/lit/ - Literature

random thought, but in the absence of a Twitter account i'll post it here: in the great age of mimesis and language games it becomes impossible to tell the difference between poisons and cures, innovations and regressions, that which destroys and that which empowers.

computer programs are perhaps described in terms of their functions and relative complexity; there isn't really a standard for human beings, although we do know that there are limits on our memory. but social obligations can become, in a way, a kind of metaphysical bloatware.

in a complicated ritual, such as a tea ceremony, what you might have thought was a relatively simple process - sit down, pour tea, drink tea - in fact becomes so freighted with significance that every aspect of it becomes a kind of triumph of aesthetics. tea ceremonies are beautiful, and we don't really think of them as having been somehow polluted with needless ornamentation because it takes so long to get your tea. there's no 'cutting out the middleman' when it comes to a tea ceremony, because the point of a tea ceremony is not actually to just drink the tea, anymore than turning going to Starbucks into a ritual would be (however much Starbucks would love for you to do this, and to supply it with a degree of the sacred that makes for wonderful advertising).

but *to introduce new customs and new habits* into the socius is a kind of a fascinating phenomenon. this, in a sense, is why political correctness or language policing bothers us: it's like being forced to comply with new rituals that we did not sign up for. *had* we signed up for them, the introduction of new programs, subroutines, customs and other aesthetic requirements might strike us as being fascinating, as things that contributed to our enjoyment.

but this is the nature of postmodernity today; the elimination of one set of rules necessarily produces another, and we are increasingly subjected to the new requirements of cultural imperatives which we not only cannot tell if we want or do not want, we are not even sure where they come from.

it's a 6/10 thought, kind of interesting but unifnished. i'll stick it here anyways. ceremonies, computer programs, bloatware, language games, rituals...meh, i think there's something in that. just not sure what atm.