December 2008
23 posts
It’s a hardly-to-non existent line between embedding what you have to say in a concrete epistemic position [playing wizard of oz with the curtain up!] and turning your opinions into personality ornaments…
I wasn’t kidding about Benjamin and Blackadder. That show is nothing if not History as movement towards the comprehension of itself as a single catastrophe. The space for agency dwindles just so every season as symmetrically comprehension begins to emerge.
I’m not sure I’m in love with Mulhall’s idea of the ‘inner’ as ‘aspect seeing’ in behavior. To think that someone is dreaming about zeppelins is to see his dreaming about zeppelins in his sleeping face? Awesome. I wish just for once that instead of ‘pain’ people will talk about “reciting the lyrics of Ziggy Stardust in one’s...
The divide between ‘continental’ and non-‘continental’ thought outside philosophy as such may go a little something like this: what entities need a programme for their (some kind of) reduction to lower-order entities and what length of rope it should allow them. This works at the respective appropriate disciplines for the reduction of the social to the psychological and the...
Too much subjectivity this week. Here’s a semi-dry one: when Derrida talks of how you’re gonna overstate the 16-18th century if you don’t know your Greeks [in White Mythology], and when Foucault goes on about how the Occident LOVES writing [in The Order of Things], are they making faces at each other?
I fantasize of one day being important enough that I can afford to have mixed feelings about subjects.
It’s either that I rather be stabbed in the habitus a thousand times over and not be bullied into taking anything on its own terms or that I’m just not a very good anything.
Hatin'
Derrida says “Deconstruction is not a sitcom”. But a sitcom is exactly that which makes an already established dynamics manifest again and again.
Les Mots et les Choses is fucking amazing. Yes Foucault has a nasty habit of presenting tautologies as historical theses, but.
*gasp!*
“oh but I’ve been criticized both for being too x and for not being x enough”
Discovery
Fuck yeah! Exhibit A Exhibit B
Modal characters on TV: in Buffy, Simpsons, more, a character is a range of overlapping personae.
Reading Lenin doing metaphysics is, I don’t know, like seeing an actor you know from a contemporary sitcom in an 80’s horror movie.
Top notch
A Real Critique of Analytic Philosophy
Say what you will about passing-by the linguistic turn, Analytic Philosophy is still essentially about language in one sense: it deals exclusively with affirming and denying propositions [as opposed to encouraging or hindering manners of cognition as let’s say Buddhism or Wittgenstein or Nietzsche are concerned with]. This is only an obvious thing to do given a particular picture of what...
A project for intellectual history:
Account for the process of a metaphysical itch [of the form “but how can x which we cannot do without survive in the absence of y which our worldview can no more accommodate”] ceasing to itch and explain why this never happens in Germany.
Thank you: “The goal of this paper is to develop a theory of content for vague language. My proposal is based on the following three theses: (1) language-mastery is not rule-based — it involves a certain kind of decision-making; (2) a theory of content is to be thought of instrumentally — it is a tool for making sense of our linguistic practice; and (3) linguistic contents are...
I’m vexed about ‘the lyrical’. I need it but I have nothing to say for it.
Why is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E never a part of something other? Where’s the whatever the project of which has its roots somewhere else but takes mind of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Punditry follows: An avant-garde is only as good as what you get when you refuse its theoretical foundations. Demiurge knows it doesn’t take a Freudian Gnostic to care about Breton. Then again maybe just give it an extra...
crossover
— “What’s in my pocket?” —“Caesar or nothing” [possibly the tasteless-est thing since Hofstadter’s translation of Eugene Onegin]
As soon as an essay makes its first really good point a near uncontrollable desire to stop reading comes down on me.
Cracked
Are nowadays all about New-Yorker-izing geekdom! I’m more for than against, though there’s a very Dangerous Minds way about the effort.
So far it doesn't feel like
there’s a lot to worry very much about other than Wittgenstein and Marx.