Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1310290050310.15844@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Paradox, Brunet, razor
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:52:14 -0400 (EDT)
Paradox, Brunet, razor "A white horse is not a horse." The paradox here, asserted by Kung-Sun Lung-Tzu,* cannot be resolved by the production of an ontological apparatus; in fact it remains irresolvable, pointing instead to the very plan of language and language's (im)possibility: what is said, even within the performative, is performative only to the extent that an arbitrary nexus of laws and protocols exists: without this, the statement devolves into sound. In other words it either takes/makes the world with it, or abandons the world altogether. And I believe that the paradox, as it stands, does in fact imply an abandonment, a sense that the truth as such cannot be allowed to falter on the shores of language, that is to say, sound. So the paradox stands in fact as a hard paradox, inherently contradictory, without solution. Or rather, solution itself is placed on the plane of the nexus of laws and protocols, and therefore may be no solution at all, inhabiting only the same ontology as the original statement - which might here be considered a sheaf or plane occupying the zeroth degree of three-dimensional space - the hard paradox in relation to the hard space of tools and the mute substance of the real. This is the insight that occurred to me, that the very nature of such paradoxes is only to point to the weakness of the ontology of the symbolic, before it is overtaken, conquered, bowdlerized, by political discourse which proceeds as if it matters: what matters is the pull of the level in the voting-booth, what happens with the enumeration of the votes, what's slipped under the table, what becomes of the allotments of food and materiel designated and distributed among whom, and for whom, and to what purpose? The paradox of the white horse is a pucker, then, in ontology, which references a certain uselessness of the universal and the fabrication of universal judgments: everyone knows where the votes go, who's doing the tallying, and towards what end... *Gongsun Long. From Wikipedia: "In the White Horse Dialogue (Baima Lun), one interlocutor (sometimes called the "sophist") defends the truth of the statement "White horses are not horses," while the other interlocutor (sometimes called the "objector") disputes the truth of this statement. This has been interpreted in a number of ways. [...]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gongsun_Long . See also: The Works of Kung-Sun Lung-Tzu, Max Perleberg, Hong Kong, 1952. I've been thinking through Sartre's concepts of existentialism and freedom, in The Last Chance, Roads of Freedom IV, which includes sections of what was to be the fourth volume of his trilogy. The absolutist position of the Communist party is contrasted in the camp with history (whose history) and the act of escape. I recognized at this point that such an escape, for me, is not a language act, but something that escapes language as the final section ends before Brunet makes his second attempt with the aid of Mathieu. There's also a quote from Lingis, from "On the Essence of Technique," in Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, ed. Manfred Frings, 1969: "The pilgrim of the Absolute is a tourist." The twisting of language resonated with thinking about Unicode after a discussion with John Cayley about language in the Cave at Brown University. My own work wars and succumbs to language - "A white horse is not a horse," in its original context is irretrievable - and I end up veering into the world of the substance of sound manque, stripped of the symbolic, of meaning, of organism itself. Just as writing, then, returns, Brunet readies himself; the end of "The Last Chance" section reads (trans. Craig Vasey): "I'll come wake you at 6 o'clock." He opens the door and slips out without shaking hands, Brunet looks around at the room for a minute, then goes to look at himself in the mirror He puts some more coal on the fire, he yawns, he goes up to a painted red board supported by a couple of boxes. There's a razor, a piece of soap, and two used blades. Brunet takes the razor in his hand and looks at it.