What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about
Emerson's explication helps to resolve the polyphonic interpretations to which Bakhtin has been transcribed as Russia adapted to post-Soviet tonalities. (Yeah, I know, but hum a few bars and you'll be drunk enough not to mind.) But she does bring out the philosophical aspects of his thought that litcritters ignore, or are ignorant of. I've found that these dovetail nicely with Chas Peirce's pragmatism, though not in the way that it's pushed, say, in the Int'l Journal for Dialogical Science (wasn't Norbert Wiley played by Don Rickles on Gilligan's Island? As an abductor?). This dovetailing does not correspond with the direction pragmatism took thereafter (a good précis is supplied by Susan Haack in Contemporary Pragmatism), but the conversation came back around (like a game of "Chinese whispers", a.k.a. 以訛傳訛) via Carlin Romano on Miller, cueing Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism and Truth off my bookshelf (despite Peirce being his least favorite pragmatist, and him being Haack's least fave). Given this (well, not given in that sense), especially in the manifold applications to philosophy of science, it was surprising to see that an article could be written on Complexity and Philosophy that completely ignored, or was ignorant of, pragmatism. Lotsa folk talking past one another, it seems, or is it bitching and its discontents?
Addendum 10.5: The inaccurate 'Chinese whispers' translation (whatever wiki says) is actually idiomatic of '[unreliable] hearsay', not the name of the game (yes, checked with native speaker while posting; but perhaps metalingual puns lose something in translation), but it seems there's a whole lotta endemic misusage out there, not to mention epidemic viral adaptation of English into syntactic muzak. Recently read, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry was criticised in Japan as reading as if translated from English due to a foreign internal complexity of grammar, which itself ambivalently suits the storyline.
Addendum 10.5: The inaccurate 'Chinese whispers' translation (whatever wiki says) is actually idiomatic of '[unreliable] hearsay', not the name of the game (yes, checked with native speaker while posting; but perhaps metalingual puns lose something in translation), but it seems there's a whole lotta endemic misusage out there, not to mention epidemic viral adaptation of English into syntactic muzak. Recently read, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry was criticised in Japan as reading as if translated from English due to a foreign internal complexity of grammar, which itself ambivalently suits the storyline.
posted by nnyhav | 20:17
4 Comments:
The Valve: what we spam about when we spam about Spam.
Doesn't that site irk you oon pooteet, Poet? The Valve seems more like a cross between Marvel Comix and the cliffsnotes to the Philosophical Investigations (which V. philosopher-in-residence JonJon Holbo memorized back in the day) than it does a literary type of site; and you know thangs will be going down when the Net's favorite bubblegum postmod. preachers, Kostco and Co, show up to summarize their favorite misread paragraph of Derrida, followed by 20 paragraphs of Scott Kazoomann's drivel. Imagine some Nabakovian or Kafka/Poe like shred-invasion of the ValveMart. Yeah.
A Dispositional Theory of Valve?
Not really. Talk about dispositions is about as useful as talk about the "status of beliefs", iddn't it. Too abstract for moi, tho' I agree that a rational, even Kantian approach to ethics should not be ruled out. But Valvesters are not about ethics of any type, as far as ah can tell; even an old-school sort of Hobbesian contract idea has been dismissed by most in Blogland: men should be allowed liberty to procur their livelihood, e.g. post freely to sites, unless they are threatening others or really obscene (tho' the usual SE Klaufmann post sort of defines obscene)--not understood by most Valvesters or the aesthetes of J.Edgar.com. INstead there's this sort of light-weight royalism at the Valve and similiar joints--cyber-royalism--all about insider deals, schmoozin', back-scratching, gnoshin' as they say in the biz, er, that is biz ala MeyerLanskyWood.
To return to Chinese whispers, five years on, it's astounding how dangerous is quotation in translation (attribulation?); not just the old saw of crisis + opportunity, or Ezra Pound's Canto-intuitive ideosyncretic misadaptions (and given his insistence on the importance of 'right names' it's more than a bit odd that he so often gets them wrong, and I'm not talking about Chinese transliterations, nor even corrupting Western names, but pure misidentifications), but also, per FT 11.6: Zhou Enlai's early-'70s response of "too early to say" about the French Revolution was with regard to 1968 not 1789 (per FSO[ret] Chas Freeman: "I distinctly remember the exchange. There was a misunderstanding that was too delicate to invite correction.") ... and the article concludes, "Scholars also say the oft-quoted Chinese curse -- 'may you live in interesting times' -- does not exist in China itself.
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