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I think this item is worth a little blog post. Indeed, that people spend their time doing things like this is what sustains my faith in humanity: Oulipo for the masses! This video of Rick Perry, made by a website called Bad Lip Reading, was a big hit on the conservative website HotAir, [...] Continue reading Save the Pretzels for the Gas Jets In the interests of minimalism and dropping extra weight as we try to stay above water I would suggest that all the morality that we need can be summed up in the injunction not to feed your fantasies and addictions. Everything else, all the Judeo-Christian stuff, everything essential in modern ethics, would follow from [...] Continue reading Exodus from the Dead End of History, 2 Liberal democracy is predicated upon the severing of liberty and equality. For liberty and equality to be sustainable, they must be reciprocally defining and supporting: I can only be free together with my equals; I can only be equal with others within a reciprocal respect for each other’s freedom. The supposed tension between liberty [...] Continue reading Exodus from the Dead End of History There are a few categories central to originary thinking: center-margin, vertical-horizontal, sign-object. We can multiply such categories, adding rather obvious ones which are probably already there, like inside/outside, and others, as necessary, perhaps less obvious: concealed/open, before/behind, amongst/amidst, visible/invisible, whole/rent, and so on. These are all very basic experiential categories, deeply embedded in language, [...] Continue reading A Little Social Theory Eric Gans noted a while back that the first “market” was war, insofar as value is established through competition in a public space. According to that criterion the market can be traced further, to the most primitive hunting and gathering societies: one hunter would prove himself more proficient than others and the subsequent recognition, [...] Continue reading Post-millennialism and Originary Grammar Health care, as we speak about it today, is a completely modern phenomenon. Hippocrates aside, if you go back maybe 150 years, doctors had no effect on their patients: your chances of recovery if you did see a doctor were identical to your chances if you didn’t. “Health care,” or the medical profession, emerges [...] Continue reading Health Care I’m much more interested in what is going on in Wisconsin than in the Middle East. The Middle East is the business of Middle Easterners now—America gave up its pretentions as a superpower, or leader of the Free World, or hegemon, or whatever, with the election of Barack Obama. Who knows—maybe it’s for the [...] Continue reading Madison, not Cairo Two speeches given the same day in response to the shootings in Tucson; one, by all accounts, brilliant, Presidential, conciliatory, the other, by most accounts, petty, small minded and self-serving. And I don’t find too much to object to in President Obama’s platitudinous remarks. But, in each speech there is a certain logical tension [...] Continue reading Obama and Palin: Opposing Anthropologies Only after reading Eric Gans’s recent Chronicle (#403, “Heuristic Necessity”) did the obvious relevance of Gans’s definition of God as that word whose signified and referent are indistinguishable to originary linguistics and grammar strike me. But, then, since, as Gans also notes elsewhere, ultimately every word (but also, then, sentence, discourse, etc.) is the [...] Continue reading Language, Inquiry |
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