matter?
RAY:
Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can’t be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—
BRIAN:
Come on , look at the medium they’ve chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus…
JOSEPH:
I’m not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse’s revival of the dialectic—
BRIAN:
Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It’s a big world out there.
[A confusion of voices]
JOSEPH:
Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: ‘If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the psychological truth of health, to the very extent that it is its human contradiction.’ He adds that psychology ‘will be saved only by a return to hell’.”
BRIAN:
Joe, for fuck’s sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?
JOSEPH: There’s no obfuscation within that—
RAY: He’s trying to be—
JOSEPH:—Trying to be precise —
RAY:—trying for clarity.
JOSEPH:— pin it down , multiple codes—
RAY: You try and read Finnegans Wake and—
BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can’t you—
JOSEPH: He’s explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—
RAY:Yeah.
JOSEPH:
—or apparently transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—
BRIAN:
Bull shit! What ‘contradiction’? Is a broken leg the ‘dark side’ or ‘infernal contradiction’ of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.
MARIO PONTE:
Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist’s analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist’s own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he’s obliged by culture to experience.
JOSEPH:
Foucault’s experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking world are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—
RAY:
The Structuralists.
JOSEPH:
The post structuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called “S slash Z”—
BRIAN:
Speculative Zonk.
JOSEPH:
Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the writerly text and the readerly text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it’s very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.
The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don’t ‘read’ the writerly text, we write the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest…You can argue that there’s no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism…I suppose…or do I
RAY:
Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can’t be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—
BRIAN:
Come on , look at the medium they’ve chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus…
JOSEPH:
I’m not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse’s revival of the dialectic—
BRIAN:
Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It’s a big world out there.
[A confusion of voices]
JOSEPH:
Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: ‘If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the psychological truth of health, to the very extent that it is its human contradiction.’ He adds that psychology ‘will be saved only by a return to hell’.”
BRIAN:
Joe, for fuck’s sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?
JOSEPH: There’s no obfuscation within that—
RAY: He’s trying to be—
JOSEPH:—Trying to be precise —
RAY:—trying for clarity.
JOSEPH:— pin it down , multiple codes—
RAY: You try and read Finnegans Wake and—
BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can’t you—
JOSEPH: He’s explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—
RAY:Yeah.
JOSEPH:
—or apparently transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—
BRIAN:
Bull shit! What ‘contradiction’? Is a broken leg the ‘dark side’ or ‘infernal contradiction’ of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.
MARIO PONTE:
Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist’s analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist’s own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he’s obliged by culture to experience.
JOSEPH:
Foucault’s experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking world are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—
RAY:
The Structuralists.
JOSEPH:
The post structuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called “S slash Z”—
BRIAN:
Speculative Zonk.
JOSEPH:
Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the writerly text and the readerly text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it’s very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.
The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don’t ‘read’ the writerly text, we write the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest…You can argue that there’s no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism…I suppose…or do I
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