This whole exchange reminds me of why it is I have always considered Art the best expression of the nihilistic perspective. As Archibald MacLeish argued:
A poem should not mean, but be.
In other words, the nihilistic perspective in Art lies in its refusal to directly communicate meaning thereby leaving it in a situation, much like dreams, in which the only meaning to be derived from it can only come from the discourse around it. Therefore, to put it in terms of a movie line from Cool Hand Luke:
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
On one hand, we have Ambig engaging in what reminds me of a dialogue out of a Camus or Sartre novel, that which exploits the full spread of the base lizard brain to the more cognitive. On the other, we have Moreno who is rightfully asking for a more cognitive hint at what it is that makes this particular discourse worthy of carrying on with. While Ambig is more engaged in the expression of the nihilistic perspective, Moreno is more focused on the discourse –which is what we are here for in the first place. Moreno simply wants to turn it into meaning on the terms of Ambig’s agenda.
That said, Moreno, I told you Ambig can be evasive. Trust me, I’m as confused by this as you are. At the same time, sharing a common respect for the nihilistic perspective with Ambig, I kind of get what he is getting at here. For me, the constant d.constructive process that has brought me to the nihilistic perspective, has left me in such a state that the only way I can deal with the ambiguity of reality is by taking oblique approaches to describing it. To describe it directly would only be to expose myself to possibility of being wrong in a way that I would have to admit was correct. This is why my goal is to write in such a way that I seem to be making a philosophical statement while basically writing a prose poem.
To put it in Lacanian terms: what we’re basically attempting to capture is the overflow of the real, that which always glances the corner of the eye and, therefore, cannot be brought into the discourse of the symbolic order. However, if it stays too far out of the symbolic order, it can only fall into the nihilistic pitfall of the psychotic. Therefore, you have every right to make the request you have of Ambig.
We all tend to think in isolation. Liberals tend to think about conservatives while conservatives tend to think about liberals. Atheists tend to think about Christians while Christians tend to think about Atheists. Likewise, those who embrace the nihilistic perspective tend to think about those that don’t; and visa-versa. And we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the other in absence of the other. Therefore, what we tend to find ourselves working with is not so much the other as our mental concept of the other, that which cannot just develop out of our actual experience of the other, but what we need them to be in order to justify our particular view of the world. This is why, while we might know the other, and even grow to love them, we can still slip back into our own little pep rallies that paints the other in terms of our personal agendas. And, sometimes, we tend to get locked in to those mental concepts and forget that the other is far more complex than what the linear language we tend work with can define at any given time.
This is why, while I sympathize and emphasize with Ambig, I have to stand with you on this one in that I believe Ambig is arguing against what he expects you to be rather than what you actually are. But please show a little sympathy (or empathy) for the kind of paranoia that can come from embracing the nihilistic perspective and of being one of two people who actually do on this board.
It’s a nice polemic sentiment, but there isn’t a great poet out there who didn’t also mean. And all the bad ones certainly do. But even then, if we stick to just being, as in a poem should ‘be’…one can still describe what the existence of a beloved line or stanza of a poem did to ‘me’ the reader.
And here’s the first Archibald macLeish poem I found…
An Eternity
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there’s now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.
Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.
This poem actually contains an argument, not simply scattered meanings. IOW it builds meanings up on previous ones in a loose logic. And it damn well means - even if there are ambiguities and contradictions. To avoid meaning it would have to be a sound poem or perhaps the work of one of the language poets. But I’ve never found either group very interesting.
I am not much of a fan of AM, but I think what he was polemically attacking were the people who wrote poetry primarily to get messages across - with big meanings and messages and who did not let the poem be a kind of sculpture and did not let themselves be guided by intuition, pure aesthetic concerns and a love of language driving them. See Nabokov on why Dostoyevsky is problematic and not quite up to the highest caliber.
ah, but he didn’t mean what he was saying, speaking of irony. He was using understatement as part of the upcoming violence. Violence as communication. He knew PN knew what he was supposed to do and not do. That kind of detached, keeping it cool, when you know you are going to use violence does a couple of things: it allows no small victory for the prisoner when one loses control and 2) it has a soul crushing inevitabilty and control about it that frankly makes everything worse for those about to be crushed.
