Prism and its escape part 1
The union of words and things is a strange one. Perhaps the weirdest of all for Hume, for whom the problem remains unproblematic. In a sense perhaps the problem comes down to what exactly happens in those basic of principles. It will be remembered that for Hume the key pointer in there principles was there capacity to jolt a mind elsewhere. There one was looking and something green, and then wham! Bang! Everything come, another, quite perception is also before ones mind, and then another – crowding one out, like Banquo’s descendants until the crack of doom. Words then entire this shifted domain with a demand. These are all green. The very process then of shift, of movement, of not quite being sure whose green a thing is anyway, gently shiftis is pattern. The thing whose green its is becomes resolved. It belong to the word. Moreover once their process has happens, words cease control. All these jumps it says are indeed Green. But other sub green jumps also happen, and we have words form them too. At which point another subtle move immediately happens. Once words are to be found for subgroups (that is for what principles leave asunder), then thee is nothing really holding one directly within the world of experience itself, to even the sounds of words. a word is a written figure as much as a spoken, and colours whose distinctions cannot be grasped can still be named.
Two deep principles thereby come into being. : or better the same complex principle which oscillates endlessly between two conflicting points of reference. On the on hand here is the unthinking annexing of conflicting patterns to the same thought. These are green that is my Green pen, says the child. Or more darkly: marriage is the way one extends ones social network my child. Your sister has married, and so in time you also must marry. Domain of idenity is created within the sound of words. A demand that all these elements are really one all along (something that Hume himself knows so well need not be the case).
Moreover the above move of cause spawns yet another dimension (which is almost a third principle in its own right). Once the connection is given a name- it matter not (given the elusiveness of of the connection itself), whether the word is exactly the same. What is labelled is not itself ‘of words: what is labelled might easily straddle many different words. All the more so as that labelling is inexact. Better it is inappropriate and yet necessary (what else is one labelling but principles after all – what else is an idea). Each principle so nuanced out could always happen in he context of another name. It always has a name beyond this one. Little Dorrit abroad feels this connection in two ways. On the one hand there is the difficulty of other languages, which she can hardly speak. Everything is lost in a mirage of words, and near guess: Everything is surrendered to those suspect translators her sister and Mrs General. Langauge by itself makes her loose sight of where and what she is. But also even within English her own language of simple consequence is lost. Words she uses are thought to be inapprioate for her new standing: meaning might then move between words, and yet, meaning (as it is caught within the world of society) demands that only certain be spoken – something Amy finds so hard.
The other principle (2/3 depending how one is counting). That is once of course one has opened up that trap of words. Once one has claimed that labelling is the thing (as Plato knew) the game is endless. Words nest (in a way experience does not). Principles can therefore dissect one another. They can run across themselves, they can be in opposite directions.: the labelling game can always harass as the world of principles, calling them into account. Requiring that they justify what is of course unjustifiable (as it can only be thought in terms of a domain of meaning which, principles themselves have no knowledge of, or care for). Little Dorrit merit is losed, under her sisters gaze, She is simply a simpleton or a goose – unable t o understand what is happening around her. Unable to understand what it meaning to be within society.
Meaning becomes the empty paradigm for thought. Or better the point, call it objective or formal that thought itself is said to oscillate from., and return to, a point which is a construction of language and society. Now here of course little Dorrit herself becomes once again anxious. She is no relativist. The point is not that all morals and all meanings comes from society and that is it, full stop. Reality lies in the vivacity of perception, and what follows on from that vivacity, it has therefore nothing to do with the perception of the hidden springs (as Hume calls them) beyond that reality. Empiricism is merely a creative axis – a locus point to bemaking such realities : It needs no concern with truth (Hume’s scepticism versus Lockean dualism). It is the meaning of words with insert the extra criterior of truth, by demanding that there exists beyond experience the grid of meanigninto which all the elements of communication are slotted. This is of course the ways of society.
