Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0708112027410.27725@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: that's really interesting
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 20:27:52 -0400 (EDT)
that's really interesting it's always a wonder, what's really interesting, and whether interest, in- terest-in, is a reasonable category of philosophical discourse. philosoph- ical writing often appears scholastic, dry, abstract; it seems to contain the semblance of power, that is argument for production's sake, production for motive's sake, motives for lifeworld's sake. the latter is crucial - that one inhabits one's work, replies, missions, admissions - exists with- in the life of worlds, structures accordingly. but is that of interest elsewhere, and what constitutes interest - there are two ways to think of 'having an interest in' - one, fascination with discourse on a particular subject - two, an interest in the sense of economic or other interest ab- stractly controlled by a steering mechanism, habitus of power, and so forth. i have a conversation recorded w/ david antin perhaps 30 years ago we were discussing astrology and about what was of interest and what was not and what sort of steering mechanisms or correlations there were and how they connected to the universe and i remember beyond or before the tape david saying that even if astrology were true it's not of much inter- est and i could only agree since personality and mute matter correlations mean relatively little and prove nothing in the long run, at first i was going to quote from the tape we made but then this particular section of interest was elsewhere, outside the thing itself so to speak. {} truth is never interesting; if truth were interesting then it would not be the flat greyness of existence. then it would be corrupted into landscape, furn- ished with ridges, serrated edges, graspable, something fallen into lang- uage - i have often said nothing could be farther from the truth. then and there interesting philosophy embraces evil, abjection, obscenity; it rides these, dis/comforts these, dis-inhabits the abstract, something's at stake - what remains elsewhere is physics, let's hear and see it for physics. "find the david antin text and what david antin says about things being interesting also try to talk about the notion of truth as being inherently neutral and not of interest because there's no error which allows distance and through that reflection and opening up possibilities connected with the lurid and abjection and perhaps one of the reasons systemic philosophy went out of favor in the twentieth century was because of the amazing amount of interesting information exploding everywhere and all of it veer- ing in interesting directions, not those of axiomatic conclusions, but those of interesting conversations always continuing. the more the world becomes (seems to become) more interesting, the more systems are retired, those systems which are steering mechanisms and not dialogs, even bell's theorem on the other hand is a dialog of sorts." crystal radios, constant chirping, western grebes, are interesting, tantra is very interesting and full of sights, sounds, tastes, touches, smells, extremely interesting and its truth is that of the back of the human being world-consorting, every thinking of the motive and intention of thinking. and curvature, curves, mathesis of every sort, is always of interest, the thinnest of beams enabling nothing, holding up even less. {} now crystal radio is interest- ing because it's driving high-impedance earphones and it makes me wonder of course why the same electromagnetic waves couldn't be harnessed to charge lithium batteries, run low-power computers, etc. i've often thought of living in pre-transmitter times, turning on a radio - of course there'd be static and atmospherics, but i think, am almost certain, there would be something else. i am the last person on earth to await the carboniferous. {} if philosophy could be presented in an interesting manner, what then? would philosophy then be of interest? i'm thinking of nietzsche, kierke- gaard, but also of witold gombrowicz, a guide to philosophy in six hours and fifteen minutes. now the text is fascinating but i wonder if terms such as consciousness, object, subject, being, existence, nothingness, reduction, etc. couldn't be considered placemarkers for other terms such as anhinga, tibet, arlington coupler, hohner victoria harmonica, vegan sushi, and so forth? in which case the discourse might well be more inter- esting - and what is the substrate of the original terminology, what holds it both to a more philosophical habitus and to a re/configuration of the world and what the world holds? texts are of course texts of substitution, deferral, differance, narration, holding language much as the phaistos disk holds language. and the phaistos disk is interesting perhaps because it remains mute, presenting us with a diacritique of language itself. {}