From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Jul 18 2003 - 15:58:53 BST
Matt, Johnny
> Johnny said:
> That balance of Dynamic and Static you refer to is a certain expected
> balance, there is a static pattern of how much to 'twist' a movie plot to
> make it fresh but familiar. The changes may seem like changes, but they
> are really just static patterns carrying forward and interacting with other
> patterns in expected ways.
>
> Matt:
> To me, this looks like subsuming DQ under static patterns, making it static
> patterns all they down--and all the way up. If history were simply a
> matter of static pattern forming in expected ways, I expect that we could
> come up with a science of history and predict the ways static patterns will
> form. This is the dead end that Marx led us down, the hypostatization of
> History. Rather than saying it's static patterns "carrying forward and
> interacting with other patterns in expected ways," I would say it's static
> patterns carrying forward and interacting with other patterns in
> _un_expected ways. You have the "static patterns carrying forward and
> interacting with other patterns" bit down, because if the future weren't
> our static patterns carrying forward in some manner, we wouldn't identify
> the future as being our future. A utopic vision of the future is one in
> which our patterns are carryed forward, but there's no way to predict what
> this will pan out to be. That's what DQ is. Dynamic Quality is the
> unexpected burst of beauty, though according to convention it shouldn't be
> there. And because it shouldn't be there according to convention, we can't
> explain other than in retrospection, a post hoc rationalization. This ad
> hoc explanation is tuned to the particular instance of Dynamic Quality.
> What is a dead end is if we try to go transcendental and try and set an
> explanation of what all breaks with convention will look like. That's what
> I take the hypostatization of History to be: an attempt to outflank DQ and
> call it all convention, static patterns. That's why DQ is undefined. It
> only unfolds in history, leaving behind it waves of static patterns.
Nice, Matt. I wish I'd said that.
Platt
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