Interpretation, Explanation

repeating this from an older post, just cause I thought it deserved it

An interpretation is not an explanation, and explanations of particular points fail as interprtation. An interpretation is a response, as strong or weak as the cumulative coaborating evidence. Being 'right' or 'wrong' has little or no bearing here. What matters is the constellation of interpretive points, how rich and suggestive that network of associations. In a constellation, meaning doesn't arise from the particular points , but in how the lines are drawn from point to point. New interpretations arise by redrawing the connecting lines.

Parataxis over metaphor!

What's a metaphor but parataxis with metaphysical pretensions?
What's a simile but parataxis tagged for easy reading?

Raw thoughts, bloody raw... Aesthetic Realism

Really enjoying Ray Brassier's piece in The Speculative Turn. Beautifully clean, clear writing on very difficult subject matter.. at last so it seemed to me. Set off sparks... asserting long brewing thoughts on aesthetic realism (NOT establishment literary 'realism'... which is ANTI-REALISM! Political idealist tyrannical propaganda!)

.. top-a-me head thoughts... Poetry (all literature) is NOT (only) 'about' language. What it is 'about' ... there's the question of interest... (& HOW) .. a question poetry is equipped to explore but not to answer--its refusal is the soul of its aesthetics. The refusal can LOOK like a reduction to language, but the medium (thank you McLuhan, Levi Bryant) is an extension of human powers, subjective & collective (they overlap, are not polar nodes) Thinking of
Benjamin on dialectic... maintaining the contradictions while (appearing to) resolve them... poetry can go all out building on the contradictions (linguistic, logical, philosophical... ) this is aesthetic realism (after WC Williams ... Geo Oppen ...Kaia Sand... Ryan Eckes...Frank Sherlock... ) ... jes... thinkin...

Reposting... Without me, you are nothing!

These seemed so relevant in so many ways... from Gaddafi to the Obama adiminstration's resorting to torture over the Wikileaks.  Posted November, 2007

From The Psychoanalytic Field, and Fadi Abou-Rihan's running commentary on Anti-Oedipus: his two most recent posts, Disjunction
and Fetish

To put it bluntly, the logic of the fetish here is the intolerant and singular logic of the “without me, you are noting” that one party fosters and with which another colludes. Author and reader, teacher and student, analyst and analysand, parent and child, ruler and ruled; these are some of the structural couplets that breathe in the stagnant air of resentment without which, and in an ironically doubled and nested move, the corresponding institutions of Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Family, and State would not exist.

“Without me, you are nothing” is the logic of quasi-causes, of boundaries and restrictions, of confinements and regulations, through which the leak is construed as a threat and the crossing is supposedly a crossing into illegitimacy, chaos, fragmentation, and disintegration. But it is precisely the impermeable boundary itself that divides, consolidates, and reifies the functions of dictator, father, and super ego. Often enough, the crossing is not into chaos but into a more liveable and freer sanity. Instead of health or truth, it is territoriality and power that are the fundamental concerns of the institution and its fetish.

Talk about being in the right place at the right time & I don't even like hockey that much but there it is on TV in Lucky 13 guys skating around & waving sticks right there in black & white & red (Detroit in red) Detroit comes from a French word something about a narrows or straight or maybe the straight & narrow who knows what goes on between great lakes the greater entering the lesser one by one Superior on top into Michigan Michigan into Huron Huron into Eire Eire into Ontario some say it's Huron over Michigan at least in the sense that first or second in line is less than the third though I think the second has it over the third in depth such that regardless of surface the second wins by sheer volume

broad is good deep is better...

The Corporate Person

We can't possibly expect to have a democracy when our model of individuality is itself a tyrany. This idea of the self being One Thing is a delusion of phallic mastery, Father of endless violence and pain. Each of us are--not a unity--but a cacophony of competing voices.

 The Master Voice finds apt models in Mubarak, Putin, Gadaffi... all those who maintain the semblance of unity over the State by terror and intimidation.

No wonder we are losing our public spaces, the forums where citizens take council and decide together, and replacing them -- with what ? "Privatization?" Private to what! To whom? To the only "Person" that exists in a fictional world... the fictive person of the Corporation! Where we cannot acknowledge our own multiplicity, & reduce by force all competing voices within us to 'parts,' to the status of slaves, of things OWNED, we ourselves become parts, owned by the Fictional Corporate Person we have invented.

1994, 15th & Chestnut

A woman is lying on the sidewalk
a paramedic is working  on her          gift of breath to the dead
shabby rags    bundle of blankets on the walk
cardboard box where not long before she lay asleep –
a rosewood recorder with an ivory handle clutched in her fist

passersby stand in a circle, transfixed... 

a simple wish to follow a story to its end... almost indifferent
to its outcome how else explain how someone
no longer part of the world inhabited by those keeping vigil
invisible until that moment -- should--at the hour of her death
become in all her strangeness--a presence to ...

"The Ontological Status of Fictions"

Levi Bryant on Larval Subjects

There are places in William Carlos Williams' Spring and All that read like a poets premonition of Speculative Realism (see the prose passages in IX)

Mary Coleman: Paintings

Web page of my niece, Mary Coleman web page

Dayroom

Through a poet's eyes... toward a new aesthetic

Everything is nature: there is no such thing as 'nature.' If humans are out of balance with the extra-human world, the answer isn't to get in harmony with 'nature.' Thinking ourselves OUTSIDE of nature, and nature as something OTHER, is the PROBLEM--whether we respond to that delusional 'Other' by trying to dominate and rule over it, or by thinking we can surrender to it and become once again her obedient children.

A toxic dump is every bit as much a product of 'nature' as a pristine wetland. Human culture is no less 'nature' than the society of bees. We begin to address the problem of this perceived imbalance by re-imagining ourselves as having no special place, no privileged ontological address, no special vantage point -- including that assumed when we do science.

Scientists are limited by their need to objectify the object of their investigation. Poets are not. Poets... and perhaps, philosophers, are free to concern themselves with the real in ways science cannot.