Robin -- I cannot quite see how a dedication must necessarily 'fail',
though I -think- I apprehend why it might seem useful to suggest
that; what would be the conditions for its success? I would judge that
possible success (assuming it is possible) according to material shifts in
attitude, the outbreak of responses apparently instigated by dedication,
whatever leap or ebb in sensibility seems consequent. Would that seem a
fair and apt way to think about (e.g.) Doug Oliver's _A Salvo for
Africa_? Can a writer authentically choose to elect the conditions of his
or her dedication, so that -- even if the result hoped for is "ideological
or emotional parity" -- success is not precluded?
The problem with talking about Mauss in this context, as Robert did, is
that writers seem often to believe that they can escape the complex of
egotism which Mauss explicates, merely by (a) having read Mauss and
disliked what he disliked and (b) convincing themselves that the
sympathetic apprehension of Mauss's argument can transform their acts of
give-and-take from a mundane and overdetermined process into a kind of
radical anti-capitalist gesture. I think the expression 'gift economy' is
very much abused by poets who take it to mean a utopian alternative to
commerce; it doesn't mean this at all.
Chris - I say that cognition destroys accidents, whether or not it may
itself be vulnerable to them, because cognition has the incontrovertible
effect of creating for every event or object which we experience a -most
comprehensible aspect-. That is, it turns mere events into -instances- of
our own history of comprehension. The desire to feel prolonged
retrospective incomprehension is, I take it, just another kind of
comprehension: the assurance we make to ourselves that we can at least
-desire- the opposite of what we effect incessantly. Cognition creates a
most comprehensible aspect for everything, and from this follows the
intuition of a causal relationship; this sense of a cause may not
always seem explicable with reference to a concatenation of prior events,
but it presents for us nonetheless the -experience of feeling that there
has been a cause-. This in turn is an intelligible feeling. Which is
perhaps why the various world propagandas always insist, when a national
or showbiz disaster occurs, that the event is 'incomprehensible': because
the fact that it just -cannot- be so invariably leads us to think about
the world which provides for the comprehensibility of such -kinds- of
things.
There is a caption from a text about incomprehensibility at the outset of
[Bar Zero], which I think fits squarely in this debate.
I guess all this would flow out primarily from Nietzsche. Discredit where
due.
un-Pow, K
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