Subject: Re: Events
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 19:52:44 -0500 (EST)


 I am going to try something I haven't done before, and that's to write
an essay, in part at least, on a list. Mark, I'll probably cross your
lines on re:events into my first paragraph giving, of course, proper
bibliographical references to the listserv. Anybody else, feel free to
help me 'finish' this thing, ordinary time is ticking.

a fragment from the second paragraph expanding on the "collusion of
knowledge and power" by way of Nietzsche.

In the Twilight of The Idols Nietzsche writes with regards  to the
"error of imaginary causes" that there is a cause-creating drive that
given the impression of some feeling, rather than just accepting the
fact that we feel, motivates the feeling by looking for its cause or
reason as if everything had to do with a doer, a suject. Essential to
this drive, to the becoming conscious of the simplicity of a feeling (a
"private experience" in Wittengstein) is the memory which "calls up
earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations (a
metanarrative?) which have grown out of them [...] Thus there arises an
_habituation_ to a certain causal interpretation which in truth
obstructs and even inhibits an _investigation_ of the cause [this is
going to be a psychological explanation]" (section 4 The Four Great
Errors). It is the speed with which this drive happens, that N calls
the reactive will which is the impossibility to 'read' slowly and to
dwell alongside the strange, that which is in excess of thinking or
interpretation. Memory then, is an "instituted process of reaction"
(_WTP_ section 478).

...
In section 479, he writes: "The whole of "inner experience" rest upon
the fact that a cause for an excitement of the nerve centers is sought
and imagined - and that only a cause thus discovered enters
consciousness: this cause in no way corresponds to the real cause [I
take this to be the psychological explanation] - it is a groping on the
basis of previous "inner experiences," i.e., of memory." The
imagination projects, schematizes on the basis of memory which itself
produces memory that allows for the regularity of perceptions, and so,
the accumulation of experience. Consciousness as constituted by both
memory an imagination posits change, becoming, or bare existence if you
will, as a 'thing.' The encounter with events becomes an entity.

...




--