(Coding worked fine. Well done!)

It is nice to try to make problems go away, but they nevertheless tend to haunt us for a while even after the solutions are there; people have been known to say “We’re all Keynesians, now,” but you won’t find people saying “We’re all Heideggerians, now.” And for good reason – the age of Descartes and Kant and the mind-body problem and determinism/free will debates is not yet over.

P.S. Hope my coding worked!

Yeah, you caught me—I overstated my case with the white spaces. All I actually intended was to use them as a capital-T Theory–type symbol that my interpretation arises in the “reading” experience as well, not just the “interpreting” experience, but I let the metaphor take over the point. I meant to focus more on the shift in writing style than on the typography.

I like this idea of primordial intersubjectivity. For one thing, solipsism chaps my pragmatic hide. (For this next bit, I’m working pretty much from 6-year-old memories of lectures in classes on second-generation English Romantic lit and German lit in translation, so if my backside is hanging out, please correct me.) The Kantian idea that we can only ever know things through the mediation of our sensory and intellectual apparatus is a nonstarter for me as a road of inquiry; it’s an important thing to understand, but every time I look at it I end up seeing only my navel, and that doesn’t accomplish anything useful. The professor in my German-lit class mentioned an example (maybe from Kleist?) of someone who saw the whole world in green. Could he be sure the world was green, or did he perhaps just have eyes made of green glass? This, to me, is where the idea of “as if” comes in—if you have literally no way of determining whether your sensory and intellectual impression that the world is green is true, you might as well act as if it were true, since you have no other option that can produce results. After recognizing our epistemological limitations, I think it’s generally most fruitful to act as if they were not there. Let them temper our certainty, certainly, but don’t let them scare us away from trying to understand anything. And that sounds a lot like a reframing that lets the problem just go away.

(And I realize I’ve kind of just said this whole post is about a problem I prefer not to consider as a problem, but your comment lets me see the kind of resolution I was trying to gesture toward at the end of the post. The communication/community that is at the core of every part of IJ for me would naturally create the intersubjectivity you mention.)

Also, that kind of intersubjective construction reminds me an awful lot of the motto at Schtitt’s boyhood gymnasium: “WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN.”

I’m interested to hear more about your friend’s work, if you’ve got a link or a copy. You know, near and dear and all that. (Off the cuff, I’m nervous about the idea of separating nature from the question of sexuality, but then it looks like your friend’s work might be more about identity than pure sexuality, in which case I’d easily agree on the social component.)

Let me point out that I’m not sure that the “white spaces” and annuli or annuluses (the little rings, maybe Ray at Love, Your Copyeidtor knows the plural?) are playing a material role. I think I saw a while back on the IS site that the annuli represent “proper” chapter breaks while the spaces a just breaks within a chapter, as the narration shifts to a different site. Interestingly, there are also shifts that take place without changing the channel, but just by panning the camera (such as the I think it was a syrofoam cup that is kicked up by the wheel of Gately’s borrowed car and hits the door of Antitoi Entertainment, after which point the “camera” lingers with Lucien until his awful Teresa-like demise).

But that doesn’t really concern the intersubjectivity/solipsism/aphonia /inferential-justification- of-the-other problems. I would just point out one thing: the best philosophers, imho, typically think that subjectivity (interior experience) is a consequence of a more “primordial” intersubjectivity. In plainer language, we know ourselves only insofar as we are seen and known by others. There are in fact plenty of cases where this happens on a very concrete level – someone can tell you whether you are “in love” or even more often hav e”fallen out of love” before you are conscious of that fact. A friend of mine did work on gay identity (which he does not believe is “nature” but a complex mix of biological subjectivity and socially organized pleasure capacities, among other things) that sprouted out of a very simple phenomenological experience, to wit, that others knew he was gay before he did. And they could thus know something “true” about him that was not a part of his conscious articulation of self, and did not depend, for instance, in his being in “bad faith” or some other state of self-deception.

What’s nice about this is that we are no longer caught in an endless philosophical loop of solipsism, never able to surmount our own interior for unguarded access to the conscious life of another. In a certain way, the question no longer arises (and this would fit well with a Wittgensteinian view of philosophical problems never being “solved,” but rather just going away).

Still, while solipsism proper may have gone away, establishing authentic/sincere communication between subjectivities that are mediated (or, fancy word, interpellated) by culture industries and institutions that monopolize violence remains a deep concern for all of us. And som once again (1), I am waiting to see the meaning of Hal’s Year of Glad aphonia – Is it the end? Is it a protection against the world’s invasive horrors? Is it the effect of the Entertainment, or a moment that surpasses the Entertainment?