Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 20:01:31 GMT
From: pennamacoor-AT-enterprise.net (Michael D. Pennamacoor)
Subject: re: danger of unseen essencing


Someone (Steve Callahan?) wrote recently:

>>>What is the primordial stuff that remains once the dross has all been burned
>off?

Finding this talk of primordialstuff and its associated (burn-off-able)
dross highly problematic. In some ways it re-minds of Althusser's
distinction between an empiricist and a symptomatic reading. An empricist
critique would (brief summary here - for the 'real thing' read Althusser's
'Reading Capital') read a text or a con-text as hiding its essence within
itself as a gloss of drosses (of shimmering but deceiving appearances, a
braid, a web of unintended deceipt). A successful critical (searching,
revealing) reading would consist in the revelation (in-sights) of
over-sights (and other filterings, shakings and refinements) in the text
whereupon the accidental but more-or-less-opaque dross would be separated
>from the now visible essence or core (seen as the 'truth' revealed by the
empiricist critic) - mining for gold. On the other hand, a symptomatic
reading would reveal, not the essence lying tantalisingly under the
removable dross, but the manner in which the truths and falsities play
themselves out as a dialogue in the text in a relation of necessity and
structural causation. This is not the revelation of dross as
wrong-footings, blindnesses, oversights, hastiness, etc but the showing of
the drama in which the dross drosses (in which the dross essences). Thus
the dross (in the text, in the metal ore, in the thing) can not be burned
off as if it were a separate thing from the 'truth' (of the text or its
object of knowledge, etc), as if it were a part (apart). And, whence
primordialstuff? A 'real' separation of the original, the under-lying, the
simple essence, etc from the dross, the complex existence, etc is the
idealist/empiricist myth, the dream of an un-sullied past, a
be-fore-the-fall, a revealable but lost innocence, a simple simplicity...

I should like to bravely (but equally ignorantly mythically) say that there
is no primordialstuff and no dross. Instead of seeking for the essence of
things (the gold in the ore, the truth of the text, the primordial in the
apparent/current) perhaps we should reveal the essencing of things and the
thinging of essence - perhaps artists are best suited to this, but what of
art? And what of technology in the sense of the saving power within its
essenc-ing, how does techne essence?

best wishes

MP


"Man is something that should be overcome" Nietzsche
M the Pbrain
snail: 38 Sandown Lees, Sandwich, Kent, UK




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