The tulip, a spring-blooming bulb, has given its name as an acronym to a set of doctrinal assertions associated with the Reformed ('Calvinist') tradition

Making additional progress. Cleared off/out about 180 inches of shelf space on my desk, got all the theory/philosophy books onto shelves where I can see them, in alphabetical order by author, and emptied the boxes I brought home from school 3 years ago. [Yes, well, some of us have these . . . personal limitations.]

This has produced a retrograde movement vis-à-vis my desktop, but — today is trash day. Although all the individual stacks of stuff (think of other words that start with “s”) require actions, I have a strategy. Courage!

Executing this strategy entailed updating a notes file, among other things.

Which included a story about our church — or rather, more precisely, the Presbyterian Church in Corydon, after the battle of Corydon in 1863, which the Union lost, btw, one of only two on Union soil, but you don’t get to choose your history. (This underscores the ultimate point, in a way.) After the battle, the Confederate wounded were brought to the Presbyterian Church for care, and laid out on the pews — better the pews than the floor, I suppose. We know this, because someone remembered having to clean blood off the pews later.

This is one of the stories of our little church.

The way our pastor tells the story, “I don’t know what effects that act had, on the Presbyterians who did the nursing, or on the men who were cared for in the church, . . . but I’m pleased and proud that they did it.”

The reaction of being pleased and proud is a way of appropriating that history. It is one of the ways history “makes us who we are,” in the sense that we can say “We are the people whose forbears took in enemy wounded and cared for them, we are the people who are proud and pleased to be able to say that about our forbears.” Presumably, we would want to do the same if circumstances called for it, or similar.

Now . . . this is a bit of history that doesn’t “determine” us. No doubt we could trace some “determining” influences in other ways, at other levels of analysis: larger social, cultural and economic effects of the Civil War, the foreclosure of this or that social and cultural option due to those effects, and so on. But this episode, and its half-life, which seems to exert some effect, doesn’t seem to exert a determining effect. And while we don’t get to choose it, we do experience it as offering some element of choice: how to feel about it, how to think about it, how to appropriate it, how to identify with or claim it.

That choice, it seems to me, does have a kind of decisive influence, in that it changes the calculus, the Bayesian probabilities for future action. Once we decide that we’re pleased and proud of it, there’s more push on the side of “trying to be like them” that’s going to apply to some upcoming episode, less on the side of “trying to be different from them.” So that there is a sense in which history (this kind of historic episode, anyway) makes us who we are just insofar as we ourselves make ourselves that way in our specific appropriation of or identification with that history.

This moment of choice seems, to me, extraordinarily important, especially from the standpoint of thinking about utopia, or pro-utopian activity.

[As a follow-up, here's a brief indulgence of relevant particular-church and small town parochiality:
Wikipedia offers a narrative of the Battle of Corydon, and Nostalgiaville features a large number of Corydon pictures that include an image of the historical marker in front of the old Presbyterian Church building on the square -- not the one where the wounded were cared for, which was the even older one, but the Anna Applegate Memorial one. They have inaccurate info. about the current site of the Corydon Presbyterian Church, however. Nevertheless, inaccurate info. is a little better than about.com's Presby-repressive walking tour of Corydon, which includes the Methodist church on the square, but not the old Presbyterian one, which is now the Wright Intepretive Center, with a museum in the basement and a gift shop in the SE corner of the old sanctuary, which, I admit, I would think would want to be included in a walking tour. On the other hand, if a person were to take that walking tour, they would be led ineluctably past the old CPC building twice, what with walking from the Visitor's Center to the Gov's Headquarters and then to the County Courthouse, so that the impulse to stop there would be well-nigh irresistible.]

My office is almost clean. The problem with this is distraction.

There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters. . . .
To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play. How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, or metaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Is there a hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been an official, referential genre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to be a language of power.)

¹

Maybe not just a distraction.

¹“What is a Minor Literature?”, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, in David H. Richter, Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd ed. (Boston/New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2000) 167-174, p. 173.

For example, the tall spire may mean something

Where do the symbols come from?

That is, where does the developed material that situates symbols, constructs them as meaningful, assigns them content, demarcates some content as primarily associated with this or that symbol and separates it from association with some other symbol, structures the relationships in which symbols may stand, one to another — where does that process of elaboration take place?

Isn’t this process precisely what “culture” — in the sense in which the humanities use that word, less in the sense in which anthropology and sociology use it — constitutes?

So that the various (very various) media, genres, forms of representation and signification, creative activity work out or embody the working out of the structure and content of networks of symbols and the received wisdom or sudden insight that seems to be contained in these.

Then, as some media fall out of use, as some genres wax more popular and their examples more numerous, as new associative or denotative content is associated with some image or word and previously commonplace associations or denotations dwindle and fade away, as the “cultural context” or “cultural landscape” or “cultural situation” changes — never mind why, never mind in response to what sets of other influences or forces — the content of knowledge changes, the meaning of symbols changes, the possibilities for and the meaning of further resignifications change, and the consequences of this cultural situation for whatever other forces or influences it is in relationship with change.

