BBC News carries a warning that Blogger is subject to attacks resulting in hijack posts with malware links. So anything on here that doesn't fit the usual style should be regarded with caution.
I wonder what my 'usual style' is, exactly...
[Update: confirmed to be a result of infected machines' uploading via the e-mail posting feature, which I don't use.]
I haven't seen Patrimonito's World Heritage Adventures (since currently I haven't the bandwidth), and I'm quite far from being in the target audience; neither can I claim to have a better idea. Still... there's something about the flavour that on first inspection looks rather checklisty. Maybe I just grew up to be jaded: I hear these things inside my head 'as read (sarcastically) by Morgan Brind'. Or maybe I just find it a bit disheartening that so much of the page is concerned with I.P. and the approval criteria for using the character.
I find it a bit odd that the linked page goes to some trouble to explain the design – it bears explaining, but I should imagine the symbolism of the World Heritage Emblem goes over the heads of the cartoon's intended viewers – yet goes into little detail about what actually happens in these 'adventures'. 'Patrimonito introduces World Heritage sites, the threats they are facing and proposes solutions to preserve them.' Are there characters who might be called villains, and if so what's their motivation? Are the often murky complexities of heritage politics successfully conveyed, or oversimplified into a black/white moral distinction? Is there an intro. or credits song, and will I hate it? All questions still in need of investigation...
Update: I've now watched some; I've seen worse.
Futakoi Alternative Minikoi (raw). I don't know what to say about these, so I'll just embed them after the jump.
I've now added a widget to display my most recent Google Reader shared items in the right-hand column, under the heading 'Catching My Eye'. This is stuff that I thought looked particularly interesting as I trawled my various syndication feed subscriptions; I'll be trying to keep it up to date and, er, reasonably work-safe, in case anyone actually passes by.
I have an unpleasant fear that I shall die in such a way as to spark a moral panic.
I have before me three different news articles connected to the Croxteth Park murder. One, from the BBC on Friday, suggests a certain sensitivity to the complexities of human life in trying to account for the deed. The commentator who cites cultural influences, a Revd. Dr. David Leslie, does it with about as much subtlety as is possible in two sentences: of course his concerns about 'commodified culture' and 'people [who] really don't know how to communicate with one another' are the tip of a whole iceberg of complication, and don't really lend themselves to empirical testing, but it appears the Reverend has refrained from looking for folk devils in favour of a critique of modern culture at large; and that's encouraging, as is the article's overall focus on the importance of education.
A short Telegraph article from the same day concerns itself with... YouTube, and gang videos of 'numerous young gunmen posing with weapons', doing its best to make the scenario sound shocking. Personally I rather wish gangs carrying weapons spent more time merely posing with them. Two days later a minister is calling for such videos to be banned.
I must dig up my notes on 'glamourisation' someday and post a critique of the notion. We hear, as usual, of 'an extremely malign and dangerous influence on young people', but it remains unclear to me by precisely what mechanism this influence occurs, or what its demonstrable impact has been. Meanwhile another MP is suggesting that 'the same editorial controls should apply to sites like YouTube as they do to newspapers and television'. The question of the proper freedoms and responsibilities of sites centred around user-submitted content, including Web fora as well as video networks, is an interesting and worthwhile one; but I don't anticipate a serious investigation of it in the wake of this.
Why does the charity worker also quoted in the Grauniad article want companies to self-censor? 'There is going to have to be some movement by the companies on this. Otherwise we'll get kneejerk legislation.' I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
[Update: Related commentary is in Mick Hume's article on sp!ked. 'The fact that nobody yet knows who shot the lad or why has left a blank space on which anybody can write their own script. That the killing appears meaningless has been widely taken as a licence to imbue it with whatever meaning you see fit...' Also some insightful comments from Vint Cerf: 'When you have a problem in the mirror you do not fix the mirror, you fix that which is reflected in the mirror.']
Via PressTheButtons news comes to me of fears that the youth of today are short of historical gaming knowledge.
I would like to see some sort of survey to support the assurance that I 'won't believe how many people out there think Mario Kart 64 is the first Mario Kart title or Super Mario 64 is the first Mario platformer'. Just how widespread is this problem; and does it arise because new people keep dipping their toes into fandom and are merely at a stage through which we all passed once in our respective ways, or are there legions who really don't care about the significant games of the past? (I'm reminded of something else MattG once wrote: 'Now I understand the strange looks I get from people when I go on about Mushroom Kingdom politics or the the history of the Triforce.')
One thing I might add is that familiarising oneself with gaming history is made a lot easier by a combination of emulator use (far more convenient than a large hardware collection) and either a belief in the moral significance of 'abandonware' or just straightforward disregard for copyright law. Although it's easier now to experience the classics legally with so many retro rereleases these days, they come with a price tag; perhaps the problem for the youth of today isn't just ignorance, wilful or otherwise, but the lack of an income.
Directed by GameSetWatch to the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I've been enjoying their Outcast retrospective (reworked from a version written originally for Edge). One of the most dreamily lovely games ever made, it was let down for me not by its legendary collection of 'alien' phonemes – come to think of it, didn't Vangers also use voxels, and is there then a strange pattern emerging...? – but by the Twôn-Ha glitch: on my laptop these beasts of burden would almost always refuse to walk or run, so I had to opt for kangaroo motion, and got fairly tired of it. (According to some forum comments I found while researching the problem, it was suspected to have something to do with the speeds of modern CPUs making trouble for the code... somehow; I got as far as downloading CPUGrab, but never actually got around to testing it out. Maybe the FSF should take more interest in games... or maybe we'll just keep relying on the good offices of bedroom hackers the way we always have.) In consequence I never got very far on Adelpha; so hearing about the 'Open Outcast' project heartens me.
It's a pity Yves Grolet doesn't want to talk about the doomed Outcast II project; not that I want to see old wounds reopened, but developer interviews are often the best source of information on the stillborn – take Final Fantasy V for the PC for example, about which I've heard pretty well nothing that isn't from the Warmech.net interview – and so it's frustrating when that avenue of enquiry is closed, especially since in this case there are two sequels it would be interesting to hear about: the one the remaining team tried to make, and the one Grolet thought should be made.
Recently I picked up a copy of Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition – in the fast-moving world of games, 15 years are quite enough to identify a 'classic' – and found in it some of the same visionary craftsmanship of a strange world; I don't recall ever seeing it named as a source of inspiration for Outcast, but I could well believe it. The graphically updated game (still with its old-school 'die repeatedly until you work out what to do, then die some more trying to do it' gameplay) comes packaged with some design documents and a fascinating documentary video; it's great to see historically significant games being treated with this kind of respect (and having creators who take loving care of their work in the first place). I don't suppose we'll ever see Outcast: Anniversary Edition, but maybe I'll ride my Twôn-Ha again someday.
I wanted one of those fancy custom YouTube players, and specifically the big version with the menu attached; but that raised the question of where to put it... So at the bottom of the page, just above the CC licence, there's a new expand/contract link. (Yes, JavaScript required...) I like this better than Blogger's built-in video search application; it gives more user control.
‘Kupo!’
‘Pico pico?’
‘Kupo!’
‘Pico pico pico...’
‘Kupo!’
‘Picori!’
‘Kupo?’
‘Pico! Pico pico pico!’
‘Kupo... Pico pico?’
‘Picori! Pico pico!’
‘Pico pico pico... Pico pico! Picori!’
‘Pico pico... Kupo?’
‘Kupo!’
‘Kupo! Kupo kupo kupo!’
‘Kupo! Kupo! Pico pico pico...’
‘Kupori?’
