“ Is there any intrinsic logic to your parentheses-usage?”
First of all: glad you asked Niklas. Not only did you give me a focus for today’s postcard, but you also gave me an opportunity to articulate (for myself as well as others (on an idiosyncrasy that is not just a choice but a habit (that which has evolved in me as a comfortable way to communicate (on my use of the one way parenthesis: something I’m quite sure confuses (and even frustrates (a lot of people on these boards.
First of all, I would note that the term “logic” has a dual functionality. On one hand, it is an attempt to explain how the brain and mind knows something in almost mathematical terms. At the same time, it can act as a kind of overcoding in that it can serve as what Frost referred concerning the poem: a momentary stay against confusion. Logic, like science, must work by isolating systems in the metonymic hope that it will tell us something about reality as a whole. In this sense, logic (as well as science or art or philosophy (is up against the same limit as language or any semiological construct: it must, by nature, always fall short of the reality it is attempting to describe. Or as Deleuze and Guattarri point out in A Thousand Plateaus:
“A book does not reflect the world. It forms a rhizome with it.”
In other words, language (or any other system of signs we have formed (can never be a perfect mirror of reality as much as a machine interacting with the various machines reality presents it with.
And my d.constructive use of the one-way parenthesis (as well as the colon (works within the parameters described above while exploiting a sensitivity to the FEEL (the inner sound (of punctuation.
(I’m a big fan of the ellipsis as well “….” which gives me the feel of trailing off into nothingness(
The one way parenthesis is primarily my way of capturing the movement of the mind (my mind at least: ADD perhaps? (in that while it, in terms of the overcoding, would seem to be moving in a linear way, it is always working in the face of a multiplicity (a bombardment if you will (and struggling to capture that overflow within the limits of the of tools we have to deal with it. Derrida managed to capture this in terms of differrance in which the meaning we absorb from a thing is always deferred in that its meaning is always dependent on other meanings absorbed from other things. And this is the way we experience thought (and even experience itself (while all we can do is express it within the linear medium of language.
Yet we try. We can see as much in philosophy’s use of the footnote which designates the text as being more than a 1 dimensional linear process, but rather more like a 3 dimensional sculpture that can be approached from multiple directions: that is given that what the philosopher is expressing is always bigger than the words you might be reading at any given time.
My use of the 1 way parenthesis is my way of folding those deferred meanings into the linear process of the text. As difficult as it must seem to others, I’m only trying to make it more convenient.