Saturday 21 February 2015

Tinned chunks - an introduction to the rejection of everything through moments in the description of deep opposition (part 11 in an extended series)

1. A puzzle in which the vague predicates are 'worthy of Borges'.

2. A trap that is sprung by the warning against it. 

3. Is there some procedure by which the warning could function as a warning, and not the trigger of the trap?  

4. Only if the warning is not itself the trap. Only if some genuine distinctions were introduced into the system's otherwise integrated moments: 'warning', 'trigger' and 'trap'. 


5. Another one, a religion in which the god accepts only blasphemy as true praise. 

6. Then, in conditions where speech acts affirm (by extending what may be said) the language domain in which they appear, one cannot speak against language.

7. Then, whereof one cannot speak against, power is located in the structure but not the use of language.  

8. Then, use of language is not a means to alter the structure of language but only a performance of its rules. 

9. Then, speaking against (at the level of speaking) always functions as a speaking for (at the level of structure).  

10. Then, whereof one can speak, speaking and structure form a redundancy.

11. Then, 'speaking for' fails to actively affirm the language structure. It recirculates the stale air of 'known knowns.' 

12. Then, blasphemy reinvigorates religious categories. Then, piety is a means for dissipating its object (to relinquish with faint praise.)

13. Then, religion demands, as a condition for its renewal, that the damned shall be saved and the saved must be damned.

14. Then, the ninety nine and the one. 

15. As a social being, by force of gravity, the one must return to the many, and in so doing inoculates the community with a trace of the outside.

16. Structure is renewed by rebellion, observance by neglect, conformity by festival. 

17. But there continues to be generated a desire, an intent, to speak against conditions. Then, is there a way by which speech maps onto intention and not to structure?

18. From the position of the speaker, at each utterance, control over meaning slips from intention and returns to structure. 

19. 'That is not what I meant at all, that was not what I intended.' Personal speech is socialised in circulation. 

20. From the position of structure, there is a profusion of speech acts, which in performance overflow the constraints of grammar and syntax from which it emerges. 

21. Speech acts perform the rules from which they are generated and to which they must return but, in the acts of speaking, also contrive to defy them. 

22. Even under restricted conditions, something may be extracted in speech from almost nothing. 

23. From out of the tight corner, from the impossible angle, variation: what swerves, curves, dips, spins and loops to its target.

24. From out of the unpromising situation, if the target is to be hit, there must be deviation in trajectory. The chip, the slice, the lob. The googly, the wrong 'un, the chinaman, the doosra, the teesra. 

25. From conditions of exhausted permutation. From where no innovation might be expected: the late discovery of late reverse swing. The deviation may occur in utterance, as a spooling out. Equally, it may occur in the act of listening, as a drawing out. 

26. In conditions where speech has become untenable, unsustainable or corrupted, deviation is re-located to the act of listening.

27. But every innovatory act of rebelliousness is strictly 'legal' (belonging to the game) - an unconventional means for achieving the all too conventional objective. 

28. In the story of Borges, 'The Mirror and The Mask', the poet must kill himself after giving full expression to, and thus exceeding, the relation of power which holds him.

29. The king, having heard the poem, must become a beggar. 

30. The soarings associated with attaining a moment of true utterance, or of having truly heard, are temporary. All instances of speech are returned to the custody which they briefly evade.

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