Friday, June 17, 2005

Standard Issue

I wait
for each one of you to confess
Leonard Cohen


Laura wonders whether her issues are "pangrammatical", forcing me to wonder what a distinctly pangrammatical issue is, i.e., what I'm doing here.

Pangrammatical homologies are articulations across the divide between thought and feeling, concept and emotion, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice. So in that sense much of what Laura is up to these days does indeed seem immediately pangrammatical. She notes that theory and philosophy somehow go together (are somehow substitutable) and that this is somehow (actually quite precisely) opposed to the poetic practice. ("Precisely" because the designation "poetic practice" is pangramatically homologous with "philosophical theory", whatever else they mean.)

A pangrammatical homology is the likeness that obtains between two expressions, A and B, such that A is to knowledge as B is to power. E.g.

A: Science is the theory of the real. [Heidegger's definition]
B: Politics is the the practice of the ideal.

are balanced qua knowledge and power and are therefore pangrammatically homologous. They are equally articulate, i.e., they present experience in an equally articulated formula, but they address different moments of experience (namely, the empirical and normative respectively.)

The ultimate joint in this endless articulation of all the uses and usage of the world is that between the concept and the emotion (perhaps only because I don't trust thought/feeling as an articulation) which parcels out the tasks for philosophers and poets.

How stale or profitable all this is, only God knows, who fixes the canon and all the other fights.

4 comments:

Laura Carter said...

But thank you for your help, as always. "None are damned, and all are doing," I think. Always looking for fresh petals, to become one as well.

Laura Carter said...

"Much prose misleads" is itself misleading. It is less precise. But I don't know. It feels overwhelming to embark upon prose, to me, to sort it out, so to speak.

Laura Carter said...

And of course (to continue revising my words here) entrusting oneself to explainers is not a precise way of putting it, nor a desirable thing to have put. Perhaps it is an unfortunate difficulty?

Laura Carter said...

The first comment of mine has been retracted by me.