notes on learning and dialectic perhaps.
i realize: why i always put off papers and other things.
learning fucks you up. really learning something, casting off your illusions, means admitting that you could be better. to really learn is to submit the ego to questionability. it's an off-balance, tottering state. it's admitting that there's something you don't know.
learning fucks you up physically. your eyes get dry and hurt. your back and shoulders hurt. you breathe improperly, you forget your body, you obsess.
learning involves controlled periods of obsession. to really think something out, one must focus, and think only of that thing and different aspects and relations regarding it. this sometimes feels uncomfortably close to unhealthy obsession. the difference is that after really learning and digesting something, one feels light, floaty, depleted, spent. you've exchanged energy and focus and mustered and marshalled various parts of yourself to change yourself. it's exhausting, but it's like sex without such a radical time constraint. you've either been impregnated with the seeds of something new, or you've impregnated someone (although i suppose that's teaching). it's true that those ideas will die when you do (unless you write/publish), and maybe even true that when you get alzheimer's or some other degenerative disorder you will still be you and the sperm of those ideas will have died. but like dogs perhaps we can have ideas fathered by more than one source. perhaps we can have ideas fathered by the interactions between sources and unconscious interactions into how we use language and when we do things and perhaps that means we can have ideas fathered by an uncountably infinite number of sources. can you really separate where the collective unconscious begins and other things end?
the impregnation dialectic and the dialectic of empirical sexual politics (the mode in which two specific people communicate during a specific act of sex or group of sex acts, abitrarily bounded in time or space) are interestingly related. how did the pedagogic dialectic get so entangled with these two?
learning fucks you up. really learning something, casting off your illusions, means admitting that you could be better. to really learn is to submit the ego to questionability. it's an off-balance, tottering state. it's admitting that there's something you don't know.
learning fucks you up physically. your eyes get dry and hurt. your back and shoulders hurt. you breathe improperly, you forget your body, you obsess.
learning involves controlled periods of obsession. to really think something out, one must focus, and think only of that thing and different aspects and relations regarding it. this sometimes feels uncomfortably close to unhealthy obsession. the difference is that after really learning and digesting something, one feels light, floaty, depleted, spent. you've exchanged energy and focus and mustered and marshalled various parts of yourself to change yourself. it's exhausting, but it's like sex without such a radical time constraint. you've either been impregnated with the seeds of something new, or you've impregnated someone (although i suppose that's teaching). it's true that those ideas will die when you do (unless you write/publish), and maybe even true that when you get alzheimer's or some other degenerative disorder you will still be you and the sperm of those ideas will have died. but like dogs perhaps we can have ideas fathered by more than one source. perhaps we can have ideas fathered by the interactions between sources and unconscious interactions into how we use language and when we do things and perhaps that means we can have ideas fathered by an uncountably infinite number of sources. can you really separate where the collective unconscious begins and other things end?
the impregnation dialectic and the dialectic of empirical sexual politics (the mode in which two specific people communicate during a specific act of sex or group of sex acts, abitrarily bounded in time or space) are interestingly related. how did the pedagogic dialectic get so entangled with these two?