I know it can seem like this, but even an artistic response to a specific quote would have been a response. IOW he could have responded as an artist or subjectively to a specific quote, but with the aim of showing why the was important to him, rather then questioning and reacting to Luno. Or something rather phenomenological? Or even metaphorically saying what was valuable and unique - given the repeated focus on this philosohper.
Somehow connect up to why this philosopher is being quoted over and over as opposed to another.
Is making a poor interpretation or an ‘error’ a problem? Or explaining incompletely?
Poets interpret and make very certain statements about the nature of reality. Think of Macbeths Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech as the first example that pops into mind. There is tremendous use of absolute statements even in very ambiguous poets. The next poem may contradict it. Or even portions of the same poem often do. But there is little fear of bluntly stating this is the way things are. It’s a trope or natural expression of themselves they use regularly.
Sure, but then…
let me make up a possible response to my request… Quote X
I read quote X by Luno and it made me realize that I often try to have just one perspective on an issue, which I need not do. See how he comes at issue Y from two angles. I felt a sense of liberation, like I was not constrained so much by consistancy.
Now read that little section and then compare it to your paraphrase of Lacan. Which of the two quotes is a more radical attempt to state this is the way things are?
I can’t really see how even a coquettish Lacan would have much ground, after making that kind of statement, for not explaining how a specific philosopher’s quote affected him and how/why.
Yes, sure. And he has the right to refuse.
Agreed. Though I am not atheist nor Christian, nihilist or not a nihilist, conservative or liberal. I know, you were just giving examples. There is an irony however in a nihilist identifying as a nihilist and identifying some others as not being in that group. That’s not what I experience out there.
[/quote]
Hey, I like the guy. Not that one can tell over the internet, but he’d be one of the first I would let babysit my kids if I had little ones. (if forced to choose one of you all sight unseen that is) And I am sure my approach could have been better in some way.
The thing is if I read a lot of very complicated arguments in favor of nihilism and then a refusal, based on nihilism and the need to maintain ambiguity and concerns about incompleteness, to explain on a more personal level the effects of a thinker, I have to wonder what is really going on. We can put forward very complicated arguments in support of something, using ideas implicit or stated about perception, culture, minds, language, and then universalizing those claims to include everyone on earth,
but to mention a specific quote and describe - even phenomenologically - what it did for you…
this would be a dangerous foray out from ambiguity?
It feels very contrained, and ironically so, as I just argued, given the lack of philosophical constraint and ambiguity elsewhere.
It’s a bit like the irony that physicists sometimes fail to notice: well, after the entire universe suddenly popped into existence it all followed very clear rules from that point. So we know everything follows rules and it would all go to hell if anything supernatural could happen, because then there would be no rules.
It also, it seems to me, makes nihilism anti-life. I cannot speak in terms of certainty, even though this would be an accurate expression of my thoughts AT THAT MOMENT. I cannot interpret a text because that would mean…what, that one is forever tied to that interpretation? that any interpretation should be complete or one should be silent? that it cannot simply be my best guess at describing a process I was a part of at a certain moment?
Words are not containers of truth that get handed from one person to another. Language is doing a lot of other things in process form. We do not speak the Ten Commandments. Most of us. We engage in a dance/dialogue.
It really feels like a strange secular concept of sin lies behind this self-limitation. I suppose I am a bit of an anarchist, I note.
A skeptic can simply not be convinced. They can offer counter-interpretations and claim they are not convinced, the latter claim we are pretty much beholden to take as the truth. They aren’t convinced. A nihilist who has built up an edifice, using ideas about perception, cultural effects on the mind, ideas about language, assumptions about distance between subject and object and subject and subject
can’t really just withdraw and say it goes against their spirit to give a single interpretation (one that can even be temporary and tentative)
as if they hadn’t built an edifice on Tuesday.
