i think i picked up the idea of "conversation" from a b3n w4tson backlash argt against de saussure!

[dubdobdee]

geuss on rorty on "conversation" (and some discontents)

have only skimmed this: am totally back-achey and mentally fuzzy today and not getting my ideas in order on ANYTHING, least of all chumpdom left right or elsewhere

am tryin to do a (small) bit of spring cleaning -- or at least its pintsize cousin "putting stuff away"

Comments

Re: "vector to the totality"

[koganbot]

Well, I thought that by "vector" you meant something like tangent or pathway - something that takes you out of the circle that you've been restricting yourself to.

But "totality" is where you seemed to be floating off into a buzzword haze. First of all, why is "all possible human interplay" a "totality"? Seems as if "human interplay" would be open-ended. (And why assume that humans only interact with other humans?) But "the totality of all possible human interplay" hardly seems a relevant or necessary concept in regard with what we want from our vector. All that's necessary is that we ride our vector to some other interplay that seems interesting or compelling, not that we care whether or not we're in sight of all possible interplay. And if there is no other interplay in sight that seems interesting and compelling... oh, I don't know. I never knew what was on your mind. You either have good reason to ride the vector, or you don't, but if you have the good reason you don't need to cite some principle that takes you to a totality or something.

(To observers this last paragraph must seem unintelligible, but Mark was referring to a convo he and I were having back in 2000. No to go find that quote.)

Re: "vector to the totality"

[koganbot]

Now to go find that quote, I meant. Unless I don't find it, in which case the quote will be no-go.

Re: "vector to the totality"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well i think my argument was that this was where meltzer -- in 65 or so -- was arguing to himself that an aesthetics of rock could take us: so vector means "pathway towards the map", and i guess i based that on his list from uastin of all the other words that had to be taken into account (all possible human responses) before an aesthetics coudl be said to be operative

i don't see how "towards the totality" is any more or less vague than "all possible" -- one reads more open-ended than the other, maybe, if you insist that totality contains the meaning "they will one day be numbered" (whereas to me it mainly contains the idea that Western Academic Knowledge -- in whose dynamic meltzer then placed himself -- is pushes itself towards the understanding of everything it can know: that's why they're called UNIVERSITIES (<-- not sure if this is true now i written it)

i think that my point was that AT THAT TIME meltzer still saw the generalised endpoint of the understanding of everything -- the institutionalised purpose of unversitiues -- as something he shared, and THAT'SD why he was excited by "the aesthetics of rock" and wanted to pursue it in that form and that language

and that his fall away from bothering to "think through" his best ideas does actually related to a loss of faith in that idealised overall journey -- that the pragmatic rock-critic life-habit of dealing with each new item as it falls before you cuts against the desire or need to "think things through"

(i mean you may have this desire or need temperamentally -- as i think YOU do, for example -- but the University Ideal maybe possibly disciplines into some very creative or perceptive thinkers, such as meltzer, who DON;T have it temperamentally; and have, indeed, by temperament, ended up in roles and social spaces which militate against it rather)