I need to rethink my outspiral process and incorporate my recent insight that chaos has two different meanings, depending on whether it is applied to objective vs subjective truth.
- Objective chaos is negative — vacuum: absence of order.
- Subjective chaos is excessive positivity — infinitude: an unmanageable plurality of interfering orders that overwhelms all attempts at singular determination.
These two forms of chaos can occur together as total chaos, but they often do not. Partial chaos is more common, because it is more stable. Objective order will tolerate/promote/create subjective chaos to preserve itself. Subjective order will tolerate/promote/create objective chaos to preserve itself. Each form of partial chaos has its advantages, but those advantages are bought at a very high price.
My outspiral process is designed specifically to overcome stable partial chaos by drawing it into total chaos and then leading it through partial orders into a subjective-objective order. (I am avoiding the expression “total order” for obvious reasons. Fair warning…)
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I recognize this line of thought in Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.
Imagine someone… who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!). Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out: who endures contradiction without shame? Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of text at the moment he takes his pleasure. Thus the Biblical myth is reversed, the confusion of tongues is no longer a punishment, the subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel.
This, of course, corresponds to Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian.
I’m reading The Pleasure of the Text on the basis of another conceptual recognition, the concept of readerly and writerly texts, a problem that has been central to my own thinking since 2003.
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A painter uses pigments to create forms that draw the active viewer into his world.
A musician uses sounds for the same purpose. Nobody but a muzo listens to notes.
A philosopher uses truth assertions to draw the active thinker into his world. Philosophers are a species of artist, but because few people can see how truth and reality are not identical, their artistry is as invisible as the air we breathe.
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