Fun(ny). From quoting Vattimo you should go to Vico (Giambattista), just to really be openly ornery and ironical. When I say “ironical” there, I mean it in terms of the question of where we are in “real time.” You might as well be openly ironical if irony is going to happen anyway, lol. Maybe, too, the openly ironic can serve as a mirror to the probable orneryness that comes your way.

From good ol’ wikipedia on Vico: “The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era.”

From Vico’s New Science, for fun: “to introduce geometrical method into practical life is ‘like trying to go mad with the rules of reason,’ attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.”

More entertaining musings from a “past time” on the “madness” of foundationalism across which Jason has recently come: “In one sense, the ‘Battle of the Books’ illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one’s own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative works. One of the attacks in the Tale was on those who believe that being readers of works makes them the equals of the creators of works. The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, ‘The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,’ illustrates the other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness.”

But…but…but…says the foundationalist…”I was saying that we should get over our fascination with the “new and shiny? That Swift things seems to indicate that you (DF, Jason) took me to be saying the opposite? Uuuhhh…”

Daang. Thanks. This was like a lurking truth in my soul. Thanks for voicing it.

And I had the same question as Len. “I really don’t know if I am making sense to the older (or those working out an evangelicalism that reached its hey day in 1955 and ruled supreme til about 1980)audience.” Do you mean that you don’t think they have ears to hear, based on their ideas of what church and gospel are? Or do you mean that they WONT’ hear (a question of the will)? Or does it really matter?

I ask, though, because Aquinas (ancient dude for whom “contextuality” isn’t really an issue), I would think, would point to the will (I think). Whereas Derrida would point to the “ear,” no?

Further, I am strongly curious to hear more of a description of “the irruptions and the rants.” Like, do folks actually get angry? Visibly, audibly? Raising of voices? Or just objections to the message, seemingly without their hearing it in the first place?

DAWN