Kenneth,
Thanks for the quotes. Conciseness is one of those questions of style that is always just below conscious level for me. I tend to associate it with Erasmus who said that briefness and economy of style is a sort of a priori of multiplication or fecund variety. It's like various meanings and possibilities are folded into the images which is what makes them 'complicated'. I'm trying to work with a style that is like this and so leaves all these threads dangling in suspense, waiting to be unfolded. It makes the kind of room that I need to go on by just making a cut into the fabric to catch the flow of a coded Cipher that is itself a fold whose lack of clarity leads on to further tinkering in order to hack open an unexpected horizon. Just like this; -- I'm with Nietzsche again adding to this amorphous subject heading that somehow keeps slipping away into that which remains to be thought and so language itself is going under like Zarathustra;-- becoming impossible to discern. I'm tracking this will to becoming incommunicado in Nietszche. There is a great and key section in the _Gay Science_ book five section 354 where he writes that consciousness is the product of distress and the need to be protected. It's the result of the need to communicate to the herd in order to find a common sense of security and comfort. But the hunting tracker who goes alone like a beast of prey -- wants the opposite. Not to be easily discernible and legible is the ideal of a beast of prey so this 'monster' is not expressive or doesn't really develope language but holds on to the possibility of communicating and in this way there is briefness, folding compactness that is also a sign of a fertile ground, or of a persephonic field that can flourish. The worst is to force out any expression. This makes it sound heavy and theatrical. On the other hand the light and carefree ways of a child are not phony and when language becomes like a child then it dances and plays. This is the frolicking art or science i.e., to descend into the unconscious perhaps cultivating along the way the indifference of a pyrrho, a skeptic who doesn't have any curiosity for what lies behind an appearance but accepts superficiality for the banality that it is: "My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility [...] Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness -- by the "genius of the species" that commands it -- and translated back into the perspective of the herd" (section 354). That which is an unhealthy interpretation of our actions is the tendency to understand them in the perspective of the herd which means that then our actions are intentional or conscious. If this is happening then the will is determined by the interest of the preservation of the species. In this case we try to calculate our actions in terms of consequences, consequences for the herd. There is always here a subject causing an effect that is accountable as a subject to the herd. Such an accountability is governed by our consciousness and the way it determines our intentional life. We are always interpreting our intentions in this regard. And in order for interpretation to be succesful or to lead to a sense of security and comfort then intentions better be clearly legible. But "today we immoralists have the suspicion that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is UNINTENTIONAL in it" (section 33 BGE). To some extent, if not wholly, this is an artistic argument because to be able to dance and play like a child is just what is needed for virtuosity in improvisation. It's not easy, this all takes insane patience and concentration and self-honesty not to mention learning how to end with that tone that falls because the ground has dropped out momentarily suspending us on a cosmic refrain. Yes, it's the freestyle of a random walk impossible to track down that over time becomes consistent marking out a new territory, Dionysian uprising of Persephone.
regs,
tympan
Ariosto,
tympanist [n]. A person who plays the kettledrums;
anyway I copied down this _superb_ Nietzsche quote on writing several years
ago and posted it once here to your attention. Considering your present
rather floridic style I thought you might enjoy a retour:
CONCISE WRITING. WINCKELMANN SAID THAT IT IS DIFFICULT TO WRITE CONCISELY
AND NOT A PROJECT FOR EVERYONE. FOR ONE CAN LESS READILY BE TAKEN AT HIS
WORD IN A FULLER TYPE OF WRITING. HE WHO WROTE TO SOMEONE, "I DID NOT HAVE
ENOUGH TIME TO MAKE THIS LETTER BRIEFER", UNDERSTOOD WHAT THE CONCISE STYLE
OF WRITING DEMANDS..
and this:
WITHOUT ANY PATHOS. ALMOST NO PERIODS. NO QUESTIONS. FEW IMAGES.
EVERYTHING VERY TERSE. PEACEFUL. NO IRONY. NO CLIMAX. STRESS UPON THE
LOGICAL ELEMENT, YET VERY CONCISE.
and from: The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Nov 1887 p332:
"A PERFECT BOOK TO CONSIDER
1. FORM. STYLE. AN IDEAL MONOLOGUE, all that has a learned appearance,
absorbed in the depths. All the accents of profound passion, of unrest and
also of wakeness. Alleviations, sun tasks -- short happiness, sublime
serenity. To go beyond demonstration; to be absolutely personal, without
employing the first person. Memoirs as it were; to say the most abstract
things in the most concrete, in the most cutting manner. The whole history
as if it had been lived and personally suffered. Visible things, precise
things, examples, as many as possible. No description; all the problems
transposed into sentiment as far as passion.
