Normal men do not know that everything is possible

Comments

[starlight]

ok. once you heavily overdetermine your meaning of "normal," and "men."

And then: "possible," sure. Probable? Desirable? thinking at the extremes tends to relieve us of the more difficult, often humiliating compromises that we must make. It helps us to see the compromises for what they are, and for this purpose thinking at the extreme is useful.

And then besides the question of judgment is the question of the temporal. Is everything possible at once? What is this, the big bang every moment? The fantasy of the time of origins only helps the priests who wish to guide the children's pathways to maturity.

I dislike the naysayers who say "get real," but here I find myself asking about strategy and tactics, the organization and the step-by-step as a response to the ideological calls for "everything is possible."

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1539636965]

Another Wittgenstien twist. Wittgenstein believed that language can not be linked to data from the world but are included in various linguistic contexts. He called the contexts a "language games".

[James]

Hannah Arendt I presume

[James]

-Static, absolute nothingness that has the potential to turn into anything at any moment. Whether or not this was your reason for selecting the picture does not matter for me, I still like it.
--What is a normal man? How does she view normal man? Does normal have to do with education, family structure, income, abilities; all combined? I'm just not sure what Arendt means here, and I sort of like it.
---I take it to mean that structure is artificial and can always be redesigned. Society can go in ay direction_it is possible_but it will never happen.
----Perhaps mob mentality could shed light on this quote. Men are capable of everything when in a ready state of mind.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

"I dislike the naysayers who say "get real," but..."

Starlight, for Lacan, a "normal subject" as opposed to a "madman", is not the one who fully accepts the external reality with all its unfavorable appearances and incidents, on the contrary, he/she never takes into account particular realities that he/she fully recognizes exist. In other words, a normal man who successfully graduated from the primary school of interpellation, as a rule, ignores certain realities that are excluded from the symbolic network. Therefore, the call to "get real" is actually trick invitation that we supposed to politely decline and do the exact opposite.

[pollywog]

i guess im paranormal cos i prefer the black noise of silence and solitude not the static generated as background noise echoing the big bang...shhhhhh

[starlight]

Ramesh, Mehmet, pollywog, Jodi: sounds like we have four modes/spaces: 1) the ideology to play it straight; 2) the youthful call to burst all bounds and start anew 3) a somewhat rueful resistance within the (language games of the) commonplace(s) (knowing we can't get truly outside, and knowing, therefore, that we're not acting innocently) 4) black noise of silence (which I presume is the pack-it-in, pack-it-out ethos of the gen-ex generation (who resist that label)

Given the 1989 revisitations, Jodi's message is clear enough. Can we get a better sense, though, of to make something possible realized (without resorting to the fantasy of the absolutely new (and even the fantasy of the hiccup "exact" or "absolute" opposite?