And a bit of recoding of Thoems.
I was returning home on the sky train tonite reading : Livingston, Ira. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.) --quite exhausted, bit of a sore throat -- and Livingston's making a distinction play between withness and witness. Basically language is a living system, self-organizing and its this inseparability from life and the world (it's withness quality) that makes paradoxes about its capacity to witness certainty arise.
I agree with him on these points.
But of course that leads Ira into the entire materiality thing. In short, the referential quality of modernist language as an illusion, and how the motion of post-modernist poetry and literary is toward a concern with language as an entity. And its there that I disagree on the exclusive importance of investigating language as system: humans probably are incapable of really seeing things change at a temporal scale that makes the refractory nature of language become dominant. Language still works pretty well, as one tool among many (along with image, touch, smell, proprioception and sound) for us to explore the equally complex seething dynamic of emotion, or biology, or cultural theory for that matter.
Still it looks like a fascinating book and if (as I suspect) i am about to fall sick with a cold, it will prove a wonderful companion.
On a synchronistic note, I came home hit the stumbleupon button and found a joke (very typical so i extended it to include a cultural theorist and a poet)
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An engineer, a scientist, a mathematician,a cultural theorist, and a poet were traveling together on the sky-train to SIAT. Just as they passed over the bridge, they saw a black barge on the river's far edge.
"Oh look," the engineer said. "All barges in Surrey are black."
"You cannot say that!" the scientist exclaimed. "You can only deduce that this particular barge is black."
"You cannot say that!" the mathematician shook his head sadly. "You can only deduce that this side of that particular barge is black."
"You are confused by referentiality!" the cultural theorist snorted. "Language refracts as it is contingently saying that this side of that particular barge is black."
"O!" sighed the poet. "Tiny specks and smudges arguing in the sun about scratches."
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Studying emotion has the disreputable pleasure of being considered contentious by both scientists and cultural scholars.
Which reminds me of a tangential bit of academic territorialism: I heard a more-than-fascinating virtuosic speech on critical geography by Jeffrey Derksen --- in relation to “space-agent wah” at SFU downtown Thursday, May 31, 2-5 pm 'Count Me In: Writing public selves' -- Derksen discussed spatial scales, space bending, and how to locate spaces of emancipatory possibility.... It all sounded a lot like Scott Kelso's open dynamic non-equilibrium systems with a socio-political twist, but when I mentioned this to Jeffrey afterwards, he cautioned that some folks in the cultural theory world might not appreciate the association.
Humans are strange creatures indeed.
Labels: barge, black, referentiality, refract
