In my day job, I often imagine a writing assignment that would have students unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text, ideally a single sentence. This would be done by making explicit the implications of the sentence, implications derivable from the very relations in the sentence itself along with the field of implicit negations and distinctions constituted by the sentence. One could then make explicit the implications in the explicit statement of the first set of implications. In the process would be produced a discourse that is transparent, self-explaining, and self-contained, while also infinite. So, for example: “students might unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text.” Students, then, are things such as can unfold, at least, a discourse, and a discourse is something that can be unfolded, at least by students. Texts can be starting texts, and, therefore, presumably, middle, and ending texts. Texts can be the source of discourses and, furthermore, can be turned by students into a source of discourse. If students can turn texts into origins of discourses, teachers either can also do this or cannot do this, which means they share, to this extent, a common relation to texts and discourses with students, or a radically different one, one in which, for example, perhaps discourses are the origins of texts and teachers are incapable of affecting the relations between discourses and texts. And so on. With the help of a dictionary, word oppositions, degree words, and other means of singling out and articulating, we would eventually have a discourse about the entire history of the universe, had we world enough and time, and along a very distinctive path. You could say this would also be the most ethical discourse, one that doesn’t impose any normative frame or extrinsic questions upon a discourse, but just keeps restating what has been said along with what has been just barely left unsaid.
Ergodism
Ergodism
Ergodism
In my day job, I often imagine a writing assignment that would have students unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text, ideally a single sentence. This would be done by making explicit the implications of the sentence, implications derivable from the very relations in the sentence itself along with the field of implicit negations and distinctions constituted by the sentence. One could then make explicit the implications in the explicit statement of the first set of implications. In the process would be produced a discourse that is transparent, self-explaining, and self-contained, while also infinite. So, for example: “students might unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text.” Students, then, are things such as can unfold, at least, a discourse, and a discourse is something that can be unfolded, at least by students. Texts can be starting texts, and, therefore, presumably, middle, and ending texts. Texts can be the source of discourses and, furthermore, can be turned by students into a source of discourse. If students can turn texts into origins of discourses, teachers either can also do this or cannot do this, which means they share, to this extent, a common relation to texts and discourses with students, or a radically different one, one in which, for example, perhaps discourses are the origins of texts and teachers are incapable of affecting the relations between discourses and texts. And so on. With the help of a dictionary, word oppositions, degree words, and other means of singling out and articulating, we would eventually have a discourse about the entire history of the universe, had we world enough and time, and along a very distinctive path. You could say this would also be the most ethical discourse, one that doesn’t impose any normative frame or extrinsic questions upon a discourse, but just keeps restating what has been said along with what has been just barely left unsaid.