Panological Negation – peeling back internalized heteronomy

Panological Negation.  If the idea belongs anywhere, it’s existentialism.  Accept, no one is listening.

Catch the play on meaning?

The idea came from an image that came to me while I was reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.  I was at the section on Bentham’s panopticon.

I saw in my head a morbid scene of myself, rotating 360 degrees and exhaling with all my might an apocalyptic scream.    I was in my late 20′s and working fulltime in the ministry.  The image depicted my feelings obviously, which were themselves a reflection of the contradictions I felt myself immersed in – contradictions I could neither resolve or transcend personally.  It was a feeling everyone has at one time or another, if one breaks with appearences and turns oneself inward for a moment to consumate an affair with the harlot honesty.

The significance of the image was its intensity: one sweeping (e)motion.  An (e)motion that held together in simultaneity, freedom and tragedy.  The of coming of age.  What I realized was that, if I was going to have any sense of self-identity, I had to find a way to panologically negate the forces that colonized my lifeworld with a sense of somebody else’s history.  

If panological negation means anything, it is initiation to the existential experience of self-reference: the break with asking someone else if everything’s OK.  Some people have to come to the realization of this sooner than others.  Others feel panologically negated by the world or others early on by virtue of their historical circumstances.  Others pass as what everyone else thinks of them, well, consistently.

From within, panological negation might mean the beginning of a semblance of self.  It begins with a sense or (e)motion.  A sweeping apocalyptic ”No.” and the silence that follows.  It’s the end of a world.   

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~ by mattfrizzell on October 20, 2007.