The skeptic - at least a certain kind of skeptic - can do this, having not built an edifice on Tuesday. They are not builders who doubt the possibility of building but doubters period, at least hypothetically.
The soft rose complexion of a woman’s face.
(You will want to know—but I won’t say—which.
It would invite misunderstanding.
And on this subject we can always use more, no?)
An older man’s reaction to it.
(A younger one’s would be seamlessly connected with it.)
To put a finer point on it: he could be moved to tears by the sight but it should still be called rape and he should be punished accordingly.
His eyes should be gouged out.[/b]
This subject is considerably beyond the ken of philosophy. But [perhaps] a clear example of how convoluted human psychology can appear when it is expressed in a manner that some might construe as philosophy.
The only people who have no right to an opinion about rape are the fathers of daughters.
For similar reasons, mothers of sons, gone off to war, on war.
It is not for nothing, though, that the actual reasons are not broached. Can you think of one?
I’m less confused by Luno now. Why? Because acknowledging my confusion about some things can be a sign of clarity. If you come expecting to be confused about the meaning of the words you can still make your own out of them. But you have to approach the relationship between words and worlds here in a way that many philosophers do not. As an ironist with a particular understanding of dasein.
I expect him to react to me or to you or to Luno as dasein. And here the communication is always [eventually] distorted because 1] there are so many different existential variables that go into the making of any particular “I” and 2] the relationships Luno broaches here are particularly prone to distorted views.
It’s the difference between discussing gender [always present in Luno’s prose poems] as a biological function [the things we can all agree on] and gender relationships as a social, political and economic function [the things that precipitate endless conflicts].
Two doctors discussing abortion as a medical procedure is one thing, two philosophers discussing it as a moral issue another thing altogether.
One is pregnant or one is not. One is raped or one is not. How subjective can Luno be about that? This transcends dasein. But discussing that pregnancy/rape [as a moral issue] in a particular confluence of men and women, can reflect a virtually infinite number of mental, emotional and psychological reactions. None of which are necessarily more conclusive when the time comes to choose or not choose abortion, to rationalize or not rationalize rape.
At best we can form a political consensus in the here and now. And that is no less true of philosophers in my view.
First of all, I’m only familiar with AM’s Ars Poetic because it’s the one that tends to show up in anthologies the most. And that particular line holds a great deal meaning for me because I use to write a lot of poetry. It was more an issue of method than anything. For me, it was always a process of accumulating lines and images until they began to coalesce into something that gave pleasure first and foremost. Generally, if there was meaning (and there often was) it emerged in the process. However, that meaning always seemed to come in a very oblique and ambiguous way. My experience with writing was similar. The same sentiment was, more or less, echoed by Joyce, who warned us against the didactic, and Ezra Pound who advised the poets to “go in fear of abstraction.” In the introduction to the 2010 edition of The Best American Fiction, Richard Russo describes a reading at his university by Isaac Bashevis Singer in which, when asked by a student what the purpose of literature was, he responded that its purpose was to “entertain and to instruct.” The important thing here is that he insisted on putting the “entertain” part first.
My take on it has always been one of “why compromise my aesthetic for something I could express better in an essay or interview”. But then I started off as musician for whom everything was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And as you suggested elsewhere, I’ve also seen a lot of bad work because an artist put too much emphasis on meaning. Too often, it can come off as pretentious and heavy-handed. I’m kind of struggling with that with the last poem I wrote. It seemed to me to try too hard to mean and was thereby compromised. The only reason I stuck with it as I did was because it was first time in 10+ years one had come together for me like that when I thought it would never happen again. In certain states of mind, it reads alright in that it is the product of years of primarily writing prose. It manages to break from that kind of poetic vibrancy that always haunted my earlier poems. Unfortunately, in other states, it comes off as awkward. I’m not sure I would put it in my “best of” collection. But I’m hoping it will lead to better things. I may even just glue it all together into a prose piece and see if I haven’t found a method of developing those philosophical prose poems I was talking about.
