I am still touchy, yes.
I appear to be going through some process which I imagine people call 'grief.' I sometimes imagine that this surprises me. It's not as it had been with my father, whom I slightly disliked for reasons I won't go into publicly.
'Publicly,' yes. I speak from the viewpoint of a typical member of a certain subset of society, that is the "communicational elites"; for they could be so named. I, like so many who might be reading this, have grown up with electronic networks, to the point where the intricacies of various levels of information transfer protocols and thinking in binary had become transparent (which is easier than you'd expect, a hell of a lot easier than trying to think in unary, anyway!).
I also speak from the perspective of the curmudgeon and more precisely from the point of view of displaying a Scrooge-like miserliness when it comes to friendship: I'm out of fashion in this, no doubt, but I don't care much for fashion. I never have.
At the time of writing I had 'flu. Rhinovirus or Swinovirus? Awkward. I may be incommunicado for a while. H5N1. Sounds like a chess move or a neurotransmitter.
Anyway, I have had an aberrant level of involvement with the development of the social aspects of what became the Internet (version 1.0 as the fools would perhaps call it) and the still-evolving milieu which is supposed to be Web 2 or 3 (those who'd assert that there even is such a thing as "Web 2.0" are mistaken in my opinion). I was even paid money for futurological stargazing:- somewhere in the vast document archives of Computer Sciences Corporation, and/or the non-existent archives of the now-dismembered NHS, there might still exist monographs on such nonsense as: "The Social Impact of Developing Digitally-based Communications Technologies" or "Thought Viruses: Exploiting Fear and Anxiety" - there was even a colon followed by a fashionably obligatory qualificatory statement about the title. I don't like orthodoxy though and that particular convention is one I instinctually dislike, though it's a dislike born of some Rococo ambivalence about regret at not having jumped through many of the hoops which others somersaulted with athletic grace, combined with an aversion to jumping through hoops at all. Add a dash of feeling that even if I'd tried there simply wouldn't have been the subject areas that I'm obsessively interested in now.
An unforeseen consequence of Moore's Law I suppose though I hoped that that would be overcome, and that that Turing tape point would be reached. I'm not talking about any hypothetical 'Singularity,' by the way. I guess I've always been a kind of Pythagorean or 'Constructivist' -- as the word applied to the interpretation of the relationship between 'Pure' math and what I would ignorantly call "the foundation of percept" or "basal nominality" or something pompous, but by which I mean the "physical world" on which we, apparently, live. (:: kidding about apparently: I think there IS such a thing, there are those that don't., they rust in the darker corridors of what I most disliked about what was then proudly parading itself as "post-Modern philosophy" during the seventies and eighties. They rust there still, spouting the same exhausted language). I have more time for some of them now: the originators, but it still seems to me to be a way of describing which consists in some interesting but obvious ideas (a nod to Mark and to Joyce here, as I think these obviousnesses float about in the same head-space as does that beautiful sentence: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." Beach-bloom born.)
I think a lot was said "by mistake" in that time. Much was rubbish then and is still rubbish now, at least when its application shifted from analysis of the arts to analysis of the real world. The problem of course arose out of language, as the best of them saw.
Okay, I'll admit that, had the 'condition' been 'understood' at the time and if had had any interest in such categorisations, I'd be very much on the "autistic spectrum" as it's fashionable to call it these days. Another issue with what seemed orthodox thinking at that time was/is 'psychoanalysis' and Freud. And, for that matter, Jung.
The damage to individuals that has been done over the decades in the name of "psychoanalysis" is truly appalling. Simplistically cretinous and grossly misogynist with it, it really amuses me that in the Eighties almost every art critic would have been proud, were the genes to have permitted it to be 'true,' and were 'truth' to actually exist in the first place, to call themselves "feminist psychoanalytical theorists"! Psychoanalytical ways of thinking are the modern world's alchemy, based on a misunderstanding of a kind so seductively subtle that the human brain seems almost hard-wired to gleefully fall for it without even noticing. You see, I am so old-fashioned.
