Out of Context

Context is a fun word to play with, especially for me, a person who has been infected with a need to define all terms, someone who has become obsessed with categories. Context: a compound word: you can break it in half and analyze the parts. Con, according to dictionary.com, as a noun is the argument, position, arguer, or voter against something. As an adverb, it means to be against a proposition, opinion, etc. (arguments pro and con). In its verb form, it means to learn; study; peruse or examine carefully or to commit to memory. The third is the nautical context, to direct the steering of a ship. It's not until the fourth definition that you get to the con, as a trickster, a con artist, but there I'm adding my own connotation. 4. con: adjective - involving abuse of confidence, verb - to swindle; trick, to persuade by deception, and nouns - a confidence game or swindle, and a lie, exaggeration or glib self-serving talk. I have no choice but to look up glib: readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely. There it is, the con artist, the first connotation of the word that pops into my head when I think of the word con, but it is hidden in other perhaps outdated meanings. Context, the front half has been fun to play with (feel free to have fun with taking that one "out of context")! Reletively speaking, text is a fairly boring word to define, until you trace back to the Latin roots from the 1300's, textus, pattern of weaving, texture (of cloth), or tex(ere) to weave. And as may be obvious, when you combine the two words together, you get what we generally understand to be context: parts of a written or spoken statement that precedes or follows a specific word or passage influencing its meaning or effect, and a set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation. But, what is the most fasciniating to me, out of all this perhaps boring rhetoric I'm subjecting my readers to is that the Latin roots of context (contextus): joining together, scheme or structure, has basically the same meaning as textus: pattern of weaving, texture. It's as if the con aspect has always been a part of the text.

Recently, I got to see an old friend from my old college, and we were catching up a bit about life. I told that that one of my classes is bumming me out about technology again. He knows that I've always struggled with this and he would make fun of the old 35 mm Pentax I used to drag around with me everywhere, and get into arguments about digital vs. film all the time. He said he's happy to be my friend on facebook and see my context. Context, I thought, and I tripped out about it for a second. My context. He could see my pictures, my profile, what circumstances I've been surrounding myself in these days. I said, yeah, so I got a digital camera, aren't you proud of me? He can add one baby step of technology to my context. I realized then that I appreciate different people in different contexts, that I too fit better in some contexts more than others. Walking, second to dancing, is my favorite context. Walking home, I was contemplating taking something or someone out of context. What boundaries are being crossed? It makes people feel uncomfortable; it is considered rude. It is an interruption of a comfort zone. For my thought experiment, I think I will try to take myself out of context. I will attempt to make the claim for technology, bring on the digital era. Hail the post-cyberpunk generation. Go for it, cyborgs! Maybe it will be satire. I'm not quite sure yet.

I've been trying to digest Austin and Derrida into my mind, to little to no avail. I've read and re-read several times over in the quietest focused circumstances and still don't really "get it." What I notice, is a reoccuring theme with both of them of stating how obvious it all must be, nevertheless a need to dissect it into bits, starting from the very origin of writing itself. It seems to me that the distinction has already been made by linguistics between communication and language, and between oral and written communication. Language is communication that is specific to humans over the age of three, that involves using words to convey meaning. Supposedly, all animals communicate, but only humans over three years old have the capacity for language (the apes can succeed, after much training, in simple language akin to a toddler, but not beyond). The distinction between oral and written communication is even more obvious, included in the name. "A writing that is not structurally readable-iterable-beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing"(Derrida, pg 7). He then of course, apologizes for stating something that may seem obvious and goes on to tell his readers to "imagine a writing whose code could be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as secret cipher, by only two "subjects." I would think he would attempt to classify this as an example of non-writing, but no. The question of whether we will be able to understand it after they are dead and gone he answers yes, because there is no such thing as a code. "The perhaps paradoxical consequence of my here having recourse to iteration and to code: the disruption, in the last analysis, of the authority of the code as a finite system of rules; at the same time, the radical destruction of any context as the protocol of code." What does that mean? Isn't that a contradiction? Can I get an example of this hypothetical non-writing? Oh, I get it. No, because it didn't live on in history. Yet the writings of Austin and Derrida live on in history.

In Austin, How to do things with Words, lecture II, he lists the six conditions for a performative utterance to be "happy" that describe, in detail, the context that the performative must be uttered. But prior to, of course he must include the premise of, "I fear, but at the same time of course hope, that these necessary conditions to be satisfied will strike you as obvious"(Austin, pg 14). And afterward, states that if we "sin" against these herby rules then our performative utternace will be "unhappy," and then proeeds to break down all the various means of unhappiness. All I can think of is how unhappy these weary scholars must have been, becoming so obsessed with words as to personify them with feelings. When you break language down into small enough pieces, it ceases to make sense anymore. Like a koan, “A paradoxical anecdote or a riddle that has no solution; used in Zen Buddhism to show the inadequacy of logical reasoning.” Or another definition, “A koan is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement whose meaning cannot be accessed by rational thinking, yet it may be accessible by intuition.”

