/tag/writing

19 quotes tagged 'writing'

Neuromancer (Afterword)

Author: Jack Womack

Publisher: Ace trade-paperback (2018)

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

Author: John M. Allegro

Publisher: Paperjacks (1971)

3-4

The study of the relationship between words and the thoughts they express is called 'etymology' since it seeks the 'true' (Greek etumos) meaning of the word. The etymologist looks for the 'root' of the word, that is the inner core which expresses its fundamental or 'radical' concept. \r\nFor example, if we were to seek the root of a modern barbarism like 'de-escalate', we should immediately remove the 'de-' and the verbal appendage '-ate', slice off the initial 'e-' as a recognizable prefix, and be left with 'scal-' for further study. The Latin scala means 'ladder' and we are clearly on the right track. But at this stage the etymologist will look out for possible vocalic changes occurring between dialects. One of the more common is between l and n, and we are not surprised to find that an early form of the root has n in place of l, so that Sanskrit, one of the earliest dialects of Indo-European, has a root skan- with the idea of 'going up'. Sibilants can interchange, also, such as s and z, and short vowels can drop out in speech between consonants, like i between s and c. In fact, we can break down our Indo-European root scan-, 'ascend', still further into two Sumerian syllables, ZIG, 'rise', and 'AN', up. \r\nOr again, should we wish to track down the root of our word 'rule', meaning 'control, guide, exercise influence over', etc., we should find that our etymological dictionaries will refer us through an adaptation of Old French back to the Latin regulo, 'direct', connected with *regno, 'reign', rex, 'king', and so on. The root here is plain reg- or the like, and its ultimate source we can now discover by taking our search back another three or four thousand years to the earliest known writing of all, that of ancient Sumer in the Mesopotamian basin. There we find a root RIG, meaning 'shepherd', and, by breaking the word down even further, we can discover the idea behind 'shepherd', that of ensuring the fecundity of the flocks in his charge. This explains the very common concept that the king was a 'shepherd' to his people, since his task was primarily that of looking after the well-being and enrichment of the land and its people. \r\nHere etymology has done more than discover the root-meaning of a particular word: it has opened a window on prehistoric philosophic thought. The idea of the shepherd-king's role in the community did not begin with the invention of writing. The written word merely expresses a long-held conception.

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

161-163

Jeffery H. Reiman argues that privacy is 'a precondition of personhood,' 'a social ritual by means of which an individual's moral title to his existence is conferred' (310). Moreover, theorists of privacy seem to agree that space or social distance is a precondition of privacy. If we accept this hypotheses, ethical problems will arise in life writing when space is transgressed, when privacy is abridged, with the result that the integrity of the person is breached or violated. I investigate this link between privacy and personhood first in the philosophical and juridical literature and then in various kinds of life writing. \r\n\r\nThe American press seized upon the death of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994 to mourn the passing of an ideal of privacy that this beloved public figure had, paradoxically, come to represent. No one needs reminding that we live in an age of intrusiveness, where each innovation in communications technology seems to create some new threat to the possibility of being left alone: we read daily about eavesdropping on the eaveless virtual space of cellular phones, about call screening, caller identification, and scrambling devices. It is surely a sign on the times that access is newly empowered as a transitive verb. The hunger of the public for the private lives of the rich and famous has spawned a breed of professional privacy-busters - gossip columnists and paparazzi - and Onassis became the chosen prey of self-styled paparazzo Ronald E. Galella. Photographer Galella's single-minded pursuit of Onassis resulted in more than a decade of litigation, culminating in a Federal Superior Court judgement in 1982 that upheld Onassis's 'constitutional right of privacy' (Galella 1106)... \r\n\r\n The legal history of the right to privacy invoked in this case dates from the publication in 1890 of a celebrated article by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis titled, precisely, 'The Right to Privacy.' The article was occasioned by Warren's exasperation with intrusive coverage of his family's social life by the popular press of the period; revolutions in printing technology and photography exposed anyone deemed to be a celebrity - the Warrens were socially prominent Bostonians - to the gaze of a mass-circulation audience. Brandeis and Warren argued for 'a general right to privacy for thoughts, emotions and sensations...whether expressed in writing, or in conduct, in conversation, in attitudes, or in facial expression' (82), a right so comprehensive and fundamental, in fact, that we might call it the right to personhood. Their own formulation, however, as we shall see, has proved peculiarly memorable, 'the right to an inviolate personality' (85). \r\n\r\nThe subsequent legal history of privacy is rich and complex, turning especially on challenges to Brandeis and Warren's positing of a single, all-embracing right. William Prosser, for example, reviewing seventy years of cases in 1960, found that 'the law of privacy comprises four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff.' I quote his description of these four torts to suggest something of the complex of issues with which the right to privacy has been associated in the law: \r\n\r\n1. Intrusion upon the plaintiff's seclusion or solitude, or into his private affairs. \r\n2. Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about the plaintiff. \r\n3. Publicity which places the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye. \r\n4. Appropriation, for the defendant's advantage, of the plaintiff's name or likeness. (107) \r\n\r\nCountering the apparent reductiveness of Prosser's four-part analysis, however, is Edward J. Bloustein's 'Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser' (1964), a defense of the distinctiveness of the right to privacy claimed by Brandeis and Warren. Bloustein discerns in all of the manifold transgressions against the right to privacy 'an interference with individuality, an interference with the right of the individual to do what he will.' His portrait of the person deprived of privacy, moreover, is chilling: 'Such a being, although sentient, is fungible; he is not an individual' (188). \r\n\r\n*Galella*: Galella v. Onassis. 533 F.Supp.1076 (1982)