2. EXPRESSIVE TERMS. Advantage of military terms. To find expressions to
replace philosophical terms."
===========
regards,
kenneth
>featureless netizens,
>
>
>I have been reading Beyond Good and Evil trying to shake loose again
>Nietzsche's propensity as I read it without imposing too much of a forced
>structure like Heidegger does. There is no systematic philosophy in
>Nietzsche but rules of thumb and a spur to a way of life that he always
>imagined as the future of new philosophers. This spur to some extent makes
>up what I will call a rhetoric of secrecy, an exilic withdrawal and
>detachment that gives him the ability to connect with odd readers on an
>intimate level. Odd readers are like those who find themselves outside the
>norms of what it means and how to go about becoming a member of society. He
>addresses himself to the mavericks, eccentrics, outsider geeks, women,
>multicolored wierdo's, fags, clowns, tricksters and other beings of the
>border between the human and the inhuman. It's oppressive situations that
>drive one to becoming refined, crafty in creating masks that conceal. As you
>know for me the issue here is understanding the basis for being innovative.
>Here it is finding oneself as not being fit or cut to the measure of what
>constitute the governing standards of normality. We are monsters in the eyes
>of society, beasts of prey who cannot be fathomed and understood who are
>constantly under going change and proliferating all kinds of masks and
>appearances as a cloud of obscurity that is always unstable and impermanent,
>not easy to get a hold off. It's a mistake to see in Nietzsche's beast of
>prey the strong. No, it's the 'position' that is weak, a minoritarian 'point
>of view' that is fragile. It's the worst possible way to be;-- make no
>mistake about it. It is making this weak position into the strong one that
>makes up the know-how of a great rhetorical strategist. In this case the
>hunter then would become interchangeable with the hunter and that's one of
>things that is shown by V&D in their book on Greek metis or craftiness. It's
>clearly not an offensive philosophy but a defensive one involving something
>like the ability to take on the markings of one's surroundings as comouflage
>and in this way dissappear, become invisible and hidden in the shadows. The
>result as you can see is also the projection of of an illusory object of
>fear, a scarecrow: "Flee into concealment. And have your masks and subtlety,
>that you may be mistaken for what you are not, or feared a little. And don't
>forget the garden with golden trelliswork And have people around you who are
>as a garden -- or as the music in the waters in the evening, when the day is
>turning into memories. Choose the GOOD solitutude, the free, playful, light
>solitude that gives you, too, the right to remain good in some sense"
>(section 25, BGE). The last thing one becomes in this will to the invisible,
>unknown and hidden, to the virtual; is easy to understand. There is a
>jamming of communicative signals but the noise of that which impossible to
>comprehend. A limit of understanding and krisis of the idea of reason is
>brought into play. The frontier of border cultures makes thinking stop in
>its tracks and ponder things very very slowly and this is how Dasein comes
>to its ownmost posibility, how we go from the ordinary operation of the
>understanding to a limit hermeneutics of the exceptions, of those choice
>flowers that are unique and singular. Thinking becomes an incubator out of
>which emerges that which is surprising and unexpected with the breakdown and
>spliting apart of a very fertile and phat idea of reason which Schelling
>'understood' as the absolute A=A, Orphic egg and esoteric BWO. How the
>krisis happens is through a intensification that Schelling calls
>CONTRACTION, a tightening up of a hard unit which then as identity breaks
>apart and in that breaking apart there is the relation that then bonds
>together a multitude. It's no accident that for a new generation of radicals
>it is Nietszche who is our Marx. Dionysus is a shapeshifting multitude that
>always operates in secrecy like the weak position always has, like the fox
>or octopus or D&V's Greek intelligence. These are books working out the
>strategic avenues of a new age politics. There is a kind of encryption that
>obscures the possiblility of legibility or a hermeneutics to take place or
>work out a stable position and point of view. For instance in their Treatise
>on Nomadology D&G in Proposition VI are discussing the nimadic numbering
>number of their war machines. It doesn't represent a measure but a stretegy
>of becoming X... : "In the war machine and nomadic existence , the number is
>no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it is in this
>capacity that it constitutes the "esprit de corps" and invents the secret
>and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc."
>As an example of highly nuanced quantities near impossible to discern of war
>machines D&G quote the _Desert Children of Dune_ by Frank Herbert, "He moved
>with the random walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert.
>Nothing in his passage would indicate that human flesh moved there. It was a
>way of walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think
>about it. the feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their
>pacing." It the strategy of a thief like Hermes when he steals Apollo's cows
>in one of the Homeric Hymns, cloud of ink of an octopus.
>
>
>tympan
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