For no terribly profound reason I find myself contemplating my awesome height—and the genetic condition responsible for it. Contemplation should make a change from the usual hobby of encouraging rumours of a connection between height, shoe size and penis size (which according to some Ig-winning research are actually true, albeit with only weak correlation). Of course, with Marfan Syndrome it's not just the height (though certainly the constant risk of walking into a lintel is a pain; literally, if I'm not careful), but the slender frame that comes with it: potentially elegant if one can find trousers that fit properly. Trousers are easier than shoes, mind. What principally grinds Marfan's into my life experience isn't the ever-present possibility that that life will end when my aorta packs it in, or even the experience of being stared at by more conventionally proportioned people (even if that does partially explain my disinclination towards cosplay, and other forms of trying not to stand out more than necessary), but the eternal search for shoes that fit (allowing for some additional padding and heel grips). Things are better now I've stopped growing, but only somewhat (though in adult life I thankfully run into fewer people who want to make 'witty' remarks or learn my shoe size; also I only very seldom faint nowadays). On the positive side, my physician's advice to avoid contact sports did get me out of some of the least appealing parts of Physical Education, to my great relief.
What I don't have, of course, is actual giantism, which is a quite different and far more dramatic condition (whose sufferers have my sympathy). I'm not that markedly 'different', but I do have a hereditary genetic condition which in some sense marks out part of 'who I am'. I suppose part of why that feels strange is that human knowledge of 'genetics' as conceived of now isn't really that old; but such is 'identity': apparently I may share a genetic condition with Tutankhamun, Rachmaninov, Abraham Lincoln and, um, Osama bin Laden. I can't say I was overjoyed to hear about that last possibility; though at least it seems Marfan's afflicts people with genuine claims to celebrity or, er, notoriety.
I seem to be in some danger now of reaching the hundred-post mark without having warranted a Zelda-specific Attribute; and that would be alarming. It would also be quite surprising, with delightful things like this to be found:
I had it in mind to write something Zelda-related at greater length, but that'll have to wait until I've more free time. It strikes me that I even forgot to note it here recently when someone uploaded a Mother 3 debug room video; so let's make amends and make this a gaming miscellany.
This is what I particularly want to post today, though:
These images are a few years old – from back when 'Super Mario 128' was the stuff of rumours – and I seem to have got them from the now defunct http://www.n-cubed.com/mario128/screens.php [Internet Archive]: as I recall they were said to fall into the 'either leaked concept screens or fakes' category. Now, of course, the perspective brings New Super Mario Bros. to mind; but I never did find out anything more about them. They're fairly pleasing to the eye, though.
So the milestone is reached. I doubt many people have ever actually visited, although I know my posts on FFVII's deleted content have been read by some other people, but writing this stuff gives me a nice record of the things that have been capturing my interest at various points, and a place to put my notes where they're accessible wherever the Web is and can be flagged up for others if need be. (Although recently the dissertation notes have tended to dominate somewhat, and often with something of a 'stream of consciousness' style at that.) The use of a CC licence has more to do with my personal stance on intellectual property – one of my research interests after all – than with an expectation that anyone will have a reason to take advantage of it. (I had to exclude non-text media, with so much game footage here and other stuff that isn't by me; of course, anyone else can use the same hotlinks and embedding.) I do somewhat regret not having more diversions into my wider interests, along the lines of the post looking back at what I learnt about early modern thinking on extraterrestrial life during First Year 'History of Science'—stuff that just makes for interesting talking points.
I've been thinking for a while that this place, not atypically, tends to represent me primarily in my Apollonian aspect, when it probably wouldn't kill my reputation to inject some more of the passion of my Dionysian side: I mulled over the possibility of making a secondary weblog for the purpose, with a black background and decoration in blue-purple flame-blurs, but didn't fancy maintaining two (despite the fact that I'm under no obligation as such to update on any schedule—and right now have other things to deal with anyway), so the current plan is to publish such posts under an Attribute to be (referentially) named Dark Chest of Wonders. Erratically.
Last time, in a rather garbled and sketchy post, I described my Grand Plan for Isolationary Phenomenology™ (Mk. II) in rough outline. Now I need to sort out the details properly. (Warning: overflowing stream of consciousness ahead.)
I said I wanted a nice, crisp argument here... On reflection I think I needn't play up the 'aloneness not derivative of encounter' angle quite so much, given the existence of other people's assertions that aloneness has significance in its own right, maybe as an equiprimordial state. So the slant becomes a more specific 'aloneness and encounter not opposed' one—which may be trickier to employ... I'm leaning increasingly towards the idea that aloneness is primary (but also that it does indeed presuppose other people), so what I'm saying remains pretty much 'aloneness ≠ anti-encounter'.
So what if it were? (Aloneness is experienced within the spatiality of presence and absence, not the spatiality of empty places.) Well, then it would be indistinguishable from experience of the absence of others; but in fact, although it refers outwards to the world around me, what I experience in aloneness is not – or not only – that others are absent, but that I am alone. Aloneness happens to me, not around me. (Plus, as several people have pointed out to me by now, there isn't that much of a necessary connection between being alone and feeling alone: 'feeling alone in the big city' is one example suggested to me.) Not that encounter happens 'around me' either, as such; but it necessarily involves engagement with the world, rather than merely referring to it.
So, putting that (hopefully) a bit more cleanly: encounter involves engagement with the world (even if it's only to the extent that one feels oneself to be in the presence of another). If experiential aloneness were directly opposed to encounter, it too would involve engagement with the world; but in fact it refers primarily to oneself. (Not quite right yet...)
If I were looking to oppose that, I'd say something like: Okay, 'I am alone', but that is by negation of the outside world. 'Hiding in my room, / Safe within my womb, / I touch no-one and no-one touches me.' You're not going to get away from that need to define 'self' by reference to 'other'.
But I think the point stands, even if it does need improvement. When I'm really engaged with others, e.g. deep in conversation, my experience isn't 'I am engaged' but 'we're together' (cf. Merleau-Ponty's 'co-existence'). Feeling alone is quite different from missing somone: in that experience the object of my thoughts is the person I miss, whereas in finding myself alone I might sometimes have particular absent people in mind – e.g. when I turn around expecting to see someone there, then discover that I'm alone – but insofar as my thoughts are not of another's absence but of my own aloneness, it does not seem that I think of the absence of 'everyone' (the population of the world? everyone who ever lived? everyone I've ever known?), but rather that... Wait, I'm not the object of my thoughts, am I? (I've been tending to think that there is no distinct object.) Plus I seem to be cavalierly contradicting my own musings about 'substitutive encounter'—
Right. The skeleton 'feels' right: 'Encounter is an engagement in the world; therefore, if experiential aloneness is an experience opposed to, or of the lack of, encounter, it too should be an engagement in the world; but in fact it seems not to be.' But the flesh is tricky. (I want to avoid spending very much time characterising engagement/encounter...) I shouldn't play up the surface grammar of 'I am alone' so much, and yes, experiential aloneness does refer to the world outside oneself... but still, it does seem that finding oneself alone differs from discovering an absence in the world. Okay, but that's subtly different from saying it differs from a lack of encounter. An encounter isn't apprehension of another physical body's proximity; that's what my analysis of 'presence' is supposed to show. When I find myself alone, I do seem to find that no others are present 'with me', 'beside me', etc.—so there is that built-in reference to the world around me in which others can appear. Yet... it's not a lack of definite others. Litter gives us indirect encounter with non-specific others, of course...
