Date: Sat, 09 Aug 1997 13:47:33 -0700
Subject: Imagination1-memory-understanding/Imagination2-virgin memory-passion


One of the results of dialogue as Caplan suggests are the abstract
idealization of concepts characteristic of instrumental rationality.
This "abstraction" is also constitutive of a "typical" or "generic" body
-- it produces the institutionalization of the emprirical singularity of
a body. In Hegel this is a dialectic that as an inwardization  produces
historical memory which then provides the typical forms which the
imagination uses to grasp, comprehend the chaos of sensations held up by
the apprehension of intuition. In Bataille what Caplan discusses as
dialogue is refered to as "discourse" which as old Hegel demonstrates is
possible even while playing cards in between class time.For instance,
Bataille writes in _Inner Experience_ that "L'experience doit etre vecue
jusqu'a la transe, unissant ce que la pensee discursive separe.
L'experience interieure doit atteindre la fusion de l'objet et du sujet,
etant comme sujet non-savoir, comme objet l'inconnu"(quoted in Pierre
Prevost _George Bataille and Rene Guenon_ p. 19).So,  Dialogue can also
work towards its own end, towards a crisis or limit situation[note:
graft something on Jasper later]. "It is not the least of Diderot's
paradoxes that for him the ultimate proof of the suitability of dialogue
to thought would come with the defeat of its very instrumentality. As i
will show, it was when dialogue finally touched him(and possibly his
interlocutor), when it moved him to tears, so that he lost all grasp
over himsefl, his conceptual instrument, and his topic, it was then that
he could sense that he had finally touched the mobile nature of reality
[...] if dialogue is the only instrument suited to seek out and probe
reality, it can only really "touch" its object when it is  not longer
quite a concept" (Caplan, p. 7). The dissolution of dialogue in the
instrumental sense is the dissolution of imagination1 by imagination2
which is also an openness in dialogue to inventive misreadings which
continously displace reified, "fixed" typical forms(the results of
following a "good" model by imagination1) -- Edward, this is where Bloom
is mixed in but also Shlovskij on "defamiliarization" -- but also in the
dissolution of dialogue itself what emerges is the convergence of a
multiplying polylogue without a particular author or source. The posting
texture constantly cut-and-mixed otherwise can never be stabalized by
any one post or sender -- perhaps this is why there is a sort of
destitute nakedness to a texture that as writing,  Plato reminds us,
cannot defend itself, cannot answer back and remains at the mercy of
"your" reading if that's not overly dramatic. If then, it's a question
of the "limit of dialogue" then also is it a question of the "limit of
dramatization"(one that perhaps begins to explore the place of gesturing
as on Artaud's theater of cruelty?). What about the "analytical
situation" ?  Shoshana Felman: "the unconscious is a reader. the reader
is therefore, on the same level,  always an anlysand - an analysand who
"knows what he means"[imagination1] but whose interpretation can be
given _another reading_[an inventive misreading which strengthens
imagination2] than it means. This is what anlytical discourse is all
about."(Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, p.22) What is being
discovered/invented in the unconscious is not some kind of meaning but a
"manner of reading", a pratical operation constituting and
deconstituting the understanding. When theory[imagination1] arrest this
operation it is always too late as the primal scene[imagination2] is
already elsewhere: "There  is a constitutive belatedness of the theory
over the practice, the theory always trying to catch up with what it was
that the practice, or the reading, was really doing. This belated
repetition of the theoretical construction[typical recurrences of
concepts, automatic return of reified forms -- note: graft Nietzsche's
discussion on memory and secondary reasonings of the understanding] can,
however, only partially and asymptomatically recover the _primal scene_
of analytical reading."(Felman, p. 24).

And...