At 02.18 +0000 0-04-05, Judy Diamondstone scrobe:
>Eva, I think we (species? we w/ our Aristotelian legacy?) are disposed to
>over-determine what's 'out there' - others, & maybe ourselves too. It's good
>practice, I think, suspending hypotheses about selves; hypothesizing instead
>about moments, perhaps - or actions likely in particular activities.
>
>What do you think, m'dear?
Oh, I think I'm not even sure about the difference, in practice -- and I
get uncertain about where among genres we have strolled...
aren't hypotheses "theory in suspension" anyway? and I DID say
"working hypothesis" ... I could have said crutch, I could have said
something to give us the confidence (whether false or not) to cross the icy
lakes of everyday... the iceprods to get up when, inevitably we crash
through... (at least I do).
... and selves, what are they, if not collectors of moments, of
performances? You know, introspectively, when I talk to myself about
specific people (i.e. I think of them) I do so by name -- the Name as a
clasp for my previous experience of'em, by whatever medium. I don't know if
a name is a self? Do you think it is? When I read books there's this
melange of quasisensory experience melded with my
sitting-there-reading-pages. Depending on the book. But the text has a
voice or voices and it makes me see the stuff it is about (works as a
projector). In this particular virtual way that isn't even as clear,
quasisensorily, as a dream. So with email, there's voice(s) with a message
from a Name, and on a mailinglist the voices from Names get into meaningful
interaction with each other and with the voice of my delegates into the
exchange. With me. I do assume that like in my own case there is some same
Body attached to the same Name, some bodily continuity going through the
ordinary cycles of sleeping, eating and having a life, somewhere in the
world. When people are using somebody elses email account they usually say
so...
I'm still somewhat introspecting, and so mix the voicings of Bakhtinian
theory with the quasi-auditory experience my reading produces from the
particular turns and inflections inscribed by different Names. If they do
have a certain stability, it is certainly a shifting and malleable one... I
don't usually pry apart whether it is me or another Name that shifts shape:
the relation moves. And with Names that are around in my electronic
environs often, the voice produces a virtual body, a vague sense of,
perhaps, a face, a deportment... meeting xmca Names IRL I have, a few
times, been really surprised, but mostly not. Mostly the expansion
contributed by RL has been a lot gentler.
So, perhaps I'm asking if we should change names more often...
Eva
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