Schizomance from Love Hypothesis

The voices have stopped for quite a while in my mind, a couple of years I guess, before that stupid cheap and unrealistic love story elbowed its way through five of my precious weekday evenings.

Why does it have to tell the story of some biology grad school girl falling for some faculty who’s exactly 8 years older than she is; why does he have to show up literally every time she needed him for reassurance and courage; why do they exchange those text messages that make her grin; why he even helped her to revise the damn presentation slides; why they go get those sugary drinks and Japanese food and struggle over sharing a hotel room; and above all, why am I so boring that I have to binge read this imaginary shit?

Of course, there’s no screaming, but those chatters start again. The voices are not as annoying as they used to be, mainly because they don’t make sounds now. They talk via pictures, blurred but vivid pictures, and smells, clear and definable smells, and feelings, brief but sharp, with their own rhythm and punctuations. These things don’t tear me apart anymore. They just hovering above so I don’t have to actually fix anything. Guess I should be so grateful for this recovery.

On theories

Saw an article on PW about Hernan Diaz’s new book Trust. Maybe what Biao Xiang said earlier wasn’t right, not that our time is in urgent need of theories, but our time is the time that puts a limit to theories’ development. I thought he was right only because I rarely feel excited whenever I hear someone saying something. No theory is fun or eye-opening any more, like Freud’s or after him, Lacan’s. The only reason that no new theory is as enlightening is because all of the former theories are still good enough for our time. So it is not theories that need to evolve, but our society, our culture, and our technology. It is hard to jump ahead of our ancestors’ theories and give brith to something groundbreaking because our practice is far behind whatever the theories could be applied. For example, experimental physics cannot prove quantum entanglement exist while theoretical physics already established the possibility. We cannot blame that there’s no new theories better than quantum entanglement when we still cannot outlive the truth of it.

Cancel culture is bad as it puts “correctness” above the freedom of expression and the confidence that we can still ALLOW the existence of diverse voices. What we are lack of is not a descriptive term or a theory that could only fit into a dystopian kind of future, but to get to a place where we could out-see the former theorists.