The question of meaning always comes up in talking about interpretation: what did the author mean, what is the meaning of this phrase, etc. Most of the times I've seen it brought up, except within biblical hermeneutics, the point is to talk about the impossibility of returning to an original or inherent meaning within the text. My own interests have, perhaps, gone towards what Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning comepls our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way."
My own interests, in other words, have moved towards functions, the functions of statements, beliefs, statements, stories, especially functions obscured by the apparent objectives (the meaning...) of what has been written.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Familiarity
"I love grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday" might just as well be "I hate grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday." The one makes as much, or as little, sense as the other. Who knows where the difference comes from...
Friday, September 10, 2010
cosmopolitanism
Isn't what is missing from cosmopolitanism the recognition of the other not as an external object but an internal voice? Isn't the celebration of many voices, heterglossia as we called it our studies, missing the same? And what does the inclusion of the voices of the other actually accomplish?
What I'm curious about is the internal difference and in the other, less as the difference between my self and others as between my self and myself. I worry that cosmopolitanism attempts to be too objective, literal objects bearing the distinctions of identity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, etc). Appreciation for the other in this way functions just like bigotry, by making room for what makes the other distinct. For instance, studying queer or ethnic or women's literature as such. Doesn't Slavoj Zizek address this same concern when he writes, "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness... of what goes on"?
On the other hand, apprecation for the other does examine the internal difference as hybridity, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. What's disappointing about this is that the hybridities are still posited as distinguishing marks between groups, so that what's happening isn't a disruption of the logic of the system as much as a brief alteration in taxonomy: what is pathological is revealed, finally, to be normal.
But that turn towards understanding the pathological as normal is also where I think this all begins to go right, focusing on a logic of madness. What I want to see is the normal become pathological, so that heterglossia isn't so much about the inclusion of different objects as different subjectivities within the same object.
Blah blah blah.
What I'm curious about is the internal difference and in the other, less as the difference between my self and others as between my self and myself. I worry that cosmopolitanism attempts to be too objective, literal objects bearing the distinctions of identity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, etc). Appreciation for the other in this way functions just like bigotry, by making room for what makes the other distinct. For instance, studying queer or ethnic or women's literature as such. Doesn't Slavoj Zizek address this same concern when he writes, "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness... of what goes on"?
On the other hand, apprecation for the other does examine the internal difference as hybridity, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. What's disappointing about this is that the hybridities are still posited as distinguishing marks between groups, so that what's happening isn't a disruption of the logic of the system as much as a brief alteration in taxonomy: what is pathological is revealed, finally, to be normal.
But that turn towards understanding the pathological as normal is also where I think this all begins to go right, focusing on a logic of madness. What I want to see is the normal become pathological, so that heterglossia isn't so much about the inclusion of different objects as different subjectivities within the same object.
Blah blah blah.
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