Natural History


Chris Maser, "What a Stream Taught Me"

End- history about ends but they never come.



So the difficulty is not in ascertaining cause and effect as usual but in patterns.

In physics, relationships are not dependent on general cause and effect but localised cause and effect.

Foucault's archaeological method is an ideal way of localising history.

Ignoring a context which is not any different- environment remains constant- physical causes rather than anthropocentrism.

Maybe humanity in its place is humanity pushed directly out of its place; compare the way the earth was pushed out of the centre of the universe by Galileo.

Core fallacies in the humanities- anthropocentric vision; fixation with identity where identity supersedes other, creates vectors of control

is understanding of identity illusory?

Biggest question: should the humanities be separated from the sciences?

Theory of history:

The study of history (at least my own) is not an attempt to understand the past but to break down the illusion of elitist aspects of human thought  i.e. the abilitity of everyone to think.

History is the speeding up of time, the cultural diffusion of centuries, the mirroring (but not quite) of the world. History breaks down structure by gradually becoming a hugely differentiated wealth of perspective, elucidating a general imagination and reality of flux.

History as liberation from linearity, welcome into sensible flux and plurality of ideas (consider Bogdanov, Einstein... Jung)

Plurality of social time. Time varies within ethnography and anthropology.

Time fluid, regenerative aspect of matter.

"timeless history"- Braudel

The only consistent is change.

Look for continuity not rupture

Inertia "one of the great artisans of history"- Braudel

To dismantle linear structure of time is to re-introduce general regenerative capacity of nature. Otherwise homogeneity ensues. No resistance to disease. variation (in ecology as well as culture) fails.

So history is about constantly learning from change- understanding that mind is a product of continuity and flux in matter. Mind analogous to matter.

Maybe what we should be looking for in history is the feedback between man and environment. Violent movement and attempt to control creates separate rhythm.

This movement is subsidiary like something latent in the earth's surface. Its apparent linearity is in actual fact mutable because of its contingency upon the environment.

Human memory and the experience of mind/ culture the outcome/ purpose of history---

History needs to be pivoted on physical laws and not the fabricated and still incipient morality/ power structures that exist .

Feedback loops broken by straight lines and violent movement. Current deterioration of matter due to perceived difference between matter and mind.

limited understanding of actual relationship. The flow of memory and mind is contingent on matter and the creation of structures without that relationship in motion and merely temporary.

Feedback to environment, legitimate morality, on consensus- basis, looking towards pragmatic education. Dismantle hegemony of time. 

Not about knowledge; about fundamental understanding of the proliferation of ideas for a certain meeting of tendencies.

Humanity in separate vector to reality; safety temporary.


Popular posts from this blog

Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”  - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace. So let me be v...
Read more about it »

Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust: "Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets." - Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley , David Foster Wallace This caught my eye, n...
Read more about it »

"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment.  And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and...
Read more about it »