words.provolot.com

What did I say about Derrida and Godel? I was so off. Forget all of that.

Much like how I dislike the application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to illustrate the vicissitudes of modernity, I don't think Godel's incompleteness theorem necessarily functions as an argument against and outside the structures of thought, or discourses, which is what Foucault calls them. Or perhaps, if I knew more math, I could talk about the guaranteed inconsistency or incompleteness of a system of mathematics and somehow make a connection with 'axioms of math' to 'axioms of thought'. As it stands, I can't.

A few years ago I remember asking (probably incoherently) my friends C and S whether or not non-change was also part of change. That is, let's say that a certain individual's life is based on movement away from the current state, and his motto and guiding principle is "always change". Then shouldn't his principle in life itself also be subject to itself? Shouldn't he "always change" from the idea of "always changing", and in other words, enter into the status of non-change, or stagnation? If change operates on itself, doesn't it exit itself?

Is this a reiteration of the genie and the "I want you to not grant this wish" idea? I'm inclined to say yes, because of the same principle of paradox-through-self-applicability that's at work here. But my question here is maybe outside of mathematics, because I'm interested in a personal guiding principle, which is really the result of the genie's wish. If I am reading and thinking, constantly editing my own thoughts and self-debating, then isn't this process of self-debating also debatable? Isn't self-editing editable?

But this is really idle thinking, outside the realms of applicability, to an extent.

I feel that if I write in my moleskine periodically, I lose momentum, some sort of inner pressure that enables me to think coherently. Like the photoelectric effect, there exists a threshold frequency where it's not the quality of thought but the quality of bottled thought that enables me to be coherent elsewhere.

it's funny how the connotations involving plastic are: flexible, adapting, changing, moving, new, and also: cold, mechanical, non-individualistic, repetitive, unyielding. Modernity in a nutshell..

There's this wonderful and heartwrenching quote by Beckett spoken at the start of Foucault's essay "The Order of Things". Here's how it goes:

"You must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens."

-The Unnamable