And yet Little Dorrit might want to point out here that this grid is actually rather perplexing. The social words is into a formal set of known meanings, so much as a task for circumlucution and the mechanics of owing. The key to the mystery of the former lies in a complex kink in realty. At any one time, what is, is made to judder in the direction of what is not: a form needs to be filled in. Reality is therefore made to jangle with that will be, if only this form is written, It is pulled towards the future. And yet if that future is every attained, it merely leads to another form. Or better this form is merely seen as a part of a wider process, One fills a form in to yet another form, and yet another and so on. Life becomes always caught up in pointless waiting for a future. Meaning is infinitely postponed., and yet the promise that it is there, that there is a resolution beyond the forms, is held out. Everything form really might be the last form (o maybe not).
At this point Little Dorrit has another point to make, For her the problem here is as such temporal inversion as anything else. It is all very well serving a future, and then finding that future was itself a part of another creation. But that is not really the way a passion ought to be. Passions really ought to run the otherway. That is in feeling one set of thoughts, under the auspious of a passion . love is given in feeling joys which are themselves complex (including pride, lust, friendship, trust….) Each one of those subsiduary passions will then also find itself in a grid of its own. That is it itself is already complex, in the extreme. It is not then for Amy that passions, with their extra dimension of intensity loiter around, awaiting the future. In being enwrapped of other thoughts, in being that thought which all the other passions that are caught by them are founded upon, are made to jangle through (Hume and the light), they are themselves directly in the service of what is not there, and yet present (and so not some future dream). They are more over doing this service in the name of a future they are composing. There future, and the desires (and directed passions alongside those desires) are therefore before them all. They are present is their actions, and in the change. In the case of passions, the future serves the present. Or better it allows the present to articulate itself, even though it of course contains myriad other possible futures, and thoughts. That is it contains other possible presents all of its own.
To be stuck in the office of the circumlocution department is therefore almost directly opposed to what could and would be most creative in being alive. It is to be clennam wh awaits in the circumlocution office twice: once for the love of Amy, and once for the mind of Doyce, and yet each time fails to realize how pointless the wait is. That is Clennam, the master of stories has a habit of attempting to make the office of language somehow allow for the office of the passion directly. The result is laboured waiting. However here there is a clearly subtly; Clennam does not simply await, with no result. Oh it is of course true is waiting is fruitless, and yet, off soots of that awaiting cause results elsewhere. Clennam’s preoccupation with Amy sets Pancks on the trail to find her lost millions (is a way mere awaiting in the office never can). Likewise the pursuit of Doyce’s ights once again involves Clennam in Pancks (this time badly, as he re-inevst’s Doyce and Clennam money in Merdle, doing so in the with the aim of helping his ‘persecuted’ partner’), and yet this act then folds back into the fist plot (as Clennam discovers his own love for Amy in jail). Moreover the act of waiting in the circumlocution office, was futile in itself, and yet it served to highlight the difference between the system in Britain based upon barnacles and circumlocution, and that and the country where Doyce ends up (neve named), and makes a fortune. The story teller is then no master of language. If he sits in language vaccuos halls (with its smells of old cabbage and polish) nothing happens.words master hi. And yet in that sitting, in the noices off, other forces are also playing (forces which o doubt also run the correct, or at least the passionate cause of time).
Circumlocution tears language away from the anarchy of passions, making it fill in forms, and realte to a world beyond the reality of mere impressions, a reality which is capabple of giving words their world their temporal inversion (the mystery of curcumlocution is that one thinks somewhere there is meaning to the process, and does so in spite of all the evidence). However by itself this might not be enough to create the alternative universe of meaning. A second ingredient comes in the ability or perhaps better the attempt through the agency of words to own passions. Here one needs to make a careful distinction. Passions, as Hume undersands them are really rather complex phenomena. His very dualism, of idea and feeling divides up their nature in two. On the one hand there is the feeling itself. This feeling is essentially utterly impersonal (as a perception ids impersonal). Hume argues it is merely the product of the glands in the brain, of chemicals. It is utterly pre-individual being therefore, and is so in two sense. Not only is it rooted in the hidden springs which compose the body (and therefore have really nothing to do with us insofar as we have mind). But also it by and large the same across differing individuals.
