If you're claustrophobic, don't go in there.

We've been on vacation for a week - the first week we spent in New York with the folks (a lot of fun, as always). We did not make it to a show, but did find two out of print Clusone 3 discs at the Downtown Music Gallery. A coup! AV also ate torchon of pig's head at Momofuku Ssam Bar (I had the lamb's belly). All in all, a success. We are presently enjoying the sand and sun of North Carolina, and we'll be here for a week and a half.

After the reunion (photos of people you don't know can be found here), I was feeling intellectually depleted. I should probably attribute this to my completing a full summer of brain drain at the hands of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but in any case, for the last half of the week AV was gone at the handmade film institute until about last Wednesday I couldn't be articulate and most of my insights were about inessential things (like my nails, for example, or Harry Potter). Poor AV. He returns from a week of intellectual stimulation with what sounds like a group of very interesting people, and surprise! Your wife's an idiot.

On Thursday last week AV and I met a friend of mine at MoMA. AV and I were on a mission to see the Richard Serra retrospective. Richard Serra is a brilliant sculptor working in giant steel plates. It's pretty awesome stuff, and it's stuff you can walk around in. This proved to be an interesting catalyst for my emerging from idiocy. On the second floor there are two huge installations of Serra's work, which are pretty much like steel labyrinths. They're molded in such a way that you can't actually see what is in front of you - you're required to follow narrow the path created by the steel in order to move forward. Additionally, the steel occasionally takes a curve that requires you to bend at the waist and effect a kind of zig-zag position with your body in order to maneuver through the sections. It's engaging and kind of terrifying at once. My friend - who is a dancer by training - was explaining how the sculptures challenge the notion of "center," where movement originates from. We continually reported an off-kilter feeling as we were walking through. As we arrived at the center of one of the sculptures, something clicked in my head and I started spouting Merleau-Ponty (I'm not kidding). In an important way, Serra's work supports MP's rejection of "spatiality of position," the idea that bodies take up space according to a grid/coordinate position. Serra's sculptures confound the grid because we were forcing our bodies to move more organically than mechanically - evidence for this is in my friend WT's admission that the sculpture challenged the center.

I've been making a joke about my processing of major events lately as"clinical," meaning that I attempt to think phenomenologically through the problem - this was the case with my Gommy's recent stroke, and - much less seriously - the reunion (alter egos emerging into my perceptual field), but here's an instance when it works kind of innocuously. I wasn't expecting to experience these pieces the way that I did, and since the pieces demanded a bodily engagement instead of a mere visual engagement, my experience of them was more profound and a trigger out of my own doldrums. :)

Thursday ended up being one of the most fun days I've had at the museum in a long time - we were enjoying ourselves immensely, and I think Serra's work intimidated people enough that it wasn't crawling with individuals trying to wind their way through the pieces. Thank goodness, because having to step over people or move single file through a Serra would be a horrible experience, but an experience nonetheless.

Another Way at the Problem

This time last year I was dealing with the problem of not knowing where to go in the storied discipline in which I work. I was thinking analytic epistemology was maybe a good idea, but I wasn't sure - and to be honest, I wasn't internally committed to the idea. Something just didn't feel right about it. This uncertainty stinks, especially if you are remotely considering applying to a PhD program.

Over the last year, though, things have revealed themselves very slowly. It's only just now that I've stumbled upon a philosophical question that is interesting, fruitful, and somehow is not a total stumper (there are a lot of those in philosophy). I'm spending some time on the problem of interaction, roughly the question "How do we know there are other selves?" My independent study is focused on this question, and the way it is resolved by phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger). It's important, I think, that the problem is usually couched as "How do we know there are other minds?" because phenomenology is in part an attempt to recover the whole self from the mind-body problem. Even in modern philosophy, though, this question has interesting resolutions (or attempts, in particular Leibniz's shot at it is fascinating). Merleau-Ponty resolved it pretty convincingly for me last semester, but I'm working deeper with his ideas this summer.

This question has consequences for how we behave toward those others we've discovered, so there's an important way in which this question is directed toward ethics. It is also a convenient study to be doing this summer, because in the fall I'm breaking from philosophy and taking a film studies course on "Film as History." I have designs on a paper about the problem I'm studying right now and The Lives of Others, which is a movie stinking with philosophical problems. It's also an amazing film.

Part of the good thing about going back to UC-D is that I've remembered I'm the most comfortable when I'm thinking in an interdisciplinary way, and continental philosophy is (at least for me) more congenial to this pursuit. When I told her this, my undergraduate advisor said "I told you so." She's been telling me this for years.

Experiencing Other People

We were in blustery Chicago over the weekend for the Easter holiday (as evidenced by the new photo at your right). More details about that to come.

For now, though, I'm getting ready for a presentation in my phenomenology class, and I'm curious to know how you would respond to the following question:

What is it like to be social?

This is not a question I'm asking because I don't know (although some of you may say "She doesn't have a social life, so that must be why she's asking us!"), but because I'm looking for some descriptions of what it is like to interact with other people. What impact do others have on you? I mean these questions in a kind of vague existential sense, but am appreciative of more specific responses.

What do you, three readers, think?