That said, I want to repeat the statement you responded to and put it back in context:
My point was not that art must necessarily be nihilistic in nature and completely without meaning. That would be silly. It was merely that if one wanted to express the nihilistic perspective, the creative arts are the best means to do so as compared to just plain expository prose. It comes out my belief that nihilism does nothing. It never attempts to justify itself. And the minute one attempts to do so by simply trying to explain it, they effectively throw themselves out of the nihilistic perspective. They are no longer in a position to say anything in its behalf. It came out of my 3 year stint of just pumping out visual art which brought me back to my musician days when I thought less in terms of what a thing meant and more in terms of how it felt. It always felt like I was working from the base of the brain. I kind of got stuck in groove with it and was glad, when it came to an end, to be freed up to pursue more MEANINGFUL (and I mean that literally) and cognitive projects.
That all said, there are a couple of points I feel I should make. First of all, I consider the nihilistic perspective to be a tool. That’s why I call it “the nihilistic perspective”. If I wanted to live in it, I would call it plain old nihilism and probably go back to visual arts –either that or join a punk band. So I would certainly agree with the agenda to mix some meaningful expression with the obscure. I certainly wouldn’t want to base my whole intellectual life on speaking in riddles or Zen Koans. I mean I’m intrigued by French ideas. But if I had to base the rest of my intellectual life solely on reading Baudrillard, Derrida, or Deleuze and Guattarri, that is without the interpretive texts, I think I would have to shoot myself in the head right now. It’s just too refreshing to get a little clarity in the midst of all that. In order for something to do me any good, it has give me something I can use; it has to be explained to me like I’m a seven year old. However, you have to keep in mind that it would be silly for me to think, at this point, that I’m going to do a lot of good as a strait forward philosophical orator. I just don’t think I would have anything that important to say –especially since I really don’t have the time to go through the whole philosophical canon required in order to be qualified to make such an attempt. Therefore, I have to hedge most of my bets on the more poetic side of the equation and hope I’ll be able to do some good there. The best I can offer is a perspective. And, quite often, that will require that I use more oblique approaches to meaning and the nihilistic perspective.
Anyway, I wish I had more time to go over more of your posts. But I’ve been using you as an excuse to avoid the project I have set down for myself in The Academy: a response to Aum’s two essays. And while I don’t see much getting done on it today, I still have to overcome my dread and anguish and get some focus back here. But, thanks for the distraction.
yes, I can connect to that. I did find that my unconscious mind, even when I adhere to this entirely, has some meanings, and can even produce cohesive argument-like structures, when I think I am being almost random.
For me also. Though part of my process would include these lines that simply stated the way things are. A little bit like Yeats in The Second Coming does this. It’s fun. I mean, it’s poetry, why not just blap down ‘the truth’, though the next line might mix things up, seem to contradict or just be hard to place.
And look where that led him Finnegan’s Wake. But sure one should be careful. I think didactic lines work great, but they have to work great aesthetically also. But then, just to make it more complicated, didactism can be aesthetic. Or to put this another way, the flow of meaning in a poem can be aesthetic also, not just the images and sounds.
And look at the corner he ended up in. I love portions of the Cantos, but in the end it feels like a collection of images and sound without a heart.
Sure, if entertain is not first then it is non-fiction, which can be fine.
But this is literature and Luno is philosophy or supposed to be. I am not saying that philosophy should be unambiguous, but still some kinds of paraphrase should be possible or to me it is not philosophy but literature. And so far he doesn’t cut my mustard as literature. Some of his lines could be a character’s lines in literature, but overall, it falls short for me as literature.
And hey, cross-genres are in, and I have mixed things up, but it seems to me philosophy is about communicating ideas about the way things are, even if these are in the negative.
a political song had better be aesthetically interesting, not just good, or I can’t stand it. And that interest often confuses the mob who wants to here an anthem for their issue.
I think being purely aesthetic is much, much harder than people realize. we have been bombarded by cliches, but not only that cliche voices, and most poems reflect that until it is pooped out.
That said, I want to repeat the statement you responded to and put it back in context:
Agreed.
Agreed.
