The Locking of the Avril Thread

Jennifer Lopez uses the 'block / rocks' binary the same way she uses her legs: to get somewhere.

it's a specifically American vice to believe in the harmoniousness of divergent models? Haha, I win 4ever, your Hegelian antiquated ass loses 4 all time haha! You do realize you just undid all your rhetoric about "using" binaries & then abandoning them, right? & admitted that you don't actually believe all this claptrap about moving "beyond" anything: that you're just a partisan adherent to some Emperor's new clothes?

http://fattydave.homestead.com/files/zing.jpg

'Staying in touch with your roots' and 'becoming whoever you want to be' are logically opposites, and irreconcilable

No! They completely aren't: and what a total failure of the imagination to say that they are! I refute you, Andre Breton refutes you, Isidore Ducasse refutes you, and Seneca the greatest playwright of all time refutes you! "Becoming whatever you want to be" without "staying in touch with your roots" (your loaded phrasing demands a refutation all its own) is not "becoming" at all: just slumming or playing let's-pretend. You're not "using" binary oppositions: you're making slow, sweet love to them and promising them sweeties if they'll play nice!

x-post donut bitch otm obv

Be that as it may, I'm still not gonna diss anyone on the internet, 'cause my momma taught me better than that.

Seriously though, as a member of the Internet Generation and all that, I've seen no evidence so far that Human Emotional Reactions have become an anachronism; if anything, I'd say that they're even *more* plentiful than IRL, and an integral part of the whole shebang, especially for those who cultivate entire friendships/relationships through it. As such, if you're rude, you will still piss people off and upset them. And unless you have a good reason for that, you're still an asshole.

(I admit this might be a generational thing, if I was 40something I'd probably think that it's a nifty new toy to experience with and nothing more, too.)

You've just re-stated the rockist position on authenticity, J0hn. You're saying 'You can do both,' but then you immediately declare a preference for 'roots' over 'becoming': in your model, presumably, one can stay in touch with one's roots without even thinking of 'becoming', but 'becoming' in its own is 'just slumming or playing let's pretend'.

I don't disagree with your definition of 'becoming' -- though the word is not well-picked, since it has traces of Heidegger's concept of authenticity, which leads us back to rockism and Platonism; I can only 'become' by stressing that I'm heading towards 'the real me'. What I disagree with is the word 'just', and the implication that 'just pretend' is not the whole core and essence of that part of the binary. There is nothing wrong with pretending to be someone you're not, and becoming that person! We all do it. Wire had 'Forty versions all dying to get the part'. This is what I mean when I talk about 'divergers'. Moving towards fiction and away from 'the authentic'. Perhaps we need a word which, unlike 'becoming', connotes pluralism, divergence, and the joys of the fictive. A word which had more Donald Barthelme than Tolstoy in it (he adds, just to keep The Music Mole happy).

'From the work of Freud, Heidegger and Lacan we can put together a definition of the Uncanny as that state of mind which we experience when the unbroken and coherent appearance of the so-called 'common-sense' world is broken or disrupted by evidence of its 'made' quality, as a constructed world. This gives rise to feelings of being disturbed, disgusted or horrified, or to great levels of anxiety or vertigo as certainties are threatened and the very structure of everyday and normal life seems to give way. A classic instance of this would be the mingled fascination and disgust many people feel when confronted with a transsexual; that is someone whose sense of themselves is at odds in a very deep way with their apparent [to others] gender identity... Of course, the threat of anyone who transgresses the boundaries which we regard as fundamental to the nature of the world and of the 'Real' is that by transgressing them they bring to our attention the possibility that these bounds may be arbitrary, or that we too may exist in some deep way on both sides of any given divide.'

This matches what I said upthread about 'natural law' and also about not believing that binaries contain inherent truths.

But I must now impose the following stricture: henceforth, all discussion must be in rhyming couplets.

These couplets don't rhyme, or scan
yet do I feel comfortable

that my man Momus
will be happy in their blankness.

Again, no preference! I say only
that your love of the binary opposition

puts to lie
your opposition thereto.

which I don't -
that wouldn't do or undo anything about

the problem of your establishing
this false binary.

"Roots" is your meme, not mine!
I think often when people complain about

"roots"-oriented things,
it's them that have

the roots sunk deep, and branches pointing
like fingers at others.)

I always call you
"conservative," and find it odd

that you position yourself
as champion of new things!

Your refusal to accept
that "I contain multitudes"

(as good old Uncle Walt
once put it)

is such quaint old-country hogwash
that it'd be charming

if you didn't slander Heidegger
in the bargain.

Nobody hatin'!
it's just ol' Momus, prevaricatin'.

That song by Wire is the same shit, man
As 'I contain multitudes' by Walt Whitman.

I'll never understand, as long as I live
Why you call anti-rockism 'conservative'.

and remarkably
American

if you don't mind
my saying so

and even
if you do.

someone must have fed young c-man a lot of toast
xpost

You say you weren't privileging 'roots' above 'becoming'
Then why did you say 'roots' without 'becoming' was 'just' something?

You wanted to have your cake and eat it too;
Eating without having wasn't good enough for you?

Then why did you say 'becoming' without 'roots' was 'just' something?