File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0211, message 109


Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 18:55:18 +1000
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: To read  or not,


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--Boundary_(ID_5lrsa7krcl1PkFAkCIPCjw)

Steve/All,

The other elements of Lydia's message are also of interest, and now (thanks) she offers to send us text.

Like blind men approaching an elephant, the most knowledgeable of readers approach a text with certain personal abilities to make observations..

 The author of the blind men was the first "sighted" observer of the artifact he wrote. But  the blind men used their other senses to make realistic observations of the elephant, and so can readers of a text who do not have the in-sight of its author.

So i think texts are whatever one can "see" in them.  Like theology, history, categorical imperatives, and other ideologies, they have a "life" of their own, and susceptible readers are sometimes impelled to action.

As for Freud, I've always been suspicious about the un-conscious, which, by definition we cannot know.   But if dreams come from an "un" conscious it must be "real" although "un" knowable.

Texts, like tombstones, are artifacts which confer a smidgen of immortality although they are sometimes poorly interpreted.  Fortunately, Shakespeare, unlike the early Egyptians, didn't need to chisel stone, and became a giant immortal in print.

regards,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  : Re: To read or not, authorized or not - "this strange practice of reading"


  Hugh
  I think that for me, as for most people who transited from English Analytical and Empirical  Philosophy (my disgraceful past) through towards continental philsophy and western marxism - a trajectory which I drift along in between work and engagements in various everyday interventions - the 'text' referred to is defined  clearly understood in Barthes short text 'From work to text' - he describes it thus "...The break as is freqently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearence of marxism and freudiansim; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What history, our history, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long - and still - concieved of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now a requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. ...." This extended quote from Barthes, is one of the best proposals favailable for defining and understanding why the word 'text' has been used and misused so continuosly during the past 40 years. More than most it contains the brief and radical statements why 'text' concintues to reverberate down the line - some bullet point quotes...


    a.. the work is fragment of substance, the text is a methodological field
    b.. the text poses problems of classification, because it always involves a certain experience of limits
    c.. the work is caught up in a process of filiation: a dtermination of the work by the world(by race by history), a conformity of the work to the author. 
    d.. the work s an object of consumption, the text decants the work from consumption and gathers it up as play, actiivity production, practice

    e.. the author is reputed the father and the owner of his work - literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the authors declared, or presumed intentions.
    f.. the text reads without the inscription of the father, the metaphor of the text is that of the network.
  in part Irigaray's use of the 'text' is perhaps built around and formulated around the last crucial  point but the whole text in a sense clarifies and legitimises her practice - i'd add the phrtase intertextuality but feel that it's outside this frame of reference myself.

  Personally I suspect that Irigrary is an essentialist...but less so these days than i used to..

  regards
  steve




--Boundary_(ID_5lrsa7krcl1PkFAkCIPCjw)

HTML VERSION:

Steve/All,
 
The other elements of Lydia's message are also of interest, and now (thanks) she offers to send us text.
 
Like blind men approaching an elephant, the most knowledgeable of readers approach a text with certain personal abilities to make observations..
 
 The author of the blind men was the first "sighted" observer of the artifact he wrote. But  the blind men used their other senses to make realistic observations of the elephant, and so can readers of a text who do not have the in-sight of its author.
 
So i think texts are whatever one can "see" in them.  Like theology, history, categorical imperatives, and other ideologies, they have a "life" of their own, and susceptible readers are sometimes impelled to action.
 
As for Freud, I've always been suspicious about the un-conscious, which, by definition we cannot know.   But if dreams come from an "un" conscious it must be "real" although "un" knowable.
 
Texts, like tombstones, are artifacts which confer a smidgen of immortality although they are sometimes poorly interpreted.  Fortunately, Shakespeare, unlike the early Egyptians, didn't need to chisel stone, and became a giant immortal in print.
 
regards,
Hugh
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
: Re: To read or not, authorized or not - "this strange practice of reading"

Hugh
I think that for me, as for most people who transited from English Analytical and Empirical  Philosophy (my disgraceful past) through towards continental philsophy and western marxism - a trajectory which I drift along in between work and engagements in various everyday interventions - the 'text' referred to is defined  clearly understood in Barthes short text 'From work to text' - he describes it thus "...The break as is freqently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearence of marxism and freudiansim; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What history, our history, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long - and still - concieved of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now a requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. ...." This extended quote from Barthes, is one of the best proposals favailable for defining and understanding why the word 'text' has been used and misused so continuosly during the past 40 years. More than most it contains the brief and radical statements why 'text' concintues to reverberate down the line - some bullet point quotes...

in part Irigaray's use of the 'text' is perhaps built around and formulated around the last crucial  point but the whole text in a sense clarifies and legitimises her practice - i'd add the phrtase intertextuality but feel that it's outside this frame of reference myself.

Personally I suspect that Irigrary is an essentialist...but less so these days than i used to..

regards
steve



 

--Boundary_(ID_5lrsa7krcl1PkFAkCIPCjw)--

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005