When does it matter what a body without organs is?
All of life is specifics. Generalities, grand courses and long-term events only exist as abstractions. For example, “the time you spent at school” is an abstraction to which you can only refer when you’ve left and look back on it after the fact. “The First World War” or as it was known the “Great War” must have seemed infinite while it was happening – not just infinite in time because they couldn’t tell how long it would go, but infinite in scope because the thing we call the “First World War” was four years long or 126 million individual seconds in which every decision contributed to the meaning, outcome, and events of the “First World War.”
There’s no moment of divine decision in which a cultural course is set despite what mass media figures try desperately to convince you. They know as much as you or me because they’re individuals – the scope of their observational powers are equal to one human being. Many self-proclaimed experts’ reputations would shatter if they were to be observed in repose.
Don’t trust large-scale narratives that only benefit the people telling you about them. Here’s the truth about frameworks – if enough people act as though they are the case, they become true. Even if they only benefit their makers.
Klaus Schwab cannot tell you the next stage in social evolution. Life develops chaotically and without a pattern, without reference to some grand design.
Therefore, all knowledge is technically functionally useless until its single specific moment arrives, and even then, most of the knowledge – the tenets and reasons underlying an idea – remain in the background waiting in nonexistence until they are created post-facto by an abstracting academic. It will never matter what a body without organs is until after it’s ceased to matter and someone wants to prove it was important at the time. They’ll bring all their learning and theoretical proofs to bear on reality and capture a piece of it retrospectively – then turn that piece into a weapon.
The study of philosophy, as with any profession, is a lifetime of preparation for the sake of a single moment, but it is also a succession of singular moments each equally significant. It’s synonymous with a degree in any applied field – say, soil study in civil engineering, in that most of your knowledge won’t be applied every day, but in instrumental moments will be essential.
This paradox of attention is what drives our most emotional moments.
A piano recital is ten thousand hours compressed into five minutes.
This is what we’re slowly realising and this is the world we’re moving into – there are no narratives. Postmodernism was confusing, was all narratives – now, the world has grown to fit the Internet, and every particular could be remembered. There is no narrative and there never was one – only endless particularities. All that’s changed is their style of preservation. Once they were rites, then they were stories, then facts, and now they’re changing into something else.
verso folio 