Toujour-déjà

So the other day, I was sitting around daydreaming (actually, I do that a lot - in relation to my Master's degree, its an activity that I feel is an extension of "pre-writing."), specifically, musing over an occurrence from earlier in my semester:

I am taking a course on composition pedagogy, as a preparation of my future TA duties of actually teaching a class (that starts in January). For this class, I had to write a paper. One of the classroom activities that we did with this paper was a peer-review. During my peer-review, a sociologist named Frank told me that I "write like a positivist." Now, this puts me in an awkward position - mostly because, while I'm well aware that my Darwinism, and belief in the value of scientific process in general, does make me something of a positivist, I'm also active in Academic circles where in "positivist" carries a rather explicitly pejorative connotation. I checked with Frank, he meant it in a good way, but still, the fierce Marxist homunculus that lives in my brain was taken aback at the notion that the brain in which it lives could really be more positivist than not.

The purpose of the daydreaming, if it can be said to have a purpose at all, was to find an out to this quandary. The goal, of course, was to coin a new philosophical outlook that could define a middle ground where my Marxist homunculus and the distributed, quite possibly epiphenomenal, consciousness that emerges from the rest of my brain could hold hands, run through the park, and just be, you know, friends. My initial stab was to claim to myself that I was a "negative positivist," but that didn't seem quite right. Plus, it reminded me of Jean-Luc Nancy's "singular plural," which, although I've only ever read the front cover of the English translation, and maybe part of the blurb on the back, and I have no notion of what it could possibly mean, still seemed too similar. My next jump though, seems to be sticking a bit for me:

I am an "empirical negativist."

I won't bore you with the details of what this newly-named philosophy entails, but I did want to post something about it. Why? Because, when I googled "empirical negativist" it came back with zero entries, so by publishing this here, I totally take ownership of this entirely new and novel concept.

Hurrah!

In other news, Graduate school also continues to make me feel like I'm the kind of person that should probably have a couple of tattoos. My most recent terrible idea for a tattoo was to get, in big capital letters, ALWAYS down the inside of my right forearm, and ALREADY down the left. Which is to say, I will never have any tattoos.