For me, the science of the nature of mind cannot consist in the existence of any kind of "psyche' whatsoever, period. It is not amenable to 'analysis' because there is nothing to analyze. It's the ineluctable modality trope again, in a better disguise. Wittgenstein or someone once stated that philosophers 'proper' were the "inheritors of that part of what used to be termed 'philosophy' that hadn't yet fallen under the Aegis of empirical science." Doesn't matter who said it, what matters is that whoever it was was correct. Also concluded was the thought that all of what had thitherto been conceived of as 'Philosophy" consisted not in the rigors of symbolic logic at all, but consisted entirely in what I think he called (in German, where it seems to be easier to neologize, "language-games"). Very, very clever entity, old Ludwig. Very relatively able instance of the human phenotype. He was right there, too.
So, having established that with one simple back-formed Greek non-signifier, 'autism,' which is a pointer to a referent which isn't understood and for which no clear definition exists, anyone who doesn't get what I'm trying to say can dispose of me as 'disabled' or go even further and dismiss it all, with the typical eloquence of the English, with the patronising remark "fuckin' nutjob, mate!" I am freed from stigma, misunderstanding and malice, thereby, freeing me to try and get to some point. The weight of forty years of systematic de-education, a word which doesn't exist even though it should, as it's better than the self-referential "dumbing-down," which I henceforth decree in my communicationally-challenged autistic way to be Anathema.
Yes, friends. Curmudgeonliness therewith.
I am, and long have been, passionate about languages and texts. I mean to the point of obsession were there not an infinite variety of knowledge to be soaked up, mixed in and, in some cases, simply to be put up with. And so little time to do it, with such awkward tools as language and writing, which are NOT the same thing, just in case anyone was wondering. If anyone is even reading this by this point, that is, and whether or not anyone reads this is of only peripheral interest to me.
Only the ideas I am attempting to articulate are important. I simply do not care. You see, according to popular misbelief, being 'autistic' is supposed to 'disadvantage or disable' by means of reducing the person's "innate empathy." True, in a vague kind of way, but not a disability. Big mistake, that one. Only sometimes is it disabling to understand what it is like to not-care; in many contexts it's an advantage and it is very advantageous to me.
In part, because it allows an element of dispassion to be applied to such questions as "what is the nature of what people label 'care' or 'empathy' in the first place?". In a peculiar, oblique way, people who are very empathetic are 'disadvantaged,' 'disabled,' by the likelihood that they care about what 'care' means and this allegedly 'natural' understanding of caring's signification must be preserved, for not to do so would be aberrant at least and inhuman at worst. I would venture that not knowing the "ineluctable modality of caring" is a necessary pre-requisite for understanding what the phenomenon of "human empathy" really consists in. I believe that such concepts have been misunderstood. Language-games again and who cares about them, mate?
Well, I do. In fact I care very much about us humans. Even though we're so very, very slow in picking up understanding of ourselves. Even though vast swathes of us are riddled to the core with speciesism and other miscellaneous forms of express or implicit prejudice and bigotry. Despite the fact that many of us have such a high level of this precious "unavoidable human quality of concern for our fellow human beings" that we have enslaved billions of those very same human beings, knowingly. We know of our complicity and yet berate those who would dare to suggest that, in light of the facts, our seemingly limitless capacity for 'caring' has been entirely invisible of late.
Even though we have collectively brought the interwoven systems and processes which permit our own existence on this planet to breaking point and most likely beyond, thereby jollily denying our own descendants the "right to life," we applaud ourselves for stumbling upon such notions in the first place. For even with certain knowledge of what we have collectively done, the near-certainty that we are collectively committing true genocide every day, some of us still make claims such as one made on "Any Questions?" last year by a discussant: that ten dollar flights from London to the Costa del Sol were a "basic human right." Perhaps it is.
Despite all this and much, much more I still care about us. About people. Both at an individual level and at the level of the genotype.
