Slavoj Žižek--philosopher, writer, and lisp-talker--wrote a book called The Parallax View. It is really dense, so I have only hit a few dozen pages in it, despite having owned it for years. Still, the concept of a parallax gap is interesting to me:
Perhaps it's because my wife has, in the last couple of years, become more and more interested in sewing costumes. It's a hobby (one which has made a lot more money than the one I do where I push letters around in order to communicate silent thoughts in my head into someone else's, kind of a weird attempt at telepathy), but she loves it. The cutting of fabric doesn't interest her, however; it's the assembly, the placement of similar things--fabric--and then sewing them together that she likes. (Her favorite part is the detail work, for the record.)
Seams, then, are fault lines, areas of supposed structural weakness, yet they are the area where the creation comes to pass. You can't assemble clothing out of whole cloth, unless you're really down with togas, and even then, there's more going on than simply tying a bedsheet over yourself. No, the actual act of sewing is one of forcing parallax gaps together--two closely linked perspectives (cloth) that can't have a neutral common ground (the cut)...yet they become attached.
I think there are a lot more parallax gaps in life than we normally notice. They can be minute--the distance between atoms becomes irrelevant and touch stimuli occurs. They can be immense--the stars we stare at are ancient, some of them so old that they shed the light we see now before the Earth was even formed. But there's always a gap, an inconsistency, a delay.
Sometimes that parallax gap is called cognitive dissonance, which, if I'm understanding the theory correctly, would be more of a branch of the parallax gap than anything else. But the reality is pretty straightforward: We know that all we do is nonce purposeful, that it has meaning in the moment and can register on a spectrum of pleasure to pain with everything in between. However, even protracted experiences hit a terminal point, and what is turns into what was and though that experience has connective tissue through the process of memory, the two experiences of past and present become irreconcilably different. In other words, we are in a perpetual process of always already being in a parallax gap--it's where we live.
Sewing, then, becomes paradigmatic for the reality that we'd rather have--a continuity of experience that appears natural. But the longer you look at the seams, the less it seems like we know what we see. There are gaps in the seams, and by inverting the clothing, you can see that, instead of absorbing the parallax gap of the fabric, it's instead smashed together, sewn, and coerced--the backroom dealings of politics writ in stitches.
Much of what we take for granted--how the world works now, why we use the products we do, where we are "going" in a vague, quasidefinitional sense--is actually the underlying seam of our parallax view. And whenever the fabric of our reality pops a stitch and we can start seeing all of the disparate pieces, we begin to panic. This is happening in our politics, but these moments--often a class of existential crises--abound. It's when you realize that you get upset because your kid didn't eat much for dinner, so you have to waste some bread and toasted cheese, as if that meal meant much more than some quick calories after a long day. It's that feeling you get that the knowledge for your test only matters until you hand the test in, and then becomes irrelevant. It's the understanding that you can read a paragraph on a blog, understand it all, but then recognize your inability to even give a rusty summation of what was written ten minutes later.
The biggest question I have for these popped seams is part of the parallel: If I can turn to my wife to fix a favorite shirt, to whom can I turn to realign a reality that's not what it seems?
...the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible. (4)His introductory piece discusses the idea of the parallax view as being one in which it's impossible to get both views to square: A strong either/or sensation. Of course, what is happening inside that disconnect of similar ideas is what the rest of the 400 paged book explores. It's all very heady stuff, and, like I said, I haven't pushed more than twenty or so pages through. But the idea of seams is interesting to me.
Perhaps it's because my wife has, in the last couple of years, become more and more interested in sewing costumes. It's a hobby (one which has made a lot more money than the one I do where I push letters around in order to communicate silent thoughts in my head into someone else's, kind of a weird attempt at telepathy), but she loves it. The cutting of fabric doesn't interest her, however; it's the assembly, the placement of similar things--fabric--and then sewing them together that she likes. (Her favorite part is the detail work, for the record.)
Seams, then, are fault lines, areas of supposed structural weakness, yet they are the area where the creation comes to pass. You can't assemble clothing out of whole cloth, unless you're really down with togas, and even then, there's more going on than simply tying a bedsheet over yourself. No, the actual act of sewing is one of forcing parallax gaps together--two closely linked perspectives (cloth) that can't have a neutral common ground (the cut)...yet they become attached.
I think there are a lot more parallax gaps in life than we normally notice. They can be minute--the distance between atoms becomes irrelevant and touch stimuli occurs. They can be immense--the stars we stare at are ancient, some of them so old that they shed the light we see now before the Earth was even formed. But there's always a gap, an inconsistency, a delay.
Sometimes that parallax gap is called cognitive dissonance, which, if I'm understanding the theory correctly, would be more of a branch of the parallax gap than anything else. But the reality is pretty straightforward: We know that all we do is nonce purposeful, that it has meaning in the moment and can register on a spectrum of pleasure to pain with everything in between. However, even protracted experiences hit a terminal point, and what is turns into what was and though that experience has connective tissue through the process of memory, the two experiences of past and present become irreconcilably different. In other words, we are in a perpetual process of always already being in a parallax gap--it's where we live.
Sewing, then, becomes paradigmatic for the reality that we'd rather have--a continuity of experience that appears natural. But the longer you look at the seams, the less it seems like we know what we see. There are gaps in the seams, and by inverting the clothing, you can see that, instead of absorbing the parallax gap of the fabric, it's instead smashed together, sewn, and coerced--the backroom dealings of politics writ in stitches.
Much of what we take for granted--how the world works now, why we use the products we do, where we are "going" in a vague, quasidefinitional sense--is actually the underlying seam of our parallax view. And whenever the fabric of our reality pops a stitch and we can start seeing all of the disparate pieces, we begin to panic. This is happening in our politics, but these moments--often a class of existential crises--abound. It's when you realize that you get upset because your kid didn't eat much for dinner, so you have to waste some bread and toasted cheese, as if that meal meant much more than some quick calories after a long day. It's that feeling you get that the knowledge for your test only matters until you hand the test in, and then becomes irrelevant. It's the understanding that you can read a paragraph on a blog, understand it all, but then recognize your inability to even give a rusty summation of what was written ten minutes later.
The biggest question I have for these popped seams is part of the parallel: If I can turn to my wife to fix a favorite shirt, to whom can I turn to realign a reality that's not what it seems?
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