Cleverness

Posted on April 14, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Jane Jacobs’s characterization of the doubleness of cheats in Dark Age Ahead hints at a connection between lying and the unbridled wish for more of the same:

Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.

Pages later one can own a wanting more that is not a wanting more of the same:

The key to postagarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression.

And one is invited to do so with clever competence.

And so for day 121
14.04.2007

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Deployments

Posted on April 13, 2007 by Francois Lachance

From Humanism and Democratic Criticism by Edward Said:

That deployment of an alternative identity is what we do when we read and when we connect parts of the text to other parts and when we go on to expand the area of attention to include widening circles of pertinence.

[Compare with Ricoeur’s notion of reading as providing an expanded self.]

From Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight by Shoshana Felhman:

Reading is an access route to a discovery. But the significance of the discovery appears only in retrospect, because insight is never purely cognitive; it is to some extent always performative (incorporated in an act, a doing) and to that extent precisely it is not transparent to itself. Insight is always partially unconscious, partially partaking of a practice. and since there can never be a simultaneous, full coincidence between practice and awareness, what one understands in doing and through doing appears in retrospect: nachträglich, après coup.

[Pair with a view of Said’s description of re-reading and parsing as deployment of an alter-native.]

And so for day 120
13.04.2007

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Semicolons

Posted on April 12, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Todd May in his book on Deleuze with particular style uses punctuation to vivid effect: a small arrest and then the flow resumes. Pages apart one instance of the form calls out to its other incarnations. Take for example:

Machines do not fill lacks; they connect, and through connecting create.

And pages and pages later:

Cities are not matters of function; they are matters of connection.

Rereading very carefully, one comes to understand that functions and connections are not opposed to each other. Matters of function and matters of connection are. And so the imagination is pushed to entertain connection as gratuitous function. Characterizing matters as of use-value type and of non-exchange value type comes close to connecting functions and connections.

And so for day 119
12.04.2007

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Vector Sector

Posted on April 11, 2007 by Francois Lachance

There is something of boyhood memories of an advertising campaign that crossed cereals with gasoline (“Put a Tiger in Your Tank”) in this line full of internal rhyme:

There’s a Vector in your Sector.

A sector has a circumference and is akin to description; a vector with its magnitude and direction is akin to a question. A simple pairing for generating stories.

And so for day 118
11.04.2007

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Slithering sentence

Posted on April 10, 2007 by Francois Lachance

I like how this sentence whispers its theme in a grammatical pile up that forces attention to the parsing. I like how the emphasized words form a scheme of their own: can – should – is.

We live in a time when a strong feeling that what can be known should be known too easily elides into a blind faith that what can be known not only is known but furthermore is known by those best able to make use of what they know.

A fine sentence turned by Michael Joyce in remarks for a panel at the “Information, Silence, and Sanctuary Conference” held at the University of Washington in May 2004.

And so for day 117
10.04.2007

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Time Gate

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Todd May in Gilles Deleuze: an introduction has a passage that recalls for me Benjamin’s invocation of the jetztzeit:

If we think temporally with Bergson, the world is always more than it seems, always fraught with differences that can actualize themselves in novel and unfamiliar ways.

What if we think spatially in terms of Cantor dust and Peano curves? We develop a patience of a different sort.

And so for day 116
09.04.2007

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Spring haiku

Posted on April 8, 2007 by Francois Lachance

one ice-rival pearl
precocious snowdrop snout
sniffing light’s return

And so for day 115
08.04.2007

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Pleasant imperfections

Posted on April 7, 2007 by Francois Lachance

I juxtapose two quotations. One seems to comment on the other.

Roland Barthes in the preface to Sade / Fourier / Loyola reaffirms for us (in case we forgot) that “The text is an object of pleasure.”

Chapter 4 “Perfection” from David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined contains the following observation:

The imperfection of the Web isn’t a temporary lapse; it’s a design decision. It flows directly from the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. the designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose.

Local perfections and global pleasure. There is a certain type of pleasure that delights in exploring and tracing out “imperfection”. For imperfection read materiality.

This fascination with the pleasures of materiality of course can be applied to the rhetoric of multimedia. To compose with graceful degradation in mind. These are the values of wabi sabi.

And so for day 114
07.04.2007

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Card trick

Posted on April 6, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Found inscribed on an index card:

The nucleus of a narrative
would be a description
plus a question.

The hand writing is loose and the “nucleus” looks like the German word “Nachen” — sailing vessel.

And so for day 113
06.04.2007

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Hermetic theft

Posted on April 5, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Shoshana Fehlman in a book on Lacan writes

Each time the analyst speaks, interprets in the analytic situation, he gives something asked of him. What he gives, however, is not a superior understanding, but a reply. […] the interpretative gift is not constative (cognitive) but performative: the gift is not so much a gift of truth, of understanding or of meaning: it is, essentially, a gift of language.

I am reading here the story of an economy of theft. What is stolen to give the gift? When I first read this passage I tripped over the idea that a reply could lead to a gift of language. Something of the reply seemed caught in an imaginary relation of hilarious specularity. Rereading allowed greater specificity to come: a gift of language is not a language gift but a gift from language. The performance perforates. It is not only not constative it is also not constitutive.

Both call and reply are given through language. And indeed a reply is a form of call. This is not so reductive as it may seem. We can ask who or what asks the analyst to give. The reply is in a sense an interrogation of the who or the what this is asking. To interpret is to interrupt so that interrogation, questioning, gifting, giving, may take place there.

And so for day 112
05.04.2007

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