Under the gaze of a closely policed semantic horizon, what unfolds are not playful accidents productive of ‘semantic mirage’ but a mirage of play whose badly acted mirth is discomfiting to the onlooker for the deadly seriousness with which it defends its interests. Yet, while it can’t be said definitively that something understood falsely, i.e., too literally will get us all killed, the reassurance doesn’t lessen the annoyance of said falsification.
The kind of heteronormative rigidity arising from too exacting an insistence on the letter can engender, as Gadamer phrased it in reference to 18th century metaphysics, a “petrified and artificial language” that immures all thought. Provincial types might not see this as a problem. It’s possible they prefer it. Hard to say.
In terms of language, the replication of word shells without a sense of play amounts to an unauthored replication, thereby yielding a fruitless understanding. Whereas, a fruitier understanding seems to be what Gadamer came to see in Aristotle, that his thought followed the language-instinct such that his concepts were merely a product of this (Hegel’s Dialectic, P. Christopher Smith trans., 1971). Recognizing this, as Hegel did, allowed for a philosophy of speculation, a thinking together of opposites that is intended to induce a time dilation of sorts. Deleuze and Guattari used this technique with their ‘striated and smooth’ theme.
But it seems a recognition of gradations would also be necessary. If you use speculative poetics or speculative philosophy to say that all stages are co-present, this is insufficient since it doesn’t say enough about the question of degree or measure. Rather, if my thoughts are a product of language, then language as something on the side of nature and not opposed to it isn’t fixed in meaning, doesn’t return me to the same place over and over, but is ephemeral and flowing, containing more or less rigid, more or less nascent aspects in its elements. I think a reading of Barthes along these lines takes us up to this point of understanding. That is, where reason used in the classic sense would seek to trace out the ideal and eternal forms already evident, Barthes emphasized the death in every scene. This implies a co-presence of greater or lesser degrees mortality as well as nascency in any given moment. That is why a reasoned use of the imagination would not overstate the fact of simultaneity and leave it at that, because to do so would be incomplete and misleading, a kind of zealotry whose containment Spinoza is said to have called for as the only way to constrain the masses (J. Israel).
It’s possible a weakened power of discrimination results in the absence of a definitive statement. And it should be said the hackery attributed to Hegel isn’t for everyone. There has to be a method in the madness. Without it, one is left susceptible to the pull of autocratic writing that conceals its hand as it pretends to advance a ‘unity of apperception,’ a forging ahead that lacks precisely what truly defines it as that, since there is not a power of discrimination being exercised, a lack that may have prompted Nabokov’s pointing up of the false homology between the Russian troika and the steed in that optical illusion is taken as evolutionarily significant. I imagine it was a confidence trick once known to the lowliest of fakirs.
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