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Sunday, February 01, 2004

Okay, I'm going to wax serious here for a sec, confident that I'll catch some flack for it, but what the heck.

Hegel said (see, anytime you start a paragraph with "Hegel said", you're going to catch flack, whether from people justifiably mocking you for pretending to know something you don't, or - far worse - someone knowledgeable enough to legitimately critique your argument), if I'm remembering correctly, that no argument or object truly exists without engaging in a dialectic with its opposite. The closer and more vigorous this exchange, the better-defined something becomes. More simply: we cannot define a thing unless we can state clearly what it is not. Basic, yes, but with an interesting corollary: everything is defined via relationships. Nothing exists independently. There are no closed systems.

I've been thinking recently about this, spurred on by network theory, blogs, and YASNs. I've come to realize that such a distinction isn't unique to quantifiable subjects, that this is very much applicable to how I live and interact with others. Identity is comprised of a massive kaleidoscope of relationships, a giant fractal network with bidirectional feedback mechanisms (sometimes so asymmetrical as to seem unidirectional: consider how the average person interacts with say, NBC - the massive majority of information is sent by the broadcaster to the viewer, but the viewers, in aggregate, sway the programming of the broadcaster). We are constantly ascertaining and reasserting our place with respect to this context. Examining your connections to everything else is, I believe, the only method of self-definition.

As I look back upon places I've lived and things I've done, I engage in a subconscious cataloging of things, people, and events that somehow, through my interaction with them, hold some personal significance (even those things which were long ago far more central and now seem heinous or frivolous still retain some residual value as markers of change). That which is unimportant is discarded or made dormant, waiting for a reconnection at some later time.

Some of the most powerful of these relationships are those we have with people close to us, both socially and geographically (familiar strangers, after all, can be just as important as a distant cousin a continent away). The process of growing from child to adult, mirroring the educational process, is rife with the upheaval of social systems. Every so often, those networks get jumbled and reset themselves. The phenomenon is well-observed elsewhere. Take your pick: schemas being refined a la Piaget, punctuated equilibrium a la Gould, or paradigmatic revolutions a la Kuhn.

But now, I've escaped that cycle. Sure, there are still jolts to the system - a new job, moving, marriage, etc. - but these are organic and unscheduled. The bouts of stagnancy are more prolonged. Since I'm generally averse to systemic shocks, this is fine by me (though I've found in retrospect that many such events, into which I went with dread, turned out remarkably well). But these periods of relative calm aren't totally static.

Barrett is leaving on Friday to return to school. This, I agree with almost everyone else, is the best course of action for a man who, in the true Hegelian sense, is quite my opposite in many ways. He is the second close friend to depart, the first having left only this past August.

This slow social atrophy is unfamiliar. Graduations past have trained me to sever ties and take with me only what I want. They were sudden and decisive, not like this gradual water torture. These friendships are chief tools with which to find my place, and now they are behaving strangely.

But the silver lining is that I may just learn to be more pliant with how I relate to the world, dealing not only with the occasional earthquakes, but the slow plodding pace of plate tectonics underlying it all.

Hmm... Once again it seems I've taken a post ostensibly about someone else and used it for a little navel-gazing. In recompense, I give you this picture of Barrett covered in beer, about to bite someone's ass.

Posted by morland @ 04:27 PM

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