Candice:
<snip>
My questions were in response to your suggestion that we _stop_ talking
about boundaries and take up 'desire' _instead_. (Not sure what those scare
quotes portend[?].) I don't see the relationship between desire(s) and
boundaries as one of alterity, but rather as something co-creating and
equally pressing on both sides.
<snip>
Our disagreement is small, I think, since I don't think it's either/or.
(Alterity is largely a red herring in that context.) And where we do it's
about how we emphasise *language*.
It's pretty clear that there are things which language can do (naming
species of fish), which it can do partially or sometimes or give the
impression of doing (expressing sympathy), and some which it cannot do at
all: riding a bicycle or sailing a boat, for example. Not much disagreement
there, I would assume. So language is one thing and what one does is quite
another. Now good practice seems to me to arise out of the desire either to
_do_ something again *because it's important* or to do a new thing (or the
same thing better) *because that's _likely to be_ important*. By 'important'
I just mean 'of value' in a slightly declarative way. Thus Mr Bradford and
those others didn't, instead of leaving for the US, simply sit on the
foreshore muttering heroically about aporias using difficult words. They got
on their boats and went in search of Cape Cod, Plymouth Rock or wherever.
Where, however, alterity _does_ come in ('And when he crossed the bridge the
phantoms came to meet him') is by way of a sort of excess, of experience
over representation, a conceptual insufficiency of some kind: 'O day and
night, but this is wondrous strange! / And therefore as a stranger give it
welcome.' Or as Dario Fo put it about a performance by the actor Giorgio
Albertazzi, reversing the *emperor's clothes* principle, 'The pretence isn't
that he's the emperor but that he's (only) portraying the emperor.' The
radical incompleteness of our understanding in other words, reach exceeding
our grasp and all that, biting off more than we can chew, opens doors, to
refashion that analogy, without being able to close them again and so render
things 'placid and perfect'.
And any aporias that arise are our being faced with that inconsistency.
CW
_______________________________________________
the surface as a concept
materialised -
God, how ironical this is!
- by the notion of the boundary.
(Robert Ashley)
