Reversals In Sign Use - A Study

baldxin

REVERSALS IN SIGN USE --- Pathology of mind set


In daily life and conversation, everyone, I suppose, kids around with others by using what may be called ‘reversals’. “My, we’re talkative today,” says one getting the silent treatment. “Real smart, that. Real classy,” the sloppy dummy hears. The hint of something intended is sacred is likely to elicit a curse. Or vice versa: the vile and profane gets dubbed ‘holy’ (“Holy Shit!). Memes, like “he shot himself in the foot again”, even occur as meta-text for standard ‘reversing’ situations. Conversations today can be filled with so many sarcastic reversals, reversals of reversals, LOL’s, username and false (‘Borat’) identities assumed as positions of consciousness, it generates a thirst for clear, simple, sincere sign use uncluttered by tweaking reversals and bad metaphors. The following aims to help peel the skin off the shpiel of their spin.

But this is not merely an academic exercise. Not just daily conversation, but signs required for use as political currency in America, especially since 2000, have become saturated with reverse meanings,

- Reversal of threat to justify war. – “You threaten us”
- Reversal of democratic will of the people expressed in 2006 national election
- Reversal of whether the surge “worked” (by paying others to make it appear as if it did.
- Reversing the justification for existing by ongoing pursuit of lying wars (Type 4: obedience of son to father)
- Chief neocon Richard Perle now denyies there is any such thing as neocons (types 7-6-5: champion of American Democracy)
- Conflating military and political enemies, tacitly
identifying war on terror a war on liberals. This was demonstrated by ‘Tennessee’ Jim Adkisson shooting up a liberal church in Knoxville because they weren’t patriotic and Christian. This is projection-reversal, type 6.
- The troop build-up in the Afghanistan war was never challenged in the last general election, therefore cannot be claimed to be democratically supported. Therefore use of the term “democracy” to describe America is a macro reversal, type 7.
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This way of being that goes by the name Republicanism springs from The Great Reagan Reversal, beginning in the “80’s”. Those who pulled it off are still spinning the same fantasies as reality now, 2.28.09. One tactic is linking power numbers (“60’s”, “80’s”; 2001, 9/11, 7/7; 2.01.09, 2.20.09) and other hyperdimensional tokens (letters encoding sub-text meanings: “H”, “G”, “L”, “M”, “X”, “V”) in templates laid out in linear sequences. The software for decoding such templates could be modeled on reverse speech analysis, assuming the same psychosemiotic mechanisms at work there are repeated at higher levels of complexity in sign use.

-Reversal of reality and fantasy: playing the role of “Mr.
President” as if hyperdimensional TokenSpace (‘destiny’
some say) had magically arranged the role he was cut out for
as a man, in life.

-- people who went along with the pretense, allowing Hollywood to dictate what America was. Hollywood America. (cf. Alec Baldwin Hulu commercial)
- Reagan’s illegal “CONTRA” war was a reversal of honorable, transparent foreign policy, signified by name.
- Reagan’s tag “the Great Communicator” was a reversal of his pattern of lying-in-the-open.
- “One mans terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” negates the differences that freedom fighters fight for.
- “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem” – says the one running the government.

These macro reversals are still being ‘spun’ in post-Reagan’s America.



7 types of Reversal in order of psychosemiotic complexity

(note: The reversals of 1-2-3 => pertain only to the tokens of signs used communication, or what Freud called the ‘formal characteristics’ in regard to dream, minus psychological content; the visual/auditory stream. The phenomenon of Reversed speech, 1 below, manifests the essential elements, evolved and involved, up the hierarchy to 7-6-5 => which pertain to complex psychological reversals with text. The 4th, Reaction Formation, is where Existential Irony merges with the Palindrome (“the higher fructifies the lower in order to create the middle”), and where birth trauma meets the Oedipus complex in the course of development. Also, where birth passes over into death and rebirth through the Moral Law; not explained here. The 1-2-3 sequence is completed in the palindrome, which would mirror the “mirror-neuron system” posited by U. C. Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik: “Mirror neurons have become the ‘left brain/right brain/ of the 21st century.”)

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7. Overlaid Negation When the token demonstrates the reverse of what says. (Ex. “I am not writing this.” “The truth matters”- Linda Tripp. “Do you know what it’s like to be standing in front of someone lying to you, and they know you know they are lying to you?”)

6 - Projection Reversal: inner child of adult projects themselves judged by the inner adult of a child (Ex. “You want to kill me, don’t you?” – mother to screaming 4 year old.)

5 - Ironic -- When an act performed from one intent achieves the exact opposite (Ex. exercise induces heart attack; trying to prove personal worth proves worthlessness.)

