Hi, Peter--yes, I see what you mean by that difference: usage that invites a
snigger versus an invitation to snigger at it--?
On the hyperspace-as-multiple-refractivity issue, I think it's a reference
to the relativism of an event and the way that it relativizes whatever it
effects in turn such that the affected element is subject to
refraction--that is, it doesn't merely reflect one or another aspect of the
event but is more or less transfigured by it to some extent.
I like Alain Badiou's work on event because he uses big ones (like those of
Christian eschatology), which makes them--along with their operations and
effects--easier to see. And there may be effects on the event itself as a
result of the shake-up it's initiated on the original context or environment
in which it's occurred. Those effects may include new events, which alter
the space in their own right. I think hyperspace is a pretty good analogical
tool for event theory because it's so springy, if that's a reasonable way of
thinking about its flexibility and resilience(?). The event has to fight for
survival (i.e., duration) in a context that's no longer exactly the one
where it occurred as a function of its very occurrence; even as everything
within the event's purview is shifting and adjusting to it, the event must
accommodate to its own new dynamic in terms of the altered one it's
initiated by rocking some world on its pins or even shifting off
course/kilter. The way that world worked before is, in turn, what brought
about the event, while the way it works post-event may bring about quite
different events than the one that brought IT about. There's a necessary
plasticity or elasticity to the process that seems hyperspatial to me (at
least in a 3 Stooges sense--boing! boing! boing!).
Stevens's plurality of the two wars doesn't quite get us all the way to that
multiplicity, as his parallels that meet in their own shadow spaces do the
non-Euclidean--as you say--but I was also struck by the conceptual force
avant la lettre of his "between the mind"--so Deleuzian so long before
Deleuze!
Cheers,
Candice
on 1/14/02 5:56 PM, Peter Howard at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Candice,
>
> In an earlier post, you said: "I think you implicitly endorse that bad
> faith when you do the same to Baudrillard here by repeating a quote out
> of its context of serious, fairly smart work ... in order to say that
> it's funny."
>
> I think I was doing something slightly different, and rather different
> from what Sokal was doing. There's a difference between poking fun and
> pointing out that something might have fun poked at it. It was the
> latter I was trying to do. But I admit it's a close call between them.
>
> Stevens's poem does a good job on the non-Euclidean issue with its:
>
>> Two parallels that meet if only in
>>
>> The meeting of their shadows or that meet
>> In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
>
> I still don't have a clue what
>
>> a hyperspace with
>> multiple refractivity,
>
> might mean, though. I'm glad you liked my footnotes.
>
> Best,
> --
> Peter
>
> http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
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