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[GreyClock]

I think, some ideas are just new, and we don't really have the language to talk about them
so philosophers have to invent ways to talk about them, and the way they do that largely stems, as most language does, from metaphor
and then those metaphors become the foundation for other ideas that build upon or reject them, and that's where that density comes from

sometimes these ideas eventually work their way down to the mainstream ("late-stage capitalism", "meme") sometimes they don't ("interpassivity")
you know what interpassivity is?
it's that thing you do where you buy a bunch of steam games and don't get around to playing any of them. that's it. the act of collecting replaces the purpose that collecting was meant to serve. it's not inter-active, it's inter-passive. interpassivity.
tidy, right?
but you can't use it yet or everybody will think you're an asshole. we have to wait for a webcomic that explains it to go viral or something

but zizek also does dip into the dense philosophical jargon sometimes (bolded the interesting parts):

As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, "really-existing men" are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new - the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: "man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man." We have here the tension between the series of "ordinary" elements ("ordinary" men as the "material" of history) and the exceptional "empty" element (the socialist "New Man," which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man's essence, "alienated" in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is - the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past

zzzzzzzzzzzz

but then later in the same essay he says, like, the most amazing shit about 9/11 I've ever read:

The WTC bombings again confront us with the necessity to resist the temptation of a double blackmail. If one simply, only and unconditionally condemns it, one cannot but appear to endorse the blatantly ideological position of the American innocence under attack by the Third World Evil; if one draws attention to the deeper socio-political causes of the Arab extremism, one cannot but appear to blame the victim which ultimately got what it deserved ... The only consequent solution is here to reject this very opposition and to adopt both positions simultaneously, which can only be done if one resorts to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions, each one is one-sided and false. Far from offering a case apropos of which one can adopt a clear ethical stance, we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is not innocent - to adopt such an "innocent" position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction. The same goes for the more ideological clash of interpretations: one can claim that the attack on the WTC was an attack on what is worth fighting for in democratic freedoms - the decadent Western way of life condemned by Muslim and other fundamentalists is the universe of women's rights and multiculturalist tolerance; however, one can also claim that it was an attack on the very center and symbol of global financial capitalism. This, of course, in no way entails the compromise notion of shared guilt (terrorists are to blame, but, partially, also Americans are also to blame...) - the point is, rather, that the two sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, of the forces which resist it on "fundamentalist" ideological grounds.

            Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative - the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride - is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the US got what they deserved, what they were for decades doing to others) really any better? The predominant reaction of European, but also American, Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the "feminist" point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed ("castrated"). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding one of the holocaust revisionism (what are the 6000 dead against millions in Ruanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of "yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism," the ethical catastrophy is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with "yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa...", you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathize, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis - but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)

it seems like such a simple, beautiful, self-evident truth: the comparison of human suffering is vain and obscene

if you actually care about human beings hurting, it makes no sense to use one person or group's pain as a bludgeon to rationalize away another person or group's pain
as AJJ put it, "you're an irreplaceable human soul with your own understanding of what it means to suffer / and that's a huge bummer"

wish I could bottle that concept and spray it on people

Interpassivity, that's cute.

I have to say, Zizek is a blind spot for me. I think I heard someone call him an asshole once, I can't remember the context. That said, I find the first quote more interesting than the second. It suffers some of the pitfalls already discussed here, like what is this "Real"? I'm assuming it's a Lacanian term. "[T]his violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite". Does it? Necessarily? Really? Both feel a little strawmanny to me, more so the second quote. Here's a statement, it's carved in stone, now watch me solve/refute it. Hold your horses though Slavoj, I'm not entirely sold on that initial statement. The answer I agree with, but it seems a little like common sense dressed up as philosophy. Maybe it isn't? If not then yeah, jizz it all over people.

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

I have to say, Zizek is a blind spot for me. I think I heard someone call him an asshole once, I can't remember the context. That said, I find the first quote more interesting than the second. It suffers some of the pitfalls already discussed here, like what is this "Real"? I'm assuming it's a Lacanian term. "[T]his violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite". Does it? Necessarily? Really? Both feel a little strawmanny to me, more so the second quote. Here's a statement, it's carved in stone, now watch me solve/refute it. Hold your horses though Slavoj, I'm not entirely sold on that initial statement. The answer I agree with, but it seems a little like common sense dressed up as philosophy. Maybe it isn't? If not then yeah, jizz it all over people.

yeah that's zizek

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

the nier not-remake is gonna have all the music and voice actors re-recorded. the delivery was already perfect so I'm kinda worried about that. there's nowhere to go but down, even with the same voice actors.