It follows indeed that Hume here is very close to Spinozaa, at this point, in set up, but also implication. Spinoza argues that passions are preindividual, but also that this means that that position implies that a passions cannot be simple united to one individual. To see a baby crying, is also to cry. Sympathy, that is the ability to feel what another feels is therefore for Spinoza one of the deepest seated of feelings (and comes into play now before any personality is formed). Now his is not that simple in Spiniza. The process is only possible perception is also prior to indvidualtion (the mind is the perception of the body, that is it is the perception of a body already doing things). To perceive another undergoing the same set of feelings, is therefore already to have changed ones body in the way of that other (in order to perceive what they are at all), at least in part (or ghist). Here, is Spiniza a terribly subltely position emerge. On the one hand one perceives the passions of others on a level before one is (one is created feeling them). But one can only do so though the precise mechanics of ones own body, which is for Spinoza the source of ones individuality. As that body has certain mechanics, which in turn then lead to a certain set of perceptions and thoughts in which the individual is made . Moreover it only does this as the mind itself is perceiving – that is as the mind itself draws its own individuality out of the body itself. In drawing that individuality, it perceiving others which are like it, the same find is suddenly jerkeditno also being soemthignmotehr than it was – even as it gives itself. Each mind is making itself a world, must also include what others are in that making, in the existence.
The effect of this complexity is that the mind it at once capable of feeling a passion as its own. The passin is peculiarly its own, it occurs to that mind, and yet what that passions is, what makes it passionate is utterly shared. It resonated between numerous individuals, numerous beings (all of whom, for Spinoza share the same body). Hume lacks the underlying ontology to allow the full development of such a position, and yet it is clear the mechanics of his argument are pretty much the same. Although with the main difference that Hue would need to have the connection understood purely in terms of association of passion rather than anything else.
The upshot of this movies that their exists on the one hand these strange products of feeling; affects which are essentially impersonal and resonate across numerous different individuals. Each individual then takes up that feeling in their own manner, and yet always does so in the foreknowledge tat that feeling is never purely their own (nor can it be). It exists within them. this is perhaps the really difference (not honoured by Spiniza0 between affects and passion. And affect is related tot he impersonal oscillating element, which arranges itself though many different individuals and combination. The passion represents the attempt to possess the feeling within one individual And yet, given the instability of the affect this attempt is doubly problematic. On the one hand, each affect has no sense of its own beyond its feeling. It is not clear what the passion is. Hume is very clear on this matter. Each passion is surrounded by other passions, from which it is more or less indistinguishible (pride is a love is a pleasure is….) To posses a passion its therefore to be caught up in a welter of other feelings, other passions (all of which are also streaming of the affect itself). On the other hand it is of course a very finally nuanced question whether one ever possess of passions (as one posses a shirt) or whether the passion possess oneself (as a daemon). Hum here is ambivalent. The passion comes first, and so it is the task of the self to great itself within a passion , and to possess that passion within a sequence of other impressions. One therefore turns it into own own possession – as one turns owns own house from a building site pr empty husk into ones own property (or as a hat becomes impressed with ones own personality). Possession is therefore something one gently and slowly acquires into time. One builds it up within the passions of the mind. And yet one only does this because at another level ones mind is possessed by their passions (as it is also possessed with a feleing) which it must uncover a way of dealing with.
Possessions are then the furniture of the mind one already has. The elements one must claim. One has no power over what such elements actively are, merely how one uses them. At this oint one becomes caught up in a second condition. One does not just se possession – one only does s by owning them as ones own. Possession are only possessed by me, they only can be forged into something that I can own, as a create a ME capable of saying ‘oh yes I own these ones here: These are Mine . One does ot therefore merely possess passions one must own them as well.
