Reading in cirlces

A momentary sojourn to allay my guilty conscience before this derelict blog: I have been productive recently, but not nearly productive enough. When I sit in my room and try to work, my unread books, perched on shelves or lying in a disordered heap on my floor, beckon to me, and my mind answers their call by sending out filaments of desire in their direction. The result is perpetual distraction. Coffee helps. The constricted worldview that it brings makes creativity difficult, but insight, on a small scale, has a better chance of reaching the surface once the idiotic din of half-baked ideas is silenced. I want nothing more than to read from morning to night, but it never happens. The obligation to produce papers mangles thought. No matter where an idea begins, I know that it has to end up commodified as a thesis, an argument, a petrified and footnoted corpse. For lack of time and freedom, the conclusion precedes the accumulation of evidence. This would not be such a problem if I accepted the impossibility of making contact with truth through the medium of words (Nietzsche). Too often, it seems that all subsequent thought about the nature of the world is a footnote to Nietzsche, but there only seem to be two possibilities anyway: to repeat what has already been said or to open up new worlds of study - that is, to be a genius. There is nothing more debilitating than the desire to achieve the latter. It makes one too aware of history - that is, it causes one to objectify oneself, become an actor before one's own audience. Genius, if it is possible for me to speak of it, requires less self-awareness, less attention to its own footnotes, if it is to avoid drowning in all that has already been done.

There is a hermeneutic circle involved in education: one learns about a subject remote from one's own experience (anything, actually, is remote) by reading the thoughts of others. The only way to assess these thoughts is to compare them to one's extant knowledge - that is, to the thoughts of yet others. There is no neutral point of entry: one's point of view is determined by the particular mixture of texts by means of which one has entered a field. All subsequent knowledge is read in light of the original, but there is absolutely no basis for a critical examination of this foundational knowledge. It gets qualified by later additions, to be sure, so that what one already knows must be, in some sense, re-read in light of what one has recently learned, but even this process of re-assessment is ultimately dependent upon the epistemic context in which it finds itself - that is, the nature of the re-reading is determined by the way one has learned to read, and this, by what one has read. After a while, it becomes impossible to distinguish history from historiography, as there is no point at which one can make contact with an unfiltered, unmediated reality.

One learns to read from the texts in the Library of Babel, and then tries to apply this absurd apparatus to the critical examination of subsequent material.