>if reality is
>structured on language than you can't go around switching languages without
>changing the entire substance. (Indeed so much of that kind of theory goes
>around talking of language as if there were only one language).
Or one idiom, or one consciousness ... despite its apparent focus on
differences, I often get the feeling that a certain kind of theory simply
erases differences, like a fog. If you pretend it's not there, then it
doesn't exist. And then there's the question of theoretical
appropriation, which has often made me feel uncomfortable. I enjoy
people like Blanchot precisely because of a sense of tact towards to the
texts he considers that seems absent from so many others. Some
theoretical writings induce a kind of asthsma in me, anyway, a terrible
feeling of suffocation. I find the argument of the whole of reality
being structured on language a bit hard to swallow (skirting a whole lot
of questions about how, in fact, it does shape many realities) having a
large component of what Brecht and Benjamin called "crude thinking" in my
psyche, and also because of the suspicion of tyranny it somehow implies -
language has limits, and poetry - or perhaps any kind of language - is so
much a question of admitting and negotiating those limits.
>Americans have spoken to me repeatedly of how much world news
>is absent from American news and people there don't know or care what's
>happening in the rest of the world. ...
>Events in the news at
>present incline me to despair on the whole subject.
I'll second this as a wicked generalisation, although of course there are
always admirable exceptions. Being at the centre of Empire, why would one
need to look elsewhere? But parochial outlooks are not just confined to
America. The question of negotiating difference without killing
eachother seems to be the sticking point of the human race. I don't feel
especially sanguine about our prospects, but that doesn't mean you give
up.
Best
AC
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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