One of my favorite passages from Faulkner, Judith’s monologue upon giving Charles Bon’s letter to Quentin’s Grandmother, passing on something precious to someone she barely knows, strikes me as a weirdly accurate description of what happens on the internet:
…and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after awhile they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something — a scrap of paper — something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it can never become was because it cant ever die or perish…(Absalom, Absalom!)
Ever since I decided to start a blog, I have noticed that my thoughts are appearing to me again, announcing themselves like those people who stand behind television reporters and wave. What have been, in one sense, passing thoughts — thoughts that pass away before they can really be — want to transform themselves into passing thoughts in a greater sense, thoughts that exist, like Judith’s letter, in the passage from one mind to another in this very un-stony medium. So if you have found your way to these words, know that your coming has been much anticipated.
You can expect Working Theory to be a blog that brings a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective to whatever happens to capture my fleeting attention day to day: we will talk about Freud, the Death Drive and the suicide button, smoking, the emotions of objects, Adam and Eve and the joys of shame, the unconscious of the web, Obama-as-Lacanian, the ontology of wolves and the beauty of post-apocalyptic cities. I hope this will be a space for wild speculation, working theories and as St Augustine says “Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.”
Let’s get started.
Tags: Alan Bourassa, cultural theory, Faulkner, Freud, Lacan, philosophy, psychoanalysis