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quoting other people's punchlines
Oct. 7th, 2007 09:38 amLike Ludwig Wittgenstein imagining a work of philosophy that would consist entirely of jokes, or like Walter Benjamin dreaming of a book of cultural critique that would consist almost entirely of quotations from other books (which is what the Arcades Project became thanks to its interruption by the Nazi invasion, but a format that Karl Kraus had already produced, in oral form, in his on-stage performances consisting of nothing but readings from the week’s magazines and the daily papers)….
…even so do I frequently feel like simply stringing together my randomly discovered paragraphs from various books,. But only the compiler really gets the point of such exercises, because only the compiler detects the points he or she wishes to extract from the quoted passages. So I’ll have to stick to my 1500-word rambles, cut to 750 or 1000 words where possible.
Marina Warner’s reminder (see the Phantasmagoria cites in preceding posts) of our lack of knowledge of the incredibly bizarre scientific presuppositions from which our great works of literature, art and philosophy spring brings me round to Wade Davis’ praise of our endlessly curious and inventive species and the impossibility of foreclosing the boundaries between curiosity and invention.
In other words, we are forever making up things that turn out to be true, albeit not in the way that we had supposed, and we are forever engaging in investigations that turn out to be false or erroneous, albeit not false in the way that the opponents of the insights supposed.
Wade Davis obviously doesn’t believe in the literal truth of all the mutually exclusive explanations of the world he presents in Light at the Edge of the World, and he clearly believes in the essential truth of contemporary chemistry, given his explication of how assorted pharmacological reactions take place. But he is extremely resistant to the notion that everyone needs to believe the same things or study the same subjects…witness his approval of the observation that nomadic herders need to be taught veterinary medicine rather than pursue courses that lead them to want to be clerical workers in offices that do not exist. And of course there are ample discussions of what a core curriculum of knowledge ought to consist of, the knformation and the accepted truths of the culture that one ought to possess whether one is going to stack boxes or program the machines that keep track of the boxes or learn why the machines operate the way they do and why the people stacking and programming operate the way they do.
And I am reminded of the depressing statistics quoted by Morris Berman in his lugubriously alarmist little book Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, regarding the tiny percentage of Americans who have more than a vague idea of geography, and the immense numbers who believe things that do not correlate even remotely with the most elementary notions of science. In order to contest the truth of contemporary assumptions about the world, one first has to have some idea of what the assumptions are, and the implications of those assumptions. I approve of crackpots (they are entertaining, or at least I hope I am), but not woefully ignorant crackpots.
Which brings me to my first quotation, pulled at random from James Webb’s account of the last days of P. D Ouspensky, the self-educated occultist whose obsessive systematizing frequently revealed the limitations as well as the freedom to imagine that characterizes the self-taught man. (I offer no opinions regarding self-taught women, but I know my own gender pretty well in that regard.) Rebuffing his disciples who parroted the jargon he had taught them for years, he interrupted them with “Be simpler. Start from what you know.” And on being asked if this meant he was repudiating his System, he replied bluntly, “There is no System.”
It occurs to me on typing this that far from simply renouncing all he had laboriously put into books, Ouspensky may have finally learned from one of his own teachers how to start to wake people up to the nature of their own standard operating procedures.
This is an anecdote from the history of twentieth century occultism, but I find it instructively parallel to the struggles of the early-modern botanists Daniel Boorstin describes in The Discoverers, who as much as Ouspensky tried to create comprehensive Systems by combining what they had learned from the ancients with what they knew from personal experience. They came down, ultimately, not on the side of the primacy of personal experience, but on the side of the realization that what they had inherited was not entirely right, and what they knew from experience was not necessarily sufficient to add up to much of anything.
I had been planning to quote, as I said, blocks of text without commentary, but I now realize that the commentary is necessary and the quotations are not. If they were better written, I would quote them for the sheer pleasure of the language, but this is not so.
…even so do I frequently feel like simply stringing together my randomly discovered paragraphs from various books,. But only the compiler really gets the point of such exercises, because only the compiler detects the points he or she wishes to extract from the quoted passages. So I’ll have to stick to my 1500-word rambles, cut to 750 or 1000 words where possible.
Marina Warner’s reminder (see the Phantasmagoria cites in preceding posts) of our lack of knowledge of the incredibly bizarre scientific presuppositions from which our great works of literature, art and philosophy spring brings me round to Wade Davis’ praise of our endlessly curious and inventive species and the impossibility of foreclosing the boundaries between curiosity and invention.
In other words, we are forever making up things that turn out to be true, albeit not in the way that we had supposed, and we are forever engaging in investigations that turn out to be false or erroneous, albeit not false in the way that the opponents of the insights supposed.
Wade Davis obviously doesn’t believe in the literal truth of all the mutually exclusive explanations of the world he presents in Light at the Edge of the World, and he clearly believes in the essential truth of contemporary chemistry, given his explication of how assorted pharmacological reactions take place. But he is extremely resistant to the notion that everyone needs to believe the same things or study the same subjects…witness his approval of the observation that nomadic herders need to be taught veterinary medicine rather than pursue courses that lead them to want to be clerical workers in offices that do not exist. And of course there are ample discussions of what a core curriculum of knowledge ought to consist of, the knformation and the accepted truths of the culture that one ought to possess whether one is going to stack boxes or program the machines that keep track of the boxes or learn why the machines operate the way they do and why the people stacking and programming operate the way they do.
And I am reminded of the depressing statistics quoted by Morris Berman in his lugubriously alarmist little book Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, regarding the tiny percentage of Americans who have more than a vague idea of geography, and the immense numbers who believe things that do not correlate even remotely with the most elementary notions of science. In order to contest the truth of contemporary assumptions about the world, one first has to have some idea of what the assumptions are, and the implications of those assumptions. I approve of crackpots (they are entertaining, or at least I hope I am), but not woefully ignorant crackpots.
Which brings me to my first quotation, pulled at random from James Webb’s account of the last days of P. D Ouspensky, the self-educated occultist whose obsessive systematizing frequently revealed the limitations as well as the freedom to imagine that characterizes the self-taught man. (I offer no opinions regarding self-taught women, but I know my own gender pretty well in that regard.) Rebuffing his disciples who parroted the jargon he had taught them for years, he interrupted them with “Be simpler. Start from what you know.” And on being asked if this meant he was repudiating his System, he replied bluntly, “There is no System.”
It occurs to me on typing this that far from simply renouncing all he had laboriously put into books, Ouspensky may have finally learned from one of his own teachers how to start to wake people up to the nature of their own standard operating procedures.
This is an anecdote from the history of twentieth century occultism, but I find it instructively parallel to the struggles of the early-modern botanists Daniel Boorstin describes in The Discoverers, who as much as Ouspensky tried to create comprehensive Systems by combining what they had learned from the ancients with what they knew from personal experience. They came down, ultimately, not on the side of the primacy of personal experience, but on the side of the realization that what they had inherited was not entirely right, and what they knew from experience was not necessarily sufficient to add up to much of anything.
I had been planning to quote, as I said, blocks of text without commentary, but I now realize that the commentary is necessary and the quotations are not. If they were better written, I would quote them for the sheer pleasure of the language, but this is not so.