Fits and Starts

question and answer
beginning and end
post and comment
fits and starts

these all dissolve
beautifully into one
(a one with no parts)
when we let go
of our heads
and enter our hearts

(http://www.short-zen-poems.com/search/label/Koans)

Defining Parasites

               One time when I was a kid, I noticed a strange toothy spoon that looked like a kitchen tool by the toilet next the toilet brush and plunger and inquired. As you may guess, it was for poking around in the worms after a parasite flush. We never had a spaghetti spoon in the kitchen, so I didn’t know its intended use, and to this day, those things freak me out. My mom was a health nut, still is, but more so in those days. The health fads would cycle through the house from time to time: colloidal silver, blue green algae, supplements and herbs galore. I hadn’t seen a parasite pamphlet in a long time and temporarily forgot they existed (hadn’t encountered a spaghetti spoon in a while) until, like the return of a bad dream, my mom suggested over the phone that I may have parasites. I was having pregnancy symptoms but negative test results, and supposedly the symptoms are similar. She delivered the box, the complete kit, but I never opened it, which is a good thing. I was pregnant, and am so glad I didn’t believe my silly mother. I’m assuming the remedy would have negative effects on my child.

             The notion of human life itself as a parasite fascinates me, because in the earliest stages, it can be ambiguous what it living in your body. Speaking of interruptions, I am suddenly reminded of Ray Bradbury’s short story “Tomorrow’s child” where the character Peter Horn fathers a small blue pyramid. Having a child is quite the interruption, but I don’t think we can classify a baby as a parasite because the host is the same species of organism, and by definition, parasites feed off organisms of different species. That is in the modern sense of the word, but looking as the Latin roots parasitus and Greek parasitos, meaning one who sits at another’s table, in ancient Greece, “a person who receives free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.” Children are certainly amusing, and free meals? The majority of American children could eat countless meals a day, having the undeniable rights to free food, and did they work for it? Not likely.

So what really is a parasite and where do you draw the line? I suppose that is the point of all this academic rhetoric we are reading for this class. You can easily look up the definition and find the obvious most common usage first, and second projecting those leachy characteristics onto people who act in that way, living off, sponging off others. The second definition is in the broader sense of the word, but also getting back to the Greek roots.

There is a definite symbiotic relationship between organisms and their offspring. It is part of the natural life cycle. For example, breastfeeding for humans causing the uterus to contract in order to expediting the healing process (“bounce back into shape”) and all the fat they consume from the milk is helpful for that as well, and not to mention that breast milk is the perfect, ideal nutrition source for the baby, something that infant formulas could never replicate… don’t even get me started. I would say that a parasite is something that interrupts that natural life cycle. Defining “natural,” that’s the hard part.

There’s been a bit of talk about technology as a parasite, which is why we are subjecting ourselves to social networking programs, etc. The internet is rewiring our brains, right? Dr. Gary Small is one of the leading researchers in the study of this phenomenon, comparing the “digital natives” from the “digital immigrants.” He found that the “digital natives” who were born into computer land have greater skills in multi-tasking, complex reasoning and decision making, but lack social skills and empathy. We all should see examples of this every day, if we are paying attention. Like have you ever had someone friend you on facebook, then you run in real life and they don’t say hello? Or someone looks really familiar to you and you can’t place them, until you might realize, “oh, I think I saw them on a friend of a friend’s facebook pictures." Or the (becoming) classic email breakup. Lame! The social downside of the digital era is becoming commonly understood, but what I would question is whether even more is lost that the way people interact in the “real world.”

So you can multi-task, can you focus? Did I stop every few minutes during writing this blog to check my plurk? Maybe, and man has my innocent post degenerated – into porn. I swear, with boys everything degenerates to shit or porn, which is shit.

Anyway, what I find most interesting about the increasing amount of time humans are interacting with machines is the element of choice and resistance. I’m sometimes surprised about the so-called hippies that friend me on facebook. They get peer pressured into it, and at some point the convenience outweighs the privacy or freedom and they begin to subscribe. In a world full of screens, you don’t want to be screened out. Who doesn’t want to know where the party’s at? Well, calling everyone on your phone list is pretty cumbersome, time consuming and expensive, in terms of cell phone minutes, so you send out a facebook invite, and call it good.

Pretty soon not having a facebook will be like not having a driver’s license or a SSI card. From a paranoid creepy perspective, it’s so convenient for the FBI or any other interested government or other agency. They don’t have to waste time profiling people; we’re profiling ourselves. Did this infection spread exponentially? Is that even a qualifying factor of parasites? In contemplating choice and whether or not to subscribe, and to what degree I’m reminded of the tapeworm diet. Some people want to avoid them, some people want to get rid of them, and some people want to consume them – anything to lazily lose weight.