Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 01:52:17 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Rhetoric,  I's and Me's



Diane/All,

If you're not already familiar with ideas of David Bohm, you might be
interested in part of a conversation transcribed below.

best,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Diane wrote:

> Traditionally, rhetoric likes to think of itself as constituting
> community: via the power of figuration/representation, it aims to
> constitute a "we" out of a bunch of previously unconnected "I's,"
> establishing an essence-in-common (some figure/idea/project) that
> individuals can identify as and with themselves. From there rhetoric's
> goals and motives are clear and simple enough, but of course this scene
> takes off from a very old and very humanist (and dangerous) notion of
> community, one based on the assumption that there are first "I's" who
> only then encounter others. I'm trying to disrupt that, to work from a
> kind of originary sociality.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bohm: Death must be connected with questions of time and identity. When you
die, everything on which your identity depends is going. All things in your
memory will go. Your whole definition of what you are will go. The whole
sense of being separate from anything will go because that's part of your
identity. Your whole sense of time must go. Is there anything that will
exist beyond death? That is the question everybody has always asked. It
doesn't make sense to say something goes on in time. Rather I would say
everything sinks into the implicate order, where there is no time. But
suppose we say that right now, when I'm alive, the same thing is happening.
The implicate order is unfolding to be me again and again each moment. And
the past me is gone.

Omni: The past you, then, has been snatched back into the implicate order.

Bohm: That's right. Anything I know about "me" is in the past. The present
"me" is the unknown. We say there is only one implicate order, only one
present. But it projects itself as a whole series of moments. Ultimately,
all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity.

In one sense, everything, including me, is dying every moment into eternity
and being born again, so all that will happen at death is that from a
certain moment certain features will not be born again. But our whole
thought process causes us to confront this with great fear in an attempt to
preserve identity. One of my interests at this stage of life is looking at
that fear.