I got Lawful Good. Some notable examples given are Superman, Sherlock Holmes and:
Captain Jean-Luc Picard
I was reminded of it when @Billchu13 and @Dahamburgler approached me one day while I waited for a friend for lunch and asked what alignment I thought the X-men's Magneto would fall under (for the record, I answered Lawful Evil)
I bring this up because of a recent thought brought on by my writing and then thoughts on life in general. You see, I believe rather strongly that you must know the rules in order to be able to break them. Be they the rules of the game, the rules of convention or the rules of society. Not to say that you cannot break the rules if you don't know them, but to break rules unintentionally is ignorance.
This is a matter of intention and creating meaning. The act of breaking a rule, knowing full well the consequences of your actions makes the act a political statement against the rule or system the rule represents. So there is a morality to the breaking of the rules that define our morality.
Comparing this to the ideas expressed in the Avital Ronell clip from Examined Life, we find that the honor of the Lawful Good or Lawful Evil is exactly the kind of alterity that maintains a level of consciousness about their actions. They are bound by their moral code, it is the law that obligates them to act honorably and in doing so occasionally question the higher authorities that ask of them to compromise for the greater good.
In starting over with parasites, we are effectively rewriting the rules, but this requires us to break the old rules.
Destruction is a messy process.
But so is rebuilding.
If love as Serres puts it is the great inbetween, the included and excluded third connecting two points, the parasite, then this what we are doing is an act of love. It is the chaos of noise before we habituate (there I go using that word again). This rebuilding is the fever that we talked about in class.
In that sense then, what we are doing is an intentional act. We know we are breaking the rules and are making a statement in order to create the kind of meaning we want to get from this class.
On a completely separate note:
While watching @low's clip of Melville I started thinking about Cinema as an act and how it relates to this class.
Cinema is a performance. Cinema is noise. Cinema is a "labor of love." Labor -> pregnancy -> production. See that thought process? It is the incubation and internalization of all the work being put into the production. Cinema is the intermediary between audience and director/producer in the same way a book is the intermediary between author and reader.
And it is uttered from the mouth of the actors.
I really have no idea if or how I was going to develop this any further. I just thought I'd share in case it made any of you readers felt compelled to question any of this.
4 comments:
your claim that "Cinema is the intermediary between audience and director/producer in the same way a book is the intermediary between author and reader." is, somewhat true, but also inherently false, for as most any director would tell you, actors are their worst nightmare, because they aren't completely controllable, and therefore the final product is as much an intermediary between actor and audience as between director/producer and audience.
What does it mean to know a rule? It means to know a construct, right? And in this context, a societal construct. So what if we break the rule? We're still referring to it as 'breaking the rule', we're still connecting ourselves to it.
Then we have the destruction and rebuilding. What is the rebuilding? The rebuilding of new rules? New constructs? Will we not inevitably grow sick of our own rules again in time and have to do it over? Will we keep switching between rules to keep things interesting? Will that be a rule in all the new rules? Or will we revise the rules until they are so fluid that there become no rules? Is there a third option after we've grown sick of our revision? Will we 'reboot'? What does that even mean? Rebooting still leaves you with the system-- a blank slate, but the system. The ultimate reboot is throwing the computer off the balcony, but can we afford that luxury? Can we live without rules? And if we tried, how would we avoid inevitably falling back into a ruled world? Are we destined to create constructs as a means to keep peace and balance? Is this our method of homeostasis? Rule making?
Your thoughts...
I would argue that breaking a rule without knowing it exists displays pure action, more than ignorance.
If you don't know a rule exists, then you are acting outside of the constructs of a ruling one way or the other. Without the social constructs getting in the way, that unconscious rule breaking us simply an action in it's most broken down form; that is, a result of desire.
pure action. Pure desire. Dogish. Do we question? No--and it doesn't ask. It is. It plays.
I am never sure which idea I like more--breaking rules or abandoning them. There is certainly more effort, more consciousness put into knowing and then breaking rules. But breaking without knowing--existing outside of--there is a great weightlessness about this idea.
I feel as if I am sometimes goaded into calling one wrong and the other right. But I do not want to. I do not want to.
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