- Jennifer Frances Armstrong I've learned that nothing I say can be understood by Americans, because they are so ego oriented -- which means emotion and self-esteem oriented -- that what I say sounds almost like the opposite to them, to what I'm really saying. For instance, if I were to make the plain statement that I'm not interested in self-esteem, they would probably take that to mean that I am do depressed I've given up on the one project that can give human life meaning. Everything taken as the opposite.
- LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley There's a problem with buzz-language here in the Western world. It gets to the point that I cannot communicate on a simple level with people who have spent their lives in the same region I have. I will speak plain English, and either they'll have no idea what I'm saying to them, or they'll get all these insane ideas that I mean something very abstract, and other than what I really mean.
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, it's very strange -- but generally I find the overwhelming error people make is to try to read ego-related issues or emotional battles into what I'm writing about. They don't pay attention to the structure, but to the idea that there's some kind of weird relational thing that they think I must be trying to regain.
- LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley The slang use here is frustrating. There are entire generations of people here who cannot speak if not to do so in slang terms. Modern "jive-talk". You can say the most ordinary thing to them, something simple, like "Do you know what time the bus will arrive?" And they'll look at you as if you had just landed a space ship, climbed out, and spoke to them in a series of beeps and clicks.
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, insider language
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong It's very lazy when they expect another person to automatically enter their emotional and linguistic worlds without being capable of forming a bridge to the other person's world.
- LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley Yes, I've seen a lot of the comments on your work, and I have to say, I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how assumptive, how presumptuous people here can be. They will choose to assign a meaning to something you've said, fully ignoring that ...See More
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, even relatively highly educated people can be prone to this, because it's their way of indulging themselves. I think they do themselves a disservice in pinching themselves off into their solipsistic bubbles.
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong There are many interpretations of Nietzsche and Bataille that are also in this false vein, only more subtle. The stop far short of understanding what these writers are trying to say.
- LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley That's why they're narcissists- they believe that you should be able to hone in on their mind's signal, even though they are strangers, far away, and know exactly how they'll choose to take something you'll say, so you should bend your writing around their thought processes.
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong For instance there is a tendency to turn Nietzsche into a meta-physician when he opposed metaphysics, or to turn the atheist, Bataille, into a normative Christian mystic, when he was using his terms about religion ironically. So the narcissists do really hurt themselves with their short attention spans
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong To give them their due, they are also intellectually very limited and can't actually reach the heights of these writers, so they try to bring them down to a level they can understand.
- LeeAnne Fourcrows Hensley Granted, I've come across many materials I couldn't comprehend, however hard I tried. But I never assigned false meaning in order to gain closure on my inability to understand it. Of course, that's pretty difficult to do with mathematics. And that's usually where my brain hits its limit.
- Jennifer Frances Armstrong People who have had a very sheltered upbringing, who have never experienced war or violence, can't understand any project as being worthwhile other than shoring up their "identities" and building status and self esteem, so they imagine everybody else who is worth anything must be trying to do the same -- only some of us...Nietzsche, Bataille, Marechera...fall down, we poor things.
Saturday 11 May 2013
Deliberate misreadings and narcissists
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