Rune @skalden@qoto.org

"In her despair she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to nothing⁠—nothing. After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very literary transcendental commission-merchant, she could not see that her time had been better employed than when in former days she had passed it in flirting with a very agreeable young stockbroker; indeed, there was an evident proof to the contrary, for the flirtation might lead to something⁠—had, in fact, led to marriage; while the philosophy could lead to nothing, unless it were perhaps to another evening of the same kind" -Henry Adams, *Xdemocracy*

Through his language theories, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed the idea of a stable link between words and their meanings. Post structuralist analyses of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé shows that the decontextualized sign is unstable and that it's possible to create a game of shifting meaning through manipulation of context. Metaphor theorists have later observed that experienced basic concepts like up and down are stable, and that we use concepts related to these to emphasize analogous dynamics in more diffuse experiences like emotions and love. The anchor of meanings has gone from being the language to the experience.

I'm Diggin' Kovacs https://youtu.be/T24OXwxm-rc?t=3 #music

I am looking for quotes relevant to what we may call the War of the Reading Intention. Here is an early one:

"You say to yourself that the work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same way do you study the document in order to comprehend the man; both shell and document are dead fragments and of value only as indications of the complete living being. The aim is to reach this being; this is what you strive to reconstruct. It is a mistake to study the document as if it existed alone by itself." --Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) in the Introduction to his *History of English Literature*

#literature #academicchatter

The assumption that everything is action was, of course, refuted together with Aristotelian physics. If we limit the scope to that of human and academic discourse, it starts to make sense. It has the advantage over everything-is-language that it encompasses interactions with the world.

Modern discursive theory seems built on the assumption that everything is language. Unlike saying, for example, that everything is state in flux, the assumption is obviously reductionist and can be discarded off hand. It would be interesting to formulate a discursive theory based on the less counter-intuitive assumption that everything is action instead.

"Ouch, now people from the entire world are calling me here."

I saw his version of the Oresteia on stage last week. Today, he got the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a pretty talented playwright, this Jon Fosse, but I doubt he will enjoy the attention.

If you challenge the conventions of academic form, you quickly run into the objection that you need to comply with academic form. The academic form has become tautological.