Here’s my ongoing recent fantasy about Alan Watts and Rosalind Krauss hanging out and having a really cool kid, as inspired by striking similarities I’m finding between Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity and Krauss’ Notes On the Index, pt. 1.
Watts: “You do not define this real, living ‘something’ by associating it with the noise man. When we say, ‘This (pointing with the finger) is a man’, the thing to which we point is not man. What, then, is this? We do not know. That is to say, we cannot define it in any fixed way, though, in another sense, we know it as our immediate experience- a flowing process without definable beginning or end. It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time… religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death.” (pgs. 49, 53)
I like how Watts finds a theoretical space between the “here and nowness” of Zen Buddhism and the late-40s/early 50s anxieties about “science and industry” interfering with society’s sense of itself, existing as a pseudo lubricant. I love pre-sexual-revolution writings on this kind of thing because my generation hasn’t commodified and romanticized the audience that people like Watts or Percival were writing for. Hippies and baby boomers weren’t born yet, or were babies, when these guys were writing. It’s a lot more touching for me because Watts was thinking about these things before and independent of the Western bohemian world’s very sudden swell into a huge sweaty Baba Ram Dass balloon of oft-diluted new-agey type thinking.
On the “other” hand, here’s Rosalind Krauss’ take on the same thing, except of course she doesn’t realize how tripped out she is (or maybe she does):
“The shifter… is ‘filled with signification’ only because it is ‘empty’. The word ‘this’ is such a sign, waiting each time it is invoked for its referent to be supplied. ‘This chair’, ‘this table’, or ‘this…’ and we point to something lying on the desk. ‘Not that, this,’ we say. The personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are also shifters. As we speak to one another, both of us using ‘I’ and ‘you’, the referents of those words keep changing places across the space of our conversation.” (pg. 197)
This opposition between the Symbolic and the Imaginary leads us to a further comment on the shifter. For the shifter is a case of linguistic sign which partakes of the symbol even while it shares the features of something else. The pronouns are part of the symbolic code of language insofar as they are arbitrary: ‘I’ we say in English, but ‘je’ in French, ‘ego’ in Latin, ‘ich’ in German… But the pronouns… announce themselves as belonging to a different type of sign: the kind that is termed the index… Into the category of the Index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents of the shifters. Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects… ” (pg. 198)
So if these two had a kid, aside from being a pretty big babe the kid would probably have the most amazingly developed sense of self, turning to mom for a linguistic-art-historical-Duchampian confirmation that they need to learn how to exist outside of a series of constructions, and turning to dad for a post-zen, pre-hippie confirmation of the same thing, and then all three hang out in the living room and roll a DaNk SpLiFf and the world proceeds to implode on itself.
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