after not sleeping
Posted by leerocco on October 24, 2007
I couldn’t sleep the other night and tried to post this then, but my hijacked internet connection wasn’t working. I have mixed feelings about posting it now. The reason I do is that I want to write things here. If this is only a place for good things or things I really like, it will be really empty and pointless. If it is a place for things, it might work.
At any rate, I’m interested in particulars, but in a general sort of way. For instance, I’m interested in myself, my experience or something, but really only as it relates to or is the general. The General, I suppose, is what I mean.
For instance, I was just lying awake thinking about math, reading Brian Rotman. I was thinking with him and realizing that I’ve thought with him for a while.
What am I doing? I feel like I’m back at stage one with this thing. Stage one as in middle school or something.
Or maybe I’ve just come to the point in the narrative of a young blogger where I question the purpose of my blogging. My friend Jim Brown will question it, in a different way, in the general case, at some point, possibly already past.
But what I thought was keeping me up or what was keeping me up initially was a question about math and finitude and the world-of-(human-)experience. I can’t think of a better way to put it. I was thinking of the discreteness that Rotman was talking about in Chapter 3 of Mathematics as Sign. I couldn’t stop reading it. It was the best reading I’ve ever done, both because it was good and because it was good for me. I mean, my major problem in grad school was reading too slow and too long. This happened fast or seemed to. At least it was painless. That’s probably because it is all I was thinking about doing.
So the talk of discreteness got me thinking about the little I’ve heard about finitude. I need to read more. That’s probably the bottom line.
But what I want to say is that the world is finite, bounded. It’s as big as this: _______. And all those spaces in between… Are they visible? They are gaps, nothings. They depict nothing. They are as much ends as the ends on the ends. It’s all compact, impacted, fractal. But Derrida knew this a long time ago. But it’s moving. He knew this too.
Does the performative give us a way “out” of this? A way to work out (of) the fractal? This is what I want to ask. But I might also… I might just want to know: Does the performative give me something more to say about this? That also connects my particular life with the world-of-(all-)experience(s)…. That makes me feel better about it. I like it better than the other thing. What’s the other thing? What am I scared of? It’s something Theresa hates. It’s the one-man-as-universal thing. Or so it seems. But it makes sense or it’s ok if it’s just about wanting to say something.