This is at risk of getting out of hand. Actually, I'm not happy with relying on 'encounter as engagement': too loose, too fragile. What I want to say is, first, experiential aloneness ≠ experience of the absence of others; second, if experiential aloneness were simply a privative form of encounter (i.e. of experience of the presence of others) then it would be experience of the absence of others; therefore it isn't a privative form of encounter. That basic structure's fine: what's causing me problems, I think, is uncertainty about just how I want to characterise the privation/negation/equiprimordial-complement-thingy element. I don't really have a specific opponent, alas. So it's got to be tightened up: let's go with negation/privation and say that what experiential aloneness isn't is a sense/experience of non-encounter. (I take it that any account which makes aloneness derivative of encounter is going to feature a central negative element.) That's okay, but less encompassing than I'd wanted: what about those commentaries on the positive aspects of aloneness, suggestive of, perhaps, equiprimordiality between aloneness and encounter...?
I think this is where I have to say more about the positive attributes of experiential aloneness, in order to show that it isn't really 'the other side of the coin'. Okay, structure: I don't think pure 'how unlike they are!' is going to do it. What I think it perhaps should be, drawing on the 'aloneness is encounter' theme, is this: if aloneness and encounter were two equally basic experiences (i.e. neither being derivative of the other), and they are not only different but mutually exclusive (which seems nicely intuitive, once we get over 'feeling alone + being in physical proximity to others' and other such non-parallel cases), then they should be unrelated; but asserting no relation between experiences of aloneness and experiences of interpersonal encounter is... unthinkable.
Squinting at this from various angles, it seems to have potential, but to a large extent it doesn't yet feel right. (Something about forcing these big categories 'aloneness' and 'encounter' into a simple r.a.a. structure is confounding my senses...) I don't think I can just assume '(neither derived from the other ∧ mutually exclusive) → unrelated' without provoking objections: I'll have to do some more groundwork here, but I want to avoid getting sidetracked. What I basically want to say is: aloneness and encounter are related. Closely related. Joined at the hip. You just can't conceive of one without reference to the other: aloneness refers to the unfulfilled possibility of encounter, and encounter... well, this is where things get tricky, since I've just argued that actually aloneness isn't just encounter gone missing. (Hence why one might expect encounter to be primary.) Yet it does seem that encounter refers to aloneness: not in that when having the experience of being with other people it necessarily flags itself up as respite from aloneness (although sometimes it can), but simply in that for 'encounter' to stand out as a distinctive state it needs a point of contrast— I have the sense, though, that I'm getting into difficulties again, and can't really afford to wander off in this direction. (Incidentally, given Dr. Ratcliffe's comments about my 'strange' mixture of phenomenology and conceptual analysis I suspect he'll be sceptical of this; but 'strange' isn't really a criticism with which I can do anything.)
Okay, so we start off with the thought – albeit not the unproblematic thought – that encounter and aloneness are bound up together, and we want to combine that with our demonstration that aloneness isn't derivative of encounter to show that encounter is derivative of aloneness (as the sole remaining option). I'm going to have to add expanatory depth to this 'derivation' thing: I have roughly in mind one experience's being made possible by/presupposed in another, thinking of the idea that aloneness presupposes the possibility of encounter— Hmmm. I'm going to attract criticisms for this whole 'priority' thing if I'm not careful. Anyway...
*Sleeps overnight, wakes up—*
Looking at this afresh, a few things strike me. Firstly, that what I've said in order to support the idea that aloneness isn't deriative of encounter is likely to work in both directions—which means I may well end up either sticking with my 'aloneness is encounter' theme or agreeing that actually they're equiprimordial. Secondly, that the phenomenological 'flesh' on these bones remains pretty lean. Thirdly, that maybe the 'unthinkable' actually is thinkable and there isn't such an obviously close connection as I thought...
Well, there isn't much time in which to resolve this. I've got an argument, which seems (allowing for its nascent state) pretty solid, to the effect that aloneness isn't just a derivative of encounter. That invites the question of what it is... and my bounding assumption here is that there is a fairly close relation between the two experiential states. So you'd expect each to presuppose the possibility of the other, and that seems to fit. After that— Let's look again at the question whether aloneness and encounter are really opposed (and then depending on the answer perhaps I can take another look at 'aloneness is encounter').
In questioning aloneness as privation/negation/derivation of encounter I'm already some way to potentially undermining opposition. What actually are the grounds for thinking of aloneness and encounter as opposed? Well—pretty much by definition, encounter involves having to do with other people, aloneness involves the lack of that. Experientially, of course, they both refer to an outside world of others; what I've done is to flag up differences in the way they operate... Come to think of it, I practically am answering the same question again. Or a looser version. Genuine, satisfying encounter can break aloneness: this experience teaches. (Though I shouldn't forget my own notion of aloneness as substitutive encounter...) So it's got to be fair enough to call them opposed in some way. Yet on close inspection it doesn't seem like a direct opposition... or maybe I'm not digging deep enough: maybe what encounter properly opposes is the self-absorption of the lonely soul... This is at risk of getting out of hand again. (Also I stand to get slated for loose terminology; though improving it would be non-trivial.)
Let's try to rebuild a nice, crisp argument structure. *ponders* Okay, it might start out something like this: Intuitively, experiential encounter and aloneness are opposed, reflecting actual encounter and aloneness. However, this seems not to be the case. Nonetheless, it also seems that aloneness and encounter are closely connected states—and it therefore appears that, if not opposed, they must be complementary, or even without clear differentiation. (Here I might dive into Heidegger's 'Being-alone is a deficient form of Being-with'.) I think criticising 'aloneness as privative' leads naturally to opposing experiential aloneness/encounter opposition, so that's okay... The remaining tricky bit is judging exactly what to say in positive terms.
I suspect this may end up as pretty pure phenomenology: maybe I could suggest an aloneness-encounter continuum? (Koch does something like that.) Playing up the connections would also help shore up criticism of aloneness and encounter as two distinct and different states with equal priority. I have the feeling ('aloneness is encounter') it's possible to go still further, though...
So where next...? Clearly aloneness and encounter are in some respect different; indeed, I've argued as much above. The question then is, what exactly is it that differentiates them, if not privation? (My idea of aloneness as 'substitutive encounter' is in effect an instance of the possibility that the difference is extrinsic and in themselves they're identical.) I'm cooling to the idea that aloneness is prior as I warm to the possibility that they're conjoined (or, yes, identical). Actually, it might be better to be more specific: I'm looking for definitive differences. (There may be legions of contingent ones...) But if we go looking for definitive differences, don't we end up back where we started, with aloneness and encounter being defined in terms of each other...? (Besides, this may be getting too lexicographical.)
*Thinks hard, tries to blot weighty distractions from his mind—* Maybe I should go 'meta' and make the problems of analysing the topic the centrepiece... Maybe I should draw on Heidegger's 'deficient modes of solicitude' and suggest that 'encounter' should actually be a category into which all too few human relationships actually fit. Well, I think it may be correct to say that encounter and aloneness can become blended, but they do have their paradigmatic manifestations...
Right! This really has to be tightened down now. Aloneness is distinct from encounter (though there may be a continuum); it isn't derivative of or (I think...) directly opposing encounter; but nonetheless they are related. So what is (experiential) aloneness, and how does it relate to encounter? It's not a sense of others' absence (though there may be a causal connection). I think... that actually it's a frustrated sense of the possibility of encounter: it's a sense of disconnectedness precluding (meaningful) encounter. Which works quite nicely in the case of loneliness, and maybe of solitude; what of those cases where one just finds oneself alone, without any sense that encounter isn't going to be possible, and perhaps still expecting encounter soon? Well, then it's a frustrated sense of the possibility of encounter now: e.g. if I turn around while speaking to find that nobody's left to listen, then if I want an audience it turns out I'm going to have to go and look for one.