4 - Reaction Formation (Freud) Automatic reversal of one impulsive reaction (“No! No!”) to its opposite (“Yes! Yes!”).
(Ex. (sub voce ‘I don’t hate him) I LOVE HIM! )

3 - Palindrome: Communicates the same backward as forward.
LIVEVIL THOHT (See DaVinci)

2 - Mirror Writing (see below)

1 - Reverse Speech. (see website; empirical evidence is obtained by reversing recorded speech, easily done by computer software program. Just press => /forward to the \<= backward button).

Two hypotheses offered to explain the infrequent coherent speech segments obtained by reversing audiotapes.

A. Simultaneous forward-backward processing of content: that which emerges at the end is that which is pre-figured in the beginning and accounts for the origination of the S* sequence. In writing, this point* is marked by a ‘period’; in speaking, by intonation or pause. It* also explains ‘motive’, and ‘agenda’ (a(g /\ d)a). In french, denoument is used for disclosure of the mystery threading all the events leading up to it. On TV, every segment must begin with a Bang! – attention-grabber, aka shock’n’awe, whether SNL or SuperBowl commercial; follow-up with the ‘message’ (brain 1 informational content, if any); conclude with a denoument answering “WHY?”, while simultaneously slipping in a mini-drama suspense-resolution: “here’s your take-a-way” (Ex. “Time in a bottle” for girls.)

Expositors of Australian researcher David John Oates explain the phenomena in terms of “two minds speaking”. “As the human brain constructs the sounds of speech, it forms those sounds in such a way that two messages are delivered simultaneously. One forwards, which is the conscious mind speaking, and the other in reverse, which is the unconscious mind speaking.” This may perhaps stretch ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ too far too soon. If “the unconscious mind” were speaking in the reverse replays, it should presumably provide information, at least of the sort dreams provide. It is claimed to have been used in crime solving, but such use implies the unconscious mind makes literal (textual) vs. symbolic (token-phenomenal) assertions. However, this strains credulity, requiring a serious researcher to look for grammar, inference, etc. Freud remarked that dreams were indeed types of communication emerging from non-random neuron firing (previously dismissed as such by brain theorists ignoring their psychic rrelations), but not intended to be seen – just expressed, ‘the way it is.

However, it need not be ruled out that the particular moments on the audiotape at which the reverse S* occurs, coincide with moments in the original performance when there was, in fact, an extra-energizing factor from a psychic, that is to say memory-looped source, “speaking”. This use of “unconscious’ is compatible with Gurdjieff’s three brain psychosemiotics. The extra innervation would be due to the second, or third, or a combination of the two lower brain centers ‘emptying’ (the original meaning of ‘cathexis’) into conscious brain 1 processing. These other brain ‘emptyings’ would arouse their own memories, associations, impulses, anxieties and attractions, leading to parallel S* octaves in the ‘future’.


A coincidental tokening of a reverse-packaged process occurred in the title of conservative columnist David Brook’s NYTimes article The Uncertain Trumpet (2.27.09). It is about Obama’s 2.25.09 speech to Congress, beginning: “On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama talked about a national culture of irresponsibility.
He talked about the way Americans have sacrificed the long term for the short term, spent more than they could afford, and how the country's leaders have broken promises and delayed reform. Obama described a rot that was ingrained and pervasive.”
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=20481714

The background mood of the country is blackest bile: rage, fear, impotence, alienation, collapse of dreams, crushed lives. The Trumpet, by shape, is a tube opened out, then curled back on itself as it elongates. Where it flares, the music blares. Go blow your horn. It is a very ancient, universal thing to produce sounds by blowing through tubes, pipes, stalks, hollow things in general, and among the earliest fetiches of childhood to shape hooters and tooters of all sorts for this purpose.

The Trumpet is an extension of the human vocal mechanism, as a bell is of metallic vibration. Though of different timbre and tone, both transmit formed wavelength vibrations through the atmosphere that can thrill the soul, bring down walls, kill enemies. Blowing The Trumpet is the stylized of concentrating the hyperdimensional energy under command.
Obama’s speech sounded that Trumpet through TokenSpace along the Frontier of Hope. Brooks, hearing only Nawahl wailing, calls it “uncertain”.

