Another grey winter-like day.  More similar days are to come.  Much in life must be accepted.

In the state of Georgia the scrum intensifies leading up to the January runoff between a pair of Republican and a pair of Democratic candidates.  The outcome will determine which party controls the Senate.  What if any difference will the the plebiscite make?  According to the Washington Post when asked, only 27 of the 249 Republicans in the House and Senate acknowledged Biden as the winner of the November 3rd national election. I cannot think of a more stark example of Americans insisting upon alternate realities.  Is this similar to the persistent demand of the slave owning planters in the old South to hold firmly to their “property” in proximity to the outbreak of war in the late 1850s?

Another way of putting it, “the social subject itself seems to dissolve.”  The fabric of social bond becomes increasingly frayed, due to the incompatibility of linguistic representations, contradictory descriptions of reality.

Do we have a “bad” connection and I cannot make out what you are saying…?  Or, I understand clearly what you are saying and words fail me, — I have nothing to say in response.  It would be quite impossible to imagine living in your world, and vise versa.

We are a “heap” of racial, socio-economic, and regional interest groups, — hardly a nation.

The social subject itself
seems to dissolve in this dissemination
of language games.
The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a single thread.
It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two
(and in reality an indeterminate number) of language games
obeying different rules.

Wittgenstein writes:
“Our language can be seen as an ancient city:
a maze of little streets and squares, of old
and new houses, and of houses with additions
from various periods;
and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs
with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”*

And to drive home that the principle of uni-totality –
or a synthesis under the authority of a meta-discourse
of knowledge – is inapplicable,
he subjects the “town” of language to the paradox of the heap
by asking: “how many houses or streets does it take
before a town begins to be a town?”

New languages are added to the old ones,
forming suburbs of the old town:
“the symbolism of chemistry and the notation
of infinitesimal calculus.”
Thirty-five years later we can add to the list:
machine languages, the matrices of game theory,
new systems of musical notation,
systems of notation for non-denotative forms of logic,
(temporal logics, deontic logics, modal logics),
the language of the genetic code,
graphs of phonological structures, and so on.

…a pessimistic impression of this splintering:
Nobody speaks all of those languages,
they have no universal meta-language,
the project of the system-subject
is a failure…

*Philosophical Investigations sec. 18, p. 8.

Excerpt, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
By Jean-François Lyotard

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Need a tune to hold onto?  I do.  This one should be strong enough to bear (to express) our confusion and dismay.

Midnight Rider

By The Allman Brothers Band (1970)

Well, I’ve got to run to keep from hidin’,
And I’m bound to keep on ridin’.
And I’ve got one more silver dollar,
But I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no,
Not gonna let ’em catch the Midnight Rider.

And I don’t own the clothes I’m wearing,
And the road goes on forever,
And I’ve got one more silver dollar,
But I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no
Not gonna let ’em catch the Midnight Rider.

And I’ve gone by the point of caring,
Some old bed I’ll soon be sharing,
And I’ve got one more silver dollar,

But I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no
Not gonna let ’em catch the Midnight Rider.

No, I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no
Not gonna let ’em catch the Midnight Rider.

No, I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no
Not gonna let ’em catch the Midnight Rider.