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"

[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)