[phd logs, 4] freakish only for work

let's say there's a boy who is obsessed with his ceiling. he notices every crack. he lays in his bed for hours, doing nothing but staring at his ceiling. he lays in the tub, in more than hot water until it is warm and then until it is cold, staring at the ceiling. the ceiling is more exciting when it has a grip. fan, light, chandelier, hooks. sometimes his enthusiasm extends to doors, but that's quite rare. it looks odd to others. no one knows that it's about the ceiling and not his stare. it is not blankness. it's something else, something more.

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i am taking three courses, all of them are exciting. but here's the thing. the first time i read saussure was 8 years ago, and today i had it open, his course in general linguistics in the norton anthology. 4 pages of reading of just the introduction before his writing has even begun, and i am already 6 pages of notes in, circling words that mean nothing to me [convention? value? resemblance? execute?]. i return. in the same way to barthes, marx, d&g, jameson, jakobson, lacan, again & again, not ever complete and always truly like a first experience.

isn't first experiences a major part of life? "i wish i could live that again for the first time," "this is one experience i want to have." i read a sentence i have read dozens of times before when encountering structuralist theory, and i come out with a question i probably never asked of that sentence before.

when i say those words mean nothing to me, i don't mean that they're empty. they're only missing definition. value, valeur, does a lot of work for saussure and translates the worst. purely differential, nothing intrinsic; it's what decides whether me writing this right now counts as my blackboard post for the week. drawing three circles around it now.

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the boy, by staring at his ceiling, is dis/re-placing what he wants out of it. he doesn't notice that people around him see his gaze. but what use is seeing the gaze and not realizing what it's for, what it's towards. what it's out of? knowing has lost some of its meaning now. whoever asked it to have meaning anyway? does the boy himself know what his obsession with the ceiling means? – does he know he's even doing it?

he was searching for belonging. sure, fragmented, but also sure, continuous. one room to another, only broken by the gaze.

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the life material. so, unpaid return to those introductory pages from the norton anthology, but it's not just that! the return has a receipt!

from han's achievement-subject, the compulsion is internal, feels like appetite. but it is not just saussure's theory i am returning to. i am stuck at the level of the object itself: notebooks, columns, handwriting, of students who listened to him; that's how his work began existing. it was put together and every time i went back to the introduction i kept reconstructing his system of linguistics with that of the system that made his words exist for us as foundational theory. assembled from speech acts after his death in 1913.

bally and sechehaye, who assembled the book in 1916 using his lecture notes from student notebooks, had never sat in his lectures themselves. purely differential, no original. collation of non-identical accounts. of course, later with critical editions and his own surviving manuscripts (which he was probably very reluctant about in producing) showed how much smoothing was done in earlier versions.

is it langue or parole? system or the individual speech act? the cours was assembled from speech delivered aloud, caught. bally and sechehaye worked backward from utterances to reconstruct the system behind them. am i focusing on the process of its production to understand saussure's theory too much? does he say that this is the operation linguistics should perform? is the text a demonstration of its own method and it never says so?

three courses across four years, in which his thinking moved, flattened into one synchronic exposition. the editors did to saussure what saussure told linguists to do to language: take the system as a moment, set aside how it got there. later, godel's 1957 version and engler's 1967-74 edition put the diachrony back by laying divergent notebooks out in parallel columns, so that same lecture in four hands at once is visible. same passage, side by side, non-identical. columnar object i love. i didn't know i'd make something, last semester, that i'll learn about an influential literary theory later.

this all makes me unsure if saussure really wrote the most famous line of his work, language studied in itself and for itself. i mean, he never wrote anything.

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his mother thought he was praying. his sister thought he was high. a friend who slept over once asked what's up there and he said nothing, which was true and also the least true thing he had ever said. each of them went away with a story. none of the stories overlap. if you put them side by side you would get a story. the story would be about a boy and his stare and it would be extremely convincing and it would be about the wrong thing.

the water is too hot and then it is right and then it is only water. he does not get out at right. getting out at right would mean he was in the tub for the tub. he stays until the water has no opinion and then he stays a while after that.

it is not the sky. people want it to be the sky. the sky is famous for being looked at and there is a whole apparatus for it, constellations, wishes, the names of things. the ceiling has none of that. he doesn't want something unending. houses and ceilings hold endings in them.

he has a word for it now. someone gave him one. the word is good, it's precise, it fits the shape of the thing almost exactly, and now when he lies down he thinks the word first and the ceiling second. he would like to give it back. there is no one to give it back to.

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i don't know if the title of this post makes sense to you, but it does to me :]