quotidian

Going With the Wind

...the end of the twentieth century seems to have come up with another disorder, schizophrenia, a psychic rather than a nervous disorder, as if it had been reading not (or not only) Hegel and Freud but [Nietzschean] Foucault and [Lacanian] Deleuze. Repeatedly evoked to describe a range of contemporary cultural phenomena, schizophrenia is best understood in linguistic terms as a snapping of the signifying chain that relates words in sense-making sequences. With syntax shattered, only scattered textual bits and pieces (signifieds) remain. Schizophrenia shatters that other form of syntagmatic continuity as well -- history -- leaving behind scattered temporal bits and pieces (immediacies). I'm not sure whether one can still think of the century in human terms -- humanoid, perhaps -- for schizophrenic language, memory, and feeling are transformed beyond recognition.

Margreta de Grazia
1590: Fin-de-Siècle Renaissance England
from Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990
Elaine Scarry, ed.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p48

Neoteny Indeed

For a pet, the average person needs an animal that remains a child. Children, raised with traditional discipline, can be made to submit -- humor me on this -- forced to take direction and accept training, molded to the will of the adult. Is that not the essence of rearing children, to produce a fine, god-fearing adult with good values and good character, in the parent's image? So nature gives us a window of opportunity to shape and mold, before the child becomes a large, hairy adult with nose rings, full-body tattoos, and the defiance, strength, and obstinacy to resist domination. Oh, the neoteny of it all. Just as wild kittens grow up to become wild cats, so children grow up to become human beings. Perhaps the fundamental goal of all domestication is to draw this genetic compliance of childhood forward and fix it in the adult animal, creating a creature that we can bend to our will and our emotional needs.

William Jordan
A Cat Named Darwin
Houghton Mifflin, 2002