self-knowledge and rules

This has been a maddeningly depressing week, and I've literally wanted to cry more days than not. I also resolved to keep a minute-by-minute accounting of how I spend my time, partly out of curiosity, and partly in an attempt to explain to myself how I manage to get so little done. The results weren't as illuminating as I'd hoped, but hopefully keeping track over time will help reveal some things. For instance, I spent less than 20 hours working this week, which I think is scandalous, but I wasn't surprised. The real question is where all the other hours went, and sadly I didn't discover some big culprit lurking around, but rather a hundred little ones, each of which ate away at my life a half hour at a time. One surprise was that I spent nearly 10 hours getting from place to place. This isn't New York, so it's not like things are spread apart. In fairness, my bike was broken for the first half of the week, which slowed things down, but still.

It was a curious exercise, keeping track of time like that. It was inspired by a New York Times article I read the previous Sunday (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all) about people who found various ways to measure their lives in great detail, and the kind of discoveries they made. One consequence of keeping track of time was that, of course, I became much more self-conscious about how I was using my time. I think normally I'd spend more time on e-mail, for instance.

The hope with this project, as with the projects I read about, is that it will give a kind of objective self-knowledge that's not influenced by various personal desires or biases. It made me think there could be an interesting project in cataloging the various forms of self-knowledge we deem worthwhile. This is the self-knowledge of the social scientist, not the introspective artist. My thesis deals with self-knowledge in a roundabout way, but neither the self-knowledge of the artist nor of the social scientist, but rather the self-knowledge of recognizing our place in the world and how the world is constituted for us (to put it very briefly). All these forms of self-knowledge are supposed to bring us insight of a kind. Are they related, though? And are the insights similar or different?

Anyway, I just want to quickly respond to your latest post before writing a new post about the thing I wanted to say. I feel I should have lots to say, since of course my thesis deals with the philosophy of language in a way, and nonsense in a way, and touches on the Derrida/Austin/Searle triangle. I'm not really sure what I want to say, though. Maybe I should raise some question about rules, since that's also central to my thesis. You say Lecercle talks nonsense as a conservative genre because it reinforces the rules it toys with. I'm not sure what alternative he has in mind. Am I really being reactionary or conservative if I abide by grammatical rules? I thought that was just a requirement for making sense. I can be reactionary and conservative in the way that I play chess if I abide by traditional principles and play a very risk-free game, but I'm not being reactionary and conservative by abiding by the rules of chess and not using my pawn like a knight, for instance. Playing by the rules of the game isn't reactionary and conservative, it's constitutive of playing the game in the first place.

One of the things that I think is interesting about Carroll-like nonsense isn't that it violates or reinforces grammatical or other rules, but rather draws our attention to their contingency. Well, three points, really. First, our rules are somewhat arbitrary: why we can't say "curiouser," why we drive on the left in England or the right in North America, these things could just as well have been otherwise and the world still would have made good sense. Second, laying out these constitutive rules isn't itself a move in the game. Here I'm starting to sound all Wittgensteinian. But, for instance, saying "multi-syllabic adjectives take 'more' rather than the '-er' ending" (which, by the way, isn't always true: e.g. "more fun" and "happier") is simply explaining the framework within which we can say things. The things we say can be conservative or innovative, but explaining the rules for saying them is neither. I know, this distinction isn't as sharp as I've just drawn it. And third, a lot of pseudo-disputes in philosophy come from taking our arbitrary conventions to be factual statements of deep truths. Kripke famously claims that "the metre stick in Paris is one metre long" is a claim that is both a priori (you know it without having to look at it) and contingent (the metre stick in Paris could have been another length). This sort of reasoning leads to a whole slew of metaphysics about possible worlds rather than a reflection on linguistic conventions. I'm rambling, and not in a particularly clear manner, sorry.

But to tie this all into some sort of a knot, the kind of self-knowledge I was talking about in my thesis involves a proper understanding of our relation to our conventions. I talked about this in a paper recently, which deals among other things with Heidegger on das Man, where he seems to confuse conformism and conformity, as Lecercle maybe does as well. It's conformism to share the opinions of the top critics because you have no opinions of your own, and that's a bad thing. But the conformity of driving on the same side of the road as everyone else isn't just not a bad thing, it's the only sensible way to live with others.