gödelian loops and twists, and which ultimately has no necessary connection to the whole wet mechanism of switches and gates that brings it about. Slow temporality would then be an interpretation within its semantic field of expected or intended events or behaviours of a distinguished part of the system, like the unhurried movement of distant landmarks seen from the window of a speeding train, and suggestive of an ultimate reference point, active or passive or some admixture of both as the occasion requires. The subject is what can bring about a semantic field and a semantic field is what can produce the sense of a subject. They are conjugate terms and to undo one is to do up the other. The problem is how to undo both at the same time, and it partakes of both the set-theoretic paradox and the koan. We live as if assured of their solutions, every assertion being the kicking of a rock to refute an error we have failed to perceive - it's not the rock that is imaginary but the kick. Impossible objects abound just beyond our apparent field of vision and the work of discrimination is to carefully disentangle them from inherited and inherent assurance and allow them to melt away in the light.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.