Whether all of that could be worked out more specifically, whether locally or more generally, might be one question. But a different line of questioning might go something like this: what medium exerts (or, media exert) a preponderant influence on people’s background knowledge of the world? Perhaps it makes sense to think of this background knowledge of the world as a “cognitive map” or framework, including categories, contents, signs relevant for classificatory and inferential thinking, the mythic or archetypal or skeletal or “known” world. What content does it assign to or provide for these signs or symbols? What networks of signs/symbols does it set up, hold in place? What activity, behavior (intellible-meaningful activity or behavior that is, we might say “significantly dressed-up activity or behavior” in fact) tends to follow from or circulate around this content? What attitudes and responses and “next moves” and conversational possibilities does it create, foreclose, encourage, discourage?

What kind of people does the cultural scene make it easy for people to be/become? What kind of people does it make it difficult for people to be/become? (Difficult: takes effort, application of resources, decision and perseverance, intention and opposition, possibly some degree of suffering.) What kind of human experience of those kinds of people does it provide for? (for example, how thoughtless and automatic, or uncertain, or riddled with doubts about whether it constitutes the best course of action, or pleasant, or subject to perpetual physical threat but capable of being interpreted as heroic action, etc. . . . )

To the Unknown Voice, Kandinsky -- another relevant example

Finally understood understood [one reason] why these people are so difficult to read.

Because when in the course of thinking something occurs to you, seemingly clearly, and then you try to convey it, or even a sense of it, in language — what else have you got to work with? — and lo, there are no words with which to construct a proposition, assertion, description, that would not amount to saying something other than what you mean to convey, and it might even happen, depending on the occurrence and the words in the lexicon and the way you have every reason to believe readers will understand them, something really false.

When a situation like this occurs, what do you do? Just keep quiet? (”If you don’t have anything intelligible and accessible to say, don’t say anything at all!”) What if you imagine that what you have to say someone else somewhere needs to hear? Or, if not needs exactly, then would thrill to hear and lift up their head and sing and come alive? What if it feels like your life depends on conveying this meaning you now are custodian of, since you received it, something like the way someone might receive an infant left on a doorstep? Or, if not your life, then your life as a particular kind of person, which you’ve chosen to try to live?

Then, I think, you write like Adorno or Irigaray or Judith Butler. Because you really have no other choosable choice.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Floral arrangements at the event featured these flowers, considered exotic in this locale, which grow wild in South Africa

Here is something that might happen in utopian space–which might appear in the form of the auditorium of a church, constructed some time around the turn of the last century: a transgender beauty pageant, in which the intermezzos that allow the contestants to change from one outfit to another are bridged by drag show acts and, for the finale, a performance of traditional Samoan dances by members of the local Samoan community, including a solo by this year’s Miss Transgender Community, at one point using an elaborately carved knife approximately 2 feet long as a prop. When the outgoing Miss Transgender Community takes her final walk down the runway, she is showered with money, hugs and kisses by the members of the Samoan group, including the beautiful little girls (3 years old? 4?) who have been dancing in the audience all night to the music of the drag show acts, and taking peppermints from the judges’ table with increasing boldness.

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 5)

Who could recognize that “form of absolute danger” concretely upon its presentation? Who could distinguish it from a form of delight with any finality, stability, or consensus?

A representation of a possible destination, ergo ipso facto not a representation of a utopian destination

Habermas’ theory of communicative action makes language the source of social salvation, reconciliation. The telos of language is intersubjective consensus, we attain rational self-understandings through discourse, and radical democracy presumably depends on more and more free and equal reliance on language, on more universal, inclusive, equal, actually operative public discourse.

Lacan’s theory of the formation of the psychoanalytic subject makes the entry into language necessarily alienating. Language users are by that fact alienated creatures, constituted by an experience of loss, and further, by irrational desire that remains utterly beyond the reach of language or, more generally, symbolic representation.

A rational discursive utopia along Habermasian lines would not it seems address the source of alienation and unfulfillment presented in the Lacanian picture. [On the other hand, psychoanalysis depends entirely on language, too, for whatever insights it obtains for the analyst and creates for the analysand. But does that make sense?]

The configuration of an actual utopia (and by extension, of pro-utopian social-political activity) — if we can even use this “actual utopia” terminology intelligibly — would depend upon, would need to correspond to, the actual configuration of the subject(s) of this projected utopia. Which just means that the model of the subject matters crucially for models of utopia.

We cannot decide whether the barmaid depicted here occupies communicative space

Finished reading Roadside Picnic. !!

