the state i am in
Active member
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2009
- Messages
- 2,475
- MBTI Type
- infj
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Oh so I did actually understand! This is great because I always feel stupid talking about this stuff with other people, especially this particular INFJ, because I never feel like I understand work like this 100%. Sometimes I think it's because the structure of the writing is specifically not meant to be understood 100% by anyone, which is totally why the INFJ (and ENTP) likes it, and totally why I tend to have problems with it. In other words, the question "is it true" is just not one that you ask with something like Heidegger.
topological models of all types really favor Ni. we see them as a scaffolding that we can rotate. your ability as an intp to lock in to specific scales of analysis really helps clarify what we gloss over. the overall big picture feeling you get from these theorists is what we go off of, whereas intp types tend to locate the limitations of use between the metaphorical constructs we bridge/fudge so easily. deleuze, i'd guess, is an intp. it's a topological spring cleaning, gets me out of the traps i keep creating, etc. Ti precision can be glorious.
Ooh, now I tend to like Foucault, and I've just been familiarizing myself with Latour. Deleuze I cannot understand for the life of me, something about machines and lines of flight and ribosomes. I haven't read much Bourdieu, but I like what I have read. Derrida is also slightly incomprehensible to me, though I have admittedly put little effort into understanding. As a whole, though, this kind of stuff is very interesting.
Additionally, I also find George Lakoff and his work on metaphors to be extremely interesting...how the metaphors that we use in daily speech (such as up and down) are really abstract extensions of our root bodily experience.
i'm a terrible reader and there's no way in hell i could actually make it thru a deleuze book. his conceptual sections are great, but then he just likes to Play, with a read if you dare kind of attitude (or not, go discover your own!) there's secondary literature online everywhere, wikipedia etc, and two books one by todd may and one by brian massumi that i find far more readable than deleuze himself. derrida is only worthwhile when you want to have a similar conceptual set in a more specifically textual domain. he's probably an intp too, but he's not as broadly reaching as deleuze, whose vision is more instantly penetrating wherever he finds himself. less language-based, more pictorial and sciencey. wittgenstein is interesting too as probably the cleanest wisest most elegant philosopher of language (esp. with regard to what cannot be said, clearing away conceptual noise, etc)
i heard this definition in a cogsci class called distributed cognition i took at ucsd. "metaphor is using knowledge in one domain to organize understanding in another domain." i'm in love with this. this concept is pretty much my raison d'etre. or maybe that's just the magic mushrooms talking. pre-semantic priming, there's nothing better.
Oh wow, that is awesome. I have a classmate in my graduate school cohort who is doing religious studies as a secondary MA to his rhetoric PhD. From what he says and the material he brings up, it sounds like a very interesting area of study. And I always liked anthropology...especially this one course that I took in undergrad entitled "linguistic anthropology." This is where I got to read some Bourdieu.
I study rhetoric, though my focus is less on the cultural studies or critical theory side of it (hence my confusion), and more on argumentation and rhetoric of science.
your program sounds interesting. when i thought i was going straight to grad school, the berkeley rhetoric program looked great. judith butler, the foucauldian scholar dreyfuss, etc, great resources.
rhetoric is an interesting subfield. my soapbox, lately, has involved bitching about a nation of lawyers, of legal language, etc. so much of our ethical standards are held hostage to rhetoricians and their tactics. we DESPERATELY need a counterbalancing force. when we cannot successfully tax the hell out of the rich bc they can manipulate the letter of the law. when we have prison overcrowding for drug violations waged on the premise of "WAR," etc. when corporate conglomerates and pharmaceutical lobbies shape the lives of the working class all the way down to the smallest most minute expression (let us rename our species to "customer service representative") with a moral legal literalalist interpretation of our RELIGIOUS "mission statement," etc. crazy, insane, inane, etc. also, politics. news. media. on and on and on.
Yeah, I will definitely try, because intuitive people are hard enough to find, and it's even harder to find intuitive people that I actually like. And she was not hurt over that particular incident, so your comment about being forgiving to other introverts on this point seems to be holding.
eh, we're all in the same boat. introverted intuitives are often almost work-of-art disastrous, but they're creative, clever/fun, and almost always interesting. once you get past (and keep working to get past) the communication barriers from undernourished extraverted articulations, gestures, etc, ESPECIALLY with people who you share a solid and productive cultural ethnicity/interest/attraction blah blah, it's worth it.