137

From time to time, in a spirit of formal innovation, critics have south to free autobiography from its perennial allegiance to biography's concern with narrative chronology, as though narrative's primacy in self-accounting were merely a matter of literary convention. As I have shown in this chapter, however, narrative's role in self-representation extends well beyond the literary; it is not merely one form among many in which to express identity, but rather an integral part of a primary mode of identity experience, that of the extended self, the self in time. If my reading of narrative's place in life writing is correct, to move beyond narrative would involve not merely a shift in literary form but a more fundamental change in the culturally sanctioned narrative practices that function as the medium in which the extended self and autobiographical memory emerge.

100-101

...narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self - the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. I have always been convinced that narrative occupies a central and determining place in the autobiographical enterprise, but I now make a much bolder claim for its function in self-representation. ...I asked whether the self could be said to be narratively structured. I concluded that self and story were 'complementary, mutually constituting aspects of a single process of identity formation' (Touching 198). \r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nNarrative and identity are preformed simultaneously...in a single act of self-narration; the self in question is a self defined by and transacted in narrative process. What is arresting about this radical equation between narrative and identity is the notion that narrative here is not merely about the self but rather in some profound way a constituent part of self - of the self, I should be careful to specify, that is expressed in self-narrations, for narrative is not (and cannot be) coextensive with all of selfhood, given the multiple registers of selfhood, about which I will say more in a moment. It follows that the writing of autobiography is properly understood as an integral part of a lifelong process of identity formation in which acts of self-narration play a major part.

...autobiographers are primed to recognize the constructed nature of the past, yet they need at the same time to believe that in writing about the past they are performing an act of recovery: narrative teleology models the trajectory of continuous identity, reporting the supreme fiction of memory as fact. 'You' and 'I' and 'she' and 'he' and 'we' - the dialogic play of pronouns in these texts tracks the unfolding of relational identity in many registers, in discourse with others and within ourselves. The lesson these identity narratives are teaching, again and again, is that the self is dynamic, changing and plural.

94-95

...Patterns of Childhood is indeed [Christa] Wolf's self-narration, an *intra*relational life which works steadily, as we shall see, to reforge the link between selves past and present. Wolf recognizes continuous identity not only as a fiction of memory but also as an existential fact, necessary for our psychological survival amid the flux of experience. \r\n\r\nLooking back some twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the German novelist seeks to understand her own participation in the pernicious ideology of the Third Reich: as a teenager, she had been an ardent member of a Hitler youth group. But how, the narrator asks, can she connect with an earlier self she has repudiated and repressed? How to begin when at least three distinct stories claim her attention? In this intricately layered narrative, Wolf tracks all three chronologies of her inquiry into the past simultaneously: Nelly's childhood in the 1930's through World War II up to 1946, the narrator's trip to Poland to revisit Nelly's childhood home in July 1971, and the narrator's writing of Nelly's story from November 1972 to 1975. What, Wolf would have us ask, can possibly bind these periods of personal history together? Memory? Narrative? Identity? The use of the first person? 'We would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves,' she observes, 'if it weren't for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that have happened to us. If it weren't for the memory of ourselves' (4). \r\n\r\nDoes memory indeed provide a basis for continuous identity, uniting us to our acts, our experiences, our earlier selves?

John Updike has identified autobiographical writing as a way of coping with the otherwise 'unbearable' knowledge 'that we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves' (226). In this sense, the selves we have been may seem to us as discrete and separate as the other persons with whom we live our relational lives. This experiential truth points to the fact that our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration.

