Words, words, words (to quote a famous Danish prince).
Words, Intrusions, and Parasites.
This work is a manifesto of intrusion, because declaring my ideas boldly is decidedly uncomfortable. Since it is easier to challenge a work which has been laid out in clear-cut conception, I hope that others will take the opportunity to edit the ideas I'm outlining below.
First, words can be parasites. This may sound incredibly self-evident, but the word can is what requires emphasis and examination. Second, intrusion (interruption, thought, pure idea) is positive, and not only positive, it is necessary. I mean to explore these ideas through examining the vast pool of interruptions that have niggled into my brain over the last few weeks, Austin, Nancy, and the writings/lectures of Susan Blackmore. I'm also fairly certain that the influence of the Tomcat Murr is lurking somewhere in the sooty stove of my mind, ready to interrupt my own interruptive musings at moments notice.
Words can be parasites. All words have the potential to be parasites, because as conveyors of IDEA they are ways in which we infect others with our basic thoughts, our world-views, even our lies and mistakes. When we phrase an idea we force it into the guidelines of the tool of language, and in doing so we create an impact on the recipient. But do all words live up to that potential? It's a tricky subject to judge, as what constitutes effective parasitism is a rather slippery and elusive thing to come to consensus on. Since I believe words have much more of a chance to be parasitic in nature than not, perhaps the best place to start is looking at what words wouldn't be parasitic. In many ways the value of words seems to be the impact they have, no doubt why certain phrases are recorded and, irritatingly, quoted on a semi-daily basis as clichéd aphorisms.
Several problems exist here, however, despite the fact that these phrases stem from the very value of words themselves. Once words have become clichés, they lose their meaning beyond the very first exposure of the recipient to them. Phrases come to replace thought, and when that happens there is no thought being transmitted, only words, words, words. There is no infection happening, the host has already been infected long ago, and no longer can be influenced by the fact that the speaker has “let the cat out of the bag,” or finally placed the “straw that broke the camel's back.“ Memetically, words lose a lot of their power to infest. If the common cold always attacked our bodies with the same makeup, our bodies would remain unphased (as well as unchallenged). Likewise, words must attempt to convey real thought, new thought, any thought at all, or else we as infecter waste our words, and our parasites die with us.
That said, memetic intrusion is one of the most prevalent in society. We are all the products of our environment, whether or not you side with Nature or Nurture philosophically, it's impossible to ignore the fact that we are the products of the books we read, the conversations we take part in, the movies we watch, the ads that surround us, the people we let in and get close to, even the graffiti that we cannot help but read, cannot help but become infected by. Our minds are perfect hosts because they are, in a sense, sticky, and all passing stimuli collects and infects in one way or another. It's hard to delve into memetics without bringing up the work of Susan Blackmore, and her work will be talked about at greater depth later, but I think it necessary to rebuke her conclusions of memetics at this point. In her essay The Evolution of Meme Mechanics, she claims that “we are meme machines, created by and for the selfish replicators,” and that it's possible to “drop the idea of an inner self” completely. This makes some sense, given the huge impact of memes on all aspects of our lives, but while memes build up momentum I believe that they all require an origin, and are limited by the fact that, as old thought, they degrade in their ability to infect and generate new thought. If Blackmore wants to suggest that memes are the totality of our selves, then she begs the question of what the difference is between memes and ideas. If one and the same, why call them memes? If not, what room is there for ideas generated by the self?
Intrusions are positive. Parasitism and intrusions both have an incredibly bad reputation as words, and by extension as ideas. While parasitism is by definition detrimental to the host, at least scientifically, (and by no means does that need to impact our concept of parasites for an English class) intrusions are, I think, uniformally positive where words and thought are concerned. In The Intruder, Jean-Luc Nancy's introduction invaded my mind and planted the idea for this whole thought experiment. He starts out quite simply: “ The intruder makes his way in by force, surprise, or cunning, in any case without any right to do so and without invitation. There must be an element of the intruder in the stranger, otherwise he loses his strangeness.” I was surprised to find that, try as I might, I could not now unread or unthink those words. They made an impact on my mind for their eloquent simplicity, and the more I thought about it the more connections started to get made. Words were the ultimate intruders, as Nancy so deftly proved. They were not simply parasites, jumping from host to host and altering thoughts and behavior. Instead, words were intruders by the benefit of their strangeness, their incomprehensible other-ness; as wonderfully complex as language is in conveying ideas, it can never make up for the loss in translation which occurs from host to host. Like we discussed in class, until telepathy, or mind melding, there will always be the need for a “jk” or a repetitive E. Nancy goes further in saying that:
Once he is in, if he remains a stranger, and for all the time he remains, instead of “naturalizing himself”, his arrival does not cease: he continues to come and he never stops being an intrusion; he continues to be without right and familiarity and habits, but he remains a disturbance, a turbulence amidst the intimacy.
What a perfect description of the foreign idea, the complex question, the difficult issue. Nancy has summed up the intrusive idea spectacularly, as a stranger which the host cannot find comfort with yet, out of an inability to understand or connect with it, but which nonetheless obsesses the mind. These ideas exist as constant disturbance, “amidst the intimacy.” Parasitism, interruptions, things you can do with words, these are all vast, complex subjects that we as a class, we as people, could never grasp through normal lecture or conjecture. Rather, once introduced, with Tony or Nanotext or whichever moniker was used, they arrive like strangers to us and never cease to arrive, at every new reading, every instance of example. Like _stephen said on Plurk, he was “beginning to see parasitism everywhere” (http://www.plurk.com/p/3addk0). Plurk, googlewave, blogspot, and the various readings we have done are all designed to familiarize us with the stranger who disturbs us always from the back of our minds. And so, as a class, we struggle with familiarizing ourselves with the otherness around us.
Susan Blackmore's equation is applicable at this point: “any information that is varied and selected can bring design.” This seems to suggest that all information, however varied and new, will eventually become memetic, will eventually cease to be varied and new, and will instead become a part of the larger body of thought called the common. While this may seem rather fatalistic, it's a hardcoded aspect of evolution; we as humans must evolve to survive as well, and thus our best ideas must evolve and improve to keep us from stagnation, or worse, ruin. So information exchange, in it's highest form, can only be intrusive, parasitic, interrupting. If ones words are NOT intrusions, NOT parasites, then one has failed to make an impact. Failed to create, inspire, or force new thought. It's clear, then, that if you go away from this experiment without having been infected by my words, that I have failed; in fact failed quite literally, as the grading rubric is designed to give low marks to a student who doesn't “engage in the production of knowledge.” And what is the production of knowledge but an interruption on the status quo, whether on a larger intellectual scale or simply on a personal level.
Intrusions are necessary. What does not intrude is not a stranger. And what is not a stranger is not strange. And what is not strange is familiar. What is familiar is safe. And what is safe is of no consequence to anyone.
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