Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 11:48:38 -0800 From: "Gerald M. Swatez" <swatez-AT-ni.net> Subject: Re: A Reading of the Dossier At 9:55 PM -0800 3/19/99, hugh bone wrote: >Enough of cataloging, referencing, talking about other people. > >What do *you* think is important in Le Differend, and what questions >arise in you mind that we (not the experts) are invited to comment on? Not quite enough, I think, Hugh. Earlier, I said I have an intuition that Lyotard's explication in "The Differend" of some of the ins and outs of the pragmatics of communication (contrasted with syntax and semantics) is an extremely powerful step toward understanding various of the conflicts and miscommunications that arise among us on this multi-culturally diverse planet. and Lyotard has something to say about objectivity, I think. I hope that we can discuss these matters with each other here in the terms he uses: genres of discourse, phrase regimens, genre-specific rules for refutation and validation. I hope that those of us who choose to participate here can agree to use this forum as a means for gaining skill in using a "language of phrase analysis" as Lyotard proposes. Perhaps we can't all agree to that. However, my own purposes at the moment here are that limited. Not so much to pose nor to comment on large questions, but merely to digest some of L's way of talking (writing), to appropriate some of the distinctions he exposes. I am slow. I like to creep around in a text, becoming familiar with its twists and and turns, its straightaways and curves, its vistas and blind alleys. (I do have manic moods while reading, indulging in flights of fancy, elaborations and avoidances. But I too easily get lost in those moods, forget where I started from, can hardly imagine where I might be going.) I *wonder* what is important in Le Differend. I've only read the Preface and have barely begun to chew on the first 32 pages. <bold>I</bold> said: I hear in Lyotard's words echoes of references to professional controversies in various fields. (COMMENT: I read this assertion with a feeling of awe. If true, its implications are vast. One example: a. Translations from one language to another (e.g., French/English) can only be done in cases in which the two languages share phrase regimens. b. Implied: <bold>Phrase regimens </bold> are not relative to cultures; they <bold>are, in principle, universal</bold>.) (COMMENT: I feel a small irony in the <bold>emphasis on goals</bold> as the basis of linking rules conjoined with the Pretext....) (COMMENT: I am touched by the "re-entrant" character of Lyotard's discourse; what he is saying must in some way be applied to what/how he is saying. --After a fashion, I see his explications here as means of resolving Russell's proposal of "category mistakes" to account for the Liar's Paradox.) The idea of "phrase regimens" excites me. "Genre of discourse" seem similar to "unverse of discourse," which I have thought with for many years. Jerry
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