I think this may work (and it has some nice potential for quoting Heidegger)... Put aloneness on a lower level than actual encounter (down with a taken-for-granted presupposition of other people—which should please Dr. Ratcliffe), have it deal with the possibility of (direct?) encounter, and suddenly they're intimately connected yet not on the same level. Plus you can have aloneness even during encounter, as a sense of its fragility: 'What would happen if I go? / Just leave without any reason why? / Would someone wonder why?' (After Forever, 'Lonely': those lyrics have been bothering me for a while.) It seems able to deal with self-imposed isolation too: here the possibility of encounter isn't exactly frustrated so much as deliberately cut off.
Now I've got to see what I can do with the litter and the Last Man, since after spending so long developing them it would be a shame (and a space-filling problem) if I couldn't find places to use them.
Litter first, then. I've looked at this vaguely in relation to some kind of 'indirect encounter'. I seem to be shifting focus away from normativity, so it may not be able to play that role... Part of what looked interesting was the way in which litter can appear as an intrusion into one's space by human agency, despite the fact that one can be quite alone physically when encountering it. Any potential...? Well, suppose we bring the Last Man in early: he can encounter litter, and that's quite compatible with his never expecting to encounter another human again. (Maybe litter would enhance his sense of isolation by failing to signify the presence of others' existence anymore...) So, now that we're interested in the possibility of encounter, that doesn't look immediately promising.
Okay, let's look directly at the Last Man. He knows (somehow) that no encounter with other humans will ever be possible for him; it might be said that his potential for encounter has been supremely frustrated. (Maybe he'll make a useful example of 'actual' aloneness in extremis... if I need one. Though I wonder whether he may prove too speculative to use now...) My work relating to him has to do with how the meaning of practices can depend on a general context, and how in its absence absurdity can beckon; also, of course, there's my original observation about how in employing him as a moral talking point we posit him as a public entity (with the link to Kierkegaard and 'the universal').
Maybe what I should take from that is that what we are makes us always open to aloneness: I mean, the need to presuppose other people in our finding ourselves in a world creates an ever-present possibility of our being confronted with this 'deficient form of Being-with'. So the Last Man can do a job flagging up how our experiences presuppose others, and thus flesh out the placing of aloneness on a more basic level than (direct) encounter. Our experiences always presuppose others; and therefore we are always primed for encounter—and hence ready for our priming to be frustrated. That seems to make only limited use of him, though; I may not be able to make full use of my absurdity-related arguments. Hmm... Maybe I could say this form of absurdity is the frustration of... indirect encounter! So maybe I'll find a use for the litter after all...
Maybe. There's some plausibility in saying that indirect encounter can give rise to a sense of aloneness through the frustration of the possibility of direct encounter: Koch cites the example of Robinson Crusoe, faced with a shipwreck off the coast of his island with, as it turns out to increase his sense of loneliness, no survivors. I'm not sure I need to place very much emphasis on the point, though. It also occurs to me: shouldn't that make all merely indirect encounter a source of experiential aloneness? That seems contentious. Also, when one comes across litter, isn't the thought that 'the litterers have vacated the scene of the crime', rather than that 'I am alone'? I think I may have to class this as an unresolved problem for now, and hope I can develop it later and use it to add flavour to the project.
Today's title comes courtesy of Wolfstone. Following both the conference and a tutorial, the project as I'd conceived it is having to be changed after all: the standard response I'm getting (except from Stopford) is 'I don't understand', which irks me rather because it means I'll never be able to test out a completed version, but isn't something I can get around, since if I can't explain this stuff to the staff, it's doubtful that even a properly written-up version would get examiners' approval. Gradually it becomes clear why there are so many people pursuing academic careers by writing 'my interpretation of $philosopher on $topic'. 'Skewered', then (though not fatally); but anything I can't use I can always develop on this weblog (and I've been thinking maybe it would be better suited to a different literary style...). In the meantime, I have to work some quick magic and reformulate the project into something digestible that can make use of my existing material.
So I've got: aloneness, in its various forms, and descriptions of some of them, with an emphasis on the way in which other people are presupposed therein. I'm going to draw on my presence/absence work. (The general difficulty with any project on aloneness, I've found, lies in finding 'problems' with respect to the variety of possible ways of finding oneself alone which don't boil down to 'psychology is complex'.) I'll be drawing on my work on 'presence', in the sense used when we say someone 'has a tremendous presence' or speak of being in someone's presence.
I've started with a leap of intuition and a nicely dramatic slogan: Aloneness Is Encounter. (Nicely controversial and attention-getting... Well, in practice I'll probably tone it down a bit.) In which it's immediately crucial to say that I mean encounter not with another person – of course – but with another presence. ('Presence' in this sense is an artifact of conscious experience, not a 'thing' in the objective world.)
Broadly I'll be arguing that experiential aloneness (feeling alone, finding oneself alone) consists not in experiencing the absence of others – 'I am alone here' ≠ 'This place is empty (save for me)' – but, instead of that, is best understood as a kind of encounter. (No wonder I've found it so awkward; I was trying to oppose it to encounter.) It's a subsitutive encounter – which is why it occurs only when one doesn't feel oneself to be in the presence of others in the ordinary sense – but not an unreal one. What's present really exists, and it really is a presence before a mind that's aware of its aloneness. (Bear with me...)
I talked quite a bit about how what we apprehend when faced with litter is a 'general agency', a trace not of specific persons but nonetheless of human action. I want to build on this and show that an experience can meaningfully be called 'encounter' which isn't with another individual. (Maybe what I should be saying is that a full understanding of 'encounter' wouldn't actually give dramatic priority to concrete encounters; but that's pretty much what I was saying before. Well, of course this won't be worlds away, since it's supposed to make use of my existing notes. Or how about this way of putting it: 'the difference between encounter and aloneness is properly construed as complement rather than opposition'?) This isn't illusory/imaginative encounter: what's encountered really exists, just as people who drop litter really exist. (Phenomenologically, it's commonplace not to encounter individuals as such: think of crowds...)
Heidegger makes some interesting – and all-too-brief – comments on how 'Being-alone is a deficient form of Being-with', linking into his with-world and Mitdasein. I'd agree that isolation experiences presuppose other people; in fact, I'm so ready to agree that I'm worried it isn't interesting: of course finding oneself alone is a kind of experience which makes reference to other people. Which is why I'm going for a bit more of a striking angle (while trying to avoid saying anything that isn't actually plausible, of course; so my slogan will probably never appear outside my notes...).
Another version just struck me: suppose we say that aloneness is more primary than actual, concrete encounter, even that aloneness makes encounter possible? (There are a few comments in my notes which suggest that...) Others encountered as a fracture in aloneness... making it possible that contact with another human being can become accompaniment/companionship. Aloneness not as derivative of encounter but as primary. (Some people have made comments possibly along such lines; though as I think I've said somewhere before, I don't really buy into 'existential loneliness' [.doc].) My speculation may be getting out of hand here... If I can make that work, though, it could work well (though I'd have to rethink 'substitutive encounter').
Okay, enough of the brainstorm-like musing. I need structure, analysis, etc. (This is going to be the kind of very sketchy plan I come up with at the peak of early enthusiasm and avoid putting definite details into because I know I'll only change my mind about them.) What's clearest so far is what I'm against: a view of experiential aloneness as a derivation or negation/privation of experiential encounter. Fine: I'll call it 'intuitive', thus sparing me a need for citations. I've always intented to have a short historical bit in the introduction, and that'll let me give a due nod to what other people have said about the primacy and profundity of aloneness, and try to stake out my own territory. There's a paper called 'Feeling Lonely: Theoretical Perspectives' [may require login] that has a convenient section on philosophical treatments of loneliness, for example; Koch will be a valuable resource too. (It looks as though there's a not insubstantial school of thought, especially within existential phenomenology, that perhaps makes loneliness and encounter equiprimordial; and of course the very blurb of Koch's book talks about both solitude and encounter being essential for human completion. I'll have to make sure I avoid straw-manning...)
