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my my what a strange thread this is becoming.
there is a scorekeeper now and everything.
something strangely mideval is taking shape--a contest between peripetetics, one of those three-round discursive boxing matches attended by the entire faculty of the local omniversity, a kind of sporting event.
i am confused:
what point is being pursued--not made--with reference to the curious status of love as a category? besides, i thought haddaway had already defined love.
giving a general account of it is simple enough---a directing of the instinct for reproduction routed through a dense, curious linguistic category. in that way, it is not different from any other category, in that once the association is in place, you use it and so what it comes to mean gets sedimented with the history of its usage--a history of associations. if your experience is such that you have come to associate "love" with aspects of attributed to this other category "god" then--well what?---the association doesn't explain ANYTHING---except something about your personal history, your trajectory through informational environments (vector that you are)---any more than managing to equate a bundle of affect that you associate with love with a discrete sequence of biochemical responses would.
in a strange way, they are the same argument: both in the end would respond to the question "what is love?" (damn it, there's haddaway again....) by saying "it happens here." which really doesn't say anything.
if you say "god is love" you are only repeating an experiential loop--since there is nothing that you can say or do that would demonstrate that this loop has any hold on anything (except to other members of the same community, who would be defined in some way by internalization of this loop as if it had some explanatory power)--all you do by using it is demonstrate your membership in that particular community.
besides, it is unlikely that a discrete biochemical reaction that would "explain" love would be meaningfully localized in any event--it could be part of an explanation for love as an embodied experience--but it wouldn't EXPLAIN the experience--if only because you have the mediation of language involved with the experience (without it, what shape would the experience have) and so a whole other set of factors/problems to take into account if you wanted to go this route. the idea that locating a particular chemical response in a particular place in the brain would explain love is hooked to a particular way of thinking about cognition. it is far from the only such model and there is little agreement about which model is preferable to others: each open onto different types of information, each has a function that it serves and any number of others that it doesn't.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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