Showing posts with label 2025. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2025. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2025
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Friday, September 12, 2025
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Monday, September 1, 2025
Sunday, August 31, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Undoing the Concept of Reality as a Construction / EZE, 2025
Human beings show up with behavior ready-to-hand. And while use of language is a behavior, the capacity to use language is not the same as the capacity to communicate, which is also a behavior.
Behavior often elicits a response, but behavior is not in itself a means of communication whether or not we interpret it as a noun or not. We simply tend to align action with communication as a metaphor, which makes [all] action a form of signaling.
Perhaps signaling is the pervasive metaphor of our present-day technology, indeed of our world, as we have the capacity to make sense of signals and thereby give them meaning.
But behavior is often noise, a signal that distorts other signals.
Signal and noise constitute communication theory, but too, we might re-do communication theory as a theory of signaling.
Indeed, we are prone to think of behavior as communicative, but breathing, eating, drinking, ... , however ritualized, however socially constructed, have no immediate dependency on language or on our ability to communicate what they are as such. Whether or not we give these gerunds language, we do them. But our doing them often becomes a context for a discussion about influence, namely, the influence of thought, of language, of various other types of behavior on these behaviors.
Essentially, within the dualism made by the distinction between thought and action, when we take the linguistic turn, we make reality a construction of thought, thought which is made manifest through language, ... .
But foregoing the linguistic turn, on the level of behavior, with no dualism in play, we speak yet of influence, and reality at this level is not a construction so much as an interplay.
Directionally, when we assume the primacy of our use of language, which is, after all, a type of behavior, rather than the primacy of behavior itself, we live under the influence of an assumed need for language and of constructions thereof.
Note: Though agreed that reality is not entirely a social construct, the use of behavior is intended to give a general basis of action, but it is not used to imply a distinction between the subjective and the objective, whatever such a distinction might entail.
The use of behavior, here, rather, is close to the behavior defined by this sort of behavior analysis, and behavior analysis generally plays well in relation to social constructionism.
Which phrase fits the situation better?
We are our language.
We are our behavior.
For example, we speak of the influence of social media on behavior. A problem most immediate here is that our behavior on social media is still a behavior of a sort.
On this level too, we need not discuss the influence of social media on behavior as we might just as well discuss the impact of our behavior on some other behavior. For example, the influence of action on thought.
The following questions concern our ability to escape influence as well as our power to influence:
Do we live within socially constructed realities? Yes. Do we have the capacity to escape socially constructed realities? Yes and No. Do socially constructed realities constitute our world entirely? No, ... our world has gaps, gaps often of the asemic sort.
Related Themes
ma, fūdo / EZE, 2025
On Between-ness
Fūdo
Sriharsa
Watsuji Tetsurō
Augustin Berque
On Difference
Galleries / Sites (from Cece Chapman)
Friday, August 29, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
A Near Asemic Switch-Logic: The Rose / EZE, 2025
A speculation on a development from Imagism to Asemic Writing.
The credo for Imagism is the primacy of the image.
Does this primacy illicit a kind of cliché-breaking in the image-narrative pattern, which then renders the conventional logic asemic or nearly so?
See also: Trope, Tropes and Archetypes and Clichés
For example, take this lyric in "The Rose": Some say love, it is a razor / That leaves your soul to bleed. This lyric breaks the trope ~ cliché by substituting soul for heart, which, in turn, risks making itself asemic, i.e., without meaning or more to the point, dysfunctional in its normal form as communication.
Indeed, the expected noun (image)-verb (action), your heart to bleed, makes more sense than the given noun-verb, your soul to bleed, a phrase which defies the usual sense of what a soul does.
But notice too how the rupture of the image-narrative flow in "The Rose" is not altogether unlike the rupture forced by the verb-lacking juxtaposition of images in "In a Station of the Metro"?
Continuity as a Logical Imperative
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