When it comes to the actual argument for that section, I'll be using my work on how experiential aloneness, though it refers to the world outside oneself, nonetheless differs from discovering absences in the world (with, I think, points of similarity to and contrast with Pierre's absence from the café). That alone (no pun intended) won't do the job, though. Ideally I want a nice, crisp structure: 'If aloneness were derivative of encounter, then P, but in fact ¬P'. I'll have to think about this some more (hopefully not for too much time).
Okay, so let's imagine I've got some finely tuned, killer argument proving that experiential aloneness can't possibly be derivative of encounter. Well, at this point I've got to set up the rest of my toolset. Litter experiences give indirect encounter and non-specific... well, I can't necessarily say 'presence' here; one doesn't feel 'in the presence of' litterers when they're over the hills and far away. What one does feel, I think, is an invasion of one's own space ('my quiet enjoyment of the countryside', etc.). Maybe I can call it 'trace presence' or something. (I'd probably better not...)
The main course has to come next, and it's got to be a substantive argument about the status of aloneness: what it is, if not derivative of encounter. So basically I build on what the discussion of litter suggests to contend that, actually, that's the sort of thing, mutatis mutandis, that's going on in experiential aloneness. Exactly what I say will have to depend on just how I set up the earlier sections... Actually this bit could end up being quite brief and/or abstract.
This is where I can play with the Last Man, arguing from absurdity to show how meaningful action depends on reference to a social/public world, and that the problem with trying to become a pillar of one's own society arises because one actually is the social world. That still needs some adaptation; it may even end up being inserted earlier. I still need to clarify just what I intend this to do now; I need to talk more about whom the isolated mind actually does encounter—
Yes, I have left this a little late... (I got excited about the possibility of giving experiential priority to aloneness.) If experiential aloneness has the characteristics of, or is a form of, or otherwise looks like encounter, who is it that's encountered? I've hinted that it's a general/non-specific 'somebody', in the sense that 'somebody' is responsible for litter, but that doesn't fully address the question.
Okay. Who's always around when I feel alone? I am. Whom do I find in some sense absent or distanced? Other people. (Tread carefully here... Recall Heidegger's comment about 'another example of a human being "beside" me' not necessarily breaking down aloneness.) Where then are they? They're embedded in the social world: they are the social world. And I'm not. (When my laptop power adapter broke, the worst thing about not being able to get on the Internet was the sense that 'things were going on' without me: my aloneness referred to social activity from which I found myself disconnected.) Aloneness has to do with 'others' in general—
Ah, but that's a problematic way of putting it. Isn't that intentionality, rather than (even indirect) encounter? I'm not being subtle enough. (Also, I need to draw on my work on presence/absence, not all of which is posted here.) First: I said it was encounter with another presence, not (directly) with other people. When I find myself alone, do I feel that the social world is present or absent? In the case of solitude, perhaps neither: Koch calls it the state in which consciousness is disengaged from oher people. In the case of loneliness—oh, I feel its presence, all right. (Other people's displays of affection → ouch...) Since 'the social world' doesn't exist anywhere in particular, the physical absence of others needn't make impossible their presence en masse...
Still not subtle enough. (Maybe I should do some more work on the arguments and descriptions before trying to flesh out this characterisation.) I'm going to bring this post to a close, I think: it's long and complicated enough already. (I dread to think what the staff would make of some of the posts here...) I really need to get some proper arguments shaped, and quickly—
Sticking with the theme of aloneness, there are some interesting insights to be found in the N.H.K. ni Youkoso teaser. (Presumably if there were ever any episodes on YouTube they've been yanked.) It's been a long time since I could tell myself watching anime counted as research.
The IPKat wonders how one can tell who a ‘real’ Harry Potter fan is. It seems that to fit into this exclusive group, one must not only be keen to read the books, but also to support its copyright, and the way in which the publishers are controlling the market by creating massive anticipation but failing to fulfil it in a timely manner.
IPKat, 'Harry Potter Lands Teenager In Jail'
This story is a few days old now; I've been busy doing the philosophical equivalent of working on The Cliffs. As the third commentator on the IPKat article says, for some of us the word 'fansub' springs immediately to mind. Having to endure a wait until... late October? At risk of starting to sound a touch 'We was poor', some of us are accustomed to waiting months for anime to be signed by North American distributors, then months more for it to reach Albion—if it ever does in legal form. (Traditional fansub ethics wouldn't be favourable to this French translator: the book was already due to be distributed in France.) That's before we get into topics like how one ends up covering the cost of dubbing even if one loathes it, or why DVD region coding hits especially hard here... While I'm on, let's talk about ROM downloads and translation patches. A seriously impressive amount of hard work goes into extracting text from a ROM (without access to the original source code or design docs.), translating it – think of how much text some of the later Super Famicom RPGs have – and reinserting it cleanly to produce a patch; all this to be able to enjoy games which never made it across the Pacific by legal means. The amount of time some people invest into giving retro games a wider audience can be pretty dramatic; unfortunately, so can the time the rest of us have to wait for projects to be completed. [Update: on the subject of timing...]
I do like the angle the IPKat takes on the story: it's one the the grim ironies of copyright that numerous inefficiencies can get in the way of providing people with opportunities to do so who value $creative_works sufficiently to be often ready to pay £money for them. Of course I of all people have to recognise the importance of calm, rational, philosophical enquiry into the propriety of intellectual property regimes; but let's be honest: there is a substantial role played by frustration, and it's going to be the most enthusiastic about the unobtainable works who'll feel it the most. Heard people wax lyrical about how fabulous Chrono Trigger is? That one did make it to North America, but neither the SNES nor the PSX version was released in the UK. (The port, being CD-based, can be played in a PC emulator without requiring an ISO, but of course you'd have to use a dump of the PSX BIOS...) Now that's when piracy gets really tempting—when, for example, your territory's been passed over twice.
Thanks to my schedule, I haven't read The Deathly Hallows yet myself; and I think I probably could wait until October without becoming a pariah. I'm not terribly sympathetic to French fans in this case; but I agree that it's often the most sincere fandom which gets a raw deal from the inefficiencies which current copyright law makes possible. And that's before we get onto the question of fanfics and the legal status of derivative works...
I learnt of Dark Roasted Blend when pointed in its direction for a demonstration that war can indeed be so much fun; now I have a new procrastination aid. Presently I'm enjoying tales of an offbeat lighthouse, automated musical instruments and curious musical scores. Especially the scores—because I'm not tasked with playing them.
Margie: Did you notice that the two great angels only have one wing each...? According to a legend handed down in Nisan, God could have created humans perfectly. But then, humans would not have helped each other... So that is what these great single-winged angels symbolize... In order to fly, they are dependent on one another.
Citan: Ah, so that is the reason for it. I see... On further inspection, the left angel looks somewhat masculine, while the right one looks somewhat feminine. Now that is an unusual feature, is it not? Usually these depictions are not gender-specific. But these angels are clearly distinguishable as having opposing genders. And the space between them is the path from where God advents... Or could it be the path leading to God? Well... I do not know, it could be either, or even both.
Xenogears
I don't know how plausible this is theologically (despite the mildly Leibnizian flavour), but it's been on my mind a lot lately. I've been coming increasingly to think that the human condition is one of being, if not 'born in sin', certainly born somehow incomplete—even that a goal of psychiatric 'wholeness' may be misguided. (Although of the implications for sociopolitical individualism I'm unsure...) By which I don't mean it should be possible to 'complete' oneself through some kind of social absorption along the lines of the Kierkegaardian 'ethical'. (Although the topic of marriage certainly is relevant, I'm not convinced Wilhelm's treatment is. Incidentally, it keeps striking me when commentators defend marriage on grounds of social stability, etc. that it's possible for a defence to be potentially true/valid and nonetheless completely miss the point.) Neither do I mean that one should resign oneself to being forever partial. (If completion were impossible then to speak of humans as incomplete would be meaningless.) It's more a sense that there's no way to reach a stage at which one is 'above' or 'beyond' needing another's aid...
