reality could be far stranger

paper 1 (due first)

so, i kind of have this confused idea that comparing pascal's pensees and cha's dictee will be critically informative in some way about (these are my "keywords") certainty, reason, convention/ritual, error and non-comprehension.

so pascal's wager goes something like this: reason (reason which is the only path to certain knowledge) cannot decide anything on the subject of god. it is in fact from the viewpoint of divine happiness (beatitude) that pascal details the wager. you cannot use reason to determine the chances of winning and losing this bet, yet in terms of your ultimate happpiness: if god is 1) and you bet that he is, your gain is infinte, 2) and you bet that he is not, your loss is infinte; if god is not 1) and you bet that he is, your loss is finite, 2) and you bet that he is not, your gain is finite. you must risk for the possibility of infinite happiness and disregard the possibility of finite loss. in this way, the wager is not performed against a standard of absolute truth (but in terms of relative personal benefit? the notion that we may access this truth through "scripture, and the rest, etc." minimizes the absolute-ness of this truth (okay, i'll work on this part).

so, pascal has denied reason as the proper faculty with which to make this wager. he says that this decision must be made (it cannot not be made, we have embarked), that the bet must be made that "god is," and that this wager must be made without hesitation. that is, with certainty. the very certainty that supposedly follows from acts of reason? also: he writes a few paragraph to an interlocutor uncertain about the capacity to believe, "but learn at least that your powerlessness to believe comes from your passions, since reason brings you to this and nevertheless you cannot [believe]" [mais apprenez au moins que votre impuissance a croire vient de vos passions, puisque la raison vous y porte et que neanmoins vous ne le pouvez] (251). so reason is in fact what brings one to the necessity of the wager and the decision of the wager?

okay, and then. after this bit about the infinite force of the proposition and weighing the incertainty of winning and the certainty that one risks that i don't understand, he writes, "this is demonstratative and, if men are capable of any truth, this is it." the truth of the proposition then, of the bet itself. what kind of truth is this? the point, i think, is to approach this absolute truth that one can be certain of, but the path pascal takes is so ambivalent. renouncing reason and the possibility of its certainty only to reaffirm it in the certain decision of the bet and "the reason which leads you here" [but which somehow you still cannot accept -- because you nevertheless cannot believe!--this isn't the certain reason at all but some other reason? a reason that still desires to be denied? it is NOT reason that stops you from believing. surprisingly.]

and it's through ritual and custom that the truth makes itself absolute [or makes one believe it to be absolute, the feeling os absolute-ness]. repetitive performativity, and the rest (butler). for pascal the point of customs is to diminish human passions (253), which osbtruct the divine because it makes humans corrupt, less likely to ressemble divine good (i'm not actually sure about this). --related to berlant's "dead citizenship"? but this is the kind of truth it must be in order to be truth: total coverage. it's a kind of wish that destroys itself as the possibility of its attainment is being described [it's being wished out].

okay, i'm going to post on dictee later today.

let's play dress up--you can be anamorphosis

I can post! This sort of little thing has been keeping me sane lately. Like: I got the light fixed in our bathroom and now I'm practically and happily blinded each time I flip the light switch.

Hm, Jessica. I'm worried that I no longer have anything to say. I'm going up to visit the boy next weekend and there will be dinner at a peruvian restaurant and much romping through san francisco and sea lions and star trek. Then the week after he's coming down for a week-long (!) visit in Irvine--he'll be finished with classes by then. I feel spoiled at the prospect of intense time-spending with boy after maybe getting used to such long lulls between visits.

I've been reading too much, I think. Enough that sometimes I'm not sure there's room in my mind for my original thoughts or connections. Also, I'll pick up where I left off in a book and it'll be five pages (and depending on what it is, five pages might take me a really long time) before I realize that I've already read this part.

Also, I had all my music on shuffle recently and desaparecidos came on and I had to skip over it. At the time it just seemed so wrong to be so young and so sad and raspy.

But it is one way to live

For the record, I'm streaming the new Bright Eyes album. Do you remember, when I first told you, "Vicki, I think he's really crying!" And I always pictured him as Rivers Cuomo.

Yesterday I went to the UNLV Architecture library to do some research on this designer for class, and the librarian was kind of mean to me about not being a UNLV student. So I tried to be, just, sickeningly polite because when I was a school librarian I learned of the inordinate power the librarian has to make things very easy. It worked, and I got my books. Like, seriously, don't be mean to your librarian. When it's the night before a paper's due and your card is expired and you have no change for the copy machine and you need a book that's buried deep inside the system...

I've also got to put together a room for some family called "The Stewarts." We have the floor plan of the space, but we pick the family dynamics. I've decided it's a hip feminist single mother with two teenage kids--really because I want to put a Justine Kurland print on a big wall I saved. (I am nervous about the idea of picking art because it matches the sofa or designing a room around a Rothko. Is there a way for art to contribute to a space without just being another 'thing' in it, more than 'stuff.' But this is a much bigger ideaproblem.)




Justine Kurland, Pine Forest,
C-print, 2005



And I'm using this brilliant coffee table that is just a plate of glass and some wheels. Super functional but poetic in its simplicity, which is a kind of decoration, too, says Hugh Fogel at Unica.

the blogging of jessica and vicki

i like that we can look at past entries and think, so this is still what we are, or, i remember it used to be that i could say this. even though it's not the same anymore.