In what sense is a must read a must read? Or a must-watch a must-watch? Or a must-listen a must-listen?
Or to generalize, a must-obey cultural consumption/knowledge imperative.
It is a version of authoritarian “what isn’t prohibited is compulsory” but an unusual kind
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is it really authoritarian, or do we just not like to be left out of the popular things?
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I think that’s a grey zone thing. Popularity is weak social proof of potential historicity, but some things embody actual historicity, where past and future of X don’t make sense without X. Memes that flood the meme pool.
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i think the statement "some things embody actual historicity" is too dubious to argue one way or the other
to wit, the stroke by which the past and the present "make sense" we should always regard with skepticism, that is, as a stroke which seeks its own, artificial historicity
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I agree, it is 100% dubious and I don’t actually believe it, but that’s the point. Historicity is a construct that a) you can opt-in to b) has no pr9vileged version.
It’s more than popular appeal, but falls short of an absolute temporality (which I argue cannot exist)
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i disagree
i think absolute temporality is the mechanism which enables art to exist, in a large part by dissolving historicity into it--sort of an experiential vortex
and as such, we are in no position to evaluate this kind of temporality, only experience it
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Ah I would say there’s no way to experience this absolute temporality at all, *except* through transient experiencable temporalities that emerge from and collapse back into it. So to believe in it is a leap of faith
This is where I end up disagreeing with experienced meditators
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that's more of a feature than a bug imo
transience is the essence of whatever we are, as paradoxical as that sounds; anyone who says otherwise is selling something
but whether we choose to understand that negatively or positively is up to us
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I’m not tagging it as either, just rejecting claims of absolute experience
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A clock is the design outcome of applying occam’s razor to narratives
Tick-tock is merely the simplest endless story you can tell.
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as paul ricoeur and virginia woolf show us, this cuts both ways:
the desire to transcend the relative illegibility of finite, experiential time (ironically) produces a more illegible, abstract, and absurd vision of the Absolute
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Or as bob hope said, eternal nothingness is fine so long as you’re dressed for it

