Spontaneous. As opposed to looking for. Ran across apophenia over the weekend in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Googled it, found that many sources, probably including (though I'm not sure yet) he who coined it (Conrad), really mean it -- the "ia" part -- as an illness, as in the "ia" in "paranoia," where of course "ia" is the Greek meaning state or condition, and a condition is a bad thing to have, a state, a bad place to be, in current usage, I suppose. But don't get all in state about it.
Which is all, of course, perception (back to the definition). The word perception, recent-modernly, has come to facilitate the put-down. As in, "Well, that's your perception." This being a corruption of the use meant for it when psychotherapy introduced it to us as a way to acknowledge one another's moments in the world without giving up our own ("I hear that you perceive me to be saying that I dislike you, but in fact I am trying to say that I dislike the toothpaste you leave on my blow dryer every morning.") but has been corrupted into a sly responsibility deflector ("You may think that I am yelling at you, but that's just your perception" -- said in a very loud voice; or gaslighter ("I didn't wink at that woman. You perceived that I winked" or "Footsteps upstairs? There are no footsteps. That's only one of your perceptions"), so that "perception" begins to mean "crazy," rather than "the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind."
Online Etymology Dictionary - Cite This Source perception 1483, "receiving, collection," from L. perceptionem (nom. perceptio) "perception, apprehension, a taking," from percipere "perceive" (see perceive). First used in the more literal sense of the L. word; in secondary sense, "the taking cognizance of," it is recorded in Eng. from 1611.
In this manner the word "perception" itself has been corrupted. One could interpret the Skeptics definition above through that lens, and thereby grok the connection between Conrad's concept and assholes using the psychological meaning to deflect one's attention from their assholedness or lying.
I like these two definitions of "perception" from dictionary.com:
1. the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.
2. immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation, as of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities; insight; intuition; discernment: an artist of rare perception.
Now, noting the introduction of "intuitive" into the mix, we move to the obvious "feminine" flavor of this apothenia idea. From there it's not hard to see how the concept is undermined. But I like Gibson's character Cayce (pronounced Case; a woman), for her job is apothenia. She is hired by branders to intuit "cool" -- to see emerging patterns of commodifiable, well, whatever. Fashion, music, habit. Even deeper than that, Cayce can "sense" whether or not a logo is going to make it for a company simply by gaging her body's reaction to it. One could argue that this is a form of apothenia,even though the logo response is not to a currently available, concrete pattern, but rather to the potential pattern (that would emerge if the logo were dissemenated), or to a pattern underlying a current but sub-whatever (liminal, terranean) pattern of connections (since in some theory all potentials are current). Perhaps a sensing of connections that could lead to a discernible pattern (even if that pattern is discernible only to the apothenetic -- apotheniod?). Which plays pretty naturally into themes or questions of Time, which are there, too. As in the discussion of the possibility of changing the past. All of this is pretty spot-on to some New Physics stuff, of course, and why we love Gibson even beyond his ability to, as the Princess said on Friday, "grab you around the throat" with his story telling.
He really does write women well. I am going to be thinking a bit about this. Maybe get back to you on it.
Maybe this writing women so well is partly due to, as with Cayce, his willingness to let them have their femininity in the way it is real -- as in making spontaneous connections and drawing meaning from seemingly (under the patriarchal, linear model) unrelated phenomena. This, rather than expressing themselves through the questing after A Man or A Child or A Toilet To Scrub or, as is the current fashion in how women are perceived in the world, Someone To Screw. Yes, believe it or not, there is more than one way for women to push against what's expected of us. Not surprising that, in a world still fashioned more than not by The Patriarchy that we'd be manipulated into believing our best defense against oppression is to engage in sex with as many men as possible, or take our shirts off in crowds as often as possible. Gee, I wonder who would have thought that up? And besides that, it has now become so commonplace, this perception of women as collectively embracing our inner sluts and therefor quite ready all the time for sex, if the man is just attractive... I mean hot enough, that it's just boring already. And yet another way to remove from us -- just as effectively as putting us in the kitchen permanently (and I don't mean the professional kitchen) -- our three-dimensionality. Another boring expectation based on stereotype, just like becoming a housewife was expected and boring and repressive when I was growing up. Fogetaboudit. Anyhow, in a word, Cayce is neither hyper- nor a- sexual. Neither a ballbuster nor a pushover. Neither obsessed with her looks nor unaware of them. Neither kittenish nor manlike. Imagine. She just is. And for that alone, WB, I salute you. Never mind the rest of your genius, which I'd all but forgotten the specific channels/nodes/depths of, given I hadn't really read you since grad school.
Maybe there are manners of liberation that would benefit us a bit more than being hypersexual, which is just another way to be on call for men, not really all that different in the end than being on call to make coffee or iron the clothes or whatever (well, except that sex is a lot more invasive and risky than making coffee)? Ya think? Maybe a way, like, say, honing our faculties to make discrete connections between seemingly unrelated objects/events/memes and to intuit our environment's trends, fault lines, directions; use that together with some logic and thereby get an edge on, well, everything, but in such a way that we could actually, like, maybe improve things rather than dismantling and dissolving them?
Think about this: to discern patterns is a priori to put things together.
Hmm, I wonder who might be threatened by that?
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Here's an interesting woman who has taken the word for her scholarly/professional use:
http://www.apophenia.com/.
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