[Slurpee]

re: the lacanian real

I'm not going to do justice to it at 4 in the morning, but it's an "order" of the universe
we're creatures of thought, our thoughts are language, and our understanding is symbolic- we process our existence and what we take in through our senses in terms of relationships and metaphors, but what we perceive as reality is really reality processed through the imaginary, because the imaginary is the only tool we have. true reality has no symbolic meaning- no semantic relationship extends outside of human thought. the Real is what simply Is, and, Lacan suggests, it's horrifying. we're not designed to comprehend the Real, our thoughts are of a symbolic order, and the Real cannot be integrated into it

post-structuralism views human society as a third thing, neither the imaginary of human thought (ala plato) nor the desert of the real, but a kind of compromise between the two, this saucer of comfortable, digestible webs of semantic relationships and symbolic meaning derived from our limited senses, limited understanding, and limited lifespans, but also derived from bumping up against the Real, and that's the level of reality we exist in, this kind of frame of imposed meaning that mediates between the Real and the imagined, both informing and informed by both (individual philosophers reject the labels and squabble over the finer points, but it's kind of like camus's absurdism vs. sartre's radical freedom- no matter how much they deny it, they're basically just differently complicated ways of describing the same thing. (I love the existentialists I think they are a hoot but all of existential philosophy is basically just trying to justify making peace with the immutability of epistemological solipsism))

so I think he's saying something about how attempts to reach the real are absurd and vain and doomed to be nothing but the performance of reaching it or something idk it's late idk why I didn't go to sleep like 6 hours ago


I should have just linked the wikipedia article to the lacanian real here we go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real

[Slurpee]

idk why I didn't go to sleep like 6 hours ago

OH NOW I REMEMBER

[Slurpee]

the nier not-remake is gonna have all the music and voice actors re-recorded. the delivery was already perfect so I'm kinda worried about that. there's nowhere to go but down, even with the same voice actors.

Twin Snakes did a similar "same voice actors, new recording" thing
there were a LOT of disappointed fans but I never played Metal Gear Solid 1 and it sounded great to me and the original recordings to my ears have some weird choices that I assumed fans of the original were just attached to

I guess I'll find out if I could still have that opinion when it's something precious to me

there's a couple of lines ("WEISS! YOU DUMBASS..." and "... oh dear. =(" spring to mind) that will probably really fuck with me if they don't nail it because fuck they NAILED IT

[Slurpee]

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

the nier not-remake is gonna have all the music and voice actors re-recorded. the delivery was already perfect so I'm kinda worried about that. there's nowhere to go but down, even with the same voice actors.

Twin Snakes did a similar "same voice actors, new recording" thing
there were a LOT of disappointed fans but I never played Metal Gear Solid 1 and it sounded great to me and the original recordings to my ears have some weird choices that I assumed fans of the original were just attached to

I guess I'll find out if I could still have that opinion when it's something precious to me

there's a couple of lines ("WEISS! YOU DUMBASS..." and "... oh dear. =(" spring to mind) that will probably really fuck with me if they don't nail it because fuck they NAILED IT

I'm in that exact same situation with Twin Snakes. I didn't even know anyone was disappointed with it for years after I played it. For Nier there's talk of a new ending too which is interesting. there's a short story (novel?) that takes place after ending D that could probably work, though I'm sure they wouldn't adapt it exactly. kaine goes on adventures, feels a weird hole in her life, goes to that weird memory forest where everything was text, and middle middle middle she fights a computer tree long doing that AI thing where they keep doing something long after it has a point, something about collecting all human memories I think. emil shows up partway through with a crazy new body and helps her defeat the thing, and then nier himself pops out of the tree slightly younger than when he was obliterated in ending D. GOOD END. it's kinda similar to Automata's Ending E now that I think of it. Don't read that if you want to go read the short stories yourself. whichever one it is I forget the name. I thought it was this one but it's actually about emil after the game ends, but before the story I just described.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

there's a whole series of this not just that one? neat.

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

no wait it's this one here we go

https://nier.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_World

and it's actually called ending E. no full translation sadly, just a good summary.

[RobClock]

[GreyClock]

re: the lacanian real

I'm not going to do justice to it at 4 in the morning, but it's an "order" of the universe
we're creatures of thought, our thoughts are language, and our understanding is symbolic- we process our existence and what we take in through our senses in terms of relationships and metaphors, but what we perceive as reality is really reality processed through the imaginary, because the imaginary is the only tool we have. true reality has no symbolic meaning- no semantic relationship extends outside of human thought. the Real is what simply Is, and, Lacan suggests, it's horrifying. we're not designed to comprehend the Real, our thoughts are of a symbolic order, and the Real cannot be integrated into it

