Monday, July 6, 2009

the two prisoners

Dickens has a second problem with the Marxian appeal to self consciouseness:
There are two inhabitance of that jail o the self.
One the one hand in that jail in Marseilles there is the individual who self consciously effects his self within others, He therefore operates by a series of effects upon other which then force them or better oblige them to behave in a certain way (The Blandios moustache). He then interprets this behaviour as somehow to his credit or as a testiment that the world shoud always conform to his hopes and expectations of it.
To be self conscious was then the have an effect, and a powerful one on others and the revel in that effect on sees then in their reaction not what they themselves thought, but only your impression upon them. On sees then only ones power and how it was effected. One does not actually care what they were at all. A self is the effected in forcing the reaction of other.
That is as I make a world in my mind to be in. I must se that world reflected in the action of others and through them, If it is i become egostical and unpleasent: To be a powerful self as such, to feel is then not to care for a consequence.
On the other hand their is the dreamy man of perception. He knows that the world beyond him is open and varied He has been therefore here or there or anywhere. He wanders. The is sustained then in his wondering by the fact that at any one time he can create a little mirror to himself in a fantasy. He can eat the his own words, or but if meat out of a hunk of bread. His self consciousness is therefore his power of dreaming. tht s of hpo ghtta the orl might be otherwise.
His self is then that self affection, that touching ourselves or dreaming for ourselves we all do, when the world is complex, in the hope that he dreams might become reality. His perception or himself in this loop in this self as affected in a hoop, is but the dream of a dream. it function not to make him more active but rather to open him up to others. A dream carried out is a dream alone, which then makes him responsive to others and look s their action and their behaviour for elements that might echo that dream: his dreams his doing it to himself therefore opens him to the wills and minds of others.
Here then dickens says are two very different forms of self consciousness: To be conscious of ones action and of one dreams are really not the same thing To merely then hope for that moment of Hegelian revelation when history becomes aware of itself, is to beg the question, which awareness is this? A question which cannot be answered, and yet which will have very great relevence to any outcome or any hope for the future...

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