Random thoughts re: sense perception, experience, Hartman's book, etc
Couple three quick thoughts, probly lowering the already low standard. Sorry/not sorry/deeply sorry as existential condition.
First off, I'm interested in hand tool wood working. The little I've done it, I find it fun, rewarding, and, I don't know how else to say this: Tetris-like in the way that rock climbing is (again, from the little I've done it) Tetris-like. What I mean is that it takes a lot of concentration, fills up the whole mind so to speak, and as a result shuts off a lot. These metaphors are gonna get so mixed, I'm basically gonna do the word equivalent of randomly grabbing shit out the fridge and cobbling it into a meal (an apple, some pasta, splash of vinegar, a few hunks of cheese, call that a salad, shut up and eat it!), terribly sorry. Okay, so sometimes I feel a bit like a browser with too many tabs open. Some activities restart the browser, so to speak. Or, like yoga (again from the little...) - my sense is that in yoga one is always subjecting body parts to a) flexing, b) stretching, c) relaxing (that I say 'subjecting to relaxing' speaks volumes about who I am as a person probly but I refuse to go there, you can't make me have that particular intrusive thought), and what happens over multiple poses is that different body parts get each of the three activities. That's valuable in part because often times parts of our bodies are doing too much of one and not enough of another, so it balances things out, so to speak. Tetris is kinda like that, by flexing specific parts of my mind it gets parts of my mind to relax and other parts to stretch. (I'm told it can be genuinely beneficial for treating PTSD as well.) So yeah, hand tool shit, it's good, I like it, it's fun. This is a good story, I'm good at telling stories.
I don't have much time or money and rarely have both at the same time, so my life with hand tools is disorganized and regularly interrupted. I try to be at peace with that and just plug away when I can on the thought that it's a bit like slowly learning guitar - moving through phases of skill acquisition that lay the groundwork for a future practice that is more open ended and thus more meaningfully free. I also try to focus on the Tetris-like quality of it for the enjoyment now. Part of this eventual future freedom that interests me is chair making. (To be clear this is quite far off in multiple ways - my skill, the gear I own and space I have, and the time available.) As I've been thinking about that and watching the odd youtube video I notice that I now notice chairs more. As I've been moving toward dipping a toe into wood carving I notice things about wood and stuff made from wood. The activity trains perception, even just reading and thinking a bit about the activity does so. There's another Tetris analogy here - when I first started rock climbing, back when I did that a little, back when I had time to to things a little, I would leave the climbing gym and my mind would notice parts of brick walls - potential toe hold? maybe a hand hold? Again, activity trains perception.
I dunno if I'm using this word right but no one can stop me (I need to start saying this to myself in the mirror, looking myself in the eye, pointing, growling through gritted teeth 'you can't stop me, old man!') -- I'm gonna say the set of perceptions people have is 'the sensorium.' Insofar as people's activity changes over time due to various pressures and logics of social process, and insofar as activity trains perception, the sensorium changes over time, much like (and probably closely related to, come to think of it) changes in dialects and regional accents (ya gotta read dat in a Illinois/'Scahnsin border accent, aright? I ain't askin ya, I'm tellin ya. Jus rememmer da speak true yer nasal passages and ya be fine). There's something sad about that in the sense of what disappears or gets sidelined anyway, and I think that becomes a point of purchase for reactionary nostalgias, and there's also something beautiful about that if we make it future focused: as we become freer - and we will, in the long term, despite how brutal the duration of the long term looks to be - the sensorium will expand and become richer.
Second thought: This relates to what I saying the other day about William Paris's article about what's emancipatory in critical theory, both in that he refers to experience as being and needing to be educated, and as I noted there's a resonance with EP Thompson referring to the education of desire.
Third thought: I'm reading Andrew Hartman's book Karl Marx in America right now. It's long and I have lot else to do so I'm trying to be disciplined, not my strong suit (my strongest suit is the one I got married in, which probly doesn't fit anymore... is that joke funny? no, and nor is the reality it names! Addressin unpleasan realities tru unfunny jokes is a key parta da life a doze of us who Gahd saw fit to bless wit d'Illinois/Scahnsin accent, it's a cross we bear wit out anger, jus disappoinment), so I'm reading the book in about 20 pages chunks. I like it VERY MUCH so far. I just read the bit on the revolutionary union the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th century and I like that Hartman emphasize the IWW's marxism, something too often overlooked despite the organization inserting a basically word for word quote from Marx's Value, Price and Profit into its constitution's preamble in 1908. Anyway, Hartman talks about the Marxism of the IWW's membership and stress its sources in, on the one hand, intellectual traditions narrowly construed and political traditions understood as cultural phenomena, and, on the other hand, the experiences they had in particular ugly locations in a particularly ugly phase of capitalism. Here too experience is educated and at the same time experience is simultaneously itself educational (past experience shapes how future experience is understood) and also has a degree of reflection baked into the category as actually lived.
My thoughts on this are largely me paraphrasing parts of EP Thompson's essay The Poverty of Theory in his book The Poverty of the Theory, a sadly neglected classic best read charitably and expansively and not as about its immediate aims and objects (the very immediate aim is basically an extended fuck you at the philosopher Louis Althusser, lurking just being that aim is basically a passive aggressively delivered [I hereby note my intent to repeat the joke about midwest culture and regional accents, passive aggression being part of our heritage, and note as well that I have chosen not to indulge that intent so as to spare you, the reader, something you likely won't remember let alone appreciate. It's fine. I just need to go wash some dishes angrily now], at New Left Review under Perry Anderson's leadership.
Those paraphrasing thoughts are that experience as used in a lot of talk and in writing implicitly names two or three phenomena and their relationship, the first a kind of raw sense data and emotional responses and events in the world producing both of those, the second the often not immediately conscious effect of those on what is intuitive to people, and the third what people more consciously make of the all of the former. (If memory serves, Thompson calls experience a junction between social being and social consciousness.) That multifaceted complexity isn't always recognized in some dismissive talk about experience-talk, where experience is treated as only the first, the raw phenomena and immediate responses.
Fourth thought: ditto the second thought, applied now to Hartman and what he says about the Marxism of the IWW membership instead of to my rambling about tool usages etc.
Fifth thought: if social practice produces the sensorium and a great deal of social practice in working class life involves enduring heinous shit (as I mentioned the other day I recently saw the film Matewan in a theater for the first time, that's full of cases in point), then that means some degree of both training in perceiving heinous shit and also tuning out that perception (by analogy, I've sometimes spent time at work where I don't have time to eat for long stretches which leads to headaches but in those same stretches I got used to partially tuning out the hunger and headache), and it also means that in contexts where the heinousness isn't immediately present - I'm thinking of the scenes in Matewan where miners are in church in their nice clothes and I'm also thinking of the way that the mind can reel when in the presence of glimpses of how rich people live. I type this in a coffeeshop wearing a mask, where I move back and forth between basically forgetting the mask and uncomfortable aware that some people seem pretty aware of my mask. Hmm. (I remain a covid zero zealot though I talk about it less lately as I have less to say that I haven't already said, and sometimes it's hard to think if I'm busy shouting 'shit's fucked' over and over, and vice versa.)
Alright, gotta run an errand. Be well, or not, as you deserve! (Just kidding! No one ever gets what they deserve. ‘That's how the world works.’)