post-structuralism views human society as a third thing, neither the imaginary of human thought (ala plato) nor the desert of the real, but a kind of compromise between the two, this saucer of comfortable, digestible webs of semantic relationships and symbolic meaning derived from our limited senses, limited understanding, and limited lifespans, but also derived from bumping up against the Real, and that's the level of reality we exist in, this kind of frame of imposed meaning that mediates between the Real and the imagined, both informing and informed by both (individual philosophers reject the labels and squabble over the finer points, but it's kind of like camus's absurdism vs. sartre's radical freedom- no matter how much they deny it, they're basically just differently complicated ways of describing the same thing. (I love the existentialists I think they are a hoot but all of existential philosophy is basically just trying to justify making peace with the immutability of epistemological solipsism))

so I think he's saying something about how attempts to reach the real are absurd and vain and doomed to be nothing but the performance of reaching it or something idk it's late idk why I didn't go to sleep like 6 hours ago


I should have just linked the wikipedia article to the lacanian real here we go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real

I was going to respond earlier, but I was hung-over. Also, I didn't read the Wikipedia article, it's more fun this way.

To me the first paragraph would make more sense if you would replace the word "imaginary" with "senses"? Like we process reality (or The Real) through our very limited senses and end up with whatever this is I'm experiencing now, sitting here writing this sentence. Obviously that perception is flawed, things like infrared and ultraviolet come to mind. Sounds outside the human hearing range. Whatever. Shadows on the wall of a cave? (fart)

Or am I way off? I'm not exactly sure why you would put the imagination component in between that. To me imagination seems more like a by-product of a living thing's endeavour to perceive. Then again it's hard to imagine having no imagination and what that would do to perception. Or maybe I'm too hung up on the "imagination" aspect and it's more the processing of sensory data into a "reality"? Can you elaborate on "our understanding is symbolic"? I took a class on semiotics once, but I forgot everything.

If we can't reach or perceive The Real, why is it horrifying?* How does Lacan know? Why does Zizek equate it to the Void? I don't know what he means by that term specifically, but it conjures up images of still emptiness or some sort of sucking black hole at most. Like within the context of that quote in the previous post: The Real sucks up and destroys all efforts to reach it? How does that line up with: "the Real is what simply Is". Or is it metaphorical, like chasing the dragon? An expression of the futility of any such pursuit?

*This is a sort of continuation of the first part of the post (and might be dumb I'm not sure), but imagine you're a completely alien entity. Your only sense is what we would call sight. You would also "see" say, smells and sound. It would no doubt look horrifying, but only from our current, human vantage.

Bottom line, I understand that as humans we're bound by our own limitations. Especially when it comes to defining something as monolithic as The Real. It's always going to be an interpretation, and probably a narrow one at that. Imagine there's a sense "hugaguron" that's detects ffffrp. Ffffrp is all around us, we have no way of detecting it. It doesn't fit into any model, is undetectable by any machine we might devise. Yet it's part of The Real.

This is veering off into stoner babble territory.

[GreyClock]

A+ for reading comprehension, "we process our existence and what we take in through our senses" is literally in your post.

[PhantomCatClock]

it's a game you play telekinetically and if your mom walks in you can just click the screen and the entire game pauses, and a YouTube UI with a play bar at a random distance across the screen pops up so it looks like you were just watching a video

[RobClock]

here's some shit i drew today

[PhantomCatClock]

Secret Agent Sonic the Hedgehog Banks

[GreyClock]

Anyone recognize this?

Sometimes I get these brief, hazy visions. Almost always when I'm a little tired and reading a book. (Only once or twice while listening to soft, soothing music instead.) I'm not sure if it's specific sentences that trigger it, I can't recreate it. It doesn't happen often, but it's been happening for a few years at least. This is speculation, but maybe it has something to do with almost falling asleep. Although it never happens at night, when I doze off in bed. I was going to say "I'm transported to," but that's incorrect. It's more sudden than that. I'm by myself in a sort of thicket or garden, there's an abundance of flowers and plants. The air is golden and warm, almost thick, like a late afternoon during an Indian summer. It's rather lovely, although very short. Like a flash. I don't have time to distinguish much, that description is just the general vibe I get when it happens. Although certain images can stick, like from the one I had just now I remember standing behind a fence made out of sunbleached logs. I'm always quite calm, like right now I wouldn't say I have any particular feelings going on other than maybe a mild languidity (and a mild curiosity, obviously). During these, I'm still calm, but for that brief moment the calmness is maybe bordering on euphoria more. There's also a sense of dissociation, I'm not sure who I am or where I am. I'm also slightly disoriented afterwards.

I don't mean "anyone been to that same thicket?" More like the general experience or similar feelings from other activities? Like, is this what meditating is like?

[RobClock]

I've never had an experience like that.. sounds very pleasant if I'm honest.

