kevin nolan capital calves

[sus]

it is the moment of whole otherness that I will concentrate on. How recognisable can this moment be in fact, “with no name & place”, to the community of witnesses drawn into its pronominal range? How free from the ironies of recursive anticipation, “the grove on/ the hill we know too much of” reducing the movement of understanding to a sanctified acknowledgement of prior historical foreclosures? How open to the ‘unrecognised turn’ which, in the ‘Note on Metal’, appended to the Aristeas volume of 1968, Prynne sets out as the true wager of poetical endeavour, so that the twin movements of outgoing and return, allotropes of the division between existence and essence, may actively signal possibilities of real (that is, ethical) change, rather than a merely mechanical materialism or, even worse, a Heideggerian apophatics which would collapse the autonomy of the poem in the rush towards a negative theology of the unennhalte?

I also only understand this half way but it seems like what he's talking about is genuine surprise, novelty, otherness. And how it's difficult to apprehend genuine novelty. Without "foreclosing" it with your existing structure of interpretation.

How do you show readers something genuinely new which they won't just collapse or hallucinate as something they already know?

Tho the last sentence about Heidegger I don't get at all

 

[sus]

What chance then, for a poetics of unfashionably imperial exigence demanding nothing less from the reader than the sort of attention formerly given to the venerably and classically premodern,

Authority and trust. You need to believe you are chasing something worthwhile. @line b talked about this years ago wrt Prynne, Pynchon, Gaddis. Will there be something worthwhile at the end of the rabbithole if you go down it?

For instance. This is a schizoid text written by a mentally ill man who is very bad at communicating. But my pal luke who has shown me valuable things in the past, and helped clarify my vision, he says this is worthwhile, so I am strapping myself to the mast and suffering through it

 

[luka]

yeah its so great its 56 pages or something and no one understands a word of it. great essay.

 

[sus]

Odysseus has always been a powerful emblem for knowledge in the form of representation, the nostos as the full close of a cyclical movement, or heimkehr. It is the fact that Ulysses returns from his voyages that validates the totalising course of epic memory, until the advent of a bourgeois epoch whose estrangements allegedly replace its inclusive topology within the fragmentary humanism of the novel. Odysseus is the archetype of knowledge as survival: the limits of representability co-extend with the boundaries of selfhood to enclose the ineradicable particularity of experience as value personally located as subjectivity.

This is very interesting this is my favorite part so far.

I think he is trying to say there has been a shift in literary production from wanting to represent an objective, in the sense of evolutionary useful, knowledge, to wanting to represent subjective experience itself. But also that the alterity of subjectivity is about being alien, about shutting you out. There is a paradox of making accessible an alterity that gains its power specifically from how hard it is to assimilate/understand. True, deep alterity.

These themes came up in my Avatar research too. James Horner for the soundtrack worked really hard with ethnomusicologists to develop a truly alien sound. But audiences wouldn't understand it theyd be too baffled. So in the end James Cameron kept rejecting real alien sounds and instead wanted a familiar signification of the alien.

 

[luka]

the key to this essay is

Not to be outread here, it is worthy of note that one of the first uses of the Π symbol in mathematics was by the Englishman, William Oughtred, in 1652.)

 

[luka]

this is a man driven by the need to read everything, or at least more than anyone else, even prynne, the arch-mage of reading things

 

[luka]

i really like this

How recognisable can this moment be in fact, “with no name & place”, to the community of witnesses drawn into its pronominal range? How free from the ironies of recursive anticipation, “the grove on/ the hill we know too much of” reducing the movement of understanding to a sanctified acknowledgement of prior historical foreclosures?

and think it means something

 

[luka]

the thing of, o ive seen this before, its that thing
which is what preemptively closes down and shuts off the experiece

 

[luka]

words, and ascribing words and definitions to things as something which forecloses the actual encounter

 

[sus]

Ok that will have to be it for now, I have to join friend for a role-playing session but hopefully we will all have more clarity on the intro when I return

 

[sus]

the thing of, o ive seen this before, its that thing
which is what preemptively closes down and shuts off the experiece

Assimilation vs accommodation

Shock people to open them up

Then you can sneak the foreign devils past the gate

 

[sus]

The hard thing is that

As I'm reading this

Because I can't quite understand it

I have to round it up or down to things I already know

 

[sus]

They say reading Derrida is like a projective-prompted hallucination

 

[sus]

Of your own schema

 

[luka]

The hard thing is that

As I'm reading this

Because I can't quite understand it

I have to round it up or down to things I already know

thats the probllem with prynne too and why he is useful. you have to reach beyond the things youve already thiguht and schematised

 

[luka]

you have to assume (its more fun that way) that he knows things and has thought things you havent

 

[luka]

generally when we read we are paraphrasing into our own schema, yeah yeah yeah, thats just saying....

 

[luka]

i like the opposition of "of Homeric wandering with the theme of Hebraic diaspora."
homecoming (circle) with perpetual wandering

 

[luka]

no home to go back to

 

[luka]

no circle to draw, only movement, exile and 'nomadology'