the Arbitrary

luka

Well-known member
You guys have your own alien sensibility that's fine, a hierarchy of priority, a system of likes and dislikes, a structure of values, which no problem I'm with ya, but then you treat it as obvious self-evident non-constructed non-subjective non-idiosyncratic
you mean we believe in it?
"But this formal involvement - here is the decisive innovation - now aims at showing that every style is arbitrary and therefore irrelevant."
 
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luka

Well-known member
"In Joyce, when one episode is presented in two or three or fifty different styles, the procedure is not based on any codified literary motivation. It is pure technical exploration. The exploration however, does not lead to a choice. The various styles - and the ideological forms they embody - are all perfectly equivalent: all equally arbitrary, all equally incapable of imposing themselves."

The Long Goodbye Franco Moretti
 

luka

Well-known member
this sense of the arbitrary has now extended itself into character formation and into interpretations of truth and reality
 

sus

Well-known member
"But this formal involvement - here is the decisive innovation - now aims at showing that every style is arbitrary and therefore irrelevant."
I think my impression here is that style isn't arbitrary, what we think of as cohesive styes are a small tiny population of especially patterned, especially non-random features in a sea of possible combinations.

It's just that when you're choosing between these styles, there is little objective grounding to prefer one over the other
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Just discovered there’s a game called Halo with a character thing known as an Arbiter

DB74082F-B8FB-4132-9932-1CF8082D7C16.jpeg


Bet Uncle Rural would cook this cunt up into quality cuts. Wash, trim down, fry in sesame oil with ginger, garlic, spring onion, peanuts, soybean paste (see, I’ve been taking notes), chillis, more chillis, even more chillis, fuck it millions more chillis

Few noodles and smash the Arbiter out of it, Uncle, you have to respect zero waste
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
"In Joyce, when one episode is presented in two or three or fifty different styles, the procedure is not based on any codified literary motivation. It is pure technical exploration. The exploration however, does not lead to a choice. The various styles - and the ideological forms they embody - are all perfectly equivalent: all equally arbitrary, all equally incapable of imposing themselves."

The Long Goodbye Franco Moretti
Very much in line with schizoanalysis, a plurality of would-be alternatives.
 

sus

Well-known member
I don't know how Luka expects to keep participation in these threads high when he won't give out a single react to high-quality contributions e.g. my own
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't know how Luka expects to keep participation in these threads high when he won't give out a single react to high-quality contributions e.g. my own
Sorry, I didn't understand it
 

sus

Well-known member
Sorry, I didn't understand it
Think about life.

A given life form is a highly patterned, non-random organization of particles. If you randomly scrambled all the atoms in a human body you'd get a pile of mush, stray carbon everywhere, etc. Not an organism.

So of the entire high-dimensional space of possible atomic configurations is very very big. A trillion to the power of a trillion but bigger. And yet living organisms that can survive and reproduce? Maybe there are a trillion such configurations, which is to say, one-trillionth of the total space is "life." A very very small sub-space of the entire graph.

Styles are the same way. Hell, communication is the same way. There are billions of possible character strings that could occupy this post, but mine has real words arranged in sentences. Highly unlikely, if you were picking characters randomly. A chimpanzee could hack out Hamlet but it'd take him eons.
 

sus

Well-known member
Styles are more patterned and less random than regular communication is, because it's adding another level of macro-organization to the mix. Certain words can't appear, or shouldn't appear often. Other words or sequences of words appear frequently.
 

sus

Well-known member
Each style is a way of seeing and being in the world.

One way of seeing and being isn't better than any other style unless you fix "better" to a specific, measurable task

These high-level meta strategies of existence are philosophical choices, not functional or pragmatic ones
 

sus

Well-known member
They're highly patterned and non-random, and their adoption typically correlates with individual personalities, cultural background etc (another level of macro-organization)
 
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