[Confession, felt obliged to check out Cryptomaoist Editions and Dave's Homepage just to make sure I wasn't cheating the Strugatskys out of their royalties. As an aside, one of the first books I remember reading was Ozma of Oz, though in an abridged edition especially for children with lots of pictures.]

Considering the possibility that the Zone constitutes communicative space, which for that reason is space as potentially utopian, but because of that, also lethally risky. Lethal and promising. Productive, but of monstrosities, at least potentially. Boundary issues and category issues: human/animal, human/divine, human/other, human/other/divine/animal/alien. Alive/dead. [I would have to think a lot longer than I want to right now about the role of gender. The characters are almost all male, the key women are wife/mother and daughter, but then again, Red's speech explaining his refusal to emigrate contains some conventional gender symbols -- signs? -- and suggests some obvious gender-analytic possibilities which upon inspection are completely reversible and undecidable, if one takes that route.]

Is it communicative space, time-space where communication is taking place, if you can’t tell whether whatever is or was there is trying to communicate? Can you count that as communication? (Well, can we count human interactions with “nature” or what we take as the material environment as communication? Pace Irigaray, can we count men’s interactions with women as communication? Say, Freud’s publication of The Interpretation of Dreams? Women’s interactions with men?)

More to the point, can we count monologic discourse in a language that is non-cognizant of others — other speakers, other languages, either way — as communication?

If we took the “roadside picnic” hypothesis presented in the text — metaphorizing or modeling or metaphorizing as modeling a ??-human encounter on another encounter, human-animal, experienced from the human side, in which the human side is the noncognizant party — then the visitors of the Visitation have left traces, a text, potentially revelatory, revelatory contingent on the development of the appropriate hermeneutics, appropriately undecidable. Leaving behind a text might seem like an act of communication. But a lot depends, from the standpoint of the conversations mentioned in the novel, on what attitude the visitors actually take or have taken towards the human side. They might have no knowledge of or interest in the human inhabitants of the space that became the Zone, of the inhabitants of the planet that got in the way of the transmission or emission or ejection or ejaculation or firing from some distant point in uncognized, unrepresented, unrepresentable, unencountered and unencounterable space. Or, they might. Whether that would be better or worse is equally undecidable. Cf. . . . whether it is love or hate one does not know. (Ecc. 9:1) Again, from the perspective of the folks in the novel, we can’t say this question and its decidability don’t matter; it matters, it will have consequences, and we would have preferences about those consequences, but can’t determine what consequences to expect, or how to influence them.

Well, it’s just a novel. But it could have some features in common with what we ordinarily think of as real life. Or some relationship to considerations we face there.

Now that I am thinking still more about space, in particular as the space of communication and the creation of space “between two” and its productive potential, I have stumbled upon Bakhtin and the concept of chronotope and have read an interesting article¹ using chronotopic analysis on Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale and various works of Manet’s, and suggesting a blurred public-private space as an emergent, disturbing chronotope of 19th century literature and art (taking Flaubert and Manet as representative), and citing Bakhtin on “the chronotope of the threshold” as associated with the more general theme of encounter — making the Zone something like a threshold, perhaps, as also communion tables and baptismal fonts — and am working on laying my hands on The Dialogic Imagination and hoping that this will be helpful in my ongoing efforts to make sense out of The Speculum of the Other Woman.

Reference
¹Janice Best, “The chronotope and the generation of meaning in novels and paintings.” Criticism. Spring, 1994, I’m inferring (36:2), pages??? — the full text is online at FindArticles, but without full citation information.

The full text of Augustine’s City of God is online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

It includes the hideously timely text of Book XIX, Chapter 6, “The mistakes of human judgement, when the truth is hidden”.

This is old stuff, and yet we have not yet heard the various parties to the current abysmal debate in which everyone is rushing to self-justification and defense, step up to the plate and acknowledge that our behavior here demonstrates how wretched we are. Or pray to be delivered from it.

Another good place to think

Further thinking about the obsession with “difference” and “sameness,” and the effort to establish intersubjective relations of difference or across lines of difference, and finally had some sense of understanding of why “the dialectic” reduces everything to “the same,” by recollecting that Hegel uses the metaphor of the relation of the acorn to the oak — i.e., everything necessary for the oak is already present in the acorn — and presents the phenomenology of spirit as an account of the stages of the coming to full consciousness/development of the Absolute Spirit, which makes the moments of the dialectical process moments of self-consciousness in the end, as opposed to any actual consciousness or encounter with another; just encounter with the self in another form or under another rubric. [This is, after all, a form of idealism.] So I was tremendously excited and happy for a few minutes. Then I realized that I was really just catching up to the rest of the class. Even so, this very concept has been so extremely difficult for me [sort of a Mulderian? "the truth is out there," whether we ever really get to know it or not] to grasp, I remained pretty gratified.

Stream of consciousness

Realized that I will definitely be able to finish ch. 4, and this dissertation.