I write and mean something right now, right this moment. Except that now that I refer back to it , it has changed. No center. Yet there is a way of belonging to a thematic without there being a center . There is relative, differential belonging which is changing itself in an ongoing manner ,yet in ways that allows relative consistency. Thus we have at the same timer difference and continuity. And my claims to 'no center' are self-reflexive. They have built into them this consistent- changing rubric. So it is perfectly possible to articulate a notion of transformative that carries along with it relative stability and have this built right into our discourse about it. This is, after all, how meaning operates anyway. — Joshs
a gathered field. — Joshs
So it's that not our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers because they have 'essential properties', but because what we call houses (the kinds of things we count as being houses) are not the kinds of things that turn into what we (happen to) call flowers (what we count as being flowers). So at stake here is a question of intelligibility, not properties and (substantial) essences. Or, if essences, then essences pertaining to what we count, call, or recognize as houses and flowers: a question of how we relate to the world around us, and not questions about the world 'in itself'. — StreetlightX
The point is - the whole enterprise brings you right back to where you started. — csalisbury
The screen I'm looking at, for example, is a pure difference. It's not existent by its form. At any moment it might disappear or even turn into a flower. I cannot use the forms I expect of it to judge whether it exists. — TheWillowOfDarkness
The difference and its effects, are neither a whim of language (Derrida) nor ultimately mysterious and inaccessible (Heidegger). — TheWillowOfDarkness
If so, then the phenomenal analysis of 'turning into' would reveal that while at one level the phrase breaks from the context of use, at a more general level it is taken into account in some way, either as nonsense or as an exception exposing the larger totality of relevance framing the discursive situation. As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. — Joshs
What transformations can't we think (which transformations really make us strain)? I think that that by definition is a more challenging question, but its exactly what thinking otherwise is all about. — csalisbury
Experience will teach you what you may
And what you may not do
I'll teach you to forget the truths
You always knew.
See what might be,
See what might have been.
Though you yourself created me,
Your own mistake has set me free
I was your slave, now you are mine
I am Time, I am Time. — Robin Williamson
Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind. — J. Krishnamurti
But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? Think again of the child who affirms the truth of this statement ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!): one's immediate (adult?) response is something like: 'this child doesn't know what truth is'; or, 'this child doesn't quite understand how houses, or flowers, or change works', or "how adorable". This child doesn't understand concepts and how they relate to other concepts - at least, not like we do. Her language is in error (according to our standards). That's the immediate adult response, not: 'No darling, houses do not turn into flowers' (at least, it's not the response parent who isn't tired and just wants to get through lunchtime with bub; or, the adult could say this, but she's being somewhat pedagogically irresponsible). — StreetlightX
distinctions with significance require asymmetry of response: if anything is possible, then anything follows, and one cannot say anything significant about anything at all.
Constraints need to be placed on our grammar such that one responds this way to a truth and this way to a falsehood: this asymmetry is the condition for language to function at all. But no such asymmetry exists in the case of 'it is false that houses turn into flowers'. — StreetlightX
And the only way to do this is to begin in the middle of things, to begin by ‘cognitively mapping’ (as Csal said) how things stand right now, in order to assess the possibilities of transformation, to measure the transcendental from within, — StreetlightX
the only way to do this is to begin in the middle of things — StreetlightX
a point where sense needs to be reoriented by our grasping our way about, by our readjusting how we understand and relate to the world about us. There needs to be a way for change, transformation, novelty to occur in the order of things, the conceptual and lived matrix by which we relate to the world and ourselves. — StreetlightX
But is there a dynamic more intricate than the order of 'things' as starting point, such that change, transformation, novelty don't have be seen as a problem to be explained? Is it possible to think change, transformation and novelty not as possible outcomes but as the most primordial ground of experience? — Joshs
Perhaps one response to this is to transform the question from 'what transformations can't we think?' to: 'what transformations can't we live?'. This, perhaps, is what gets to the heart of what Cavell takes from Wittgenstein: at the end of the day, of course we can say - and think - if we want, with all abandon, that houses can turn into flowers. We can think this. We do think this, insfoar as we do (a tautology). We say it: houses can turn into flowers. But can we 'live' this? To say this, and perhaps more importantly, sustain it's 'saying', is to have to transform how we relate to houses and flowers, insofar as we live those relations. This is why, I think, when Cavell asks the question, he immediately turns to questions not 'immediately' related to houses and flowers, but to questions about 'growing' and 'gardens' and 'seeds' and 'stones':
"What would "houses" or "flowers" mean in the language of such a world? What would be the difference between (what we call) stones and seeds? Where would we live in that world, and what would we grow in our gardens? And what would "grow" mean?"
I think the 'style' of questions here are significant, and they remind of Deleuze's dictum to not ask 'what is?', but "who?, how much?, how?, where?, when?": Cavell's questions are in this vein, it seems to me. Even when they ask 'what', they are not 'what is?' but 'what would we grow?' and 'what's the difference?', questions that bear on relations and their significance, on how we relate, how we live with our ways of speaking, and how ours ways of speaking (and thinking) and embedded in ours ways of living.
Another way to put this is that the question 'do houses turn into flowers?' cannot just be about houses and flowers: it's also a question about growing, about gardens, about stones and seeds, all of which it carries in tow like an umbra which is easily missed if one doesn't make sure to pay attention to it. So to bring this all back to transcendentality: would it answer your concern to say that the 'missing bridge' between 'deep transcendentally' and 'local transcendentality' is just us? — StreetlightX
when everything is 'change as primordial ground' or whathaveyou, what you lose is precisely the ability to think change. If you make it your point of departure, any attempt at distinction is lost in the white noise of 'change': — StreetlightX
This Derridean regurgitation is fucking insufferable, please fucking stop. — StreetlightX
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