Eating your words
Aug. 30th, 2007 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus1. No knowing is total, no knowing is without its particular perspective, its vested interest, its framing.
2. There is no knowing that will not, at some point, be abandoned, replaced by a better knowing, which will be replaced in its turn. All sciences rise and fall on history's stock exchange.
3. Methods of knowing are like fictions, or like constructions that we assemble playfully, experimentally, and disassemble when they cease to be useful.
4. In order to know, we must be capable of forgetting, abandoning, abjuring.
5. The tragedy of autism is that the sufferer is incapable of excluding things that are not relevant. He cannot, therefore, "know" in the way most of us do. (See "The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time".) But autism is only a disability because not everybody is autistic.
6. One way to look at a "renaissance man" is to say "He's interested in so many things!" Another way is to say: "He's already passed over and lost interest in so much!"
7. One way to look at a socialite is to say "He knows so many people!" Another is to say "He snubs and is snubbed by an incredibly large crowd!"
8. What are the ethics of forgetting mistakes? Revising, for instance, the archives of the New York Times so that it looks as if the paper never made any mistakes? Ought we now to become the Winston Smiths of our digital archives just because we can be? Would you rather read a "corrected" version of what 1966 thought, or what 1966 actually thought? Is correction of fact falsification of history? If so, which do we choose, fact or history?
9. Might certain decisions look, one decade, correct, the next, incorrect, and the one after correct again? Might there therefore be a case for leaving in everything "wrong" until it becomes right again?
10. Barthes says, in his wonderful Inaugural Lecture at the College de France, 1977, that when science writing is made "wrong" by subsequent science (and it all is, eventually), what remains is writing; pure literature.
11. In that lecture Barthes also says that every language is a system of ranking things, and all ranking is oppressive. Ranking, too, is a way of sifting things in order to forget the less important.
12. Equality of the importance of information sounds "just" in some way -- it's egalitarian -- but it's the enemy of semantics. That's why it's more like autism than communication. Communication relies on ranking and disambiguation (disambiguation: the banishing of the equality of two meanings). Communication depends on binary oppositions in which one element is dominant, the other repressed.
13. The effort to restore the repressed element of a binary ("women are better than men!") does not remove power's asymmetry, it merely shifts it somewhere else. As Barthes said, "we boast of reviving what has been crushed, without seeing that this, in itself, crushes something elsewhere".
14. Roland Barthes quotes Pasolini: “I believe that before action we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventuality did not exist… But I also believe that afterward we must be able to realize how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity has been controlled or manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure.”
15. Pasolini thought that his Ragazzi di Vita trilogy had been misappropriated by his political enemies. He abjured the films, but did not regret having made them. Compare Auden's abjuration of his communist didactic poetry in later years.
16. Speak your words without fear. But later, be prepared to eat your words. Their meaning will change. History will see to that.
2. There is no knowing that will not, at some point, be abandoned, replaced by a better knowing, which will be replaced in its turn. All sciences rise and fall on history's stock exchange.
3. Methods of knowing are like fictions, or like constructions that we assemble playfully, experimentally, and disassemble when they cease to be useful.
4. In order to know, we must be capable of forgetting, abandoning, abjuring.
5. The tragedy of autism is that the sufferer is incapable of excluding things that are not relevant. He cannot, therefore, "know" in the way most of us do. (See "The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time".) But autism is only a disability because not everybody is autistic.
6. One way to look at a "renaissance man" is to say "He's interested in so many things!" Another way is to say: "He's already passed over and lost interest in so much!"
7. One way to look at a socialite is to say "He knows so many people!" Another is to say "He snubs and is snubbed by an incredibly large crowd!"
8. What are the ethics of forgetting mistakes? Revising, for instance, the archives of the New York Times so that it looks as if the paper never made any mistakes? Ought we now to become the Winston Smiths of our digital archives just because we can be? Would you rather read a "corrected" version of what 1966 thought, or what 1966 actually thought? Is correction of fact falsification of history? If so, which do we choose, fact or history?
9. Might certain decisions look, one decade, correct, the next, incorrect, and the one after correct again? Might there therefore be a case for leaving in everything "wrong" until it becomes right again?
10. Barthes says, in his wonderful Inaugural Lecture at the College de France, 1977, that when science writing is made "wrong" by subsequent science (and it all is, eventually), what remains is writing; pure literature.
11. In that lecture Barthes also says that every language is a system of ranking things, and all ranking is oppressive. Ranking, too, is a way of sifting things in order to forget the less important.
12. Equality of the importance of information sounds "just" in some way -- it's egalitarian -- but it's the enemy of semantics. That's why it's more like autism than communication. Communication relies on ranking and disambiguation (disambiguation: the banishing of the equality of two meanings). Communication depends on binary oppositions in which one element is dominant, the other repressed.
13. The effort to restore the repressed element of a binary ("women are better than men!") does not remove power's asymmetry, it merely shifts it somewhere else. As Barthes said, "we boast of reviving what has been crushed, without seeing that this, in itself, crushes something elsewhere".
14. Roland Barthes quotes Pasolini: “I believe that before action we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventuality did not exist… But I also believe that afterward we must be able to realize how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity has been controlled or manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure.”
15. Pasolini thought that his Ragazzi di Vita trilogy had been misappropriated by his political enemies. He abjured the films, but did not regret having made them. Compare Auden's abjuration of his communist didactic poetry in later years.
16. Speak your words without fear. But later, be prepared to eat your words. Their meaning will change. History will see to that.