The background of Brooks’ personal situation is the djarktlomization of the Republican Party, neo-conservative right wingism. “An ideological sea change” which the mass of Bush backers don’t yet get, one Huffington Post writer notes, putting text to Hoagland’s hyperdimensional metaphysics. Djartklom is the process in which the figure of a higher level unity is distributed into each of parts previously bound under it. Jung traces such a process in Egyptian psychohistory in regard to Osiris. At first, there was One Osiris, personified Father of all, old Sol who rules the sky by day, is killed by Seth each night; revenged by Horus, reborn again tomorrow….then, as cycles of time accumulate, the elements of the story as a template of lived duration (EN.DUR.AN.KE) were internalized, so that not just Pharoahs, but Every Man has an Osiris: it defines The Egyptian soul. The figure analogous to Osiris for the Egyptians would be Ronald Reagan, for these Republicans. His was the unifying soul of post Vietnam war militarism, neo-conservatives (Catholic and Jewish interests, fusing the legacy of JFK and Nixon-Ford), the Religious Right, together with other factions reacting against the liberalism of the ‘60’s. Having been shot and symbolically killed, thus taking the bullet for our death wishes, Reagan was the Reborn White Male Hope. Little Horus sons were reborn on College campuses as Right Wing Moral post Hippie Student Association presidents.


B. Complementarities

Each S* in a communicating string intersects various planes of TokenSpace:

Forward-backward (the time dimension of token sequences)

1. “Human speech has two distinctive yet complementary functions and modes. The Overt mode is spoken forwards and is primarily under conscious control. The Covert mode is spoken backward and is not under conscious control. The backward mode of speech occurs simultaneously with the forward mode and is a reversal of the forward speech sounds. “
Comment. This distinction between “covert” and “overt” here obfuscates another complementarity, “above-below”, which intersects when a unified textual content is given in advance -as above - in Thought, via cerebral cortex – so below - actualized by the vocal apparatus. The overall structure and dynamics of the psyche assigns the thinking function of consciousness control over the lower, material processes causally involved in producing the actual S* tokens. Speech is only a special case, though a very important one, of these larger polarities.
2 - Mirror writing is the most transparent translation of the plane of visual space into tokenspace. A hand writing what is observed to be left-to-right script from one side of a two-way mirror, as in several movie sequences, would be producing script from the reverse direction (cf the AMBULANCE letter reversal seen in the driver’s rear-view mirror.) The two sides of a moebius strip map this. If each side loops through the “I-You 2-way nose bridge”, what occurs on the moebius is the same for both.
3 – mirror writing mirrored in TokenSpace: the Palindrome. As if the “other side” were alongside, or “in” the two-dimensional plane on which the signifying signs, written out, occur. (outside in is inside out).

Neural mirroring
http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Mirroring,%20Mindreading,%20and%20Simulation.pdf
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a793399891~db=all~jumptype=rss This is a study of cohort responses in a participatory judgmental situation, arguing for neural mirroring effects as a factor in social relations.
The phenomenon posited here was introduced to explain the discovery that particular brain lobes in macaque monkeys are excited by a man peeling and eating a banana, as if it were them. The hypothesis that what externally perceived is internally mirrored – then mirrored again – explains a cluster of psychic

1. -spontaneous imitative behavior (“parrot”, “sock puppets” …’Rush Limbaugh ideologues’)
2. - projection with identification (directly involved in adult-child reversal)
3. -jealously (awareness of gap between self and what is perceived externally, with desire to include it as internally mirrored opposite)
4. -mind reading (internal proprioception for tokens; instinctual matching of text)
5. -vicarious participation (Aristotle’s ‘catharsis’; Levy-Bruihl’s participation mystique; the distinction between signs (level 2) and symbols (levels 1 +2).)
6. -impuses to agree or disagree with a given flow of process (resistances; alignments)
7. -flocking of groups under one leader (teacher, school)
8. -idols (‘embody the spirit’; resistance to idolatry as ‘tempting’, ‘alluring’, SINFUL if ‘yielded’ to ( loss of psychic polarity)

9. -definition of THE CRITICAL STANDPOINT: A position of consciousness contrary to the ongoing psychosemiotic process. This requires flexibility in regard to identifying with external positions that reflect one side to the exclusion of the other. This requires the results of work of transformation of perceptual messages, in order to ‘take it to the top’ and render individual personal judgment on the higher level content. A critical standpoint not backed by intellectual equipment for an apriori basis of judgment is merely obstinate resistance (perhaps instinctual).

This definition matches Gurdjieff’s “second conscious shock” – awakening work of higher S* centers from the mechanical, dream-related effects of “first conscious shock” upon entry of S in the field of perception. It is intellectual activity supplied only consciously to incoming impressions; you know you are doing it or its* not being done. It corrects the grammatical flow of text, to keep it from being swept along by the flow of tokens.

In Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, each plot deneumont in the narrative is a palindrome. And there is a sequence of them; as if exemplifying the concept of a “totality squared”, of reversals themselves: the reversal of all reversals; a meta-palindrome. Da Vinci himself, who perfected the form, was left handed. Reversals shown together with what they reverse would be how metaphysical duality manifests in communication. Also: external mirroring of neural mirroring.

(note: The 4 4 cross-over in the 7/1  1/7 loop is also the tier in the hierarchy where moral distinctions apply to movement of objects in 3 dimensional space (conscious voluntary action).)
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THE 8TH REVERSAL


2.01.2009 The Great Moment in the New Frontier of Hope

2.20.2009 Alec Baldwin Superbowl XLIII TV commercial

These juxtapose as bookends of the 19 day duration between the football game watched globally and Obama’s inauguration. These two singular, decisively unique America* group events define the New situation by their violent psychic clash.

Taking both together, as the public is required to do now, as collective reality distributed in the unconscious at different fantasy levels, defines a very large psychodynamic current in TokenSpace. The energy trapped in it’s flow reflects off two mirrors reflecting reversals of each other (mirroring neurons mirroring neurons). Satanic Lizard Baldwin can be taken as either Liberal, mocking mush brain conservatives; or as conservative’s projection of this to incite loathing. Both are there; and the conflict, being mostly unconscious but existentially aroused, is activated again by the Black/White reversal witnessed in the transfer of Authority. This follows the 1/7 Reversed Speech template: what comes last was the Unconscious mind speaking first. The one with “the most liberal voting record in the Senate” has been officially crowned and coronaterd.

Reptilian mind control through TV, on the one hand …..vs. patriotic solidarity with those who assembled on Washington D.C. mall to witness the 44th President of the United States being sworn in.

These two active currents flow together, through each other now. In addition, at the level of daily common group life, merger fantasies are highly cathected. A hyperdimensional vortex is pulling all together into a virtual psychotic womb-surround, filled with loathing, hate, loss of soul and pain. But with a Frontier of Hope (Hoagland).


(cf. Beavis and Butthead –mentioned a lot recently; used by Paul Krugman to describe Republican economists)


TWO STAGES OF CONSCIOUS THOUGHT FORMATION

The Two Stages of Conscious Thought

-Based on Reverse Speech theory (The 7th if => What - the as – is?)

Stage 1. Introduction (admission, penetration) of tokens (movements forming words, pictures, gestures – whatever is t expressive of state, position, attitude of consciousness) that function as a shock*. This is the content* first becoming conscious, a completed intra-psychic event (‘act’) presenting a fungible ‘mark’ (S), or ‘bit’ (snippet), which ‘arrests’ (holds…) the flow of process we call mind (‘..hostage’ to the unconscious’). The motion connecting the S’s would be drawing a string of ovals. Each oval (bit, token) represents a content collected independently of others; the line connecting them as geometric identities represents what “it” stands for to The Unconscious (pre-conscious content, in Freud’s early classification system). Thus, the fluid arm motion used to draw ovals on a tablet mirrors The Unconscious fixating consciousness on a cartouche, a place in T*Space where the Pharoah’s name appears. Tokens also supply experiential templates of text weaving in and out and through them .

Stage 2. Texting the tokens as grammatical categories used to convey a ‘message’ that can be thought in advance.

A second intra-psychic process must occur in order to transform S into S*, a sign available for use in communicating with others. For this, to transform an event in/of private tokenspace into a content accessible to all who access what is being talked in ‘the public domain’ of discourse, requires rules for common collective S* reproduction, or grammar. Grammatical order replaces the line connecting the spiral of circles, breaking them into numbers, words, functioning as units in sums and sentences. Through such rules, beginning with 1-1 correlations between names and objects agreed to by all parties to the conversation, tokens are mechanically converted into units of text in the presence of, or available to all who are present in, the ‘audience” of public TokenSpace. Supplying text for tokens gets their message “out there”.

Conversation is grammatized flow of process. It is a process connecting two intra-psychic converstions on either side of the 2-way nose bridge (ME () THEE) (= 4 strands of relations entwined in actual concersation.)


The verification of this two-stage analysis:

-direct self-observation. First ‘getting a term”; then, predicating on it talking with others.

-the disconnect between text-token shifts in different conscious states (“forgetfulness” of dope-related content – “memory” only connects Unconscious identies. This disconnect can have hyperdimensional implications. (cf. R. Hoagland)

The developmental transition from pictures to words, speaking to writing, in language acquisition. A legacy of this transition is the sequence of types in the mass media: pictures, cartoons, cartoon strips, comic books, motion pictures, TV programs (back to the future)

The two stage process is also verified in every process that mirrors it.