The contemporary debate about the nature of the self portrayed in autobiography was launched forty years ago in a remarkably influential essay written by the French critic Georges Gusdorf, 'Conditions and Limits of Autobiography' (1956). The model Gusdorf posited for the identity that autobiographies presuppose - let us call it the Gusdorf model - was emphatically individualistic, featuring a 'separate and unique selfhood' (Friedman 34). In a similar vein, writing in the 1970's, Phillippe Lejeune (L'Autobiographie) and Karl J. Weintraub traced the rise of modern autobiography to Rousseau and Enlightenment individualism. Then, in 1980, Mary Mason became the first of a long line of feminist critics to repudiate the universalizing claims of this model and question its place in the history of the genre. The model might suitably describe the experience of Augustine and Rousseau, she conceded, but it did not fit the contours of women's lives. Correcting this gender bias, she proposed an alternative model for women: 'identity through relation to the chosen other' (210). \r\n \r\n A few years later, Domna Stanton asked, 'Is the [female] subject different?' and by implication, 'Is women's autobiography different from men's?' Answering yes to these questions, subsequent scholars - and I am thinking especially of Susan Stanford Friedman, Bella Brodzki, and Celeste Schenck - have returned most often to Mason's notion of relational identity as the distinguishing mark of women's lives. Thus, in her essay 'Individuation and Autobiography,' and indictment of 'the conflation of autobiography with male life-writing' and 'the conflation of male experience with critical ideologies' (60), Joy Hooton observes, 'The presentation of the self as related rather than single and isolate is...the most distinctive and consistent difference between male and female life-writing' (70). Following Friedman, Hooton cites research in developmental psychology and sociology, by Carol Gilligan and especially Nancy Chodorow, to support this view that individuation is decisively inflected by gender. The female subject, then, is different, and so is her life story. \r\n \r\n... \r\n \r\nThe understandable pressure to settle on reliable criteria for identifying difference in autobiography, together with the rarity of comparative analysis, has promoted the myth of autonomy that governs our vision of male lives. I hasten to add that men are hardly the victims alone of critical misdescription; like women, men also are constructed by patriarchal ideology. Consolidating the gains of feminist scholarship, and emulating what Sidonie Smith and others have achieved for women's autobiography , we need to liberate men's autobiography from the inadequate model that has guided our reading to date. As Chris McCandless's story demonstrates, the Gusdorf model is potentially a killer. \r\n \r\nWhy, it is fair to ask, didn't critics pick up on the implications for male identity of Mary Mason's early critique of the Gusdorf model? Part of the answer, I believe, is that Mason, Friedman, and other feminist critics helped to keep the old Gusdorf model in place - paradoxically - by attacking it: it didn't apply to women, they argued, but it did to men, leaving men stuck with a model of identity that seems in retrospect rather like a two-dimensional caricature: so-called traditional autobiography became the province of the Marlboro Man.

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

233

Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called, becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first millennium B.C. The idea of sacrifice itself, of course, originated in the feeding of the hallucinogenic idols as we saw in II.2. With the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the idols lost their hallucinogenic properties and became mere statues, but the feeding ceremonies now addressed to absent gods remained in the various ceremonies as sacrifices. It is thus not surprising that animals rather than oil, wax, smoke, etc., became the more important media of communication with the gods. Extispicy differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly not the speech or actions of gods, but their writing. The baru first addressed the gods Shamash and Adad with requests that they 'write' their message upon the entrails of the animal,22 or occasionally whispered this request into its ears before it was killed. He then investigated in traditional sequence the animal's organs — windpipe, lungs, liver, gall bladder, how the coils of the intestines were arranged — looking for deviations from the normal state, shape, and coloring. Any atrophy, hypertrophy, displacement, special markings, or other abnormalities, particularly of the liver, was a divine message metaphorically related to divine action. The corpus of texts dealing with extispicy outnum-bers all other kinds of augury texts and deserves much more careful study. From its earliest and very cursory mention in the second millennium, to the extensive collections of the Seleucid period around 250 B.C., the history and local development of extispicy as a means of exopsychic thought is an area where the tablets are simply awaiting the ordering of proper research. Of particular interest is that in the late period the markings and 22 See J. Nougayrol 'Presages medicaux de Tharuspicine babylonierine,' Semittca, 1956, 6, 5-14. 244 The Witness of History discolorations are described in an arcane technical terminology similar to what occurred among medieval alchemists.23 Parts of the exta of the sacrificed animal are referred to as 'door of the palace,' 'path,' 'yoke,' and 'embankment' and symbolize these locations and objects, creating a metaphor world from which to read out what to do.

213

In summary, I have sketched out several factors at work in the great transilience from the bicameral mind to consciousness: (1) the weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing; (2) the inherent fragility of hallucinatory control; (3) the unwork-ableness of gods in the chaos of historical upheaval; (4) the positing of internal cause in the observation of difference in others; (5) the acquisition of narratization from epics; (6) the survival value of deceit; and (7) a modicum of natural selection.

Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.\n\n And also on the production side. Try speaking with a full consciousness of your articulation as you do it. You will simply stop speaking.\n\n And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to the next line, does not begin consecutive sentences in the same way, determines that we place a question here, an exclamation there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in what we are trying to express and the person we are addressing.\n\n For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what we are actually doing at the time. Consciousness functions in the decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow done for us.

...In the first instance we should say that the person suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I am calling reactivity, and they are therefore different things.\n\n This distinction is also important in normal everday life. We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture, since if I wish to walk, I will quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so.\n\n Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely conscious even of where I am. In writing, I am reacting to a pencil in my hand since I hold on to it, and am reacting to my writing pad since I hold it on my knees, and to its lines since I write upon them, but I am only conscious of what I am trying to say and whther or not I am being clear to you.\n\n If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.\n\n In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon. We are conscious of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas reactivity can be definded behaviorally and neuologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.