Not exactly a developed theory. Still, I like the idea of taking human weakness, human incompleteness, and seeing in it an opportunity for something better and more meaningful than independent 'perfection'. Even if it's an opportunity most of us often fail to recognise.
Update: this may actually be the Takahashi-Saga-Kato Theodicy.
Oh dear: Flash-based sites... They usually get in the way when one's trying to browse through beautiful images.
TerBush creates some stunning landscapes: the use of (often ghostly) light and colour especially gives them a fabulously unreal quality.
I survived: I got a thorough grilling, mostly having to do with the overall structure, but things could have gone much worse; I wasn't sure beforehand whether my talk would even be long enough for the allotted slot. The staff generally agreed that the ideas were interesting, but – as I've noted myself in some posts here – there was a lack of focus/clarity; I've just had an e-mail from Dr. Hamilton which reassured me greatly about what he thought of the talk overall.
Actually, though, the most helpful specific question to my mind was Mitch's query about whether Sartre's example of the voyeur ruled out a special role for the presence of other people in the kinds of structures of consciousness I was talking about; that helped me clarify in my own mind that mere physical presence is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. I'll also have to give some thought to Dr. Ratcliffe's suggestion that I was playing fast and loose with different senses of the word 'alone'.
I wonder why I didn't quote that one earlier... Lonely songs are fairly commonplace; with regard to solitude, on the other hand, Truax's 'Escape from the Orphanage' is the only one that springs to mind. (Takemitsu's was an instrumental piece.) Anyway, following some fairly unsatisfactory rambling I really need to improve my focus and get a better grasp of the overall structure. So, besides my presently wishing I knew more about Buber—what exactly am I going to tell the Dissertation Conference...?
There have always been several points of departure for this project, and I'm coming to think I maybe shouldn't be looking for a perfect resolution. First, there are those comments by Sartre: 'nobody can be vulgar all alone'; one can be truly ashamed only under another's gaze, 'no matter what results one can obtain in solitude by the religious practice of shame.' I'm still struck both by the insistence that such experiences are only intersubjectively possible – mere thoughts along the lines of 'Whatever would so-and-so say?' apparently can't do the same job at all; and Sartre of course had thought long and hard about the imagination – and by the normative content: he seems to be saying not so much that vulgarity is a matter of subjective judgment (for such judgments can of course be internalised, and that's as real as they get) with which the Other can paint one's actions, constituted by and nothing more than the Other's opinion, nor that the Other's look serves to illuminate the vulgarity of a gesture or draw one's attention to it (for then the gesture would always 'be' vulgar, and it would be correct at most to say that no-one can know his own vulgarity all alone), but that vulgarity is a real (though perhaps culturally specific, etc.) aspect of the gesture which nonetheless is constituted intersubjectively, and irreducibly so.
That's an interesting enough idea in itself, but it also invites the question of just how much of human experience might be constituted in this way (especially since one can think Sartre's on to something here without necessarily adopting his in-itself/for-itself/for-others distinction); or to put it another way, what are the limitations of isolation? (Maybe that's a bit one-sided for Sartre... or full stop for that matter.) If part of my normative life, as it were, is possible only through encounters with others, how large a part is this?
This brings me to the second point of departure, which is illustrated by the 'last man' thought experiment, in which we imagine that only one human being (and in some versions not even one non-human animal) is left alive in the world, and then ask e.g. whether it would be morally wrong for him to wander around wantonly chopping down trees or to exterminate some species of plant. As I've suggested previously, it seems to me that in framing the question we posit the last man as 'already' within the sphere of public duties, culpability, responsibility, etc.—precisely in order to ask whether in fact he has duties, moral responsibilities, and so on. Here I'm inspired by Kierkegaard's treatment of 'the universal' in Fear and Trembling, where he strongly emphasises intelligibility as its apparently defining criterion: moral virtue and vice alike find themselves within the ethical/universal, by, er, virtue of being publicly comprehensible attitudes and acts, which can be subject to defence and counterattack in debate, and which can be considered in general terms as the actions of 'someone' in a given set of circumstances. (Johannes de silentio is concerned to consider what differentiates Abraham's near-filicide from 'murder' as generally understood: everyone understands and is capable of murder; at a murder trial or elsewhere, certain arguments may be brought by either 'side' – the victim was endangering the accused, or he was not; intentions of euthanasia are a mitigating factor, or they are not – and these are in effect arguments concerning the general principles of what is incumbent upon one in a given situation; here I'm reminded of Stuart Hampshire's suggestion that our very understanding of rationality depends on our understanding of public debate.) I don't intend this as a methodological criticism; I mean to observe that when we set out to ask about the normative aspects of the life of one completely alone, in that very act we require that he be the object of a kind of public scrutiny, and indeed make him one by positing him in terms of public potentialities, general rules by means of which one might judge his actions and in accordance with which he himself might choose to regulate them.
Now, even supposing that this is – in Marcel's sense – a 'problem', with this project I'm not particularly looking for a solution. Rather, I want to explore what's happening here. I've introduced a sense of 'public' which is quite distinct from Sartre's descriptions of 'encounter' proper: this sense of 'public' is bound up with the positing of the isolated man as a potential subject of normative constraints. Why did I feel the need to do that? Well, in the first place it seems that when the felt presence of others manifests itself, even if the others aren't present in person, normativity often comes along for the ride. Heidegger's discussion of Mitdasein is largely concerned to show that we're always already 'with others', but in an offhand reference to a field 'decently kept up' by someone we can see normative judgment creeping quietly in: my discussion of litter is meant to press the point further. Such is the immediate impression of agency encountered in litter that Flanders and Swann were able to make a whole song out of imagining that all the broken bedsteads and laceless boots you might come across in the countryside 'if you're not careful' were the product of careful distribution by a secret society dedicated to the aesthetic enhancement of the British landscape. It works because there is agency behind litter and flytipping, and we know it's really not like that. These others disrupt contemplative solitude no end: 'Oh dear... I'm finding myself in a with-world of always already being-with-others.' But one doesn't (unless one happens to be Michael Flanders) enquire deeply into their identity; neither does one merely register the existence of others in the world. Being faced with litter comes as an intrusion, an assault—because its occurrence is bound up with 'somebody's' agency. Or to flip that around: the agency one apprehends in litter is apprehended in the form of an assault. So this form of finding oneself in a world 'with others' is a strikingly normative one, and that should give some clue as to how much of our normative experience is possible without actual encounter.
In the second place, I want to flag up the question of how much of the experience of isolation can involve voluntariness. Sartre seems (unusually) keen to deny a role for choice when he says that even engaging in a 'religious practice' of shame won't produce shame proper—even as he acknowledges the possibility of such a practice. So let's take the extreme case of the last man and ask: can he not choose to orient himself 'within the universal'; and if he so chooses, to what extent does it matter?
I've had some fun imagining Sartre's grocer as the last man: he who inhabits grocerliness, stiffly assuming the posture of the grocer archetype, because a grocer who dreams is 'offensive to the buyer', not wholly a grocer, etc. (Of course he 'puts his feet up' in the evenings, goes fishing at weekends, etc.—but besides being practices with their own performative scripts – whoever spontaneously decides to 'put his feet up'? – these fit into the overall structure of his life as 'the non-grocerly activities', defined in terms of grocerliness.) This example of 'bad faith' as a response to public opinion/expectation gives us a nice example of someone regulating his behaviour in public terms. Now insert him into a post-apocalyptic setting. He's got ample freedom of choice, even if it's often meaningless: he could even choose to keep going to his shop every day to wait for customers, and nobody would ever criticise him. For him to sit in his shop, lamenting the downturn in custom, running out of vegetables and using rocks to represent them (which every child can understand) would be obviously absurd, even if in fact there was no observer to find it so. Not an absurd choice, though – just what should one do on finding oneself the last human alive? – but an absurd scenario, because the whole meaning of 'being a grocer' is bound up with the existence of a social world.
Another possibility, that of his deciding to proclaim himself king, looks on the face of it less ridiculous. He's free to appropriate what he pleases, to assert what authority he can. He can go around pointing at things and calling them 'my town hall', 'my nuclear facility', 'my dominion of Old Elvet' and so on; and indeed he does wield an unchallenged authority over them. Nonetheless, this is all a matter of his whims; he can decide to be king one minute and decide to be a humble grocer the next, and there is no constraint to make his status more than a matter of fancy or to make his designations of 'property' more than arbitrary labels.
Now suppose that the humble grocer simply spends his post-apocalyptic time tending his garden. This is still less obviously beset by difficulties: it's quite within the powers of an individual to tend the patch of land he lives beside, and quite reasonable for him not to want it to be overgrown. The problem is not that a corpse-strewn wilderness gives the traditional garden a decidedly non-traditional backdrop; neither is it that seeds are no longer sold, Gardeners' Question Time is no longer broadcast, etc. That the practice of gardening has otherwise died out in fact is merely a technical problem. The last man might perfectly well set himself the project of keeping his garden well kempt, even though the rest of the world is returning to wilderness; and when he laughs at his own jokes, he might avoid laughing coarsely or too loud; he might rise early and regularly; he might dress smartly and cringe at the idea of wearing a suit without a tie.
The problem with trying to become a pillar of one's own society is not practical; it is that of trying to apply to oneself a constraint which one intends should apply to everyone, when 'everyone' is co-extensive with 'oneself'. What is it that makes a judgment of principle distinct from a gratuitous whim? If anything does make this a genuine distinction – and here I am concerned not so much to scrutinise its credentials but to ask what sort of distinction the last man might make if he reflected on the question – I think this finds its root in the general, 'public' nature of such practices as early rising and dressing smartly. They're the sort of thing one does because one has standards (with implied contrast with those whose standards are slack), and those standards feature not as some personal quirk of style – even if in fact they are, they can't be apprehended as such by those adopting them – but as how 'one' properly conducts oneself (to take the language more openly towards Heidegger). There may be no potential subjects to give or deny reality to a claim of kingship, but there remains at least possible space for common practices of herbaceous border trimming, early rising, etc.—albeit common to a population of one.
Is there any problem with this? Qua phenomena, public standards of this sort do seem to have a sort of objective quality: one has a comfortable sense of the absolute propriety of wearing a tie with one's suit, and this is quite independent of any risk of meeting a violator (although reports of such people in the area do enhance one's sense of the importace of the standard). Of course, in the absence of any external constraint the last man could adopt the exact opposite standard with equal enthusiasm, and it is only his upbringing in a now-dead world that determines his choice; at root it is a choice, a choice to continue with the conventions of a deceased society, and for this reason it arguably retains a tinge of absurdity. Yet it is not so obviously absurd as the examples of the grocer's shop or the proclamation of kingship; it is not so rendered so hopelessly meaningless by the absence of wider society. If anything it suggests that one can choose to open up possibilities for oneself which involve positing oneself as a figure in public life, not because there are in fact public onlookers but because public life as a means of conducting oneself is itself a constant possibility for one. Meaning that you can be a public figure all alone; you can uphold public standards of propriety all alone; but you can't, according to Sartre, be genuinely vulgar all alone.
So let's move on to my third point of departure, and look at what's going on in the actual experience of finding oneself alone. I've drawn on Sartre's description of how experiences of spatiality are affected by the discovery of other people in them to distinguish between consciousness of things in the world as 'isolated', i.e. experience of isolation as a phenomenon within the world and as a feature of certain objects, and 'isolated consciousness', i.e. the structures of a consciousness that finds itself alone. Why would I want to make such a distinction? Well, it seems clear enough that we can experience things and especially places as isolated: as remote, abandoned, neglected, etc. What I find implausible is that the same operation is going on when I find myself alone, i.e. that I discover myself as an object in the world and discover that it is alone. What I discover is that others are absent from the world around me, or from the world insofar as it involves me, i.e. from my world. Of course it is also the case that they are absent from a certain location (which happens to be a location in which I am present), but in finding myself alone I don't discover that each co-ordinate in my field of vision is occupied by nobody; I discover that there is nobody here with me. Finding oneself alone is an outwardly-directed experience, a matter of finding that nobody else is present in my vicinity; but it is always my vicinity (cf. Sartre on 'the things in my universe').
'So what?' Well, if I am conscious of a room as empty (save perhaps for myself), then my consciousness is directed towards the room, the space so enclosed as to constitute the room, the absence of persons from that space. If I am conscious of myself as alone then what I am conscious of is a lack of others, i.e. my consciousness is still directed outwards towards my environment; but at the same time it seems not to be 'about' this environment or the mere fact that others are absent from it. It is I who am alone, not the room. Moreover, I find myself 'all alone' (a redundancy?), not merely 'alone with respect to a certain region in space which is my present location'. Plugging in some Husserl (mutatis mutandis) suggests to me that what's going on is that in finding others absent from 'my' world, 'my' vicinity, etc. I'm presupposing my own perspective in an outwardly directed experience.
That still looks like 'consciousness of isolation'. But it's consciousness not of isolation as an event 'in' the world, but of one's world as one empty of others; for if it took something in the world as its object, it would concern itself with the isolation of that thing as opposed to other things, whereas what is discovered is the absence of others from one's whole world. (If one discovered oneself as isolated, it would be oneself thought of as opposed to other things in the world; but the isolation happens in one's whole world.) So a consciousness discovers its whole world to be one of isolation, i.e. discovers itself to be isolated (but not 'itself' as an object of reflective thought). (Cf. anxiety towards the totality of Being-in-the-world; although that may just be a superficial similarity.) Phenomenologically, isolation happens not in the world but in the consciousness which makes it my world; that consciousness isn't 'of' isolation, since isolation isn't an event there in the world to be the object of consciousness, but it is structured by the emptiness of the world in which it finds objects.
I'm getting carried away; and I'm about to run up against the especially tricky part, that of actually tying this together. I think I'm basically right about my central point, that phenomenologically, finding oneself alone isn't just a matter of finding others absent, but can affect one's whole experience of finding oneself in a world (although whether it necessarily does is another matter, and potentially a complicated one). Nobody says e.g. 'I feel lonely wth respect to my present circumstances.' I think this may help shed light on Sartre's comment about vulgarity, but clearly I'm not there yet...
At the root of this project is a puzzlement about the role of contact with others, and whether there actually are any structures of consciousness which can't be had any other way (imagination, positing oneself as a public entity, etc.): in particular, whether there's something about our normative life which turns out to depend subtly on intersubjective encounter. In exploring 'isolated consciousness' I'm wondering whether, with-world or no, there might be something distinctive about 'being alone' which perhaps rules out certain possibilities. What I don't yet have is a conclusion.
Where are my fears for tomorrow...? As Therion didn't write [.mp3]: 'They're hanged around the wreck of Pingu.' I played with this a bit last year, and something about having to gear up for the Dissertation Conference made me want to return to its soothing charms.
