What is the absurd? We know the absurd in our bodies. It is something we come up against, a kind of wall, a halt that presents itself as the end of comprehensibility which presents itself as the end of meaningfulness. The absurd overwhelms our thinking brains, too much to compute. When I come up against the absurd, it feels like I’m trying to think a thought that’s too big for my brain – the thought is pushing to the very edges of my skull and outwards. I am trying to stretch my mind big enough to hold the thing, but I don’t have sufficient elasticity, or maybe brain plasticity.
This un-grasp-ability is what makes a turn to the absurd post-modern. Philosopher Hiroki Azuma articulates postmodernity as the period in which "the grand narratives break down” and we lose a stable sense of meaningfulness in our lives and worlds (Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, 28). The absurd is that which refuses to be grasped. It glitches the idea of meaning and comprehensibility, forcing upon us the realization that the grasp was only ever partial, curtailed, insufficient to any sort of deep engagement with the world.
And I don’t exactly mean the existential kind of absurd, the lack of meaning that Camus and Sartre came up against. This isn’t the confrontation between the rational man and the indifferent universe. It’s the confrontation between a woman who is actively trying to deprivilege the rational coming up against a fever dream of a TikTok.
The difference between the absurd that I am feeling, the kind elicited by this media that I’m describing, and the existentialist’s absurd, is that I want to disrupt rationality, because I know that the rational is a thing in me and not a thing in the world. I don’t want to expect the world to conform to rationality, yet something in me still does, and even if not rationality, then comprehensibility. I expect most of what I interact with in the world to be comprehensible to me.
This is an interesting shift, though, from an existentialist/absurdist view of the absurd; for the existentialists, the absurd was what answered them when they asked questions which attempted to penetrate (yes I use this word intentionally) the world, to get to a deeper level of meaning. The absurd is what faces me on the surface of my world – the very sensorally available world of TikTok.
This perhaps expresses well the fact that we are not exactly beyond the Modern world – if, as Azuma asserts, we are in a post-modern world, that world is still very much defined by the Modern. I would argue that it is better described as a world defined by the disappointment of the Modern, or by disillusionment with the Modern, than it is by any sort of meaningful move past the modern. After all, post- is not a different thing than the thing, but a different take on the thing, a taking of the thing differently.
I don’t want to get inside the absurd – I want to think the absurd. Does spatializing have utility here? Spatializing thinking is kind of always absurd, because the space is only ever in your mind – is the same every time – how does this even work? Do we somehow self-stimulate the parts of our psychosoma involved with orienting ourselves in a space, and create rooms of our ideas, our concepts? Is our situating of ourselves always spatial? Is spatiality anything other than material relations? Relationality between things, objects, walls, ideas? When I’m thinking well, it feels like I am spinning a concept in my brain – like I am able to perceive three, rather than two, dimensions of it. I get a prickly awareness at the base of my skill, like something more is being activated, and the two sides of the top of my head – the upper right and upper left – also feel increased sensation.
Can we think better about the absurd by moving our hair? Manipulating the way that our brains feel from the outside?
We feel via neural cascades from our limbs up to our brains, right? So is head-sensation more immediate, because the nerves are closer to the place that they are interpreted? The cascade is shorter? Now I have pressure on my temples, right outside of my ears.
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