I hear what you're saying, but I (do I? Oh, yes sir I do) still quibble. Does the injoke as outlined really have anything to do with internal management of oneself/one's memories--with psychic cleanliness? Are what we're talking about really injokes at all?
If the injoke is the spontaneous eruption, the manic nothing, the late-night catharsis that attains epic status between a few once-friends and is referred back to by them as a touchstone, but defined by its internality--origin in the self and as such more of a point of meditation or departure that anything else, an accessway to one's thought processes at a past time--then aren't these really outjokes, cultural kernels whose paths intersected with ours, or not? And if not, we fake it, fall back on our poverty of stock images when that perennial conversation about actors or what have you rolls around? I just mean, rather than a contemplative focus, fresh sweet hay as you've made of ol' Pikachu notwithstanding, aren't they a open hand or shalom or collective kowtow, a way of
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Oh, but I agree with this summation as well, the many negative adjectives I may have thrown around notwithstanding. Such is the trouble with writing; acknowledging the presence of 'multiple parallel truths' is second nature for most of us mentally, but to express it in static sequential words one must hijack prose with a certain kind of cleverness and profundity which has so far been outside my reach.
Yet if we imagine a Venn diagram based on the relationships between the three assertions "communication is good", "advertising is bad", "evil is unfortunate" I think it becomes clear that we are describing a similar system, just focusing on different areas of overlap...
(...but by that logic, if you imagine a Venn diagram big and recursive enough, maybe EVERYBODY is always in perfect concordant agreement with EVERYBODY else.)
Morphologically - that is, aesthetically - cute relies on big eyes, round heads, fat bellies. The limbs of the cute are subby or nonexistent, its mouth abstracted or disproportionately tiny, its nose button, its ears enormous or alternatively invisable. Cute tumbles, toddles, waddles, rolls; it is visibly dependent (I realize pikatchu does complexifiy this). Cute is apparently engineered by natural selection to stimulate a nurturing responce. If this is true in evolutionary terms, it follows that the surplus cuteness manufactured by culture might deonte the culture's attempt to trick itself into kindness.
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If the injoke is the spontaneous eruption, the manic nothing, the late-night catharsis that attains epic status between a few once-friends and is referred back to by them as a touchstone, but defined by its internality--origin in the self and as such more of a point of meditation or departure that anything else, an accessway to one's thought processes at a past time--then aren't these really outjokes, cultural kernels whose paths intersected with ours, or not? And if not, we fake it, fall back on our poverty of stock images when that perennial conversation about actors or what have you rolls around? I just mean, rather than a contemplative focus, fresh sweet hay as you've made of ol' Pikachu notwithstanding, aren't they a open hand or shalom or collective kowtow, a way of ( ... )
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Yet if we imagine a Venn diagram based on the relationships between the three assertions "communication is good", "advertising is bad", "evil is unfortunate" I think it becomes clear that we are describing a similar system, just focusing on different areas of overlap...
(...but by that logic, if you imagine a Venn diagram big and recursive enough, maybe EVERYBODY is always in perfect concordant agreement with EVERYBODY else.)
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and I like to imagine that diagram.
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Morphologically - that is, aesthetically - cute relies on big eyes, round heads, fat bellies. The limbs of the cute are subby or nonexistent, its mouth abstracted or disproportionately tiny, its nose button, its ears enormous or alternatively invisable. Cute tumbles, toddles, waddles, rolls; it is visibly dependent (I realize pikatchu does complexifiy this). Cute is apparently engineered by natural selection to stimulate a nurturing responce. If this is true in evolutionary terms, it follows that the surplus cuteness manufactured by culture might deonte the culture's attempt to trick itself into kindness.
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