This is form Hume where the second aspect of thought of indirect passions start to hit him. To have a house which gives ones pleasure or a friend is to create a feeling of pride or love. This feeling intracably connects up the possession of the passion to the furniture of perception. In owning the one them own the other (and feels it to be what one has a right to have).
This move them allows the mind tho arrange itself,a nd to become caught up in its own self love. It allows the mind (for Hme) to move out from this position and found its own morality. The moral involving the transfiguration of the mechanics of owning through the gaudy world of possession, and into the world of affects. That is morality is what allows owningship, which is necessarily defined within the very restricted confines of immediate passions in the mind over which one can have a claim, to a far greater claim about what it was to be acting in the manner of ownership across all ones actions.
Little Dorrit at this point wants to break off. She suspects there is a problem here. While she lauds Hume’s aim (and thinking that this is possibility the only bases for morality), it strikes here that one would have to be Saint David himself to follow its caused to the conclusion he reached. Her problem, she says s that it us far too easy to be smug here. It is far to easy for the self to forget its own very perilous positono in this picture, and simply (by habit or whatever) claim the rights over all the world, as if that world did indeed belong to it.
Moreover it will be greatly helped in this act of myopia by the fact that the idea of the self, and its calims for ownership will be far greater than the possession, which also posessit. Ach self will therefore resonate far beyond their own immediate abilty to possessions, and willmoreover wishto do so. This in turn leads to the dual society she very much lived i. 9or the them mechanics of Merdle’s table). On the one hand the table was filled with professions; lawyers, doctors bishops, were there as representatives of their kind. And yet in being there they were moved beond their kind, they became mere guest within the dance of death. Each therefore involved in eleborate conversation and rituals, which as a whole oiled the entire social system, and so served nothing directly beyond the heirachies of that system. To be dragged out of own possession, is therefore to own in being part of a schemata or hierarchy of ownership – within a mechanics of the belives of ownership.
Additionally when these belief are abstracted and refined they become distinctly unpleasent. There are other societies, not composed of professionals, societies that perhaps more truly represent the full weight of owning. These are the Gownas (or the Mrdles) – peoples which deny the need for posssions (and even actively dispise those who have them),a nd yet subltly engineer to get them. Hence Gown ensures her son marries for money, and yeta ffe t to despise mnoney- calaiming that is is attempting to comormise its right to own 9that is that is attempting to muscle into those right – that it ias ot conent to reamin a mere possession). Or again mrs merdle, from whom all assions are enpunge, and yet who is cleatly more that capabple of using that passionless state (given in the whiteness of her breat – te utterly frozen nature of her heart) to direct others, according to her needs.
That is for Little Dorrit possession is all very well when it is kept with the mind itself. Ten it I fine and dandy. Likewise it might be extended with some accuracy into morality. And yet it also faces the very real peril that it will slip from a mere innococent confession of what one ones. The stories of a life (by it Amyor <Maggie) a history, into a claim which is far wider in orgin, a claim fro which all actual possesion are suspended (or merely reduced in importance). To own is not just to own up to something (although it is always also that), it is also to shout in a strident voice THIS IS MINE. A shout that is made irrespective of right o customs, A shout which is powerful enough to follow the lines of affects back up their cause, and enter the pre-indvidual world as if it were the world of mine (genetics or spirtualism- in our time – society and circumlocuation in their’s) makes whoppee with reality.