I suppose I have a semi-conscious bias that says that being a philosopher - a system maker, cohesive world describer, etc. - is a bit like being an anorexic or OCD. I think an unhealthy narrowing down of the mind is needed to be good at that.
“What’s brittle doesn’t bend.”
When he stops being a generic boy and catapults himself from the cloying intimacy of his mother, he, facing only forward, cannot—on pain of dissolution—look back.
His isolation, for better or worse, from woman, all women, hardens into crystal, so bitterly hard and brittle, it forms his most deniable tragedy and inspires disbelief in every woman.
I read in the paper where a large icicle fell from a lofty eave and impaled and killed a woman.[/b]
He makes this particular journey from the cloying intimacy of his mother to the casual mention of an unnamed woman’s sensational death.
What’s brittle here perhaps is the use of third person as a point of view. No one in particular to ask, “what do you mean?”
Yes. But on the other hand, you can become aesthetic without meaning to the point of becoming irrelevant. That was the rut I was falling into during my 3 year stint with art. I mean I hardly read any books at the time.
Anyway, I think we’re pretty much of a common mind here.
But the downside of that is that it gives me little to respond to. And that kind of sucks because my run with my essay didn’t go so well. It’s like I can’t decide between explaining my point in a dry philosophical manner, or going for the poetic which risks coming off as dramatic and pretentious in the context of Pav’s forum. Something about trying to write a post for it is really fucking me up.
I think I’ve come to one of those points where I just need to admit it’s not going to happen today.
You can focus on the aesthetic and this messes you up. But an aesthetically well done work of art, will be, well, well done. And likely have meaning, if it involves words at least.
[/quote]
maybe you could aim for a middle ground. Somewhat poetic, somewhat discursive. Or, you could switch back and forth as you feel.
Picture Otto Weininger with a twinkle in his eye.
I can aspire to this kind of unsettlingness.[/b]
Or picture Otto Weininger picturing Bianco Luno picturing him with a twinkle in his eye. Is that something he would aspire to?
Weininger quotes:
[b]All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.
Fate determines many things, no matter how we struggle.
A poseur almost always interprets the actions of another person as poses.
Woman does not want the pure, chaste, moral man, but somebody else.
No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.[/b]
And how does this fit into the manner in which nature and nurture endlessly misconstrue each other?
The fundamental gender of things explains why English is better suited to abstractions than, say, Continental languages.
“Darkness” and “Light”—of the two, the first is male.
Most feminists implicitly agree.[/b]
Most feminists can’t agree on the meaning of the word feminist. And darkness will never be construed [necessarily] as a bad thing. And the English language may well be hopelessly infected by religion. The consensus here being that God is almost certainly male. Is that a good thing?
That’s pretty much what I’m after. What I’d like to try doing is a style where I’m telling a fictional narrative one moment, then breaking into a philosophical exposition the next, then a poetic one, then back again. I probably need to go back to reading more Delueze and Guattari for that. And actually, it will require that I switch back and forth before I manage the subtle blend (or fusion) of the two you describe.
However, I get the feeling that Pav’s board is looking for straightforward exposition. I’ve written 2 intro’s now, one with the more poetic approach and the other with a more straightforward one. It was funny though. When I posted the two together above to get your opinion, I noticed a process similar to the second law of thermodynamics concerning equilibrium. No sooner than I posted them, I found myself moving stuff from the poetic one down to the straightforward one. It was like a migration of poetic btu’s. I’m beginning to believe I’m incapable writing in the straightforward way, like I couldn’t so without some consideration of style -even if it is a bad one. I would certainly suck as an analytic philosopher.
Studies show: exactly half of all human endeavor is evil.
For men, the proportion is usually greater.
The behavior of women manages to dilute the concentration, a delicate titration, without actually diminishing contamination.
All the time, it remains exactly half…[/b]
All this is moot however until it can be established more definitively which half that is. Until then, men and women will have to be content with being on opposite sides of what, for lack of a better description, I’ll call “conflicting goods”.
“The truth is foreign to me because I am flesh.
In death I shall attain it.” My ex-wife dressed in red.
I return to the same idea.
A cold winter morning sun.
