what I always took away from my time with Lacan was the impossibility of postmodernism. Disassociating the sign from its power and context is not a possibility. He wouldn't agree with that, but I think he could have been convinced. Upon returning from his trip to Japan, he claimed that "you cannot psychoanalyse the Japanese" due to multiple factors, most of which being the grammatical fluidity of how the Japanese language handles the subject of sentences. (A lot of people have taken this claim very seriously, but I'm not so sure he meant it like that. He said similar things about "Catholics" and "the English" and so on. I kind of think he was half making a joke, half making a meta-point about how psychoanalysis isn't really possible with any macro-group and only possible with atomized, chewed-up-and-spit-out-the-mouth-of-Capital individuals).

I think what he probably, actually observed was a culture that hadn't yet been entirely consumed by the sirens song of postmodernism -- of believing that symbols do not have power when removed from their context. He saw a culture where people will place the (upside down) death date of legendary outlaw Ishikawa Goemon outside their business, believing that the symbol would protect them from thieves.

Would a belief in the innate power of a symbol halt the process of psychoanalysis? Perhaps the psychoanalyst is simply one who DOES believe in the power of symbols, of words, of allusion, and takes them seriously enough to try and connect them.

Sometimes I wonder if our historiography is all wrong, because we kept trying to categorize WHILE it was happening. We we talking about post-modernism WHILE we were doing it ; of course we're going to have a skewed image of it.

I think Actually Existing Post-Modernism is really more about the decentralization of symbolic power, rather than it's dissolution. Whether we believe it or not, every symbol in our life has power. We make connotations and those connotations shift us in imperceptible ways -- it's impossible to be fully in control of one's self and opinions. We are a people who "want to want" things. We don't want to exercise, but we "want to want to exercise". We don't control our tastes and preferences and inner reactions. Our inner life is barely our own, controlled much more completely by a vast, impossibly complex symbolic network of images and sounds and words and feelings, all crisscrossed by interconnected symbols and associations.

I guess what I'd say is: it doesn't matter if the symbol has innate "power," because embew them with power whether we want to or realize or not.

there’s something I’ve been trying to express about operating systems. it seems like Unix-likes, DOS, Haiku, illuminos, etc. all have their own “idioms” or in other words, they assume the user knows and follows a set of axioms? “everything is a file” the way the PATH works, the way files are expected to be arranged, the way programs are meant to be installed and others from the lower to higher levels. they all assume different ways of using them. and I think those should be more explicitly talked about

A six-foot tall woman can do whatever she wants forever honestly 💅

this shit has me crying