No, don't abolish Philosophy as an academic subject; 'analysing the hell out of government policy papers' is often a frustrating waste of time, I assure you... (I recall Dr. Ratcliffe's story about his time working for Norwich Union, when his critiques of company practices got him hauled up before a disciplinary comittee.) Still, pessimism aside, it would be odd for me not to agree that philosophy can shed important light on real-world problems (even when the blind are leading), and any involvement of interested 'laity' in philosophical investigation sounds good; in book format, too, it's less offputting that the discussion seems rather... one-way. The real philosophers out there, of course, will be the ones subjecting it to analysis of their own.
I just bought a copy of The Art of Yasushi Suzuki (published last May); I've seen pieces of his before – he did promotional artwork for Treasure – but hadn't heard about the man behind them. His sense of colour in particular is superb, and there's some very vivid characterisation (though I can't say I'm very keen on his website's current cover image); yet my favourite picture from the book is one of the quietest, the softly atmospheric cover image of a Tatsuaki Ishiguro novel called Toji-Sou.
I mentioned previously that in FFVII International the optional tutorial in the Materia outtake is different from the one in the final game; I didn't pay much attention at the time, having more exciting things to look at and thinking that maybe it was just a placeholder from before the kanji were working properly or something (although it did strike me as a little odd that according to Debug Room Insanity the English game has the regular tutorial there). I've taken another look and... well, it's odd: besides the presence of an occasional (Arabic) digit and some text boxes actually extending off the right hand side of the screen (clearly unfinished), the text itself has left me wondering whether I'm looking at the Japanese equivalent of Lorem ipsum. Here's a transcript of the first line: the character # signifies the point at which it entends out of visibility, and in the Roman transcription lower case letters are used for hiragana, capital for katakana.
0 さ コ ふ ギ バ パ べ キ キ バ ふ ス ケ キ は ほ ク バ ホ く し バ プ は サ ふ コ ほ は バ #
0 sa KO fu GI BA PA BE KI KI BA fu SU KE KI ha ho KU BA HO ku shi BA PU ha SA fu KO ho ha BA #
The whole thing's like that: the only (non-numeric) characters used are the kana for the s-, k-, h- and occasionally t- morae, along with their diacritic versions. (Perhaps not coincidentally, these are precisely the kana that have versions with diacritics.) There are no free-standing vowels, and no w-, r-, y-, m- or n- characters; terminal n and the katakana 'long vowel sound' sign are also absent. Punctuation wise, there's one comma-equivalent (pictured). This makes me think I must be looking at probably random nonsense; that, or an unfixed glitch. (Maybe once the tutorial was moved upstairs nobody bothered to overwrite this file.) I hope this doesn't mean that any of those enticing places in which the Japanese text files appear to have data where the English ones are blank are actually full of junk characters.
Interesting lyrics, those (and these). Anyway: concrete examples à la carte...
Whereupon I immediately face the problem of isolated consciousness, as I've intimated before, not actually having simple connections to circumstances... Okay, let's say that by 'concrete' I might have implied 'narrative'. Continuing with loneliness – although I really ought to bring in solitude more fully in the near future, especially to deal with what Koch says (with qualifications) about its being characterised by the disengagement of consciousness from others – where do you go to look for examples of lonely people? Somewhere where interaction is expected and presence is compelled, because being forced up against other people is a forcibly isolating experience for the soul that wants to be elsewhere. Back in school, nothing accentuated my sense of difference like the end-of-term form party: just about bearable if Richard and Morgan were nearby to facilitate the exchange of esprit, utterly rotten otherwise. So let's start with my memories of those, and see whether doing so produces anything other than relief at my emancipation.
What immediately strikes me – and possibly ties in to my work on the atmosphere of exam rooms – is the sense of the place, the occasion as oppressive and isolating: it wasn't so much 'other people' there I wanted to escape as the event itself. (Right: it's often not 'other people' qua individual persons but the social structures in which they participate. 'I don't want to be in this person's presence' is a quite different feeling.) The oppressive presence wasn't anybody's presence particularly ('general agency'? Das Man?). There was a kind of disconnection that operated because I had such a sense of 'not my world, not my scene, not where I can be comfortable' and through that I'd apprehend other people as 'not in my world'—pretty well precluding co-existence. So the circumstance of isolation – i.e. of being isolated generally – actually precedes encounter and structures it. (Is that directly relevant to the limitations of isolation...?) Nobody was particularly making me feel that way; 'other people' were just serving to instantiate an alien(ating) performance.
Well... that doesn't mean removing others from the scenario wouldn't change anything; of course it would. (Though perhaps it would be correct to say that it wouldn't much matter who the others were that were involved.) It's more that the loneliness isn't really 'about' them... So in what way are other people necessary? People certainly can feel lonely/disconnected/alienated/etc. while in fact alone. Perhaps what I should be saying is that qua people they maybe aren't necessary, because they're just functional, and maybe objects could do an equivalent job. (Also suggested by my work on atmosphere... Whatever paraphernalia generates a sense of discomfort will be bound up with certain human practices, of course – it's a quite different feeling from that of an oppressively dark forest – but the point is, people actually get downplayed... Well, maybe one hopes not to be taken notice of; but one can feel lonely either way.) Or it's an encounter with a crowd, not with individual persons (who are busy realising the universal). Or 'my world' is threatened by 'not my world', and that registers as an indefinite threat to the ego...
This speculation is getting unwieldy. Let's reduce it to asking: is there anything about the structure of this kind of experience which cannot be had without the presence/proximity of other people? Suppose the last man came upon a room set up in anticipation of a form party (assuming he shared my antipathy thereto): I think that might trigger a sense of isolation if he had suitable memories. Still, I wonder whether that actually proves anything— (I hope I am asking an answerable question...) Well then, why might it matter, if it does, that the people I behold are people rather than puppets, besides the consequence that has for spatiality? I think the answer must be that a person, unlike a puppet, is the sort of entity with whom one potentially can have a meaningful sort of encounter; and so to apprehend someone as simply an instantiation of what one feels as a general social phenonenon is to apprehend a deficit, lack, failure which isn't present in a mere object.
This still feels a bit sketchy, so let's see how I manage with a different example. Let's shift away from loneliness and look at the invasion of loud music (in college last year), or the way in which everyone near my home in Derby seems to pick a different time to mow the lawn, or the cries of small children from next door (in Sunderland, where I also suffer the noises of the street outside). It's not an invasion of 'privacy' – nobody is observing me (or interested in me) – but it does feel like an invasion in a way that e.g. a bird's cry and Amber's barking don't. (Well, maybe the latter example is questionable; she's not very well behaved.) What then is invaded? Not my space – I'm not concerned about the noise qua vibrations in the air – but my consciousness: my concentration is disrupted, my peace disturbed. What if it happens to be an isolated consciousness: does that make a difference? Well, I've intimated that the isolated consciousness is a detached one, one for which the world is empty of other presences—so I'm being rather violently jerked out of solitude, or whatever trance-like concentration I might have entered. (I am presently equipped with earphones, trying to drown out the cries of children outside...) Maybe 'general agency' again: I feel that some conscious mind is responsible and hence culpable, but it doesn't necessarily matter much whose...
I'm still not altogether happy with progress here; I have the feeling I'm missing the mark somehow. Maybe instead of asking what the limitations of isolation are I ought to ask what potential isolated consciousness has... No, that becomes a completely different question, which Koch has already answered in large part. Maybe loneliness and solitude are less similar than I've acknowledged, and I'm experiencing problems arising from trying to hold them together in a single account... (What's it like to be alone? Is solitude like anything, or is it fully acknowledged as solitude only in recollection?) Another post brought to an unsatisfactory close.
