roachboy

in my world, the most basic element in philosophy is the recursive statement.

i am writing the statement: "in my world, the most basic element in philosophy is the recursive statement."

across this shift, one moves from an arrangement of linguistic particles that rearrange and reconfigure elements selected from a perceptual field (if you expand the notion of field to include workings of incoming data, memory and the social co-ordinates that enable the former to be for us and which enable that being to be communicated), to a level that indicates the relations to these arrangements.

if that's right, then epistemological relations are those which obtain within the first sentence. so the situation--which is what epistemology describes---is immediate in a sense and so pre-philosophical.

the recursive statement bumps you to the level of considering what conditions that immediate relation.
this level of ontology.
philosophy is primarily ontological argumentation--all about modes of being.
there is no single Question of Being---being is regional. being as a social-historical process. being is emergent.

ontology is not transcendent, then: it is simply a level of logical generality greater than that which obtains in the immediate. it is a space that enables consideration of process rather than a contemplation of relations that are formalized as states. verbs, not nouns.

so philosophy is a form of doing characterized by developing a capacity to engage in a process in ways that are shaped by an awareness of what conditions that process. to philosophize is to create something--this creation is not description--like robert anton wilson says in this film i watched last night (i've been saying this too, but it's better coming from a different talking head) the map is not the territory---it refers to, it indicates, elements drawn from the social-historical, but the *ways* in which indication happens, the relation between what you write or say and the phenomena in the world, whatever that is, that are indicated through it, is not "natural" or given, but seems more a space for the application of what you might think of as procedures. so indication is a type of conceptual art. so our experience is as well. so representations of the world are.

philosophy is a practice that can place you in genuine danger of being free.

we move through the world as a space of significations maybe--bundles of referrals--which are given in a sense (instituted) but which we continually take over, rework, reuse, reshape--which we make and remake (instituting). the fact of the instituted means that the making (the instituting) is conditioned by certain constraints. our relation to what results repeats our relation to constraints.

personally, i think that if you are doing philosophy you are not bound by instituted forms of philosophical expression. you can do it through any forms you take on.

the production of glosses on a body of Authorized Texts is at the center of academic philosophy. this is a midaeval relic. it is not useless, but it is also what it is--if what matters is the relation to constraints, this production comes explicable as a huge example of what happens when you stop extending your understanding of constraint to the genre you write through. if sentences do rather than say, if they perform the organization that they purport to describe, then this production of glosses performs a view of the world as given in advance across hierarchies which are natural. this sits on a conception of the world in which meanings are given in advance and so are found. like there is a god who made the world and in making the world endowed it with meanings that are the same always. if that's the case, we don't really make anything--we just find what is already there.

this is naive: it has nothing to do with how we are in the world--it is only an indication of how a particular region of social being accounts for being in the world mediated by a particularly rigid set of assumptions.

conventional philosophy is good mostly for the discipline it provides---ways of structuring argument, ways of interrogating experience, etc.--but it is not therefore a good example of what you can do with those tools, once you acquire and learn to use them.

everyone implicitly does philosophy all the time.
you do it each time you ask a question like "what the hell am i doing?"
where you go from there is a direct function of other assumptions about what it means to be in the world.
these assumptions we make binding on ourselves.

there is a strange question that arises from this, though: a virtuouso is someone who can be understood in two ways: either as having so thorughly internalized the ways of doing particular to an field or a tradition sedimented around a medium as to become free with them--or as someone who approaches that medium from outside and has a highly developed sense of how to move with a medium as well. but if you think about it, both have to be true at the same time.

anyway, from this viewpoint, a virtuouso in the first sense is the paradigm of subordination that gradually turns into its inverse. the second is effectively a theory of regeneration from the outside. so you have the monk and the wild man. this is what remaining locked into the dominant way of thinking gets you to.

virtuosity seems to me all about the relation to constraints which enable a freedom in one's relation to technique. so it is a mode or a space of interaction first. it is also the result of a committment to precision--even as the idea of precision moves away from exact description in the sense that would obtain is meanings were found in the world (and not made) and toward developing control at the level of the medium through which indications are fashioned.

like the good mister wilson says:
we made the map.
we invented the lines.
the map is not the territory.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite