Issue No. 2

“Allow myself to Introduce myself: What you can and can’t or well maybe shouldn’t learn about yourself”

By Eric Hancock ⋅ September 3, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print this article ⋅ Post a comment

I heart heart to hearts with family and friends. They are special opportunities for all involved to spout platitudes and to divy contradictory and conceptually flawed generalizations short order to anesthetize the throb associated with, for me at least, a nagging sense of agnosticism (maybe in general, per se) and it’s evil cousin, a nagging sense of not-get-along-with-women. One particular evening just recently under the sobering Hopperian Nighthawkian gleam of beer signs at a favorite Mexican restaurant with my parents who don’t drink beer but do, as mentioned above like to talk about my life while sitting underneath beer signs at a favorite Mexican restaurant, a discussion was initiated which pertained to my life. At some point under the Mexican lights, I issued a statement somewhere in the ballpark of “I can’t learn that lesson…I refuse to learn certain lessons about myself, and that is one of them,” a seemingly queer notion to conjure, being as lessons once in your pocket, are…learned. Essentially, when you realize the moral of the story, you take that moral and apply it…right..however, doesn’t the short circuit arise when attempting to understand under what circumstances to apply the Lesson. My particular lesson to learn at the restaurant was that I am too likable, that recently I had strived to make someone like me so much, that I had forgotton who I was. I had tryed to dupe life and someone in it into liking me…how disengenuous of me. Additionally and a tell-tale sign of bad-person-who-tries-to-get-girls-to-like-him syndrome, I often find myself thinking…this isn’t fair because it’s to damn easy for me, let’s mix it up; maybe I can get everybody to like me by trying really hard. Relatedly, a similar conversation happened recently when speaking with a professor. “Be true to yourself…don’t over-think it” he said, “and everything will be alright.” Is it this easy? Doesn’t language in general provide a robust counter-example for why it isn’t that easy. According to Julian Jaynes, langauge is built on metaphor. Numerous explanations of language generation describe language as being one meta description of itself followed by an infinity of meta-descriptions of its other selves, with the ensuing meta descriptions meta descriptively distorting the original message with each successive round. Additionally, as per Douglas Hofstadter communication is only isomorphically related to whatever program issues it. If I’m supposed to express truth to myself, how do I understand truth, and then how do I in turn externalize said truth outside of social pressure via language or actions. Slavoj Zizek comes close to illustrating my point(actually, he makes it point blank). In Parallax View, Zizek redescribes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night:

” In the first edition, the novel begins years later at the Divers’ villa on the French Riviera, where the couple live a glamorous life: the story is told from the perspective of Rosemary, a young American movie actress who falls in love with Dick, fascinated by the Diver’s glitzy lifestyle. Gradually, Rosemary gets hints of a dark underside of traumas and psychic breakdowns beneath the surface of this glamorous social life. At this point, the story moves back into how Dick meet Nicole, how they got married in spite of her family’s doubts, and so on; after this interlude the story returns to the present, continuing the description of the gradual falling apart of Nicole’s and Dick’s marriage(Dick’s desperate affair with Rosemary, and so on, up to one of the most depressing and hopeless endings in modern literature). For the novels’ second edition, however(the first printing was a failure), Fitzgerald tried to improve it by rearranging the material in chronological order: now the novel begins in 1919 Zurich, with Dick as a young doctor called by a psychiatrist friend to take over the difficult case of Nicole.
“Why is neither of the two versions satisfying? Obviously, the first version is the more adequate one…Rosemary’s external point of view, fascinated by the ideal(ized) couple of Dick and Nicole, is not simply external. Rather, it emobdies the gaze of the social “big Other,” the Ego-Ideal, for which Dick enacts the life a happy husband who tries to charm everybody around him: that is to say, this external gaze is internal to Dick, part of his immanent subjective identity-he leads his life in order to satisfy this gaze. What this implies, furthermore, is that Dick’s fate cannot be accounted for in terms of the immanent deployment of a flawed character: to present Dick’s sad fate in this way(in the mode of a linear narrative) is a lie…I am even tempted to say that the flashback chapter on the prehistory of Dick’s and Nicole’s marriage, far from providing a truthful account of the reality beneath the false glitzly appearance, is a retroactive fantasy, a kind of narrative version of what, in the history of capitalism, functions as the myth of “primordial accumulation…”

thus, Zizek expounds via Fitzgerald what I intuited about myself. There is a multitude of Erics but most importantly there was an Eric that by some “primordial accumulation” had nothing to do with the Eric that is going to act in the future. There was an Eric that attempted to be someone else because it was his “immanent subjective identity”. Zizek claims that to contrive a lesson out of the peachy prehistory and subsequent stormy break up is a mistake, a fallacy of trying to make sense out of something that is immanently non-sensical. Doesn’t this also pertain to Art Making? Do I learn potentially deadening ‘lessons’ from myself and my work, or do I sever my prehistory and keep on pluggin’? Do I continue to institute a normal and healthy system of desire, a driving immanent subjective identity, or an ossifying narrativization of myself and my work. I am leaning towards the former, because it helps me not care about quality…and to dwell more on quality.