Yes, I was being unclear - I ought to have explicated or not written, rather
than my clumsy short-hand. Sorry about that.
>I was denying that personal guilt can survive in the sense of guilt as
personal responsibility. So I do not understand your _but_."
The But was meant to say, But rather than thinking of guilt, its nebulous
presence or absence in a Country, instead the thinking-through of a
social-political past which has created the present. Not guilt really at
all.
>but rather as a function of the historicity of the
social and political context of living in a culture, components of which
have, in the past, condoned or acted in a particular way. It's this
historicity that we face, or track, and the way we do has implications for
how we act now, within and through a public life.
>a function of the historicity of the social and political context of living
in a culture, eh? I'll need time to digest that. As we all live in cultures
and have a social and political context, I guess this means what I just
said. That anyone could have done it given the appropriate triggers.
Yes. Oops. I meant to emphasise the historicity of culture, the "social and
political context" being unnecessary to put it. To me, it seems that, in
writing/speaking, it's the historicity of language that is substance and
context of a poem, which is why the question of the historicity of
living-as-ethical-task seems a doubly vital one.
>I don't see that. I think you're mixing categories. "America will feel
>free"
/ "America feels safe", yes. But "America feels strongly about its
immigrants from Greece", no.
Yes, I think I was mixing categories. My wrong example. I don't think
Sundays are a good day for precision.
>That people might have expressed their feelings by attributing words to a
virtual reality does not make those words to have happened
I meant, that the virtual reality is a social fact. But again, I said it
clumsily.
>Well, I agree with that if it's a majority of Londoners, otherwise I want
>it
to be "There is a feeling among a minority of Londoners"
>but as you say that isnt to say that London feels; because it doesn't
Tangentially, is it that the personification of groups of people, say more
commonly as "We...", seems tempting because it draws the speaker out from
the locked-in self, and into the feeling of being multiple, that a hundred
other voices speak through us, which temptation then runs against the
political problem of representation? And another question in poetry is how
to run out from a presented self without speaking-for. By recourse to the
democratic nature of language, as maybe happens in Language poetry?
I don't know, I don't know.
Edmund
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