You frighten me with your mood changes.
“—would it not be scandalous to leave this corpse behind, the body still quivering with fear and giving off pestilential odours, reeking of the sudden decomposition set off by the fear we hold within ourselves our whole lives long?”
—Marie-Clare Blais
The modal auxiliary ‘shall’ prescribes not a future performance but a present, probably already past, hope.
If I should be doing anything in particular after death, it will be contemplating this.
In the meantime, I have fear to occupy me.
And I shall call the cold sun, the color red, you, all beauty to its altar.[/b]
Between that and this…
[b]Blaise Pascal
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity
before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the
infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I
am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no
reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me
here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to
me?[/b]
…lie all the things that occupy me.
As for what is true, I’ll leave that for others to decide.
The logical form of male thinking:
Such and such and this and this.
So, I will do…
Practical illation.
You will never cease reminding me that it is possible to escape it.
Always, we are escaping: this bothers me.
Your solution no less than my problem.[/b]
Would it really make any difference if you knew what the problem and the solution were? Only, I suspect, if you entirely miss the point.
I would rather murder than father a child.
And as for the other reason for sexual contact: it has become a nightmare.[/b]
An antinatalist perhaps? As for the other, was it necessarily a nightmare?
For some time the keeper of these words has been a fiction.
But the reader he envisions is certainly more so.
What is most real, what is the most cowardly fact of all, is the writing itself.
It is an antiphrastic account of my moral world and its shameless seams.
This is the argument I made time and again to Olivia. Or, rather, I think I did. To be consumed with writing is not to be consumed with the futility of writing. The writing becomes analogous to religion. The words to God.
William James said there was no problem of good.
A crow—beyond a fast walk, an airborne walk—skips along the coping of a brick parapet, lunging into the face of January’s breath.
There is no corresponding problem of good because we expect compatibility of some sort with the world.
A mother’s affection is not supposed to be an object of wonder (in the sense of suspicion).
I think it is.
The first sight of her child can turn a murderess into a saint.
The ‘good’ also requires explanation.
On a sunny winter morning this crow skips like a child.[/b]
Is this not a reality constructed out of words? We could construct a world in which determinism prevails. This would be another world in which there was no problem of good. Or a world in which there are conflicting goods able to be defended equally merely by positing different sets of assumptions.
The crow will never be like the baby unless the baby is taught to be like the crow: good mechanically.
I run from pain but the running brings with it pleasure.[/b]
What then are we to make of those who run toward it? Or who push others into its path?
At 3:02 in the morning at the airport my memory is sharp, visionary.
…saying to Kathy from a balcony overlooking the Ave that I was alright, I was going to live.
(Four years ago.)
I had thrown up two days worth of undigested food, stored in my distended esophagus.
Skate-boarders roared by.
I sipped my canned apple juice.
Kathy is a dear character in my life, haplessly dear, like my cat.
You are not that, not exactly, not yet.
Maybe you are my conscience, something always to be at war with.
I can mention her name, I can only refer to you as “you” with the same uneasiness with which I address it.
You needn’t feel slighted, I would not leave you for Kathy.
I don’t know if there is a creature I would leave you for.
The level of pain and its attending grace, I’ve come to expect and demand, wouldn’t permit it.
But you won’t think I love you in the way you want to be.
No one ever believes that.
Or maybe you are the hapless character created by Kathy. You are obviously created by someone other than the one you want us to believe you are. Some believe you are created by me. But we both know a thing or two about fabricating personas. It begins at birth and it ends at death. With all the stuff in the middle becoming no less enigmatic.
Morally, I don’t suffer; aesthetically, I have a right to claim a supreme competence and, as you see, I do.[/b]
Even if you suffer morally it is only because you are unaware that suffering is merely the embodiment of the same connundrum: dasein. And that such points of view are – aesthetically – only as competent or incompetent as we think they are.
17 January 1991/23 February 1991.
War—I am almost left opinionless—is appalling.
It is an embarrassment to terrorists everywhere.
Oh, they’ll make up for it. In a word: W. Next to him, Osama is a piker.