Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
405. thanks to the overzealous revealing of the wizards behind all of the curtains, in "the postmodern condition" we're stuck with scary questions: "once the existence of the irreducible 'individual' is contested, what becomes of identity, autonomy, agency, moral freedom, and collective responsibility?" her answer: "a new kind of subjectivity which might refigure our sense of liberty"
406. to do this, the "first step is methodological"--we need to pay attention to literature, where the answer's been unfolding all along. "languages are out tools of thought, the essential precursors of practice. if, as saussure said a century ago, languages are above all systems, then literary texts are the most highly achieved specifications of those systems." ex: "henry james, the first author writing in english actually to situate subjectivity at the perilous margins where syntax fails"
407. chunks of his text show that character & plot don't cohere except in what the readers reconstruct; "the point is the way language operates, through uneasy referents and displaced concretia"; "whatever of importance is 'there' lies in the in-between"; & "keeping readers on that boundary...keeps alive the threat that inspires creative, liberating performances and that asserts the indisoluble bond between subjectivity and language"
408. "reconceiving subjectivity in the discursive condition involves important reconciderations of what language is and how it operates" & "the renunciation of any dualistic representations" such as it "must be either symbolic or semiotic"--"the potential for both/and is rendered tenuous by the dualistic formulation [of] such either/or[s]"; "the formulation suggests that language is a sealed system, a prison house, a sort of Truman Show of Discourse," which "obscure[s] the potentiality of language as a site of liberation from the restrictions that modernity imposed upon subjectivity": "in the discursive condition, subjectivity must be kinetic, not static; it must be multiplied, not single." "it is not necessary to conclude that we have left individuality behind," for 2 reasons: (1) "the cultural conditions of modernity remain broadly functional"--
409. --"very much part of the political and cultural practice of eurocentric societies" & (2) "because it remains applicable to more kinetic postmodern forms of subjectivity." "this emphasis upon a discursive condition has taught us to search for 'code' rather than for 'structure': a shift with substantial implications, not least for subjectivity....language as a system of differential relationships, and not a collaction of pointers."
410. "inhabiting a language means inhabiting a reality, and that so-called 'reality'...changes with the language"; "to reformulate 'the subject' as an element of such differential systems, that is, as a function of discourse, means to accept the multiplicity of what used to be called 'the subject'"; "saussure provided the clue to a new construction of subjectivity when he pointed the way toward langauge as a model of a new kind of system--a differential, not a referential one"; "this difference between the potential and the practice renders a linguistic system forever incomplete-able"
411. "the arena of subjectivity and freedom lies in this gap between the potential capacities of a differential code and any particular specification of it. this 'tender interval'" (to nick from nabokov) "between language (langue) and enunciation (parole) brings to subjectivity a set of conditions entirely different"; "the structure is always potential, never explicit" & "the explicit statement can push the limits of systemic potential without ever exhausting it." "as václav havel suggests...identity is kinetic; it is a process, an event, a particular expression of systemic value"; "identity in his terms definitely has nothing to do with reducing difference, as is the habit of identity-producing political regimes whether they are the 'retrograde' chauvinist regimes based on 'blood,' or the marxist and capitalist systems 'hypnotized' by economic indicators. rather, identity appears only in the act of specifying sets of rules. and as we operate simultaneously in several sets at once, identity appears as the series of constantly multiplied specifications of the potential provided by those rule regimens"; "we no longer have only a subject-in-process, or even a subjectivity-in-process, but something more like subjectivity-in-processes"--"'palimpsestuousness'" (--michael alexander)
412. "the unique and unrepeatable poetry of an individual life cannot at all be compassed by sociological generalizations, which confuse its crucial singularity and flatten its palimpsestuousness..... identity consists in the unique and unrepeatable sequence of a complex enunciation," & "this idea of a distributed subjectivity..allows for the actual complexity of conscious life more fully and precisely than the modern 'subject' ever did.... it seems particularly pointless, even wrong, to impose that monadic idea of 'the subject' upon a personal knowledge that is more random and radical than that traditional model allows"; "this postmodern subjectivity is the moving nexus or intersection at which a unique and unrepeatable sequence is constantly being specified from the potentials available in the discursive condition. such a subjectivity is individual in its sequence, not in its irreducible core. its uniqueness lies in its trajectory"; & "the volitility of language--its resonance, its power of poetic, associative linkage--provides precisely the varied opportunities for selective specification that constitute the unique and unrepeatable poetry of a life" (& all of this has consequences--for 1, it "radically alters our relationship to the past")
413. "given the discursive condition, we have the power to revise our acts of attention" & so history, since story is just what we choose to pay attention to--"there is no longer any possibility of realizing the neutral time of modernity" ("neutrality in time and space were possibly the most original and powerful creations of modernity; they were the necessary conditions of empiricism in science and philosophy, and of representation in politics and in art"
414. "any individual sequence of subjective specifications is palimpsestuous, involving not one but a plurality of possible specifications"; "the 'time' of history is really not possible to the extent that history is a collective event, an expression of faith in common grammars, especially a common time. discursive time is only as long as a given sequence, and those sequences are always finite. old style historical conventions of explanation, especially their causalities and their emergent forms, have little validity when they are restricted to this or that unique and unrepeatable life"
415. nabokov's "anthemion" & thus ermath's "anthematic recognition"--in his description the (made-up) term "indicates an interlaced, flower-like design where themes or patterns arrive and depart from various posting places, recurring and recrossing without exact repetition, and yet providing a kind of rhythmic iteration and patterning. between the iterations of a thematic sequence, as between the beats of a particular rhythm, lie tender intervals within which opportunity lies and the sum of which constitute memory."
418. "conscious life is reborn every three seconds, perhaps not much different from, but perhaps not quite the same as, before....this inflected sequence of anthematic recognition indicates the way experience retains value without lapsing into explanation. this is what replaces 'the subject' and its history."
419. "at the exact level of the moment we are well beyond the determinations of historical 'pluralism' and its singular subjects and projects, and well ahead in the reclamation of a discursive subjectivity"