And this Little Dorrit notices is part of the problem The game of language – its claim for meaning, reflects and underpins this claim for reality. Society wants its realty – and its reality is given in words, and by circumlocution. Indeed the very basic inversion configure time in the same manner. Words invert making the present serve the future (though the mystery of circumlocution). Owernship likewise claims rights to force possession to accord with itself To claim as Mrs Gown does that ‘ a thing = x’ is Mine (to be ‘x’ at all- a neo-Kantian claim) is to claim that the right to possess what ever lies at land, to take control of it: it is to force it therefore to be witnessing another splendour. Each move demand what is around in the world are caught up into what is not their at all (and is defined in such a way hat it never can be – this is why Hume starts with the self which he has already at another place or time so ably deconstructed). One starts therefore with what is not their or not their simply there and attempt to create a feeling for than non-reality.
However there does reamin rather a clear difference in all this – one Little Dorrit is more than aware off. Langauge demandas the present accords to the future. Ownership by contrast is created within a miamia of the present, and past. Its claims amount the the assertion of the rights of an possible and not ever present present, to claim for its own another level of reality, the world of the possessions, on the grounds that these possession are what it has had a long established right to – are what have always been its own. It possess and has a right to a possession, as that present is given within a past, or the legacy of the past in which these rights are simply and directly ensured and guranteed. Mrs gown lives in Hampton court palace, and has a right to the Meagles’ money. Mrs Merdle has come from society and has a right to social standing. The logic of execessive ownership is to place the possession of others in the past, as a part of and in its ‘having been’. They are what that past is – how it is being given: What is standing there of that past.
The parrallel political claim is of course made in the west very day of the year. We claim to have a special right to owning the worlds resources. A claim based not on logic or position so much as history. The world, and the possessions of that world have been historically ours. We claim that history for ourselves. We claim it to be ours (but not ours alone). We have a right to bugger up everything, or the right to certain forms of destruction or the monopoly of political philosophy in the name of this past.The past (the legacy of colonialism) and trating things as we did in that past, has become the stuff of our lives – the stuff of our ability to be at all). The world of possession is then treated as if it were one with our ast- and done so in the name of what we currently are-orf the greed of our present.
Circumlocution destroys the present in the name of the future. The world of society creates for itself, in the name of a present and owned past (and does so in the manner). The present is therefore at once the tryant of the past. It is what the past, poor dear is trying to say. it is the meaning of that past (as if the past needed to be the kind of thing to have a meaning: History surely delights in being utterly meaningless). But then the same present is also caught up in what it is not, the miseries of being caught in a future (in what it is trying to say – poor dear). Past pulled to present and present then located (rather firmly in the future).
Moreover in all these shifts there is a peculiar place and role for circumlocution. Langauge in a sense is the ultimate gurantee of the ownership system. If all else fails a single word (the language of society) can be devolved and developed which is capable of owning in a grasp the mutiliple shifts in property which an illicit ownership must claim. Heidegger is therefore either than he knew. Philosophies which tie being to language have as their natural consequence the claim that a certain (and partially obscured) future is paramount. This future is indeed the future which guarantees ultimately the mastery of the present over a past it fashions, and the capture of that present within the maze of ownership.
The last move of course matter as it is this world (of stale cabbage and old polish) which then anchors all the rights of owning one against the other, has at its heart the mystery of circumlocution: the Lord Barnacle the man to know and be: the lord of the language – which allows then entire process to continue. It is also of course worth noting that there is another trend also at work here. Ownership does not savage the right of possession without at another level, possession retaliating in kind. To claim ownership is also to need to possess – it is to have money (which is Merdle is the other star in societies firmament): But that is quite another story…
Meaning is created is an empty creation: the demand of society is owning meanings something. The demand to be greater than it appears to be. The demand to have the right to force meaning on the world, in the name of owning words., and in that meaning smuggle a whole extra sequence o concerns and thoughts and believes. One does not jus speak in the name of meaning, one circumlocutes, and within that locution ownership lurks and possess the words as its own. It demands in the name of passion, in the name (ultimately) of affects that the world bends towards its own will (or at least the mind is made as its own – for itself to be within).
However it is clear that this prsino is not enough to (quite) contain amy. B but it means for her to esacpe meaning (and the problem of where the poor girl can flee to) will need to be task of the next essay.