sharing boris' frustration, i am very grateful for
JMC's admirably linear attempt at sorting out some
issues , , , but i want to pose a follow-up question
to JMC or anyone else who cares to answer . . .
JMC writes:
the philosophy/style of post-modernists . . . allows
them to be delieberately incomplete, discontinuous,
and non-linear . . . Post-modrenists deliberately
refuse to do [make the world a totality]. Sometimes,
this style wears thin, but it can often be thought
provoking and engaging--as I think Deleuze and
Gutarri are--rather than a canned act that uses the
same bag of tricks as every other canned act . . .
and i understand -- even while abhoring -- the desire to turn thought
into poetry, as it were . . . but what i don't at all get is the rigid
refusal
of any move that would "make the world a totality" . . . presumably on
the grounds that such a move requires misrepresentation -- would be a
kind of false consciousness . . .
BUT . . . if indeed totalizing moves are, by their nature, impossible,
surely there is no need to willfully flee from the linear, since one would
never be able to achieve it in any case . . . thus it seems that the
intentional skirting of coherence is a way of creating with one's
discourse the very circumstance that the discourse claims to be
naming as pre-existent . . . or, to put it aother way, does JMC live
in any less a post modern world by virtue of having offered so totalizing
and clear an overview of D & G's glossary? . . . i would think not . . .
finally, if the tired argument [talk about "canned acts"] is made
that elliptical reasoning is more "thought provoking," one needs to
wonder just what kind of thought is being provoked . . . if it's
just good fashioned linear thought that is ultimately generated by
this discontinuous prose, then the P-M gang are simply being
duplicitous . . .
or am i missing something?
mike
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