[RobClock]

[PhantomCatClock]

I'm fucking sick and tired of Clock Crew posts while Duke is being left for dead. Good enough?

[Slurpee]

Anyone recognize this?

Sometimes I get these brief, hazy visions. Almost always when I'm a little tired and reading a book. (Only once or twice while listening to soft, soothing music instead.) I'm not sure if it's specific sentences that trigger it, I can't recreate it. It doesn't happen often, but it's been happening for a few years at least. This is speculation, but maybe it has something to do with almost falling asleep. Although it never happens at night, when I doze off in bed. I was going to say "I'm transported to," but that's incorrect. It's more sudden than that. I'm by myself in a sort of thicket or garden, there's an abundance of flowers and plants. The air is golden and warm, almost thick, like a late afternoon during an Indian summer. It's rather lovely, although very short. Like a flash. I don't have time to distinguish much, that description is just the general vibe I get when it happens. Although certain images can stick, like from the one I had just now I remember standing behind a fence made out of sunbleached logs. I'm always quite calm, like right now I wouldn't say I have any particular feelings going on other than maybe a mild languidity (and a mild curiosity, obviously). During these, I'm still calm, but for that brief moment the calmness is maybe bordering on euphoria more. There's also a sense of dissociation, I'm not sure who I am or where I am. I'm also slightly disoriented afterwards.

I don't mean "anyone been to that same thicket?" More like the general experience or similar feelings from other activities? Like, is this what meditating is like?

once, kind of
it was nothing like the thicket, though

I'd been in bed, sick with a fever. it was hot, and I'd been drifting in and out of consciousness all day, and suddenly I was lying down on the metal floor of a massive, round room
and all of humanity was there with me. everybody was asleep, and I felt a shock of familiarity, and a profound, indescribable sense of understanding. it was like I saw everybody's pain, everybody's joy, and love, and sadness, and longing, and anger. all the people in the world. and I saw how it all fed through each other and from each other and out into the world, in this plane of meaning that's not reality as we know it but this kind of operating layer in the background that we don't normally get to see
and I saw how people hurt each other, and it was like... watching cells attack other cells in the same organism. just wrong, like something had to have gone terribly, terribly wrong for this to be happening, like we didn't understand yet, or forgot somehow, how we're all connected, and how one cell hurting another just hurts the entire body
the room was artificial, but not unwelcoming or alienating. it was like a... dog house. or a petri dish, like it was made, but it was made for us, a home where we could be warm and safe and grow.
and beneath it all, and over it, and laced through it, was this overwhelming sense of love. not from each other, or from anything outside, but from the body as a whole, the thoughtless, definitive love the body necessarily must have for its own hand, the simple inextricable truth of the part belonging to the whole
there was dissociation and disorientation and euphoria, but a lot more on top of that. "overwhelming" wouldn't begin to describe it
I'm a very empathetic person. just, whatever's in me, whatever makes people different as individuals, I'm an outlier on the empathy end. I feel what other people are feeling, even where most people don't, even when I don't want to, even when it makes no sense, it's just the way I'm wired. and if the system in our bodies responsible for empathy is... idk, a network of nerves or glands or whatever (mirror neurons?), it was like every single one of them was going as hard as it possibly could at the same time. like I was feeling as much emotion as I'm capable of feeling on like a biochemical level, as much as my nervous and endocrine systems are physiologically capable of
but not chaotic, not beating me down; in equilibrium, all doors opened to a new and unexpected kind of stasis

it lasted maybe a moment, then it was over
suddenly myself again, back in the world and stricken with panic, I struggled out from under a tangle of hot blankets and onto the floor, my limbs weak, breathing heavily and covered in sweat. I'd been shivering when I laid down, so I'd bundled up under layers and layers of blankets, and with the fever my body heat had accumulated and become dangerously hot. I wobbled to my feet and, more with the weight of my body than any strength, flung the window open, letting the night breeze in. I carried myself to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and drank from the faucet until my face stopped throbbing from the excess heat, dried off with a towel, then just curled up on the floor and bawled my eyes out. ugly crying. I laid there for maybe an hour. I felt like an infant that was ripped away from its mother. I felt like a murderer.

when I talk about this I usually call it "a fever dream" because I don't know what the hell else to call it
my mom was the first person I told, and she said it sounded like I "touched heaven". it's been suggested to me that it was a hypnogogic hallucination, and I know it wasn't that, because I've had those, and they're pretty trippy, but nothing like this. it's also been suggested that this type of experience is consistent with a seizure of the temporal lobe, and I guess that's as good an explanation as any, but I wouldn't have any way of knowing if that's the case. sometimes people ask me if I've ever taken hallucinogenic drugs, because the feeling at least sounds similar to what people who do shrooms call "the godhead". I haven't, but ain't that something?