by
Blake Crouch
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[...] He turns to DAniela. "I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could've been. That's why-"
"Then you should have stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance."
"Then I wouldn't have built the box."
[...]
He says, "Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."
Daniela says, "Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system."
confronting the other (main) jason
[...] Foucault notes that neoliberalism concedes this: 'neo-liberal government intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system.' The difference, however, is the point of application. It intervenes on society 'so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the market.' Therefore, we miss the point if we simply leave a critique of neoliberalism at the point of saying 'neoliberalism is as statist as other governmental forms'. Instead, the necessity is to analyze how neoliberalism creates a new form of governmentality in which the state performs a different function: permeating society to subject it to the economic.
[...] Operating in the mode of a macho hard-edged realism, what accelerationism attests to is the poverty of a theoretical imagination unable to reconstruct any rationality in the present and is instead content to wallow in the fantasmatic residues of capitalism's own irrationalisms.
[...] An interactive category is a category in which the people named by the category can be affected by the category. When a person is diagnosed by a family practitioner as an alcoholic, that category is not simply a description but rather 1) the person so defined can adopt behaviors and thoughts in accord with the category, and 2) the category can change their social relations. The person defined by the doctor as an alcoholic might, for example, begin to draw on cultural narratives about what alcoholics are like - for example, the film Leaving Los Angeles - and begin to enact those behaviors where they didn't before. Likewise, the person's social relations can change as in the case where the doctor's diagnosis has legal ramifications, leading them to be forced into some form of treatment or even sent to an institution. Here's it worth remembering that these sorts of categories aren't simply a personal affair, but rather are a collective affair.
The point is that unlike rocks, persons and social systems interact with the categories that befall them. They take up attitudes and behaviors with respect to these categories. It is in this sense that people and social institutions are formed or constructed by signifiers and concepts. A media report that says the economy is bad is not simply a description of the economy, but becomes a call to action upon economic institutions, governments, and individual people regardless of whether it is true. By contrast, rocks adopt no attitude or behavior with respect to the way we categorize them. They go on behaving rockishly just as they always did before. The important point is that these categorizations are not simply a matter of us adopting an attitude pro or con with respect to how individually have been categorized. Rather, these categories function independent of us, socially, even where we think they're bullshit. The former Republican US Presidential candidate Herman Cain might think that racial categorizations are bullshit and that we're all free neoliberal subjects, but the social system still codes him in ways to which we must respond. Even where we doesn't adopt an attitude towards these things, the effect of these signifying structures still has a causal impact on him that delimit possibilities for him, that situate him socially in such a way, and that contribute to his life experiences and how he develops.
My point is that if we're true realists - and hopefully materialists! - we should be attentive to the properties of different types of systems. We should recognize those systems that have capacities of reflexivity or of taking up attitudes towards ways in which they are described and those systems that do not have these characteristics. And given this we should heartily embrace theories of social constructivism, recognizing that categorizations and signifying structures have a real impact on the operations of reflexive systems leading them to develop in particular way [sic]. [...] for certain types of systems descriptions have real constructive effects and for other types of systems descriptions do not. We should be able to have our Baudrillardian analysis of the system of objects as commodities imbued with symbolic value and our realism too.
in the context of a discussion (critique?) of social construction, citing Ian Hacking who stipulates that social constructivists are speaking of interactive concepts
In Kierkegaard's view, an individual is not automatically a self but has to become one. A human being merely embodies the possibility of becoming a self. For Kierkegaard, there is no "true core" that an individual already "is" or "has" and that underlies selfhood. Becoming a self is the task of human life [...]
The tragic fate of the aesthete raises the question: how can the individual liberate himself from the ironic-aesthetic attitude and realize a meaningful life? Kierkegaard's answer is deceptively simple: by choosing. In Either/Or, the ethicist affirms that "the ethical constitutes the choice" and that this choice is "the main concern in life, you can win yourself, gain yourself" [...] The aesthetic life is characterized by not-choosing; the aesthete wants to retain his negative freedom. To overcome the empty despair in which this life-view runs aground, the negative freedom established through irony should be followed, as mentioned above, by taking up the responsibility to give shape and meaning to one's life, thereby realizing a positive freedom. This is the choice that, for Kierkegaard, characterizes the ethical life view.
referring to the father of the contortionist boy from TPK, who became addicted to seduction (405)
Choice is always an action in which the individual connects to reality, to the world. Choice always means taking responsibility for a certain commitment to the world. And it is through that choice, through that connection to reality, in consciousness transcending itself toward the world, that the self emerges.
i love reading literary criticism not expecting much but then coming across something like this. this is what i live for
This emphasis on the importance of what is right in front of of our noses is a central theme in Wallace's work (cf. This is Water). Like existentialism, it is about the experience of concrete human existence. One of the more valuable things that Wallace's fiction can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the current age is that it points out the real world and urges us to pay attention to it, to commit to it, and thereby, to become ourselves.
Among Wallace's notes for The Pale King are scattered references to Walker Percy's nonfiction, specifically to his volume The Message in the Bottle [...] the essay from Percy's book that most directly engages with The Pale King is "The Man on the Train" [...]
Percy begins the essay by identifying his focus upon the "literature of alienation", which is of course the title of a class Fogle takes (184). But Percy's argument is that this body of literature is, in fact, an inverted category.
[...]
In this imaginative union, I'd suggest, there's a clear precedent for Wallace's own belief in fiction's ability to invert loneliness [...]
read his stuff. about aesthetic reversal of alienation (diff between an alienated person, and someone reading about an alienated person; the latter is able to transcend the alienation)
An even more damning comment on this older existential discourse occurs in the middle of Chris Fogle's story of personal conversion from “wastoid" to IRS devotee and wiggler. Fogle describes taking, ironically enough, a "Literature of Alienation" course during his "nihilistic" years at Fogle's failure to get through Camus' The Fall is partly ironic in and of itself, but his ability "to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm" (186-7) suggests that there is something outdated or cliched about "alienation" and existential thought in the postmodern era. Whether or not the "B" Fogle received on the exam is really indicative of "a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit" (187), it does reveal the limitations of any literature of alienation. Instead of finding something of value in existentialist literature (for which, considering his nihilistic outlook on life at the time, he would appear primed), the younger Fogle finds it a waste of time and can easily mimic its familiar discourse.
inspiration