[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
...In your description of DQ as not blank at all, but "rich and thick and overflowing," does this come from the idea that there are little particulates of sand that one sorts?

dmb says:
No, as I read it DQ is the ENDLESS landscape and the sand sorting is static. It's like James's analogy wherein conceptual buckets are drawn from the stream of experience. In both cases, you get this image wherein our static concepts are taken from something much larger. I'm just saying that the white paper depicting DQ is like that endless landscape and like that stream of experience. I'm pretty sure that these are just three different analogies for the same idea. To your question, "is there a conflict between his SODV description of a permeating DQ and where DQ would fit in the earlier sand-sorting analogy?", I'd say no. I don't see any conflict there. That's what I like about reading them that way; it gives us coherence and consistency and we don't have to stretch or bend anything to make it fit.


DMB said:
...She was stuck because she always relied on repeating things she's heard before. Starting with the upper left hand brick precluded that parroting option and forced her to see with her own eyes, apparently for the first time in her life. ... This specificity doesn't just mean smaller or more limited  so much as it means more concretely felt and lived and immediate.


Matt replied:
..., I'm not sure how that changes the conceptual story I told--you start with [an immediate] chunk: a static pattern.  For the brick is a static pattern, still, isn't it?  Does it make sense to say that the girl is beginning with DQ/immediacy when she begins, as a practical heuristic, with the brick/inorganic-static-pattern?

dmb says:
I can see how one might take it that way, but I don't. I mean, it wasn't really the brick that got her going. It was the fresh seeing of the brick. It happened to be the thing that tricked her out of her unoriginal parroting ways, that tricked her out of starting with some standard or model to imitate. And isn't she a lot like the amateur philosopher in the sense that they both want to write something excellent and original? They both want to say something that hasn't already been said by somebody else? 

Matt said:
 ...The interpenetration of DQ/SQ makes it apparent that it doesn't make a whole lot of theoretical sense to say one begins with either. And reverting to the discussion of amateur philosophy, I didn't want to say that one _begins_ with standards, but that one _is_  standards, facing down that DQ/blank page (which is this analogy's version of the whole of the aphorism: static patterns plus contact with DQ).

dmb says:
The point that "one IS standards" is not at all clear to me. But I'm pretty sure that it does make sense to say we should begin with one instead of the other. I'm pretty sure that his central point in those classroom scenes.

"As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric-teaching could begin. ..the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. (ZAMM 192) " 'It doesn't make a bit of difference HOW you do it! Just so long as it's good'. ..The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly that and nothing else that taught him to write. ..the academic system ..forced students to conform to artificial forms that destroyed their own creativity. Students who went along with his rules were then condemned for the inability to be create or produces a piece of work that reflected their own personal standards of what is good. (ZAMM 208-9)

But it seems pretty clear that we have very different ideas about DQ. If I imagined it in terms of a blank page, I would NOT be making a case for it like I am. I mean, it would be very unhelpful to suggest that creative excellence begins with a blank page. In fact, that image only conjures the terror of writer's block. To put it roughly, I'm saying it begins with an honest attempt to render your own specific experience as opposed to starting with standards. The idea is that excellent is a real goal even if you can't say what that excellence will entail in advance. 



This particular moment would be an excellent time to start cooking my dinner.

Later.