Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 13:37:36 -0800
From: "Wilkerson, Richard" <rcwilk-AT-dreamgate.com>
Subject: RE: totalizing


Hi Lois,

  I sure miss the wonderful conversations on  the lists you participate 
in.   Wish I had more time for them, always think I will next week, next 
week..... years go by.

sorry to be a hit-and-run philosopher.

I'm thinking at the moment about some useful but simple expression of 
writing that isn't totalizing.
Any general example will fail, falling immediately into the realm of 
abstraction without its materiality.
Perhaps just to say that any writing which overflows its own intentions and 
plots, its own codes without completely coming apart at the seams, has the 
chance of laying out a plane or field or zone which may avoid becoming 
transcendent.  If the plane becomes transcendent, then its like a Platonic 
ideal and a totalizing structure. If it remains immanent, having resonance 
and consistency yet incompleted objectness, free subjectness, then however 
contorted it may be said to be a force or a network of forces moving across 
and creating the plane as they move.
   If the movement is preceded by an ideal or abstraction, or the flow of 
the parts are all pre-channelled, there is then a subsuming under the 
general. Difference falls apart and is just a species of a higher 
similarity. (look, the dog's feet are all different!  No, this difference 
is collected under the same of feet, of dogs...)

  much like my writing today, uggh.  - gotta go.

  -Richard