Another lecture in the evening
This time it was “Normative Agreement and Models of Reasoning” by Chris Campolo from UC Riverside. Nothing much to talk about there, it was less about models of reasoning than the effect of implicature on premises for reasoning. HP Grice again, but under a different set of labels from a different set of theorists.
I confirmed a suspicion though. Philosophy lectures are even more ghettoized than literature lectures. There were five people, counting me and two professors. Real high demand items, these lectures.
To respond to a comment from this evening in the open, rather than buried in an entry soon to scroll off: Yes, Turbulent Velvet, I was perhaps a little off in the Artaud reference. I should have said Picabia. Though eventually I’m sure I’ll get to Deleuze and Guattari, most of that vocabulary is a bit older. It’s from the Dadaist heritage. I suppose I should offer an illustration:
At least in my mind, “Universal Prostitution” from 1916, not to mention many other examples, count as desiring machines. While VV may have gotten the idea from Deleuze and Guattari, well, it’s that damned intertextuality thing. In 1948 before he died, Artaud actually rebelled against this early Dada modeling of experience:
Where the machine is
there is always an abyss and nothingness . . .
And I shall henceforth devote myself
exclusively
to the theater
as I understand it
a theater of blood
a theater which every performance will have achieved some gain
Modernism was marked by the seductive qualities of machine culture, and it seems only natural that postmodernism would appropriate its symbols. It’s hardly new; roots run deep. I keep finding evidence of these “new perspectives” circa 400 BC. Satyr plays anyone?
I keep formulating in my head a sort of reactive cycle, where the appeal to the emotions always returns in our modes of communication. Emotion is the one universal affective that just won’t die, no matter how much theorizing is done about it. I try to avoid being locked up in any language ghetto, including the postmodern one. I tend to stagger and weave across different fields, so I suppose that’s why I’ve ended up in Rhetoric.
It’s only talk. [King Crimson reference intentional]
