Re: [xmca] Abstract to Concrete

[Christine Schweighart <schweighartc@gmail.com>]

Hi Larry and anyone wondering,
I made a big leap from your fragment - but it lit a train of
experience which crystalised in Covent Garden, swamped in expense and
elite refinement:) experiencing Handel's Tamerlano in 2010 - I'm still
out on ' The Muse' as aesthetic value..but its form in music was
directly connecting with its mood, which appears here in your
fragment.

 Yes, your reading follows mostly what was prompting me.
>
Your point: In his
> phrase *face of the other* is the UNIQUE *other* who if categorized [pigeon
> holed] is totalized.

- I'm thinking about that still  - particular seems OK,  'totalized'
in your sense is  in the sense of 'categorised'  in that 'formal
logic' kind of way - next thing would be to start measuring and
counting.. That doesn't seem profound enough to me as a dynamic.
Levinas discusses that 'being' is already 'disturbing' , he's a
theological writer, he uses the idea of recurrence, but he also seems
to reside in a 'passivity of self' a theme recurring in his writing in
many ways - I'd have to work really hard  ( and it's beyond me) to
appreciate a locus of debate...
''being and entities will turn out from the start to be important and
to be determinant for truth, but this distinction is also an
amphibology and does not signify the ultimate. ''
where meeting a person is moment of recognition

> Christine, you then link *face of the other* with *dialogical expression*
> and a PARTICULAR quality of relations.
> Next, you caution that THIS quality of witnessing *the face of the other*
> may be lost in written text or shifted to a generalizable *everyman*
sure - it's a mystery. What Levinas brings in is a  strange  argument though
" The recurrence of persecution  in the oneself  is thus irreducible
to  intentionality in which, even in its neutrality as a contemplative
movement, the will is affirmed. In it the fabric of the same,
self-possesion in a present, is never broken. When affected the ego is
in the end affected only by itself, freely. Subjectivity taken as
intentionality is founded on auto-affestion as an auto-revelation,
source of an impersonal discourse. The recurrence of the self in
responsibility for others, a persecuting obsession, goes against
intentionality, such that responsibility for others could never mean
altruistic will, instinct of 'natural benevolence,' or love. It is in
the passivity of obsession, or incarnated passivity, that an identity
individuates itself as unique, without recourse to any system of
references, in the impossibility of evading the assignation of the
other without blame..... "
p112
then ' 'under accusation by everyone, the responsibility for everyone
goes to the point of substitution. A subject is a hostage.
 --- well that's one possibility....but where does it go?
accused in its innocence, subjectivity in itself is being thrown back
on oneself. i.e accused of what the others do or suffer, or
responsible for what they do or suffer ....... this accusation can be
reduced to the passivity of the self only as a persecution, but a
persecution that turns into an expiation. ... Everything is from the
start in the accusative.

Basically then he locates a withdrawal and questions a beginning
arising in this passivity.

I couldn't 'do' such a thing to my children though -  nor do I think
I'd get them 'ready for the world' to follow such involutions! That's
not the kind of 'naked exposure' of a social world I enjoy..
Levinas,  Otherwise than being (1981) p112
So if not passivity - a vitality?

> Christine, you then shift to *othering* in the English essay form which
> RELIES on the quality of separation of audience through the *construction*
> of a particular type of reader - *the intelligent informed reader*.
>
CS  Perhaps I'm thinking of passivity , the art of positioning the
reader as a passive one 'so that the object comes to them'

> In your final turn you remembered our earlier conversations on *plurality*
> of forms of living. Plurality is NOT relative, or random. Plurality is
> multiple [discourses, traditions, genres, EACH constituted within effective
> history. Pluralism is NOT looking for universal truths, nor is it relative.
 CS These are Kant's kind of universal truths ?? I'm just thinking
about this with my reading Ilyenkov   holding me in this period.
> It is multiple and contrasting VALUES or NORMS which may be brought into
> dialogue but NEVER made *equal*
> Your final reference was to al-andulus which I *imagine* as a historical
> moment when pluralism was honoured.
>
 CS yes it was a 'holding period' too. I'm intriqued as in circles
around Edward Said lectures etc this is assumed to be 'gone' and
questioning begins with 'wouldn't that be what we need?' - yet to me I
have 'lived' present day values which *are* such a 'recurrence' ,
'it's all around' in Andalucia of the 1980's/90s - isn't it still ?-
were n't those ( victims of nostalgia?)  able to look and find what
they so want?
> Christine, I may have mis-read or mis-understood some particular points but
> I hope I captured the theme I saw moving through your commentary.
>
 Thanks, Larry you did:)

> I would like to pause here with a comment Huw made in response to the
> concept of rhetoric grounded at its source within reading and readers.
> The history and development of *reading* and our conscious understanding of
> reading as a phenomena I heard in your response describing the distanced
> intelligent scholarly reader.
>
> *Reading RESPONSE theory* explores the PLURALITY of ways of reading.
> I wonder if a new way of reading *as conversational* and *as dialogical*
> may be developing to *see through* the intelligent scholarly reader who
> is distancing from others [as a particular historically constituted  kind
> or norm of reading]
> As we explore the plurality of norms of reading [and the value
> presuppositions within each type of reader] we may be developing a new
> understanding of developmental psychology.

If that is a way that helps more , more freely - ,, !!
>
> Christine, I considered writing this off line as a more private response,
> but I am questioning the boundaries between private and public discourse
> and the values and presuppositions embedded in these fuzzy boundaries.

yep,  -  ethicalities  of living in an IT mediated world - makes it so
much harder:) one step back , two forwards though..
Thanks again.
 Christine.
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