Heidegger

I was browsing again and find myself trying to be more conscious of the experience of linking and googling. I come across writing and read and try to asses quickly whether or not something has authority for me. It’s a risky business that is not answered by relying on institutional sources which can be the most trivial and suspect. When you cut something out to paste it this is a really quick and dirty operation where you don’t have to agree with whatever else the person wrote that you cut out of. It simply is like the process that Levi-Strauss called bricolage. I come across prefabricated expressions that are found while browsing that are reworked and made to resonate in another sense that is given by the history of what I have already written. I could give a real fancy academic explanation of how this works but this trivializes what is essentially an improvisational folk art. Bricolage is not unlike what “we” often reference as improvisational free jazz which, yes, is an analogy that breaks down all over the place and runs into snags that drag it into fuzzy thinking that in the end looks like a patchwork made of fragmented phrases whose origin made sense in a different system but now looks positively foreign. You get a sort of idiom that has to support itself by invention as it moves along. It has to come up with neologisms for instance because thinking starts to ponder more noise than signal as it tries to think that which is emerging and often simply has no words. This is what was most interesting about the discussion of neologism in the wikipedia article on this topic. The article itself is one of those self-reflective moments that give a little insight on the transformative nature of this new media that is leading to new inventions like wikipedia and its collective writing experiments whose politics we witness in the discussion of the article. When rapid changes are happening this is the time when people neologize becoming comfortable with a fluid sense of what is real which is the skeptical attitude one has to take on the internet. You really have to use your own judgement.

****

So that is what I did and am doing as I paste the found fragment you see below that is helping me to think through a little more what I am trying to grope towards on my knees as it were while practicing my Jesus chant.
A narrow path is also that taking of a stance in the sense of dwelling or an erect standing out waiting for…. or simply as a simple being there with… It’s a process that polishes the heart but also sharpens the edge of a knife or an arrow to use more metaphors that can operate as symbols as much as “tags” or “colors” of a collective prolepsis, midrash or wikipedic communal expression. A Biblical emphasis is a prejudice for certain symbols over others that come to resonate with tropic possibilities given how immersed a person is in the contemplative life and how much of the habits of classic primary source codes have been learnt, how much of God’s DNA you have received. The source code is public property and is what helps us avoid a crazy coder who doesn’t know what he is doing that might create an unwanted virus. Part of networked discourse is this question of what constitutes strong immunity. For “us” it is about participating as an artist in a creative process that gives way to emerging stories of how a people come a have a sense of themselves. Being able to defend oneself is certainly part of this story. It is the story that one is compelled to tell after a while of how we became “disciples of Jesus”. It’s not about writing propositional apologetics but describing a process by which one became an extremely vigilant guard looking out for the subtlest nuanced movement of the enemy (the individualist consumerist I and its natural appetites). It is the consumerist I which defines what it means to be alienated and not to own oneself, not to be at one’s ownmost possibility which cannot be outstripped. It is what gets us distracted from the narrow way, from the straight gate.
The path is a process that involves the ability to *concentrate* and focus with a single and simple intention in mind, a “naked intention” that is code for a “pure heart”. The narrow path is related to the Greek source indicated by the word “histemi*
***
“In the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, we discover histemi’s original nuance, that a subtly contemporaneous listeners would have appreciated. We learn histemi “conveyed a sense of relationship” and it “referenced the place in which the person took their stand.” The women at the empty tomb who experienced the risen Messiah probably would have known that histemi was “derived from a root which implies that it was active in nature and that it contributed to the enabling of others to stand upright, conveying the sense of initiating, instituting, appointing, and performing something related to standing, establishing, stirring up, and causing others to rise.” “ http://yadayahweh.com/chapter.aspx?g=510…
***
Contemplative Christian immunology is the ability to defend the perimeter of our heart to keep it virgin. So the polishing of the heart is like the clearing away all the garbage and wild growth from the “stupid idiot” who is clueless of who he is. In order to grow in the spirit and practice servanthood we have to separate out the “stupid idiot”;– the individualist I who is in the way of a serious communal experience. I’m not the “intellectual idiot” that’s for sure but I am willing to give it a try.
Jesus have mercy on my soul as my thoughts are nothing….
***
So the prompting of the spirit causes a movement that is also an uprising, a rebellion against the corruption of the I. This process of negative theology is also a negative labour power which is the ability to refuse the commands of the stupid idiot and produce on the basis of *co-operation* which is the basis of value or the first good. This is what gives us *free time*. Negative labour is the freetime of non-work. Negative labour power in this regard is the liberation of time from the conditions of exploitation.

Posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 5:10 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback