[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt:
...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's his central point in those classroom scenes.


Matt replied:
Yeah, but this as critical point against me assumes that I'm suggesting that one _should_ begin with standards.  I don't want to say that,..


dmb says:

Oh. Well I thought you were not only suggesting a set of standards, I thought you were also wondering what those standards should be. Such questions, I think, conjure up the MOQ's central complaint about rationality, namely the way it has subordinated Quality. The MOQ's central aim is to reverse that relationship so that intellect is subordinated to Quality so that Quality is always primary and intellect always secondary. In those classroom scenes he tells us what he REALLY thinks about all those rules from the textbook on rhetoric and what he really thinks, he says, is that the rules are post hoc. They are added after the fact. They are extractions and abstractions taken from excellent essays. They're generalizations based on what's been identifies as good in essays from the past. This is analogous to the hot stove analogy. You respond and act first and then you come up with the reasons afterward. 

The hot stove analogy also defies the notion that DQ is like a blank page. As I understand it, DQ would be better imagined as an ongoing aesthetic charge, as a sensible flux, an experiential flow. And this is not a separate compartment wherein the world of static patterns is absent or detached or turned off. Maybe it would be something like that if you were a baby or a mystic or a Zen master. But normally DQ is just the cutting edge of experience, that split second of experience before it is snapped into neat conceptual categories. These two elements of experience can be distinguished and talked about but they are always working hand in hand. As James put it, we don't walk with one leg more essentially than the other. You need both if you want to get around. 

You know, because no matter how freshly that girl saw the upper-left hand brick she still had to use words and grammar, the paper and pen, and all sorts of static, conceptually knowable elements. These things aren't completely divorced from experience. It's a matter of priority, of what comes first, of what follows from what. And so the general thrust of the overall project is to assert the view that intellect is a servant of life and that bad things happen when that relationship is reversed, as Plato had done.